Why I Write

A Note to Readers

47th and King Drive, Chicago, Summer 2025 ©floydwebb.

Someone must leave a record. This Substack is my attempt to do that.

That belief has guided me for a long time—long before I began publishing essays here.

When George W. Bush was elected, I was working abroad. Distance has a way of clarifying things. It was during that period that I was handed a book that would stay with me: The World of Yesterday, written by Stefan Zweig as Europe slid toward catastrophe. Zweig was not chronicling events alone; he was documenting atmosphere—the slow realization that collapse rarely arrives as a single rupture, but as a series of accommodations, denials, and normalized violences.

He was not alone. Writers working in exile across Europe—Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Camus, and others—understood that when institutions fail, the obligation to remember does not disappear. It intensifies.

The Lineage of Witness

Much earlier, a friend, Edward Wilkerson, recommended Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning’s study of how average people become participants in atrocity once systems grant permission and protection. We were talking about the men who murdered Emmett Till. That book never left me.

What Ordinary Men clarified—what still matters now—is that atrocity does not require monsters. It requires normalization. It requires structures that make violence procedural, routinized, and defensible.

That insight connects directly to the world we are living in now—a world where cruelty is defended as policy, and where ordinary people are again being asked to participate in systems they claim not to understand.

These books did not teach me what to think.

They taught me why witnessing matters.

I was also shaped—steadied—by the writings of James Baldwin, especially the work he produced while living in exile. Baldwin did not leave the United States to escape it. He left to see it clearly. From that distance, he wrote with moral precision, refusing both despair and illusion. He showed that exile is not abandonment; it is a position.

The Prophetic Warning

Around that same time, I encountered the work of Bernard Stiegler, who warned that digital technologies were not neutral tools but pharmaka—substances that are simultaneously poison and cure, depending on how they are used. He understood early that networked media could hollow out attention, accelerate amnesia, and turn outrage into a resource, even as it still carried the possibility of repair if used consciously and collectively.

That framework has never left me.

And now, we are living inside the poison.

The Unfolding Collapse

When I returned home, my focus narrowed. I wanted to be with my partner. I wanted to care for my sons. That grounding in witness now had a personal stake.

Then the world shifted.

After September 11, 2001, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security marked the beginning of a long retreat from democratic norms. What followed was not just policy, but atmosphere: the normalization of surveillance, suspicion, and force.

I returned to a country I barely recognized. The surveillance state was no longer clandestine. It was visible. Loud. Confident. What had once been reserved for the most radical, the most outspoken—and most predictably, for Black people—was now generalized. Scale changed. Permission changed. What had once been denied became institutionalized.

Now the collapse feels nearly complete.

And collapse demands witnesses.

Not slogans.

Not reaction.

Not the performance of outrage.

What is required is documentation—analytical, critical, factual—written close enough to the ground to retain truth, and steady enough to survive time.

I did not think I was the right person for this. My instinct has always been to say exactly what I think and move on. But release leaves no record. That is not the kind of reactionary I want to be.

The work I do now has to answer to something larger: my ancestors, my children, and my grandchildren—who will ask what was seen, and what was said, when it mattered.

Why This Work Lives Here — And Why Now

I write here because the internet is no longer neutral ground.

The same digital systems that promised connection have become instruments of capture—of attention, memory, and behavior—feeding surveillance, outrage economies, and institutional amnesia. The internet now profits from forgetting, while punishing those who insist on remembering.

That is why this record must be slow. Public. Independent. Accountable to readers, not institutions.

For all its contradictions, Substack still allows something rare: sustained thought written in real time, without editorial softening or algorithmic distortion. It allows a record to form—essay by essay—outside the coercion of virality.

This is not a newsletter.

It is a document in progress.

What Your Support Protects

I kept this work open intentionally. I wanted readers to understand what kind of project this is before I asked for support. Now there is a body of work—sixty essays and counting—tracing the contours of a collapse too many have learned to call normal.

Paid subscriptions do not buy access to secret knowledge. They make continuity without compromise possible.

Specifically, they protect:

• Time — to research, write, and document thoroughly

• Attention — from the coercion of outrage cycles and algorithmic pressure

• Independence — from institutional softening and sanitized language

This is not about growth. It is about continuity and integrity.

Your support ensures this archive remains intact, unsponsored, and outside the very systems it documents—systems that rewrite history after the damage is done, whose forces of amnesia accelerate by the day.

An Invitation to Stewardship

If this form of witnessing matters to you, I invite you to become a paid subscriber—not as a consumer, but as a steward of the record.

Not everyone can support this work financially, and that is understood. Reading, reflecting, and carrying these essays forward still matters. For those who are able, your support is what keeps this document public, independent, and alive.

If you are ready to join as a steward, you can upgrade your subscription here.

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Your support is what allows this document to continue.

Somebody has to remember.

Somebody has to leave proof.

— Floyd Webb