Hi. A note about this portal, subscribers, and support

Hi, I’m Wassim.

What am I doing here?
I’m going to use this new subs-tacky place to develop and seek commentary on work-in-progress writing: the research-oriented “scholarly” variety as well as more creative and speculative works. I’m also getting a new website up and running, it’s still bare-bones at the moment, but you can slide over to wassim.xyz to see some new and archival works, collated together for the first time. The old website wassim.pubpub.org is still going, and will remain online as an archive hosted by PubPub. As always, you can slide on over to the 0xSalon (Substack / website) to keep up with what’s going on over there.

What’s going down?
As some of the texts I’ll be workshopping here will be for invited or commissioned works, I’ll be experimenting with different ways of using the paywall to keep those fragments stay low-key for the time being. Since I have a backlog of material to draw from — due to lots of research writings, creative projects, lecture-performances etc that didn’t result in a textual output at the time — I’m going to be pushing out quite a bit in the first few months of 2025, and then we’ll see after that. I’ll be able to commit and continue publishing regularly on here for subscribers if the numbers make sense. Otherwise it might turn into more of a public archive. Writing — and particularly the kinds I do — is incredibly time-consuming and I don’t have another, reliable income source other than my independent scholarship. Please support this process if you enjoy the fruits of those efforts! Further, there are special “incentives” for those who can come through with much-needed substantial levels of support: you can inform the topics that I research and write about. Maybe, I should also offer a higher level where you can bribe me to not write about a particular topic…

Alright, so having got that out of the way, I wanted to briefly introduce the next few posts. Last autumn, after many months of stewing ideas and/or wildly procrastinating, I finally sat down to write a dirty first draft of a lengthy new article taking a critical look at the epistemological arc of the sciences (my original home territory) through the memoiristic lens of autotheory. It’s going to be included in the second issue of the wonderful Ars Scientia, a new journal of scientific arts, which takes as its second theme “axiomatics”. Since the article is a weird mix of history and philosophy of science, historical recollections, and post-disciplinary meaning-making, and also because it still needs a little something extra according to some critical feedback I received and agree with, I thought it might be a good place for us to start. It’s pretty long — first draft was over 10k words, and the journal editors originally asked for 3-5k — so I’ll be splitting it into 3 or 4 digests and saving a final one for some additional rumination and riffing.