This is a brief explanation of the big changes around here. Following the introduction, I've shared one of the most vital-to-me essays I've ever written. (Truly. If I never write anything again - I will have written this essay! That's not nothing!)
The day after I sent my last newsletter, I realized that I wasn't doing enough. I needed to do more. But what? I found my answer after reading a document shared by Mariame Kaba, activist, author and archivist. She includes record keeping, educational pamphlet making and community knowledge sharing in Some Actions that Are Not Protesting or Voting. I know how to do that work. So that's what I am going to do.
I've restructured Pocket Observatory. It is now a not-for-profit project dedicated to helping individuals and communities regenerate the information field. (I will get into the nitty gritty of this later. I had to learn how to make a five year not-for-profit business plan! It was...a lot.) This took months of work and was only possible because of support from paid subscribers. Thank you. From all of us.
Now, let me share a little of what I've built.
Drawing on years of research and reporting, I've developed a pocket-sized framework designed to help you reclaim your attention, preserve information and share knowledge. This framework includes a MUCH improved dynamic digital archive, a daily newsletter of contextualized observations and a monthly curriculum focused on preserving information and cultivating community knowledge.
Today, I am sending you the first issue of the curriculum.
Each Pocket Observation contains original writing, research and prompts. I create one half of Pocket Observation. The other half is created by you. As you interact with each Pocket Observation, it will be transformed into a piece of your personal archive.
Pocket Observation is always uploaded to the Internet Archive, ensuring long-term preservation and public access. You can download each Pocket Observation in multiple formats from Internet Archive. You can keep the download on a device. I encourage you to print each Pocket Observation, if you can. Each issue can also be printed at home, requiring just four pieces of paper. (I had mine printed at a local shop - it came in just over $2.) It's nice to have something to hold.
As part of my own observance each month, I will send out exclusive writing, audio notes, free art downloads, and recommended resources. We'll learn how to do this whole thing together as we go along.
Each Pocket Observation begins with a letter from me to you. I will share the first one here, if you don't mind.
Dear Observer,
I’ve been trying to process the future since I was a kid. If I could just see what’s coming, I could understand how to keep my family safe. My insides are always softly whirring, struggling to render an accurate model of the approaching space and time. When things are very uncertain, the whirring turns into a roar, my hands tremble, my teeth clack.
After the 2024 United States presidential election, it felt like I might shake apart. The day the Trump administration took down the first archives, my insides went still. I could see what’s coming.
In my nation’s capital, a coalition of Christian Nationalists, Tech Reactionaries and Trumpists are installing an authoritarian government. They claim their gender, race and class gives them absolute authority over hundreds of millions of people.
Authoritarian regimes can’t justify their claims in an information-abundant environment. Information enclosure must precede systemic dispossession. Authoritarians always start by pulling down the archives, stopping the research, and banning books. I understand why others might not recognize what government erasure of public information foretells. So many of us have been misled about the way information functions in our lives.
As a child, my textbook timelines taught me to conflate information with technology. The Stone Age humans battered their world into shape with rocks. I lived during a more evolved age, humans used information systems to engineer the world. My education trained me to optimize information retrieval but neglected to teach me how to detect significance. I learned information could exist apart from people. Documents could create, maintain and defend institutions. I was told to buy into a world where information enclosure generated exponential growth.
I couldn’t have even if I wanted to – others got there first. Private interests manufactured information-scarcity in the decades before Trump’s ascendancy. Libraries, newspapers and community spaces were hollowed out by private equity. Higher education became the handmaiden of financialization. Misinformation is distributed by algorithms aligned with billionaire interest. The details of our lives were relabeled data, a euphemism that gave corporate agents permission to exploit our connections. Digital decay devours crowdsourced knowledge while AI slop seeps through search. In this environment, archives exist to be erased.
And here, Dear Observer, you might think, “Yes, Meg. It is bad and sad to lose our histories and our research and our books. But many things are bad and sad right now. Why should I care particularly about information-scarcity? And what can I possibly do about it?” These are the very questions I’ve set out to answer.
First, I can tell you why information matters so desperately. And then I can tell you one thing you can do about. I found both answers by searching through public archives.
What happens when information is kept from us?
By the mid-twentieth century, advances in information technology facilitated efficient knowledge sharing across communities, borders and great distances. These interactions produced new ways to capture and release energy. World powers began treating scientific discovery as “the most essential of warlike activities in a time of peace.” Information was controlled, commoditized and classified.
Just a few years before his death, Albert Einstein cried out, “the field of information unceasingly shrinks under the pressure of military necessity.” An answer to our first question is found in the layers of this lament.
Einstein taught us that the energy-matter content of the universe never changes. He also said that existence depends on change – energy transforming into matter and matter transforming into energy. These transformations produce all the variation we see – stars, mountains, your most beloved person. These transformations also produce all the variation we cannot see – quarks, dark matter, the space that once held your most beloved person.
This brings us to one of Einstein’s biggest ideas: Reality is not created by the fundamental fact of energy and matter. Instead, reality is created by the relationships between energy and matter. The more relationships, the more expansive reality becomes.
Now. Imagine a field of information that grows as it encompasses difference communities that know and ask different things. As people interact with information, things change. These transformations produce every piece of the human-made world – goods, social structures, your most beloved person. A large field of information means more transformative relationships. As Einstein watched power shrink the field of information, he understood he was watching reality shrink too.
Authoritarians must shrink the field of information so they can diminish and dominate reality. Destroying archives and banning books is never enough because documents don’t consider meaning – communities do. Authoritarians try to use closed systems to separate people from shared meaning. But no system containing humans can ever be closed to information leaks. Not even the blockchain.
The human ability to detect significance and consider it within the context of the past, present and future is species unique. Homo Sapiens seem to have emerged alongside meaning. We have always been Children of the Information Age.
And so, after the archives are torn apart, authoritarians destroy us too. People, especially children, die when information scarcity is imposed by the government. This is intentional. Each loss depletes a community’s ability to process reality beyond authoritarianism’s fragile framework.
We need to keep our world too big to be captured by their code. For most of us, this work will manifest through small acts we perform every day, with the skills and resources we have at hand. Every action their program can’t easily compute is an action that drains their power.
One of the things that can be done
As you find ways to act outside their authoritarian script, I am asking you to include the work of preserving information and cultivating shared meaning. Keep records of what you know, what you learn, what you observe. Find communities where you can give and receive knowledge.
Mariame Kaba, activist, author and archivist, includes record keeping, educational pamphlet making and community knowledge sharing in Some Actions that Are Not Protesting or Voting. It can be difficult to know how to do that work. That’s where Pocket Observation comes in.
This Pocket Observation is the first document in a personal archive we are each going to build. These booklets will help us preserve our dispersed knowledge in a systematic, unhackable, accessible way.
I will post my own observations on Pocket Observatory throughout the month. Simply scan the QR code on the title page of this booklet to read my observations.
What will we do with the records we keep? Well, I expect they’ll sit on our shelves where we can reach for them when we need them. Someday the archives will go back up. Maybe some Pocket Observations will end up on those shelves. But there is the hope of something more in my request.
As we keep and share meaning, we create relationships that extend reality beyond limited men’s limited horizons. What will that reality hold? I can’t be sure.
But I think the answer includes an epigram found in the margins of Octavia E. Butler’s archive,
“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
Love, Meg