What Next?

About the future of News from Uncibal

Ain’t life strange, ain’t it funny?

Nothing matters much but love and money

-Warren Zevon, ‘Empty Hearted Town’

I took the photograph that accompanies this post as I strolled into work a few weeks ago. The route I take runs through a vicious shard of dystopia which stabs into the heart of central Newcastle upon Tyne - a splintered landscape of underpasses and walkways, abandoned buildings, and urban detritus that hides its face from the sun behind the central motorway. The very walls themselves there seem to spawn graffiti, as though the concrete each day absorbs the fevered angst that courses through the city’s collective subconscious and vomits it forth in spray paint each night - there is always something different each morning. The results are never artistic or skilfully done; there are no putative Banksys or Jean-Michel Basquiats in the North East of England as far as I can tell. But what is plastered on the walls nonetheless very often manages to express something that seems in some way to matter.

The graffito in green that appears towards the bottom of the photo is an example of this. Of course, in one sense it merely poses one of the great questions that characterises the human experience as such - a question which is always at the forefront of everybody’s minds, in respect of more or less everything. What is next?

But, as the artist who wrote those words seems to intuit, we live in a time in which the matter of what comes next has more pertinence than ever. This is because it is a time of metaphysical fragmentation. Our societies have lost religion; they have lost their old consensus; they have lost their sense of themselves; they have in many ways lost their marbles. It is as though our collective Etch-A-Sketch has been shaken and everything has been scattered into aluminium dust - but instead of there being one set of knobs and one artist to create one new picture, there are a million such artists who are all now busily drawing fresh lines of their own. Nothing is predictable, because nothing is as it was. The world that we inhabited twenty years ago has vanished. And we have no idea what will replace it save for the fact that it will likely be worse. We find ourselves, in other words, in in a twisted, looking-glass version of the song ‘Something’s Coming’ from West Side Story: ‘Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is, but it is gonna be bad.’ In this regard, of course, the surroundings for the graffito in question - shattered windows, decaying buildings, the faint stench of urine and marijuana - are a highly apposite mise-en-scène.

The question of ‘What next?’ is largely what has come to interest me in writing this substack. But, of course, it also needs to be asked in respect of News from Uncibal itself. (I hope you enjoyed the seamlessness of that segue.) I started this substack just over a year ago, mainly as an outlet for thoughts and ideas that I simply did not think had a cat’s chance in hell of being published by mainstream, paying outlets, with the vague notion - I will be frank - that it would be nice some day to make some money out of it. I had a brief flurry of enthusiasm that lasted for a month or two, but then found myself being distracted by real life and was at the end of July 2023 ruminating over deleting the substack. But rather than doing that, I decided to set myself a target. I would try to write two entries a week for a year, and see if I could amass 1,000 free subscribers. If I managed that, then I would continue,. If I didn’t, then I would stop wasting my time and do other things.

Well, the 1,000 free subscriber target has been smashed within the year, and I believe in sticking to plans once they have been made, barring force majeure. So this means I will continue. And I should take the opportunity to thank my readers for subscribing; for liking, commenting on, and sharing my posts; and for interacting very decently with one another ‘under the line’. Special thanks in particular go to the good folks at The Daily Sceptic, who have done so much to promote my writing.

However, it probably goes without saying that the current approach is unsustainable. I spend about two hours, every day (Saturdays and Sundays included) writing entries for News from Uncibal, and that is time that I could spend writing academic work (I am an academic, after all), learning a new language, doing push-ups, or drinking whisky - or possibly all of those things at once. So I cannot realistically continue without generating some small amount of money to keep me in good single malt scotch.

At some point in the next few weeks, then, I will start paywalling some posts here. My intention is that most content will remain free - at first, there will probably be one paywalled post for every three or four free ones. There will also likely be some additional bonus features for paying subscribers - such as more video content, subscriber-only chat, and so on.

The good news is that I have some posts lined up that will be worth subscribing for. I have been working on subjects such as: the semiotics of the moon in the government of humanity; why it is that climate change has taken on such significance in the constitution of global governance frameworks; the ‘dying earth’ subgenre of science fiction and what it has to say about our predicament; the meaning of ‘constitutional statues’ in the UK constitution; Nietzschean and Christian themes in the fantasy literature of the 20th century; whether technology is the problem; human excellence and the competence apocalypse; the political philosophy of Joan Didion; and more on Machiavelli and New Labour. All of which, obliquely or directly, addresses our friendly graffiti artist’s question. Stay tuned.