Things are about to change around here

Humanity Redefined, redefined

I’ve been running this newsletter, in its various forms, since 2015. It is my longest-running project and is now a fixture of my life. It is hard for me to imagine what I would be doing without it.

However, Humanity Redefined is not what I promised it would be. The promise was to deliver Sync every Friday and at least one longer article per week. I have not fulfilled that promise. Sync goes out on Sundays, not Fridays, and articles are rare.

Let me take you behind the scenes. It takes me about 6 hours in total to prepare the news section of Sync. I select all the links myself from hundreds of articles and videos that enter my feeds. I read and watch each one of them, and I write the summaries myself (although recently I have been using AI to help with that). The write-ups take another 6 to 8 hours, sometimes more. The problem is that with a full-time job and with everything else happening in the background, I barely find time to finish a new issue of Sync before the week ends. This got worse in recent months to the point where I am getting close to burnout. Something needs to change so that I can deliver what I promised, at a standard worth your time, in a way that's sustainable for me.

Here are the changes that will come to the newsletter in the coming weeks.

First, the changes need to start with me and how I work. My goal is to streamline the writing of Sync so that you get the best overview of what happened in tech every week in your inbox—and so that it stops eating the hours I could be spending on longer articles. Those articles are the part of the newsletter I most want to get back to, and the process changes are largely to make room for them. I'm also planning to experiment with automating some of my processes (I am a software engineer after all). AI will play a part in those processes, but I won't offload writing to AI. Writing articles for this newsletter helps me better understand what is going on in tech. Giving away writing to an AI robs me of that. It would rob me of the opportunity to discover new connections and explore new ideas, and that would hurt the quality of the newsletter in the long term.

Second, the schedule will change. Sending Sync on Sundays works better for me. As for other articles, I want to see first if the changes to how I work will yield positive results. If the answer is yes, then the schedule will be Sync on Sundays and one longer article per week. If not, I'll move to one article every other week.

Third, the newsletter is getting a new identity. At the beginning of September, it will arrive in your inbox under a different name and from a different email address, so don't be alarmed when that happens. I'm not ready to share what the new name is yet, but I'll tell you before the switch. But the general mission—exploring technology and the futures in which humanity flourishes—will remain the same. The new identity is designed to give the newsletter a voice and perspective better aligned with the kind of futurism I want to explore and promote.

Lastly, I want to interact with the readers more. To be honest, that scares me a little. But I realised that this newsletter cannot be a one-way communication. I want to listen to what you think about technology and understand your perspective. Substack offers a chat, which I am planning to enable and see how it goes. I will send a message once it is on. I also plan to send a survey by the end of August to ask what you think about the newsletter and what I should change.

Those changes—improved processes, new schedule and identity, and actually building a community—will set the newsletter on a new course. A course where we can explore positive futures and discuss how to maximise chances of them becoming a reality.

Thank you for reading through all of this. If you want to share what you think about those changes, then my DMs and inbox are open.

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A big thank you to my paid subscribers, to my Patrons: whmr, Florian, dux, Eric, Preppikoma and Andrew, and to everyone who supports my work on Ko-Fi. Thank you for the support!