I’ve been doing my thing on this website since June of 2018, and doing it on ConcernedNetizen.com since February 2019. That’s nearly six years of blogging!

Some deep dives I’ve done in the past month into the nature of metamorphosis and transformation have pushed me into some deep introspection. And so, with much deliberation with my friends, I have made a decision to open up a bit more online, and have started a second blog over on Substack.

It’s called Less Mad.

Presenting myself to you here as the Concerned Netizen, I made this online persona something of a technology-buff as social commentator. From the peanut-gallery, I’ve been throwing in my two cents on the state of our messed-up relation to technology and trying to provide context from my own unique vantage point. Anyone reading can see that I’m extremely interested in the work of McLuhan and various old books on computers.

I think this second blog will, among other things, contextualize the impetus for this Concerned Netizen project. In truth, I started this blog here as a way to indirectly document and work through my recovery from a rather severe psychotic break which I had suffered in 2017.

I’ve never mentioned psychosis or mental illness here; as the Concerned Netizen, I’ve stuck mainly to polemics about computers and riffs on whatever I was reading or creating—as well as tried innovating some rhetoric for Free Software activism. But what this website has presented, since 2018, is an aspirational character of my image of recovery—a regular guy spouting off on topics of interest, out of a feeling he can contribute meaningfully to social discourse.

When it started, I was a whole lot more a nebulous character than the front I’ve put up here—I have been becoming the Concerned Netizen in all this time.

Now that I really am the Concerned Netizen, I’ve the confidence and support to share a little more about who I was when this project started. Over on Less Mad, I’m going into the experience of psychosis a lot more, especially as it relates to theories of personal development and becoming, or metamorphosis, and topics like cult initiation and the like as I intimately perceive them from experience. Thoughts regarding the “occult” and McLuhan’s relation to gnosticism, etc. will probably migrate over there, to Less Mad. What goes on there is going to be a lot different than I’ve written here.

I’ve decided to paywall some of it, and if you like what you see over there, please consider subscribing as a paid reader. Regular computer stuff and normal McLuhan stuff will continue to be posted here. At any rate, thanks for being a reader!