What this is/Who I am/Who I am is what I am is who I am (context collapse)

My name is Ian Williams and I'm a writer. It is, bluntly, the only thing I'm decent at. Sometimes I'm quite good, other times I'm merely passable, but I don't think I ever descend into the bad or (worse) good but thoughtless. I've spent over a decade as a professional writer in various capacities, first as a game designer, then as a cultural critic and labor reporter, and finally as an academic. The last one is still being sorted out, because it is murderous out there on the job market.

The purpose of this newsletter/blog is to create a space for me to write, because there just aren't many places to write anymore. The ZIRP-driven boom times of mid-tier media is dead. It was dead when my steadiest gig at VICE Sports died a second, more permanent death in 2019. Fortuitously, that was nearly the same week I was accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill's Communication program for my doctorate. I, of course, finished my doctorate in time for the possible/potential/likely death throes of steady academic work.

I admit here that I've developed a tense relationship with writing. It was never as joyful for me after the 2019 collapse. But the ideas never went away, or I'd never have finished a dissertation, pitched it as a book, written articles. It's not that I object to the professionalization of the whole thing, but the idea of getting back out there on the freelance grind or, worse, enduring the rejections for regular positions in an absolutely desolate media landscape filled me with dread.

So I'm trying to rediscover a little of that old joy and motivation. The ideas never went away, for good or ill. But I admit to a great deal of ambivalence toward the idea of writing on the internet in 2025. I suspect that everything eventually turns into slop for the internet attention machine, decontextualized, cut up, read ruthlessly or not at all, responded to, forgotten. I wouldn't say that's a particularly cheery stance but neither do a feel an inclination to pretend otherwise.

Right now, this is free. I'm going to write often. I hope. If it goes well and people subscribe, I might set up a subscription system to scrounge up a little cash, but that's for later and I don't know what that looks like. I'll do it while I have ideas and it's fun.

My preoccupation is temporal and context collapse. There seems to be no cognizance of the past and no vision of the future. There's just a perpetual now. Open your streaming drug of choice and you'll have an endless scroll where 40 year old music is now, old movies are now and are then remade for now, people dance for you now but also when they do it tomorrow it's now. We effortlessly flit between time streams but the realization of that fact is only ever experienced in a present moment which was also then but also later but forever now.

I suspect this isn't good for us. But more than that it's interesting.

We mark time by noticing shifts in culture and in politics. I was born during the Carter administration. I saw Star Wars in the theater when I was three. I remember when Nevermind came out, I was 14. Those are real things that I say when I recall my life or talk to people. They do those things, too. We all do them.

But what if those things stopped? What if politics never changed because nothing new was possible? What if movies became an endless parade of remakes and music just kept repurposing old styles for years, decades? How would you notice the past or plan for the future? What would now feel like when everything is plucked from its context of time and place, reduced to just a tiny screen? What if you talked to your friends in the liminal space between synchronous and asynchronous on that same tiny screen? What would that do to us?

This isn't novel and I'm not original, though I hope I offer some originality to come. I'm informed by the work of Assmann, Bergson, Fisher, Gilbert, Gilroy, Jameson, and Reynolds. My dissertation, outwardly concerned by the melange of craft and industrial practices in the strange corner of popular culture called miniatures wargaming, is about this under the surface: why do we want to work at our "own" pace, why do we distinguish craft from other practices, why do we revisit past historical moments via importation into the present in WWII wargames or Warhammer?

Why are we so weird?

I know that's a normative claim when weirdness is a comparative thing that is always changing. But I don't exclude myself from that observation. In fact, often when I'm thinking about how weird things are I'm writing about myself. Why am I so weird? Why do I detest this thing in my pocket but can't imagine life without it? And I am, as I tell my students, a voracious consumer of trash. I'm not snooty, even if their/your trash isn't my trash and thus not to my tastes. But I am curious about all of this and I think it's useful to figure out the stakes of any given cultural artifact. Everything is important but not everything is as important as everything else.

Not everything will be about temporal politics and context collapse, though there will always be some of that in there, even if it's not obvious to me. That would be boring and eventually would devolve into a pat explainer for anything and everything. Oh, that political thing happened? Time must be out of joint. If all goes well, there may be some throwaway stupid things. I might link to my neglected wargaming blog because I'm trying to do something interesting (and trashy) there. I hope it never turns into reflexive commentary on today's event. I never want it to be just another running commentary on now, even if sometimes it will be.

So that's what this is. But it's only what it is, because what it will be is what it is and it never actually was.

Now is the only thing that's real.