An Open Letter to Michael Smith
You posted recently about the problem of what we can really do as individuals to deal with problems you describe capably and suggested a two-part format for addressing this hole in the communication challenge. I replied with this:
“There’s an alternate universe to be built out there. For all of us who care about the ones who will come later, the ones who are kids now and the ones who may only be a gleam in your children’s eyes. A deliberate linkage of all that we consider best and inspirational, both intellectually and creatively, including pure entertainments. We have all been taught (programmed?) to regard ourselves as vectors, pushed by economic (egononomic?) needs, working alone with friends, acquaintances, acolytes as support for our labors. But we are limiting ourselves by an engrained habit of clinging to customary means of attracting notice to ourselves. I know there are projects for which you must be paid to put bread on the table, but consider the possibility that copyrights and trademarks (possession of content) are prisons from which we can make a mass escape. I have never cared who stole my stuff, reproduced my writing even without sttribution, screen grabbed and reused my graphics, used my audio and video files for mixing and sampling in a new age Internet rapping genre yet to be invented. The ideas and the reach are more important than any royalty if the mission is sharing the joys of liberated imagination and questing consciousness. Think TikTok done right, a playground that’s also a developing replacement for all the dead schools and universities and dead lit magazines and dead-ending nihilist film experiments. Grow the kids and one another in the process. This might be the very best thing we can do to make a difference in lives well beyond the span of our own.”
I was completely serious in what I said and proposed. Neither you nor any of your commenters replied or even acknowledged what I said. My sense is that you see me as an occasional long-winded troll on your page, best dealt with by being ignored. I am not a troll. My career has been different from yours, but it has been a productive one. All the things we are both concerned with I have been writing been about in one way and another since I was 15. That was 57 years ago. We are neither of us spring chickens. In my life I have written well north of 6 million words, most of them still available on the Internet or in print.
I respect you and your writing. We agree on much. But this question of next steps, for people like us in particular, is vital. My own mission, and why I have not done much of anything to promote myself over the years, is because — after I was effectively banned from the book publishing world for daring to satirize feminism in the 1990s — my mission changed from attracting acolytes to leaving behind a body of work that could help a future generation rebuild what has been lost in a century of deteriorating education and impaired consciousness.
Now there is an opportunity to make a difference at a critical turning point in our history. Voices like yours (Daniel Jupp, other thinkers with followings…) have the capability to band together and start building a new kind of social network whose real mission is multimedia education, although in form it is rich with entertainment, humor, real dialogue and debate, and running commentary on current events. Many of the people who usually just pat you on the back are potential participants in this, with life experience, anecdotal recollections of important events and people in the rewarding parts of their own personal journeys through time. Photographers, cartoonists, graphic artists, writers of fiction, poetry, movie and music reviews (past to present), music creations, essayists, pet fanciers, athletes, every mother’s son and daughter united by belief that there are verities which must be recorded, illustrated, celebrated, passed on to their own and others’ children, in perpetuity. Which means part of the challenge is building our own version of the stumbling Wayback Machine/Modern Archive/Wikipedia edifice.
This is an opportunity which should be fleshed out and brought into being. I have no money, very limited mobility, and not a great deal of time left to me. But I still write and create multimedia materials 8 to 10 hours a day, every day. But it’s not enough. What you do is not enough. Time for some leveraging of resources that are there but not being inspired to participate in a new and meaningful way. You have more reach than I do. You know others who have reach. They, we, are not rivals. We are potential collaborators in a vital enterprise.
Please think about this, whether you choose ever to respond to me or not. “
As I said, I’m perfectly serious about this. Thanks for reading and sharing this as widely as possible. United we stand and all that…
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