Each of us is a unique human being who will all experience today differently. My day began as usual, up early, coffee, reading selected Substack articles. No one will have read the same combination of articles. No one will have had the same thoughts as me, some of which I will now capture in writing.
Herald of the Octopus tells us Why Hiding Makes Us Human.
Thinking of privacy as a trade-off is an intuitive starting point. The classic framing pits individual freedom against collective security. Privacy seems like a dial to turn between these two competing values.
But, of course, what we really want is both maximum individual freedom and maximum collective security.
But this trade-off misses the deeper causation at work… Privacy creates information gradients in relationships. Concentric circles of membranes where the most trusted connections access the highest information content. But here's the key: The same secret creates intimacy when disclosed voluntarily to a lover, but becomes a weapon when extracted by manipulation.
I am probably less concerned with privacy than most people. I am telling my life story in detail on my personal website, The Life of John Stokdijk. I share a lot of my thoughts in my Substack articles. And I am fortunate to have trusted friends in a space where I can safely share more than what is in my articles. Even better, I can share thoughts with Pat that I do not share with my trusted friends.
Paying more attention to my home country, Canada, I added Dean Blundell to my Substack subscriptions earlier this year. Yesterday he described in fascinating detail that Elon Just Got Into Fight With GROK, on Twitter, And It Was GLORIOUS... I agree with Blundell’s conclusion.
Why This Should Terrify Everyone
Elon Musk restored white nationalist accounts to X in the name of "free speech." He lets literal neo-Nazis run wild under the banner of “free inquiry.” But when his own AI echoes Reuters and GAO — suddenly that’s too far?
That’s not a commitment to free speech. That’s not truth-seeking.
That’s a fragile ego rewriting code to avoid accountability.
Alexander Beiner shared something that I am very interested in, 'Leviathan' Screenings Near You.
Leviathan premieres on Thursday, 26 June.
A documentary and immersive art piece, it’s about the breakdown of trust in society, and how we get it back. It will draw you into the roots of the Western mind, the polycrisis, tech, economics and myth to point to a new future.
It stars an incredible group of heterodox thinkers including Yanis Varoufakis, Nora Bateson, Josh Schrei, Minna Salami, Douglas Rushkoff, Alexa Firmenich and John Vervaeke. Edited by Whetham Allpress, directed and produced by Alexander Beiner.
Unfortunately, I am not in a position to respond to his appeal for financial support to help cover production costs.
Jonathan Rowson was at the Lakefront. This article sparked many thoughts. And I appreciated the image.
Tomas Bjorkman - international man of mystery…
Björkman is not a complete mystery to me as I have been following the work of this extraordinary man for several years. He is a co-founder and chairman of Perspectiva and Rowson is the Director. To the best of my knowledge, Björkman was a financial backer of Rebel Wisdom, but I am unable to verify this information.
Rowson continues,
On Friday, the group and a few Lakefront residents began with an antidebate, which has matured as a process. The statement chosen by the group was suitably intense: Only a new religion will save the world.
A new grand narrative is a much discussed topic amongst Metamodern Wannabes.
Propositionally speaking, a great deal depends on what we mean by ‘religion’, ‘save’, ‘world’, ‘new’ and ‘only’, and those things all came up, but the antidebate is mostly a form of embodied, relational and participatory knowing where we acknowledge such ambiguities but don’t get stuck in them.
AND, juicy…
There are a few more things to share. There was a conversation about men and women in the sauna that led me to offer an Irish goodbye (when you leave without telling anyone). There is too much context to share to properly explain what happened, but in essence, I joined in on a conversation between two guys who were unsuspectingly dominating the conversational space in a sauna for eight people. I think the conversation lasted between five and ten minutes, and it might have seemed insignificant, but it was recast as a microcosm of the world going awry because men can’t stop themselves from bloviating.
Heather Cox Richardson gives us another important lesson from history,
…the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
But some people want to bury those lessons.
In 2025, as the Trump administration echoes those people, celebrations of Juneteenth are being cut back or even canceled. Corporate sponsors and local governments, as well as the national government, are pulling back their support for festivals and Juneteenth events.
Ben Meiselas continues his hard sell, MeidasTouch Needs Your Help on this HISTORIC DAY!!! and I love the results.
Any minute now, I expect we will pass 5 million subscribers on YouTube. We are averaging 30 million views every 48 hours on YouTube… I want to thank all our subscribers to this Substack for supporting the independent journalism at the MeidasTouch Network and making us the most-watched news network in America, topping Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.
We always knew that the survival of our democracy depended on independent media. We anticipated corporate news would support fascism and betray our country many years ago. When it happened—when Trump got elected—we were prepared for it. We had built the infrastructure brick by brick to replace corporate news.
I now see more interesting articles in my Substack Inbox. But soon I will be going out for breakfast with Pat. If I have time and energy I may write more later today.