Quick Projects Update (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Just giving a quick update about everything currently filling up my brain space so that you all have a clear picture of what's coming up in the near future. If you want a longer term plan, please look over my earlier planning posts this year, it's mostly still true & the plan. I'll also make more of these short-term-plans posts once the following projects are out of the way.

1. Life on Mars. I've just recorded a video (similar to Mildred's Slime World) where I tell everyone how society works on Mars, a little bit of Martian history and why it's very comparable to Earth history, so that everyone can get on thinking about how to make the world a better place. This ties into my big upcoming project (3) and somewhat to my smaller project (2) as you'll see. Most of the video is unscripted/from notes because I wanted to quickly push out a description of a better kind of society and get the conversation going, rather than agonise too much over getting it "perfect" right away. I still think there's a lot of useful stuff in there, especially a focus on "big systems and small systems". That vid will be up for patrons in the next couple of days and going public on Friday

2. The Forgotten City. It's finally here! My analysis of The Forgotten City is mostly written and will be ready to record pretty soon. I'm hoping to get it out either by the end of June or very early in July. For those totally unaware, The Forgotten City is an RPG that explores and examines ethical systems and challenges the player to think about morality and how it relates to society. VERY up my street, hopefully it'll be up yours too, I'm also streaming it regularly at the moment for a bit of research/discussion.

3. The Future. (working title) I'm working on a really big project to be out in the next few months some time (hopefully before September, but no promises). It's about the future, and it's aimed at getting people in the online left to stop being doomers, stop being blackpilled, and start learning how to fight for a more loving world, because the future isn't fucked, but it's very popular and trendy to act like you know for sure that it is. The truth is, the future is uncertain and will be determined by how hard we fight now for a more loving world. This is why I've been doing Organising Interviews, this is why I've been doing Red Planet, this is why I share Positive Leftist News and It Could Happen Here around constantly. This video is essentially the "theory side" of all those things, making intellectual, political, philosophical and historical arguments for why we need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and get on with organising. My hope is that it will drive many people to stop engaging with the online left simply as a media consumption sphere and encourage both creators and audience members to form an online left where we teach, learn and strategise together rather than relying on spectacular politics as a way to maintain an audience and make money.

The latter half of The Future is going to be a historical study that I'm currently researching for which I call "On The Character Of Revolutions" helping people to understand why revolutions fail or succeed, and why they have the different politics that they have, and what those mean for what happens. It's also asking the question "can we have a (mostly) peaceful, anarchist, feminist, pro-queer, bipoc-led revolution in the imperial core? and if so, how?"

4. Surpise 4th point! Except it isn't a surprise, it's just saying that I'm still working on the big over-arching ongoing project that I'm always doing, Cyberpunk 2022: A Direction For The Online Left. I don't have progress updates per se, but the above project "the future" borrows heavily from the third essay in the C22 collection, "Against the Blackpill: An Argument for Optimism" so progress on the one is progress on the other. I hope I can release the first 3 (of 9) essays from that soon.

As ever, let me know your thoughts below, and I look forward to seeing what you think of each of these as they come out.

Solidarity, Hope and Power

Sophie