Complete 2020 Roundup

Contraptions (private feed for [email protected])

Well, I guess 2020 is a wrap. I’m going to do a quick round-up of everything I published on Breaking Smart this year, and try to tease out the larger themes, but obviously no look back at the year can begin without acknowledging the 800lb virus in the room.

To quote J. Peterman on Seinfeld, in the episode where he takes back the reins of his company from Elaine after she mismanages it during his absence, kudos to all of us on a job…done. It’s a reference I’ve used before, in my 2018 annual roundup, but this time, I am really feeling it.

Whatever our personal successes or failures, as a species, the highlight of our collective performance is probably that we made it through the year without either sliding into apocalypse or going insane.

Well, most of us. As of this writing, 1.75m people are dead from Covid, and will not be seeing 2021. Against that backdrop, the best thing I can say about my writing and podcasting is that I continued doing it all, and that you guys continued to pay some attention.

On to the roundup.

It looks like we’re finishing the year pretty strong on this list, with just over 10,000 subscribers, and just over 500 paying subscribers.

I published 10 podcast episodes (free, with accompanying transcripts), 8 one-off essays, and 11 chapters or essays across 3 serialized projects. Let’s take a look.

Podcast Episodes (free)

* Beyond Optimism and Pessimism

* Defaults and Defaults

* How, What, and Where to Build

* The Medieval Future of Management

* From Story to Setting

* Big Moods, Little Moods

* The Next Experiments in Elitism

* The State of Business Play

* Fifth-Generation Management

* Involvement Capitalism

One-off Essays (paywalled)

* Life Go Brr

* Reimagining Publics

* Post-Covid Circularity

* A Bad Prequel

* Tunnelhead

* Notes on Textual Capital

* In the Wake of the Eighties

* Darker Things

The Great Weirding (paywalled)

* Into the Weirding: Part 1, Part 2

* Control Failure: Part 1, Part 2

After Westphalia (subscribers only)

* After Westphalia: Introduction

* The Descent of the Public

The Clockless Clock (paywalled)

* Chapter 1: Pandemic Time, Pandemic Time -2 (abridged free version in Noema)

* Chapter 2: Indoors in Time

* Chapter 3: Operating in Time, Operating in Time -2

This would count as a productive year if it were any other year besides 2020, but obviously, against the backdrop of everything going on, it feels marginal at best.

Still, thank you all for reading and listening, and here’s to the light at the end of the tunnel that we will hopefully emerge into sometime next year. I’m not going to wish you Happy Holidays or Happy New Year, since I personally find it kinda unseemly to even attempt to be festive this year, but I do wish you some productive introspection and contemplation, and perhaps a brief personal break from the bleakness.

I’ll see you again in January 2021. Have a good week.

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