Book Contract sought on Planet

I want to write a book, probably using words, to describe The Flat White Dimension.

Proposed Title:
The Flat White Dimension: Working within the confines of Comfort in the Apocalypse

Ideas in the book:
Why is it so hard to change even when we know we need to change? This is a book that describes some aspects of the daily life of the beneficiaries of empire (including the author) during a time when wars and violent extraction destroy the world in our name. It carefully explores the current inability of the most privileged people in the world to adapt to what is happening to the beings and the planet, because of some kind of glitch in our understanding of the mega importance of individual human life. We have many names for what caused the glitch, including capitalism and colonialism. However, a characteristic of the glitch is that even when we know that the ways we live are not in line with collective survival for the planet, so far we don't seem able to collectively shift out of it. The first half of the book is dedicated to identifying the world created by this glitch, by telling stories that cut through from the personal and the contemporary, with connections to global stories of human life inside financialization as well as experiments in understanding the absurd ways humans are competitively going into debt to pay rent for a home on a planet in outer space.

"We" who are the subject of this book have not chosen to be in a comfortable and stylish chair at the expense of most of the planet. Yet we are living in a dimension where we may drink coffee from places where the people are living through a multilayered ongoing war due to empire and colonialism, in order to fuel a piece of text about this very contradiction. Shame, guilt, yoga and even systemic therapy don't change behavior. What does? Perhaps there is something about identifying and naming the comfortable synthetic reality that we are locked inside of so it can be discussed. The Flat White Dimension is the name given by the author, of this social space of contradiction, to describe the pressure to "save the world" and our total addiction and subordination to regimes organized and supported by war and extraction. Ultimately, these conditions feed into a great flattening of sociality where we can only speak to like minded people, where we are afraid to know the scale of other peoples' unmet needs, and thus we become less collectively, socially and personally powerful and courageous.

And just as we are arriving to a point of no return, where our flat and white behaviors seem malignant and are entangled with a set of wars that accelerate the worst examples of violent settler colonialism and capitalist extraction imaginable, there may be a need for a very different kind of response. What if some element of necessary change begins socially and locally, by engaging in collective practices of long term care and repair? What if we need to experiment on each other before we attempt to "help" the people who we have nonchalantly made into global victims of empire? What if, neurologically, the only way that people change is if we all change together? What if we require a kind of social belonging or stability, to heal a little from capitalist alienation before we are able to take real risks with our lives on behalf of "others"?

The word in this book that is rarely written but always implied is contradiction. The word is not enough to explain the distance between what we know we need to do and what we are doing. There is something beyond contradiction that we are looking at here and this book attempts, through accessible and sincere stories about humans in racial capitalism, to see the equations that have led us to the state of impossibility we are in. We know the changes necessary to respond to the heightened level of emergency across the globe are collective, social, and behavioral, and the tools we have learned to use do not allow us to begin in any conscious way. What if long slow behavioral change is about making prefigurative spaces for organizing and practicing care? We don't know what would happen if we, the lonely winners of the game of global capitalism, became less lonely, isolated, like millionaires on a bad day, and felt like a part of a global majority. We are too afraid to try. This book asks us if there are small local social and material changes in how we give and receive care that can create larger, slower shifts that can last. Using experimental social research, analysis and stories from experiences of organizing collective care using a specific mutual aid protocol, readers will walk away with some tools and ideas about what it means to change. Nothing is spelled out because no one knows any answers, but the text will charge people up with a sense of possibility for a new world that begins with collectively reorganizing energy and time around care. What if all caregivers were cared for?

Progress report:
This book has been being written for quite some time. It is for you. I am looking for a publisher or a sponsor to support the completion of this book. (actually!) And maybe the best editor on the planet, if you are out there.

This book will probably be designed on some level by Miranda Mellis, who says of the flat white dimension: “an image that comes to mind just now, related to the seeming nothingness of that dimension, the blank white page of it all, the 2-D, is the inability for us to see our own backs, we can sense the back body, but we can't see it, not without mirrors anyway. If one walks backwards in the flat white dimension, what happens?” 

Also, the text may be ghost written by David Graeber pending availability. Graeber famously used the word cosmic, 14,000 times in one lifetime, to describe debt.

The blurbs and endorsements will be written by people who have been to space or to Mariana's Trench or other edges of human presence.

Acknowledgements: (in progress)

You, my friend. Thank you for helping me get the energy to want to do this or something like it. I needed to write this and have it read by you so you would speak to me about it. Everytime I write an article, the 2-3 people who write to me afterwards pay my inner energy bill with a direct payment.

Also thank you to the billionaires and big tech CEOs who are making this book possible by controlling our reality and our minds, pouring constant distractions down our spines, enforcing a quality of twitching at a cellular level, making it impossible to connect thoughts with actions or to otherwise live outside of a simulation where wealth and status still exist while our friends get bombed and our water is too hot for fish and plant life. I love the way that you helped us become addicted to everything, including watching screens made by people who have to dig up the whole planet so we can look at these screens and how these same people who used to only get to work in mines can now also select to work in data centers. Namaste.

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