Welcome, reader. Thank you so much for joining me.
Today, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the newsletter you’re reading, and about me. Unfucking The World is not a newspaper, and I am not a reporter. I follow current events, of course, and from time to time I might comment on something noteworthy if I feel the existing coverage is missing something, but there are plenty of other people on the Internet talking about things that have already happened in the world.
I’m a lot more interested in where we’re going than where we’ve been, and what I’ve seen has me very, very worried. I worked in the technology sector for over two decades, and it landed me at the very top of the tech support chain; I was the person that even the experts went to when an installation was failing with a multi-million-dollar contract on the line, and I always found the answer.
You don’t treat as many ailing systems as I have without developing some very strong techniques and intuitions for what kinds of things can go wrong when you take millions of individual components, each with their own goals and instructions, and expect them all to work together as a cohesive whole. You begin to see patterns that show up again and again when a system starts to struggle, even when the causes are completely unrelated.
When the COVID pandemic hit and wrecked my health to the point where it ended my career, it left me with a lot of time to step back and take a critical look at how things were going in the world, something my work had never left me with the energy to focus on before. And, given that all software is created by humans, it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that I saw the same patterns from my professional career popping up in human society, too.
The bad news is, the pattern we’re currently in is terminal. There are some fundamental flaws in our global economy—I’ll go into them in a later article—that will eventually, inevitably, cause it to collapse in its entirety unless corrective action is taken. I don’t think I need to tell you that if the global economy collapses, humanity does not fare particularly well.
I’m not an economics expert. If I were, I could probably tell you how long we have before we need to worry about it; it might be decades down the line, or it might be just a few years away. The equations I’d need to get that kind of specificity aren’t something I ever needed to study in my work, but I’ll tell you, I’m seeing a lot more early-warning signs out there than I’d like.
The good news is, I’ve charted us a course out of this mess. It starts with stabilizing US politics, it moves on to curtail the wasteful spending in the technology sector, and it continues on, someday, to guarantee basic human rights the world over.
Fully none of the steps involve waiting around while politicians decide what will happen with our lives.
Unfucking The World is not a newspaper; it is a verb. It is the will that I am putting out into the world, and I hope you’ll back me when I’m right, and tell me I’m wrong when I’ve missed something. In return, for as long as I’m here, I will spend every bit of energy I can muster guiding us toward ways to turn our dreams into reality.
My name is Danielle Church, reader, and together, you and I will unfuck the world.
Stay safe.
Thank you for reading, and welcome to Unfucking The World.
This is the start of a fairly monumental undertaking, and I hope at least some of you will want to come along. Whether you’re here to help, argue, listen, or simply watch one person attempt to chart a path toward a better world, I’ll do my best to make each article easy to follow and worth your time.
UTW is being produced as both a newsletter and a podcast. You’ll be able to read each article here on Substack or listen to the audio version, and once the podcast launches, future episodes will be released in both formats at the same time.
Thanks to volunteer help with translation, each episode will also be available in Spanish. Yes, that means four versions. No, I have not yet decided whether this is ambition or a cry for help.
The next article is where the work starts in earnest, so make sure you’re subscribed if you don’t want to miss it. If you also want updates on UTW as a newsletter, podcast, and movement, you can subscribe separately to the Updates section in your publication settings. You can also choose whether you want English, Spanish, or both in your inbox.
Please leave questions or comments below, and share this article with anyone who might want to help unfuck the world.
The journey starts on June 29.
Wish me luck.
–Danielle
Este artículo también está disponible en español.
