Welcome, Fellow Human!
I’m humbled, honored, and not a little bit gobsmacked that you somehow found your way to my publication. In our reaping-the-whirlwind age of all-engulfing informational swampland and quagmire, it is no small thing that your travels in hyperreality plopped you down here.
Progressive Worldbuilding discusses the problems of modern human societies and how we can work together to solve them. It will explore and articulate a collection of hopeful (and hopefully not dunderheaded) ideas, theories, arguments, thought experiments, and proposals for concerted problem-solving actions that can drive human progress toward the creation of conditions we humans actually want to live in.
If that sounds enticing, I hope you will stick around, return frequently, and find some beneficial insights and usefulness herein.
If you want to deep-dive into the minutia of the whys and hows of Progressive Worldbuilding, you can read on in the How This Works section below.
Thank you for reading, and welcome to Progressive Worldbuilding.
Obligatory Requests
Subscribe
Like all substacks since the birth of Substack, Progressive Worldbuilding is reader-supported. If you like what you see and find value in the words, I encourage you to become a free or paid subscriber.
Donate
If you are unable to become a paid subscriber, you can make a one-time donation to support the publication. All donations, of any amount, are deeply appreciated.
Spread the Word
I don’t use social media (at least not yet), but if you do, please consider sharing the publication and posts from time to time. Given that I won’t likely be pitching, peddling, and puffing up my stuff all over the place, I would be grateful for any publicity you feel inclined to direct my way.
How This Thing Works
Origins, Explanations, Clarifications, Disclaimers
1. Definition
The term “progressive worldbuilding” refers to the process of applying our creative faculties in the real world to build a progressively better version of our world, one that respects, aids, and advances the flourishing of humanity and all the other life forms we coexist with and depend on.
Given that progressive worldbuilding is a term of my own creation, this publication constitutes the entire corpus of original source material on the topic.
For a more detailed discussion, see What Is Progressive Worldbuilding?
2. “Progressive”
Because all political labels (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, nationalist, populist) activate a stinking hot mess of assumptions, stereotypes, biases, and derangement, I’m using progressive with no small degree of hesitation and conflictedness.
Yet we only have so many words to work with, and at this point in human history, nearly all our of cultural terminology is so semantically polluted that no one knows what the hell anyone else is actually talking about (even though we all very much think we do), and we’re mostly talking past one another in one way or another while wandering the jungles, wastelands, and recursive echo chambers of our solipsistic souls.
So it is that I’ll be using progressive with a lot of qualifications and explanation, and I suspect that some readers will likely resist or reject most everything I say simply because I’m using a term that triggers autonomic brain-stem-level cascades of moral revulsion beaten into them by whatever tribalistic group their genetics, familial context, social development, geographical location, and historical moment of their birth randomly assigned them to.
If you found your way here and identify as “conservative,” or with some other ideology that has programmed you to think that everything “progressive” represents a grave threat to your cherished values, beliefs, and way of life, I encourage you to exert yourself, overcome your impulses, and give some consideration to the ideas contained herein.
If you just can’t conjure up that level of intellectual curiosity, cognitive effort, and ideological transcendence, I encourage you to do something else with your limited time here on planet Earth.
For a longer discussion of this last point, see #8 below.
3. Context
While the stuff discussed in Progressive Worldbuilding may be applicable in other contexts and countries around the globe, the publication primarily addresses American conditions, problems, and opportunities.
4. Honesty
Honesty is the first step that must be taken when attempting to solve a problem.
Facts are also necessary, as are many other things, but facts alone won’t help much if we’re being dishonest about them.
In my view, honesty offers the prospect of hope, while deception, self-deception, and their related symptoms (e.g., denial, avoidance, etc.) are a 100% guaranteed kamikaze dive-bomb into hopelessness.
To the fullest extent we can, we need to be honest with ourselves, honest with others, and honest about our biases, prejudices, and limitations, including the obvious and demonstrable fact that we are not nearly as self-aware, benevolent, or intelligent as we like to think we are.
Consequently, progressive worldbuilding begins with a brutally honest analysis of the dysfunction and harm our species causes, quite often for no good goddamned reason whatsoever.
But the second step is even more important: Using that brutally honest analysis to counteract, redress, heal, and solve as much of that dysfunction and harm as we can. But a brutally honest assessment is not only useless if it isn’t used to enact corrective measures, but the defensiveness, demotivation, demoralization, and depression our dishonesty engenders will only make an already not-very-good-at-all situation even worse.
5. Humanity
Progressive Worldbuilding is unapologetically committed to advancing the dignity and flourishing of humankind in all its multitudinous forms.
Every idea, theory, argument, and proposal has been generated in the mind of a real human person, and every article has been 100% written by a real human person.
In addition, other human persons, and the knowledge and analyses they’ve generated over millennia of cultural evolution, have directly or indirectly inspired or informed the ideas that somehow appeared, unbidden, in the mind of this particular human person typing out these particular words.
At times, AI has been used to confirm facts, track down references, and save time, but zero words in the publication were written by AI.
Until such time that we become cyborgs (though I would argue we already are), and cross the Rubicon of the singularity, our humanity—and our humaneness—are what we have to work with.
6. Patterns
Progressive Worldbuilding is focused on large-scale pattern analysis. The objective is to isolate signal from noise, and discuss durable things that persist over time and across places, rather than on particular transitory things, such as what someone said or did one time, that get memory-holed beneath the next day’s mountainous pile of particular occurrences.
While many specific facts and events will be mentioned and discussed in Progressive Worldbuilding, they will primarily serve as examples and illustrations of underlying patterns.
I will also try to avoid engaging in one-sided arguments about specific facts or events that everyone is claiming either are or aren’t true, or that did or didn’t happen, or that they believe are right or wrong or good or evil because… What’s the point of tinkling a tiny bell in a global storm of clamorous clanging?
7. Format
The format of Progressive Worldbuilding will evolve over time, and the format of specific articles will vary. But my general plan is to write articles that accomplish three primary objectives:
A. Summarization: Many articles will include brief summaries. The purpose is to render the content more accessible to those with distracting lives, limited attentional resources, or certain cognitive processing conditions.
B. Exploration: Articles will include long-form discussions that unspool entwined ideas into followable threads that can be knitted together into interesting insights and patterns—or, at least, insights and patterns that are interesting to me. These discussions also give me space to be creative and play around with ideas and language because it’s fun and motivates me to learn and write more.
C. Activation: Articles will include suggestions for actions that can be taken right now to advance urgent civilizational projects. Everything we do matters, even if we have no idea how those actions, once taken, will matter. Everything we do either contributes to the making of the best world we can envision or to the vaporization of those aspirations, ideals, and imagined futures into a smog-like diffusion of deprivation, predation, and all-too-likely self-annihilation.
8. Choice
I made the choice to start this newsletter; it is your choice to read it or not.
If you think this newsletter blows your hair back and butters your toast, I encourage you to subscribe and/or contribute whatever money you feel it’s worth to you. I will be deeply appreciative, and not a little bit shocked, if some of you contribute some simoleons.
If some significant percentage of readers send some money, I will invest more time in writing the newsletter in direct proportion to the amount of money sent. If I get subscribers, but little or no money, I will produce the newsletter when I can fit it into the gaps between all the other life stuff I have to get done—which is a lot of stuff.
If you want more newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber or one-time or multi-time supporter at whatever level is doable for you.
But if you think this newsletter sucks, or if you think I’m a dumb-dumb, or if hate what I write, or if you’re really upset or pissed off about it, or if you want to put me on blast and rant about it, or if you want to spam me, dox me, or send me death threats, I suggest, instead, that you simply don’t read it.
It’s supposedly a free country—for the time being, at least—so go read something you like reading instead. If you choose to read my writing, that’s your choice, which means you’re responsible for whatever physiological and emotional discomforts result from your choice. If you don’t like feeling those feelings, you can always take your ass elsewhere.
9. Errors
To err is human.
(Except, apparently, in many liberal circles, where the ambient fear of making a mistake appears to be an ever-present catalyst of inaction. More on this topic coming soon….)
In this publication, I will strive to be as factual, evidence-based, and error-free as I can be with the far-too-limited brains, experience, knowledge, time, and situational resources that I have at my disposal at the time of writing. I will also strive to bring sound ethical and editorial judgement to the process.
With that said, I’m not going to let perfect be the enemy of productivity. (Much of my life to date, seen in retrospect from an orbiting satellite high up in the heavens, is a study in the paralyzing, unproductive effects of perfectionism—I do not recommend it.)
Therefore, I am intentionally choosing not to care too, too much if I make a mistake, inadvertently introduce an error, get a name wrong, misstate something, or overlook a typo because I don’t have research assistants, fact-checkers, and proofreaders in my employ.
Yet if I do happen to make a mistake, inadvertently introduce an error, or overlook an inaccuracy, misstatement, or typo, and these or other glitches are pointed out to me, and if I have the time when I feel the inclination, I will make an effort to correct as many of them as I can with the far-too-limited brains, experience, knowledge, time, and situational resources I have at my disposal at the time of correction.
For related discussions, see #8 above and #12 below.
10. Confidence
Throughout Progressive Worldbuilding, I will write with the spirit and tone of confidence animating my words.
Why? Confidence is more rhetorically persuasive and compelling than insecurity (liberals take note!), and I want readers to want to read what I write. I believe my ideas and proposals are generally sound and potentially useful, even when they’re largely intended to be provocative thought experiments (and many of them will be).
Also: I tried the insecure, self-doubting, self-effacement thing for most of my life, and I can confidently report that being unconfident doesn’t work.
Also: Why the hell not in this age of Dunning-Kruger-inflected overconfidence, rampant self-interest, concocted pseudo-expertise, and world-despoiling arrogance? Some huge number of people with demonstrably bad ideas are boldly, loudly, and unfetteredly proclaiming the goodness and righteousness of those bad ideas, so why would I write like a shrinking violet when so many confabulating fabulists, sham gurus, shameless profiteers, tinpot corporate pirates, unctuous lickspittle politicians, Russian democracy hackers, and AI slop-bots are shamelessly, but quite confidently, spamming us all with brain-swamping bullshit, disinformation, scams, and nastiness every day?
Finally: Confidence should not be confused with arrogance, despite the fact that they often are. I tend to loathe arrogance, in part because the arrogant among us tend to ruin lives, including their own, even when they know not what they do. I value humility, I try to be as humble as I can, and I think everyone should. But if those of us who are good people, who have better ideas, who are being honest, and who want to do good things in the world, don’t confidently go about the business of making the world a better place, our chronic humility will only continue to enable the acute outbreaks of arrogance-fueled inhumanity we’re trying to cure.
If we don’t conjure up the courage to ask that person on a date, chances are some asshole will.
11. Citation
In this publication, I’m not going to litter pages with references, citations, and footnotes, though I will include those things when and where appropriate.
Progressive Worldbuilding is not an academic project, in part because hardly anyone reads the output of academic projects. I happen to read these outputs as often as I can, but I’m independently interested in academic stuff, whereas most of the planet’s human population is seemingly not. In the effort to make this publication at least somewhat more interesting or accessible to a somewhat larger audience, I’m not going to lard the text with a bunch of references, citations, and footnotes.
With that said, I will strive to mention people or publications that, to the extent I’m able to recall, directly influenced a particular idea, insight, theory, or proposal. I will also interpolate links when I think external linking will be helpful or funny.
I want to give credit where credit is due, but I’m also not going to spend a large amount of my time collecting dewdrops off rose petals when the world is on fire, and we all need to be hauling sloshing buckets of water up every Sisyphean hill in sight to dump on the raging infernos now mounting up into the charred and blackening dome of heaven.
12. Revision
Progressive Worldbuilding is a creative project meant to spread ideas that could be useful, possibly illuminating, and, in some cases (I hope), enacted in the world. If, upon reflection, resultant from suggestion, or in light of new information recently emerged, I determine that certain articles should be revised or updated, I will revise and update them as I go. I’ll also include last-revised dates at the bottom of each article (unless I forget)
Nothing is stagnant, and we already have so much dead, dried-up, disregarded, and disappeared informational litter all over the place that no one no reads—or, if they did, remembers—that I’m going to nurture this project as if it were a living, growing, proliferating garden that requires ongoing tending, weeding, plantings/replantings, and regular infusions of novel fertilizing agents.
13. Anonymity
For the time being, I’ll be writing anonymously. Given that it’s entirely my choice whether I reveal my identity here, I’ll do it until I no longer want to do it.
Why am I choosing to remain anonymous for the time being?
There are a few reasons, but only one that’s worth mentioning here: I don’t have a lot of time right now.
I need to stay focused, motivated, and productive, or Progressive Worldbuilding will not exist, so anything that’s distracting, demotivating, or unproductive is counterproductive to my project. What matters to me right now is getting words out the door as quickly as I can.
I see this as an easy one-decision way to keep my personal/private and public/professional lives separate. If my personal/private life became a lot messier for unforeseeable reasons related to this publication, my public/professional focus, motivation, and productivity would suffer.
Our lives are but a tinkling sprinkle of sparks shooting out from the great cosmic sparkler of the universe, and I want to burn as brightly as I can on my little parabolic trajectory until I snuff out, drop down, and become one with the dust through which we all trudge.
Which means I need to be ruthlessly preservative of my time for the remainder of the time I have remaining.
There is no big mystery behind this decision, there’s nothing to hide, and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll change my mind.
14. Questions
If you have questions about anything contained herein, and you want some answers to at least some of those questions, I suggest you keep reading. Some of those answers will be revealed in the fullness of time. But also keep in mind that, like so many questions in life, the answers to all that you seek won’t materialize in your lifetime.
If you feel the need to contact me with questions that cannot be otherwise answered, see #15 below.
15. Contact
Because I’m interested in hearing what some of you have to say, you can send me an email if you want to say something helpful and constructive: wrldbldr@proton.com.
But please be advised that I might respond or I might not, and you won’t know why I’m not responding (because I haven’t responded), which could be perturbing to those who expect their messages to be responded to.
Why am I not responding to every message sent to me? Because (1) I’m intentionally deploying the Neal Stephenson method of disciplined literary production and (2) there are a whole lot of people out there who spend a whole lot of their time trying to waste a whole lot of other people’s time (we call this phenomenon the internet).
If someone out there only wants to crap on my newsletter, project their misery at me, or projectile-vomit the foul-smelling, hot-burning regurgitative acid reflux welling up from the convulsing lower esophageal sphincter of their mind due to their hyperprocessed ARFID diet of zealotry, chauvinism, propaganda, and meanness, they can send me a message, but this is what will happen:
I will delete it unread.
I will yawn, chuckle to myself, and move on with a song in my heart and that effervescent feeling of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.
So if they want to drain their life force sending messages into the black void of unread deletion, that’s their decision, but I’m not obligated to drain my own by consuming the rancid effluence foaming over the sides of the hideous witch’s cauldron of their wasted life.
16. Collaborating
From time to time, I consult on a wide variety of projects. I typically work at the intersection of analysis, strategy, and what I call “organizational therapy,” with the goal of helping the progressive movement in the United States be effectual. I also do presentations and workshops, and I’m open to doing interviews and getting involved in collaborations of mutual benefit.
If you are interested in discussing an opportunity in which we might work together, send me an email: wrldbldr@proton.com.
17. Author
~SEA lives in the United States. He has worked in progressive spaces for many years, and over that time many thoughts, observations, and theories have been accreting in his mind to the point of bursting. It is those ideas and reflections he shares in his Substack publication, Progressive Worldbuilding. You’ve probably never heard of him.
Last revised 1.30.25
