Author: Benjamin

Let’s take a moment to really consider the full significance of the Republican’s failure to pass a replacement for the ACA.

The Republicans have been unified in their opposition to the ACA since well before it was passed in 2010. They used that opposition to sweep into power on both the federal and state levels in the 2010 midterms. They currently have a strong majority in the House, a strong majority in the Senate, and their party holds the presidency. Their opposition to the ACA has been constant, unrelenting, and vociferous.

Furthermore, they have used their power at the state level to gerrymander as many Congressional districts as possible in order the assure safe Republican seats, meaning there’s almost no electoral pressure on most House Republicans.

The Republican party holds all the cards right now–and despite that, their Congressional leadership chose not to bring their replacement bill up for a vote, knowing that it was doomed and thereby avoiding the embarrassment of a quantified failure.

This is not merely a setback. This is an indication of a system so locked up in conflict that it’s essentially no longer functioning at all.

So last week was a pretty intense week around these parts. We started with a lengthy four-part essay reflecting on what I’ve learned from two years of publishing the Free Refills Project, and from there extrapolating into a forceful statement of intent. Then on Friday, I made a strong assertion about the as-I-see-it impending awakening to the reality of flow of energy in our lives as we deal with the fallout from the collapse of our political system, a collapse that’s well in progress by now, and soon will be very, very hard to deny.

And then yesterday I continued with a call to action. Like, I said, intense times.

So with all that in mind let’s take a bit of a breather for the rest of this week. We need a little space to let all of that sink in. (Not that I won’t be publishing. But just, you know: simple.)

Let us go then, you and I, on an adventure. Last week’s pieces set out something of a manifesto: Here is how I have worked. Here is how I am going to work. And I’m staking my future on it.

There comes a time when all the struggle, all the self-excoriating name-calling, gets a little old.

I’m done facing the dumb momentum of the old system, pursuing what I believe to be the better idea, and then somehow calling myself a coward. I’m done downplaying my abilities as a writer, as though anyone anywhere actually benefits from me shrugging and saying, “I’m pretty good, I guess.” I’ve put in the fucking work, thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of work–of practice–and through it I’ve earned the right to stand up straight, center myself, look the world in the eye, and tell it that I’m really good at what I do.

And that I’ve earned the right to get paid for it.

So pick up your sword and shield and join me. Together we march boldly into the future.

(No, this was not one of the original six observations/propositions. But in trying to follow the logic from O/P5: (“Hyper-partisanship is leading inexorably to the collapse of the current system.”) to the old O/P6 (“To solve the overarching problem, we’re going to have to create a new way of engaging with each other both politically and personally. That means building on an understanding grounded in flow of energy.”), I discovered a gap. What exactly is going to open us to the idea that bioenergetics, centering, flow, etc. are the path to the right answer? What’s going to bring about our awakening?)

The shift to hyper-partisanship isn’t something those people did. You’re a participant in it. So am I.

We can trace a massive cultural shift back to the fall of 1996 and the launch of the Fox News Channel. To people who wanted 24-hour news coverage but felt that CNN and MSNBC held a liberal bias, Fox News offered an alternative. Its meteoric ascent showed just how large that demographic really was.

Since that time, the proliferation of media outlets, along with the Internet’s evolution from a curiosity to a central position in our lives has radically accelerated the fragmentation of the population into carefully orchestrated media demographics. When you extrapolate from the ease of providing content to any niche audience you can imagine, it doesn’t take long before you end up with a situation as happened this election, in which people were so primed to believe things that fit their worldview that they stopped being concerned if those things were actually, you know, true.

The shift happened naturally enough. It results from tendencies within us that aren’t even something to especially decry. One of the core tenets of TTW is the cultivation of a state of ease in all things that we do, and from that perspective it’s clear why people would choose to consume media produced by people who share a similar worldview: it’s far more comfortable. Who wants to choose the discomfort of constantly experiencing the dissonance of dealing with people whose worldview does not match your own? Instead, at our current level of energetic development, we seek the comfortable consonance of “This affirms what I already think.”

Unfortunately, this is leading, pretty inexorably, to the hyper-partisanship that is destroying our society. So there are some downsides.

But as I’ve said before, if you practice centering with real regularity and are honest about what you experience, you will fairly quickly be forced to confront that your existence as an entity discrete from all these other entities is actually an illusion. The truth of our deep connection simply becomes undeniable. Which is not to say that your thinking will suddenly line up with that of people with whom you disagree. Rather, you will recognize that your thinking, and thus your participation in this culture of conflict, is built on a faulty foundation. Your thinking is built on a notion of “us versus them.” But there is no them. There is only us.

Thus for the awakened creator to properly survive in the digital age, supply must become binary. You see, the awakened creator recognizes that they cannot control their work once it is out there in digital form, that every attempt to do so will be foiled if someone wants to work hard enough, so the creator stops trying to demand that control.

This is what I mean when I say we have to think of supply as binary. For a digital good, the question is not how many copies exist. That’s a desperate holdover from a prior age, built on systems of control that no longer work. For a digital good, the question should be, Is there a copy at all? Does it exist, or not?

The contortions we’re going through, in order to continue to refuse to acknowledge that fact, and where it necessarily leads us–it all gets a little exhausting, don’t you think?

In the digital world, for digital goods, the only thing that makes sense is to pay the creator not for the work they’ve done, but that they keep working. You pay them because they have earned your trust: you have found what they produce valuable, and you see that they continue to produce.

In other words, you stop paying by the copy. You pay for the first copy. You pay to help bring it into existence.

It took me ten years, maybe more, to trust that insight enough to commit to it. That’s what you see here. It is, in part, what Free Refills means.

That insight tells me that I am not going to spend my day asking other people if I can have their permission to write something in exchange for money. I’m just going to write the fucking thing, and publish it, and then I get to point to it and say, “See? I wrote this. And it’s good. You like it too? You should pay me to write more things like this. Then everybody wins.”

I called myself a coward all those years ago for hating the fairly insane and deeply demoralizing act of querying for work. I watched myself work very hard to write something (the query letter) in which I promised that I have the ability to work very hard to write something really good on the topic that I am here in this letter already talking about. But in the Catch-22 that every freelance writer experiences, until you have the evidence to show you can keep your promise, in the form of pieces already published, most of the time the editor in question will say no.

So I took that asshole out of the equation. Who the fuck are you to tell me no?

I spent years calling myself a coward, but I’m not doing it anymore. Neither am I tilting at windmills and calling them giants. The old world is crumbling in part because of our stubborn, terrified refusal to acknowledge the new.

Two years ago today I tentatively put forth my first piece in the manner that I believed my long-ago insight demanded of me. And I’m staking my future on that belief.

And thus we come full circle to the promise I made that day. In those first, hesitant steps, I gave up on the stupid idea that it had to be perfect. Instead, I committed to the better idea: that something had to be. Every. Single. Fucking. Day.

I used to go to bookstores and peruse the magazines, looking for publications I could query to write for. I hated it. I just hated it, and I hated myself for hating it, called myself names like coward— but what I remember now is leaving the store and feeling physically sick, after having been swimming in a sea of random information. Just by itself that is a fairly dangerous and poisonous environment, but when you add in that all that information was supported by advertising, that is to say, the content existed primarily because someone thought they could sell something by strategically positioning that content next to their advertising, it became downright toxic. Swimming in late-stage all-needs-met-so-let’s-invent-needs capitalist advertising of which you might not even be the target demographic. Always a surreal experience.

I hated that feeling.

It seemed all the more stupid and futile because when I was doing this, back in the early 2000s, it was already clear that I was willfully participating in an anachronism. I’d recognized that the Internet was going to change everything during my sophomore year of college, back in 1994, when a friend of mine had showed me that it was possible to download music over the Internet. Right then, I understood that all the rules were going to change. It wouldn’t be long before everything was very, very different. (When I tell this story, I like to add that if I’d really understood just what this change portended, I would have immediately changed my major to C.S., and instead of Napster it would have been called Benster.)

So in the early days of what would be my sad, depressed, ineffectual freelance career, I was therefore struggling and perplexed by the issue that no one seemed to be willing to understand (or was it that they willfully refused to understand?), that in the digital age, for digital goods, there should no longer be such a thing as supply and demand, or not in the way we understood it in the past. When the marginal cost of another copy falls to zero–the ultimate fate of any digital good, no matter how large, because computers and networks just keep getting faster–then supply, in the traditional sense, becomes infinite. When infinite supply meets finite demand (and demand can only ever be finite), the correct price per copy simply has to be zero.

Of course, acknowledging that would be hugely disruptive to the current structure of our economic world.

And refusing to acknowledge that isn’t preventing that disruption. It is only barely–just barely–keeping the old system afloat.

When you are accustomed to seeing who you are as a problem, it can be pretty challenging to make choices that make you happy. Happiness seems suspect, as though corrupted.

We call this emotion shame.

Consequently, if you do what you are called to do, you do it without joy, or mostly so, except for those occasional times when the voices stop and you dissolve into the work itself. On those days the words come like surfing the terrain on a powder day, where it’s less like you are going down the mountain than that the mountain is coming up to meet you, and you are at the center of everything.

Those times are beautiful, but they tend to slip through our fingers like the finest sand, because somewhere we learned that we have to suffer to make art. We are called to make art, so goddamn it we are going to make art. And so we suffer.

There comes a time, though, when struggle just gets boring.

So we decide, Fuck it, I’m just going to be happy. I’m going to make the choices I need to make to make me happy. And if my life blows up: okay. Okay. I’m willing. I’ve been through worse. I have been to the darkest places.

I carry a refuge within me: I can always escape into the present. I will dive as deeply as necessary into it. I will slow down time to feel each exquisite moment of anguish if necessary, to examine what feels like flatline and discover that slow vibrations, barely perceptible, remain. Look close enough and you discover that the oscillations always continue. What that says to us: This too shall pass, just like this moment, and this one, and this one.

And now after years of practice, I know that I have another refuge available: I have the work itself. No one can take that away from me. Even in the darkest days, even when all went wrong, the work was always there. And when I came back to it from off the bottom and learned to show up despite that I couldn’t allow it to make me happy– because happiness is suspect, remember–well, seriously, there’s no way I’m going to stop doing it now. This is who I am. I did it: there’s no question anymore. I need no external validation.

That said, I do this daily dance with words as a means to connect with people.

And earning a nice, regular paycheck from this work would feel really good.

Two years ago today, I began my weekday publishing practice here on Free Refills with a piece entitled, “Planting a Seed.”

I did it because it was time. I had been called, years before, with an insight: The Internet changes everything. In the new world, you don’t need anyone’s permission. You do the work. You write, and you publish. You don’t need to declare yourself to be a writer. You do the work, and the work does it for you.

Two years ago today, I truly began to answer that call.

“By changing the boundaries under which the game is played,” I said, “you change the game itself.”

I made a promise, to myself and to all who were there to see it. I promised I would publish a new piece of writing every weekday, backed every week by 5,000 words of drafting.

“Today is the equinox,” I said, “and right here I am planting a seed.”

I would publish every weekday like it was my job. I would publish every weekday because it was my job. In two years–more than 520 pieces now–I have never missed my daily deadline.

What I did not do was tell the world about it. I felt I needed a clearer idea of what I was doing before I began to share it. So far I’m just writing about the process, I told myself. Who is going to find that kind of thing interesting?

The last sentence of that first piece was this: “I still don’t know what exactly is going to sprout.”

In recent weeks I have read over those earliest pieces, and two years on, I have the perspective to see what I was doing there. Those pieces coherently tell the story of the early days of this experiment. They teach. And they are very, very good.

Who’s going to care about pieces about process? Over recent weeks, I’ve come to a new understanding of that question. I’ve started to find my way to something that can only be called faith. I long ago came to understand that the best work happens when I get my ego out of the way and just allow what needs to come through to come through. The universe asks me to become a channel, and I allow it happen. The faith, though, is this: the universe doesn’t play tricks. If you’re called to speak, the universe will bring ears to listen.

Proposition 5: Hyper-partisanship is not just making things worse, it’s leading inexorably to the collapse of the current system.

I acknowledge that worse is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but let’s use this chart of Congressional job approval ratings to make the argument. (This chart comes from Gallup, the polling company.)

Let’s start our discussion in 1992. Through the Clinton presidency, Congress’s approval ratings trended upwards. Notice the substantial spike after 1994, which was the election that brought us the Gingrich revolution and really began the era of deep partisan divide in Congress. I propose two reasons for that upward trend. One was the economic boom of the ’90s–when people see improvements in their lives, they are more likely to see the government in favorable terms. But the other was in fact the partisanship that Gingrich brought with him, as highlighted, ultimately, by the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton’s impeachment. Initially, and contrary to my thesis, people liked partisanship. What changed?

The boom ended, that’s what. The boom itself was essentially extra-governmental. It arose via the first wave of efficiencies wrought by the Internet. Thus the partisanship of the ’90s was essentially a sideshow. But then the boom ended, and we returned to a situation in which we needed a functioning government to make things better for people. And the government has increasingly failed to do so. You can see that failure in the trends of Congressional approval ratings since the end of the Clinton presidency.

If we discount the peak right after September 11, 2001, the trend was strongly downward throughout the George W. Bush administration, rose sharply but briefly at the start of the Obama administration, fell to news lows as that administration went on, and now has risen again–all the way to 28% approval!–at the start of the Trump administration. I predict the bump upward will be as short-lived as it was at the start of the Obama administration, and we’ll soon see Congressional approval fall to new lows.

Conflict is not a path to creation.

So if partisanship has not led to outcomes people like, is there any sign that the trend toward partisanship is abating? In fact, just the opposite is happening. Check out this graphic showing how the electoral results across America are getting more and more polarized:

(For more discussion of this graphic and the underlying phenomenon, please see Purple America Has All But Disappeared on fivethirtyeight.com.)

So: partisanship is making things worse, and partisanship is increasing. Only time will tell if the second half of my proposition is accurate. But I propose that increasing partisanship and worsening results from the system form a feedback loop. Extreme partisanship leads to a Congress (and therefore government in general) unable to get anything done, which leads to disgust with the system and deeper distrust of the other side, whom each side respectively blames for everything that isn’t working, which leads to deeper partisanship, and so on.

There’s a limit to how much a system can degrade before it collapses. Once a feedback loop gets set into place, it will grow and grow and grow until something comes along to arrest it. Do you see any evidence that anything is going to do that with respect to our system? Any at all?

Now that we’re at Thursday, let us reflect on everything we’ve accomplished at Free Refills this week. On Sunday night, we found ourselves facing a very busy week that would largely keep us away from the computer, an empty queue of ready-to-publish pieces, and no real ideas for how to proceed. Then we began to zero draft, still with no ideas but running with who-knows-where-it-came-from impulse that it might be fun to play around with the weird superlatives that pepper the speech of the person most people agree that most people agree is our president, which is to say he occupies the White House and does, sort of, the president’s job. And now consider what a terrific set of pieces we’ve been able to write via linguistic contortions, self-circularity, and no ideas except playing with that language. We’ve come up with a week of pieces that everyone agrees is pretty much genius, and those hideously un-American people who don’t agree that everyone agrees that these are terrific pieces, really the best pieces, probably feel amused anyway, and when even the people who don’t agree smile and chuckle and thus are forced to agree, then they really must be the best pieces, which also forces them to agree.

They’re forced to agree or we’ll deport their undiscerning asses back where they came from, and by that I don’t mean spatially, since many of them are from here, and also because Free Refills refuses to even appear to countenance the racism implicit in the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the current administration, but instead temporally, back to a time where there’s no internet and no concept of an internet, and then they’ll woefully agree that when the internet does finally get invented, a terrific site, really the best side, was/will be this one site called Free Refills.

Should have agreed all along, eh, Time Traveler? Enjoy your bubonic plague, Time Traveler.