New Year, New Media

And gratitude to the sources that have informed and inspired my work on understanding media

More than I want people to subscribe to my publications and support my work, I want them to:

1. Understand media

2. Maintain equilibrium at the intersection of matter and metaphor

3. Regard each other as human beings, and

4. Continually cultivate their responses to fractal falsehood.

For the past two years, I’ve been exploring these horizons of possibility, and in the new year, I’d like to continue this exploration with a new breakdown of my preferred and “other” media. I explain this breakdown in Part 1 below.

Due to the new approach to my media, I may gain or lose subscribers, and the frequency and word count of my Substack posts may increase or decline. Whatever happens, the exploration is only accelerating and deepening.

In addition to my supporters, what has fueled this exploration over the past two years are my sources. In Part 2 below, I express my gratitude to the sources that have been most helpful in my work on MISM. Separately, I’ll share links to the most important sources for M2D, DaaS, and BS”D.

Part 1: The Show Must Go On, But Where and How?

As a subscriber to one of my publications (or my follower on Substack Notes), you may have already read some of what I’ve published about the ways in which the flood of bullshit has ruined Substack’s paywalled gardens. You may have also heard the argument that, despite this unfortunate but unsurprising turn of events, the show must go on. I’m not writing to rehash or revise these observations and arguments. Instead, I’d like to provide some updates on how I’d like to continue my “show” in the new year.

Preferred Media

First, as I begin this new chapter in my resistance to the ‘enshittification’ of everything, here’s how I’d like to use my digital and non-digital media.

1. Non-Digital (aka IRL): I don’t know where or how, but I will find a path to less screen time and more time unplugged from my silicon-based extensions. So help me God! For my consulting work, my preferred place to meet is not only non-digital, but also non-office (e.g., walks in the park, hangouts in coffee shops).

2. Zoom: I may be part of a tiny minority of people who would like to spend more of their screen time on Zoom. In fact, I’d like to form a small Zoom group (probably no more than three to five people).¹

3. Proton Mail: Most of what I’ve read and heard about Google lately makes me want to use non-Google services as much as I can. I started by using my Proton email instead of Gmail.

4. Google Docs: Substack works beautifully for a small minority of independent publishers. For me, the preferred medium for my writing is currently a Google Doc which I will probably share with subscribers sometime in 2025.

Other Media

In addition to my preferred media, I’m still exploring fruitful ways to use the following tools:

1. Substack: For me, Substack has lost a lot of its appeal as a place to publish my work, but it’s still a phenomenal place to discover great writing. So, I will probably continue to hang out on Substack Notes.

2. YouTube: On the one hand, my initial renewed enthusiasm about YouTube has been dissipating ever since I observed that the most important video I published in 2024 attracted 40 views while my least important video of the year quickly crossed the 2K threshold. On the other hand, I know at least one valued subscriber who mainly consumes what I publish on YouTube, and he likes to watch my videos on his big screen. I have a feeling I’ll have a few YouTube missives for him and others in 2025.

3. Gmail: I think of Gmail as the email account I use for everything I need to do when I’m plugged into the Matrix. For everything else, I prefer Proton.

4. Phones and Phone Numbers: I’m glad that more people are becoming aware of our ‘phones’ as our slave-masters, but I hope to see a similar spike in the view of our phone numbers as the slave-masters’ whips. I haven’t yet found a way to reduce our dependence on phone numbers. I’m open to suggestions.

Part 2: Recommended Sources for MISM Subscribers

Now that I demoted Substack from preferred to “other” media, subscribers to MISM may see a commensurate decline in the frequency of my posts. However, just as easily, the opposite may be the case. Gazing through the dense fog of our wars, acknowledged and unacknowledged, it would be hubris to pretend to see very far ahead.

Wherever this exploration leads, I feel abiding gratitude to the sources that have fueled my work over the past two years. So, I depart from my normal practice of concluding my posts by inviting readers to subscribe to MISM. Instead, the call to action for this post is to subscribe to the sources that have led me to a clearer “recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technology”.

On Substack

Off Substack

• Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

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ICYMI

1. FYI for active subscribers and other supporters: Tomorrow, I’ll be sending out an email with an invitation to my first Zoom meeting. Please add daasnow@proton.me to your contacts to help keep the invitation out of your spam folder.