The Vaccine Moment: a free ebook

News for the New Year

Dear readers,

A Happy New Year to all of you who are signed up for my free list. I hope 2022 is treating you well so far - and let’s hope that it treats all of us better than 2021 did.

Next week sees the resumption in my ongoing series of essays here at the Abbey of Misrule, in which I am trying to dig into the connected collapses we are living through. This project is broken down into three parts. The first, which ran from April to November last year, I called ‘Divining the Machine.’ It was a broad and occasionally rollicking historical journey, in which I attempted to trace the rise of our machine society across history.

Part two - I’m calling it ‘The Hollowing’ - began in December, and will continue with the next essay in the series next week. This part of the project consists of a dozen or so essays exploring the turmoil we are living through today, and what I think its deeper causes and consequences are.

After this, we’ll arrive at part three, which I hope will be more uplifting. In this final section, which I’m calling ‘Return to the Centre’, I’ll be offering up my meagre thoughts on how to live through the times, rebuild culture, protect what matters and generally remain human in a time which militates against it. This is perhaps the most important part of the project, and will also be the hardest. It’s probably a fool’s errand, but I’m committed now.

Most of these essays will be for paid subscribers, though some will be free for all, and I’ll be sending a few other goodies your way too if you can’t or don’t want to sign up for a paid sub. If you do want to give it a go, you can do so here:

In the meantime, here’s something free for everyone. The three essays on the virus and the Machine which I published in the final month of last year got a much bigger audience than I ever anticipated, and this has led me to stick them all together, along with a new introduction, and offer them up as my first free ebook. You can download (and share) the book of The Vaccine Moment here.

On the same subject, just before Christmas I recorded a podcast with fellow author Charles Eisenstein, in which we talked for an hour or so around all the issues in our recent writing around covid and the new authoritarianism. I found it really nourishing, myself. You can listen to that here. If you’re hungry for more along these lines, I can also recommend the excellent Mary Harrington’s recent essay about the quasi-religious nature of the new vaccine authoritarianism.

Many blessings and much strength to you all as the strange times roll on.

Paul