I have largely stopped writing because the person that I reveal when I write genuinely doesn’t fit with the image that I want to project of myself in the world.

One of my biggest fears is of being labeled as mentally unstable and being marginalized. I want to move beyond that. I want to let go of the image I am attempting to project — the person that I think I need to be in order to be content and happy.

It is difficult because I don’t have a concrete place to stand. Over the course of the last two years the grounding that I developed in undergrad and Peace Corps as to what I am good at, why I am valuable and interesting has been eroding.

I’m assuming that there’s a rebirth in store, but I’ve been primarily involved in the dying part. I am getting close to letting that go and being honest with the world about my ideas and plans is a necessary first step.

So far as crazy, there’s a simple place to start:

Holcomb for President 2016

The American political and economic systems were designed at a time when the fastest a message could travel was the speed of a running horse. As trade or political influence expanded it required building networks of trusted individuals to deal with the local administration.

Telecommunications has changed that. Hierarchical organizations can now be administered from afar and the dispersal of resources and power that were once necessary to keep the wheels greased are less necessary. This can be seen in the rising income disparity that has developed over the last 40 years:

Beyond those broad systemic problems, however, there are more immediate issues:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
—Edward Abbey

This is, in many ways, the American ideal. We arrived in an expansive land where our fore-bearers believed they could expand forever. The drive for growth and improvement has served us well, but we’re starting to reach our limits. We need new systems grounded in a awareness of a limited ecology.

The system is fucking just about everyone right now.

I worry at times that the change is going to come violently. That while I’m working to get the ideas and people organized for a non-violent transition someone is going to start shooting and things will go downhill from there.

I’ve been talking to people about the “shit hitting the fan” and there are quite a few who both expect it and have plans for dealing with it. Lots of different perspectives, but I’ve not talked to anyone yet whose basic plan isn’t “take care of me and my own.”

I’m frazzed and stressed and, frankly, desperate much of the time because I worry that it’s September the 10^th and if I could just be smarter, faster, more convincing, whatever, then future violence could be avoided.

It’s something I’m learning to let go of. For the longest time I tried rationalizing that it was simply ego and self-aggrandizement, but that wasn’t effective because it wasn’t true. I, as an individual am potentially important to this progression because in my head is a design for a municipal information system that has never existed before.

Windows 95 was the last major change to interface fundamentals and that came out 15 years ago. The web is even older. My design essentially treats the system as a single machine which is working with the user to help pertinent information bubble out of the rapidly growing sea of information that is the net.

Everything is organized in terms of message delivery. Be it a chat, an e-mail, a webpge or video, each of these is a message for which a probability of interest and estimated consumption time and location can be calculated for a particular user.

Those calculations are used to manage the contents of a distributed set of named queues. Those queues contain both the code and data for the system. Each user has their own dataset with complete control over how that information is exposed to the network.

I’m currently stuck on a couple of the technical details. I’m working on my own, and finding someone with the technical wherewithal to give meaningful feedback has been a challenge. It’s like a sculpture though, I can feel that the shape is there, I just have to uncover it.

Running for President isn’t about ideology or rhetoric, if change is going to happen there has to be something to change to. Someone has to come up with a plan to at least serve as a starting point to a discussion of what alternative systems might look like and what the transition to those systems might be.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein

If you can’t be fed, be bread.
—Rumi