(note: this post used to live on my old blog, named Downwell. That blog has now been moved into a subdomain of my personal website. The name has changed but the intention remains the same.)
I have been delaying this for a while. In 2020, during a country-wide lockdown spent in Cape Town, I felt an urge to write things. This started with daily journal entries, some short fiction and essays. But I never finished a story, or posted one online. The idea of sharing your creative work with others is terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. To share your art is to be vulnerable, and this is something I find hard to do.
At some point I realized that unshared creative projects are like trees falling in uninhabited forests... did they really happen? Art is fundamentally social - we do it to share our internal world with others. So I would like to begin the process of creating in public. And that's what this blog is. After procrastinating by building this website from scratch (note: and then building a second website from scratch), I am ready to share. Welcome to my internal world.
I know you're wondering... why the name Downwell? I was reading Ancillary Mercy, a science-fiction novel about an interplanetary human society (I wrote more about the Ancillary series in this thread). Breq, the protagonist, is in a shuttle on her way to visit Athoek planet, and she says that she is going down the well. The well being a gravity well. A few weeks later, I was watching The Expanse, and Amos says he is going downwell to visit Baltimore, his hometown.
So, downwell is where we are - it comprises everything affected by earth's gravity. And that's the scope of this blog: pretty much anything I feel like, as long as it is within earth's atmosphere. That means economics, politics, computers, literature and film. And no astronomy or astrophysics, no suns or stars... for now at least.
This may seem like an overly broad scope, but it is a starting point. I expect the nature of this blog to change over time, as my interests and activities change. These are some of my current interests.
I studied an undergraduate degree in Economics, Philosophy and Politics at the University of Cape Town. Since graduating from UCT, I have wondered into the world of Heterodox Economics, and there will surely be posts about struggling through four years of Neoclassical Economics at the UCT School of Economics, and about the various alternative schools of economic thought out there. With equal certainty, I can say that at least a few posts will be about computers and technology, especially insofar as they relate to Economics. I have spent the last two years since graduation learning everything I can about computers, programming and the internet. I am a sucker for blockchain technologies, and I think their economic implications have not been fully unpacked yet. I want to write about films and books too. Beyond that, who can say. I contain multitiudes.
Stick around. For updates on new posts, you can follow my twitter. I sometimes do threads (like this one, or this one). Or even threads of threads. Feel free to DM me there or drop me an email too. Until next time.