Good morning! No one ever leaves the internet—no one we can see, anyway—but as of today Hmm Daily is on the internet. As of this week, the president’s penis was said to look like a video-game character. Sex creeps are pleading to rehabilitate their careers almost as fast as, if not faster than, they can be found out and de-habilitated. None of this country’s wars have ended, although Ethiopia and Eritrea’s has. Migrant children are still locked away from their parents. The Carolinas are underwater and California is still burning. (Did we know California was still burning?) Everything we do is under surveillance to sell to advertisers.
Will it help to read about any of this? To read about other things? Can we stop and think a little? Can we try?
The president’s penis is old news. The president is poisonous but he is not the poison. We have built or allowed the building of a world whose primary substance and medium of exchange is attention. The president has fabricated himself out of it, out of attention. Fear gets attention, rage gets attention, money talk gets attention, sex talk, shiny brass, polished granite, the color red. Phone screens.
Hmm Daily hopes to be a place where you may pay attention and get a little better return on it. We will not sell your attention to advertisers. Now and then we will interrupt your attention with pop-up messages to ask for your email address, and eventually, after you’ve been reading for a while, to ask you for money. We are very sorry to interrupt you, and we hope to make it worth your while.
Hmm Daily is one part of the Civil network, a collection of independently operated publications that will exist on an undeletable blockchain. Some of us have been deleted in the past. Some of us have lost our old platforms in the collapse of business models. The Civil model relies, ultimately, on readers funding the writing they like to read. Part of the model includes a system of blockchain-based tokens, which people may purchase and use to cast votes on the growth and governance of the network, or to support writing they like. Those tokens are for sale as of this week. But readers may also use ordinary money to subscribe to us or our sibling publications.
We are going to start now. Thank you for reading.
