Twenty Thousand Subscriber AMA

So what do you want to know?

Edward Barons

A couple days ago, Postcards From Barsoom hit the twenty-thousand-subscriber milestone. I wanted to do something on the day, but I was wrapped up finishing the Starship Troopers essay, and after that I made the mistake of catching a head cold that pretty much nuked my last couple days for anything productive.

When I started sending these Martian missives I never expected that they’d prove so popular. Twenty thousand isn’t a huge number in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a much larger audience than I’ve ever had before. My essays now routinely break the five-figure view mark, meaning that everything I write is going straight into the heads of tens of thousands of people ... and, I like to flatter myself (and you), not tens of thousands of random people, but tens of thousands of highly intelligent, thoughtful, and often successful people ... the kinds of people who have a greater-than-average influence on the world.

The responsibility of that weighs on me with increasing heaviness. There are consequences to ideas. Every time you say something, it has some influence on the people who hear it. On a densely connected medium such as the Internet, every thought is a sort of wave that pulses out into the collective consciousness; the more connected one is, and the more that wave resonates with connected receivers, the greater its amplitude. This doesn’t only have an effect on the people who directly read something, either. There are second-order effects: someone reads something, and this influences their thoughts, which in turn influences their own words and actions, which has an effect on the people connected to them. And then by extension there are third-order effects beyond that, cascading throughout the noosphere.

I didn’t start Postcards From Barsoom with any kind of plan in mind; to be honest, I still don’t have anything that could recognizably be called a ‘plan’. There’s no niche I’m trying to carve out, no one over-riding message I’m trying to communicate. I write about whatever I find interesting enough to capture my attention, I try to be honest without pretending I’m always right, and I try to find creative angles on the subject matter, to say things that haven’t been said before, or at least to say them in a somewhat novel fashion. It’s a constant dance between poetry and science, perched on the razor edge between rigour and ridiculousness. Striking that balance while also being aware of the responsibility that a large audience entails is trickier still. Nothing crushes playfulness faster than the gravity of seriousness.

Years ago I was conscripted to give a short presentation at a TedX-style event being held in an off-campus pub. I decided to give a talk on cosmology, treating it as a set of emergent cultural metaphors and interrogating these to see what they say about our society, and where those cultural biases might have produced certain scientific blindspots that occluded other physical possibilities from our consideration. Years later, a young man came up to talk to me. He’d been in the audience, and told me that he had been so inspired that he’d dropped out of his engineering program to study philosophy.

“But I never saw you around the philosophy department,” he finished.

“That’s ... because I’m not a philosophy student,” I replied.

We looked at one another, both rather embarrassed. On my part, because I felt like I’d accidentally derailed the poor kid’s life. Engineers are well-paid; philosophy majors, not so much. I certainly hadn’t done so intentionally: I’d never said I was a phil student¹, though I can’t recall if I had said what department I was with (it’s entirely possible I didn’t; I usually consider such details to be of minor importance). Nevertheless, the power of my words had sent the young man down an entirely different path in life from one he might have travelled otherwise. I’d had a considerable impact on him, but barely knew who he was.

I suppose, reading this, you might think I’m gearing up to say ‘I’m going to stop writing now’, as an April Fool’s joke. The joke is that there is no joke. I’m not going to stop writing, now or any time soon. I enjoy this far too much.

At the moment I’m sitting outside at a Latin American cafe. The weather is beautiful, sunny and fresh. I can do this, bounce around the world, drifting from country to country as wind and whim take me, because of you ... because there are enough of you who find enough value in my writing that you’re willing to buy me a beer once a month, in order to keep me in front of my keyboard. Since I put almost everything out for free, my patrons don’t get anything that free subscribers don’t, which is something that does eat at my conscience a bit. I don’t even lock down my comments to paid subscribers only; I enjoy the back and forth too much.

Today, however, is not like most days. Today, the comments are open to paid subscribers only. This is your chance to ask me whatever you like. I do not promise that I will answer everything to your satisfaction: questions that are too personal may be met with somewhat evasive or at any rate non-specific responses, as I’d prefer not to get doxxed. Or you can ask me my opinion on some subject; if I don’t know enough to say something informed, perhaps it will send me down an interesting new rabbit hole. You can ask me to clarify or expand upon something I’ve written previously; you can ask me about something I’ve never written a word on. I may respond in the comments, or I may not: my rough intention is to gather the most interesting questions, and respond to them later, in a full post, at whatever length they demand.

Alexander Preuss

1. Indeed at that point, I’d never taken a single philosophy course; out of sheer perversity (and the desire to make a point to my girlfriend at the time) I did take a grad-level course towards the end of my Master’s, a choice which baffled my supervisor, the departmental secretary, the philosophy department, and the registrar’s office (who thought it had to be some kind of mistake). In any case I got an A without too much trouble.