It’s 2025. I published my first book at the end of 2023, just after the genocide in Palestine had begun. My High Holidays were spent meditating on rage and complicity. Indeed, I found 2024 to be a year of rage, of loss, of disappointment, of fear, and of struggle. Too often, I found myself without words. A bad look for someone who claims to be a writer.
I intended to post about so many things of note, but so many of them been difficult, in ways large and small. Even the beautiful things have been somewhat eviscerating. And to boot, my primary spaces of writing (beyond the paywalled and limited pages of academic dialogue) have been Facebook and Instagram. These have been wonderful spaces of connection for many of us, especially in times of withdraw and enforced solitude. And yet, it’s been harder and harder to justify centering my communications on financialized platforms that have grown ever more brazen about weaponizing our presence and exposing us to bad faith actors, reactionaries, and those who make a job of trying to bring about a world built on brutal and deadly hierarchies. There’s much to say about the shortcut of the “us” here (let alone the implicit “them”)–and yet, this is precisely the reality that these platforms manifest.
In any case, while I ponder Substack and other modes of circulating communication, I’m going to pretend like I’m still in the early 2000s and start a blog. Don’t laugh, I’ve always been a late adopter!
Christoph Hanssmann 