About Me (sorry)

In case you care about who is behind these essays.

I’m always wary of sharing too much of my personal history on this Substack because it was never intended to be about me. At least not directly. I started it because the attacks on October 7th, 2023 triggered a genocide in Gaza, and for me that initiated a process of deep learning about the history of Palestine that I felt compelled to share.

That being said, I feel it’s important for readers to understand who I am and how I came to be this way. Given that all of us are brought up surrounded by different values and belief systems and with different economic positions and cultural contexts, I think it’s useful to know the frame in which someone’s worldview has evolved.

So with that in mind, here is what I think you should know about me:

The Material Conditions

Someone once said the worst part of meeting new people is having to tell your life story like it’s a coherent narrative that you endorse. I couldn’t agree more!

My father was an ex-convict with little formal education and my mother is a former Catholic nun. I am the youngest of 10 children. My mom took us kids away and divorced my abusive father when I was 7 years old. I was arrested at 13 for threatening my brother with a kitchen knife, and spent 2.5 years drinking and drugging (as they say)¹, committing petty crimes and skipping school a lot. As a result of all this I was on probation and in and out of juvenile detention until age 16, when I quit school and my mom offered me the option of paying rent or moving out, resulting in the latter.

I got my G.E.D. and joined the US Army at 18, stationed in West Germany during the Cold War. I was invited to leave the Army at 20 (early but “honorably”) and worked various odd jobs between Michigan and California for a few years, until in 1993 I stole a Park Ranger truck (while drunk) at 24 and spent 90 days, including my 25th birthday, in the county jail, followed by 6 months in rehab. Not long after I got out of rehab I developed an obsession with an online game (Genesis MUD), which drew me in to the world of tech, where I have worked (more or less consistently) for 30 years.

The Philosophical Conditions

My parents were what I would describe as radical Catholics (see ‘Focolare’, ‘Cursillo’, and ‘Charismatic Renewal’), but with some awareness of and appreciation for Judaism as well. Some of my earliest memories are of the menorah on the fireplace mantle and watching The Sound of Music and The Fiddler on the Roof when I was very young.

When my parents divorced my mom brought us into the Word of God community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an organization I variously describe as fundamentalist, fanatical, and a cult. Not that the community was without good people and in some ways a strong, loyal collective sensibility that I can appreciate. But when I started asking hard questions and got “just have faith” as an answer, I was unimpressed.

Living on my own in a college town, almost all my friends between the ages of 16 and 25 (except for a few who I knew from the Word of God) were students at the University of Michigan. It was probably some of those students who recommended authors like Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and other existentialists to me, and it’s safe to say that reading those books instigated an existential crisis that persists over 35 years later.

How Should a Person Be?

I’ve always envied (and somewhat resented, if I’m being honest) people who are able to just live their lives without overthinking the ‘why’ of it all. I contemplate the meaning of life, the universe and everything literally every single day, and the worst part of it is that I don’t believe anyone (living or dead) has (or had) the answer.

As far as I know, reason is the only reliable skill humans have to determine facts about the universe, and reason alone cannot explain why anything exists. It’s great at explaining how things exist. The big bang. Evolution. Dark matter. Quantum Entanglement. These are all reasonable (if difficult) explanations for how things are. But once we start talking about why things are the way they are we are in the territory of faith, and in my view faith is not at all useful for evaluating competing claims.

One result of rejecting the beliefs imposed on me in my youth and not wanting to sign up for another pre-packaged set, was that I was forced to think extremely critically about my opinions and values and to try as hard as I could to determine my own. As I already mentioned this meant reading a fair number of books in my early 20’s, the most influential of which were by Hermann Hesse, Richard Bach, and Tom Robbins². I believe all were recommended by my Jewish-American girlfriend³ at the time.

Who Have I Become?

In the early 2000’s, coincidentally the same year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, a friend and I launched an online discussion forum called The Freethought Forum. The idea was to make a forum for discussion of life, the universe and everything without heavy-handed content moderation, and it was reasonably successful. We had engaged with hundreds of likeminded people across several other forums, so we had a substantial user base from the jump.

Over the 20+ years that forum has been online I’ve had countless discussions and debates about philosophy and politics, among all the other things people like to think and talk about, with a lot of really smart people (most of whom had far more formal education than me.) During that time I developed a worldview that works for me, but until 2020 I still struggled with how I should “show up” in the world.

I spent almost 20 years just existing, rationalizing my lack of engagement with the world⁴ as perfectly justifiable as long as I was paying my taxes and not hurting anyone. Nevertheless, my parents (for all their faults) had instilled in me a tremendous sense of responsibility to society that I couldn’t shake and didn’t know how to fulfill. At the same time I wasn’t just apolitical, I was downright anti-political.

Political Awakening

It goes without saying that 2020 was a monumentally significant year in the US and around the world, but the particular way that year impacted me, informing my response to the George Floyd protests and Covid-19, was the death of Michael J. Brooks.⁵ The first time I ever heard that name was when Cornel West tweeted an R.I.P., and suddenly I started noticing people from all walks of life lamenting the loss.

Nobody seemed to have a bad word to say about him⁶, and everyone was in awe of how passionate and driven he was to make a difference. He was a political analyst with a YouTube show who wasn’t just pontificating to hear the sound of his own voice or being snarky to entertain himself. He was genuinely concerned with sharing his knowledge and analysis with the world and working to make it a better one. From there I came under an avalanche of shows, books, and a crash course in political science, philosophy, electoral politics, geopolitics, etc. but no idea what to do about it.

What really struck me was that he identified as a socialist (Socialist? Not sure if he would have said big ‘s’ or small ‘s’, but definitely socialist!) I swear this was the first time in my adult life that I heard someone relatively young, very smart, well-educated, and apparently not some ranting conspiracy theorist identified as a socialist.⁷

Once I started taking politics seriously I also started taking history, economics, sociology and geopolitics more seriously. I started watching The Majority Report and many satellite shows⁸ regularly, buying every book they mentioned, and even dipped my toes into the electoral process⁹ and joined the DSA¹⁰. None of these experiences really made me feel like I was “doing something”, though, even though my political consciousness was expanding rapidly and my desire to act was growing alongside it.

Discovering Palestine

Looking at my journal entries, on October 7th, 2023 I was in the middle of reading Frances Fitzgerald’s seminal work on the Vietnam War, Fire In The Lake, and I was impatient to start reading If We Burn, by Vincent Bevins, an analysis of what went wrong in the largest of the mass protest movements in the 2010’s. For some reason I didn’t mention the Hamas attacks on Israel until October 10th, at which time I wrote:

I’ve been listening to American Prestige podcast daily since Hamas attacked Israel, and yesterday they had a really good guest who is a professor of, I think, Middle East studies.¹¹ He made the really good and tragic point that Gaza was a powder keg waiting to explode, as all settler-colonial projects are, and that Hamas’ actions were wholly predictable under the circumstances. There are 17 yr olds in Gaza who have lived their entire life in one of the poorest, most desolate landscapes on earth as a result of an Israeli blockade that has lasted since they were born, and they live right next to one of the richest societies... at least in the region, maybe in the world. At some point something’s gotta give. That is just physics. The professor said historically the only time a colonized population HASN’T eventually reacted violently are circumstances like North America, where the colonizers killed enough of the native population to render it impotent. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of his argument. Anyway that professor and several others have also made the argument that this situation represents a paradigm shift in Israel. The Netanyahu government has been trying to pretend that the situation was under control and that in the worst case they didn’t have much to fear from the Palestinians, but now that veil has been ripped off and their vulnerability exposed. It seems likely that the Israeli people are going to change their opinion for better or worse. I’m not making a lot of sense, but this is what’s on my mind this morning so this is what I’m writing about.

Back then I had a friend I used to chat with almost every day, yet for some reason the topic of the Hamas attacks didn’t come up until October 14th, when I shared links to a couple TikTok videos with her. The first was a user named notyourlawyermd and talked about Israel’s control of Gaza’s water, the second was Sim Kern questioning why Jews believe they need a “homeland” (what Sim called a “theocratic ethno-state”).¹²

In those days TikTok really was my primary source of information about the history of Palestine, just as Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton warned. Of course I was also reading books, watching YouTube “explainers”, and consuming lots of overseas media like Britain’s Channel 4 and Al Jazeera to follow the genocide as it developed. That I was watching a live-streamed genocide was obvious¹³, but what could I do about it?

On or about January 3rd, 2024 I saw Paul Biggar interviewed on Counter Points, and that’s how I learned about his brand new initiative called Tech for Palestine. I wasn’t sure what I could add to the group but I joined immediately, hungry for the chance to do anything to put everything I had been learning to some use. The rest as they say is history, and most of that is documented in the virtual pages of this Substack.

The Struggle is the Point

As I have been learning about the history of Palestine and watching current events unfold around the world—especially the rising fascism and mask-off imperialism being demonstrated (predominantly) by the United States and Israel—it has become very clear to me that the struggle for liberation of Palestine reflects, to one degree or another, just about every other struggle for freedom and liberty. It has also become clear that the ordinary people of the world are at an extraordinary disadvantage.

I’m not going to lie, I am not optimistic about the future. All signs point to things getting quite a lot worse before (and if) they start to get better. But in a very real sense the better world I want to live in is already here—it’s the work in progress that I and everyone else who is actively engaging with the world is trying to build. I’m not in the movement because I expect a miraculous outcome (though that’s not impossible!) but because this is who I want to be and what I want to be doing. And the fact that there are many others getting up every day and doing the same is what keeps me going.

1. I quit drinking alcohol and doing recreational drugs about 25 years ago (leading to some of my new Muslim friends joking that I’m more Muslim than they are). It turns out I’m way too reckless and self-destructive when my inhibitions are lowered, so with a little help from a friend I made the hard decision to stop. I had already quit smoking cigarettes a year or two earlier, which helped me believe it was possible. I no longer miss any of it.

2. Especially Siddhartha, Illusions, and Still Life With Woodpecker, respectively. Another quite influential book, one which I just finished re-reading 35 years later and which somehow inspired what I’m writing now, is Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Maybe I’ll actually write about more direct thoughts about it later.

3. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating that I didn’t know antisemitism was a contemporary concern for American Jews in the 90’s until I dated that woman. Having learned about antisemitism from The Sound of Music and The Fiddler on the Roof, and not having attended high school where I might have learned about these things, I genuinely thought it was ancient history. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was a real and present fear in my 20-something girlfriend in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

4. I made enough money in tech to live comfortably, but I never developed the drive or dedication necessary to find great personal satisfaction (much less great wealth). I never lost the deeply anti-capitalist ethic I somehow developed at a very young age.

5. In this context I think the best possible introduction to Michael Brooks is not a clip from when he was co-hosting The Majority Report or from when he was hosting The Michael Brooks Show, but from a talk he gave at Lafayette College just a few months before his sudden and untimely death, from which this brilliant exchange was clipped.

6. I have never cared about my “legacy”, but for some reason hearing all these people say nice things about Michael when he passed made me want to be a better person. Not because it will matter when I’m dead, of course it won’t, but because it somehow matters now. Especially since I’m eternally preoccupied with dying. I literally think about it daily.

7. Not to belabor the point, but two years ago I wrote: “Five years ago I would have said that anyone who identifies as “socialist” was naive, uneducated, or unserious. Michael Brooks is the person who made me realize that there are very smart, well-educated, and worldly people who identify as Socialist.”

8. Some other people/shows I like in no particular order: Krystal Ball, Kyle Kulinski, Ryan Grim, Francesca Fiorentini, The Humanist Report, Hasan Piker, The I’ve Had It Podcast, The Vanguard, Doomscroll, Democracy at Work, Chris Hedges, Yanis Varoufakis, American Prestige, The Lever, Naomi Klein, etc.

9. Which is just to say I started actually paying attention to candidates and policy, and doing a little research before voting. Before 2020 the only elections I had voted in were 2008 and 2012, and only because I thought having a black president was a good change.

10. The Democratic Socialists of America. I was a dues-paying member for about six months or a year, I don’t remember. I still kind of follow what they’re doing but I waffle on whether I want to be involved. There’s something about it not being an actual party that bugs me, and I get the impression (possibly false) they tend to focus energy more on optics than impact.

11. I just checked and it was Rashid Khalidi. That’s probably why the very first book I read on the topic of Palestine was The Hundred Years War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi, which according to my notes I read immediately after Fire In The Lake, before If We Burn.

12. My friend’s response to the videos was: “jesus christ, i had no idea about the palestinians having to beg for water all these decades… i’ve never heard the term “theocratic ethno state” before, that’s deep. christo fascist colonizers fuck yeah.” Also, Sim Kern’s Genocide Bad. is an excellent book, definitely worth reading.

13. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, wrote A Textbook Case of Genocide on October 13th, 2023.