Choose Your Own Monster

I was reflecting the other day that while I’m probably a better writer than engineer as a human (relatively speaking), as an AI augmented transhuman, I’m probably a better engineer than writer. At least right now in October 2026. Building stuff has once again become my main dopamine loop, ahead of writing, after two decades away from hands-on engineering work.

I am becoming a strange, chimerical, transhuman critter with a coding agent implanted in my skull. A monster traversing the Gramsci Gap — where “the old world is dying, the new world is struggling to be born,” and it is “the time of monsters.” I guess I’m living up to the motto I adopted a year ago: Be Slightly Monstrous. I feel like I’m now gleefully choosing what kind of monster to become. It’s like choosing a halloween costume, but for the next decade, rather than just a day.

I also have a less capable (and more glitchy) writing prosthetic AI implanted in my skull, which is also improving rapidly. So mine is an evolving sort of monstrousness. The writing dopamine loop may become stronger than the building dopamine loop again in the future, when I’m 2.5x more monstrous, and the villagers are attacking me with pitchforks.

Speaking of becoming monstrous and the Gramsci Gap, I’m proud to announce the launch of the world’s first ever protocol fiction magazine, Monstrous Times, “the magazine of strange rules,” right here on Substack.

We will be hosting a small launch party in Austin on Thursday, 22nd October. If you live in Austin or are visiting, and like the idea of ambitious efforts to make sense of the unfolding future through fiction, join us. There are a few spots left.

The magazine is launching under the able stewardship of Benny as editor-in-chief and as lead ideologue. I’ll be serving as editor-at-large, and contributing opinion pieces, fiction and an endless stream of annoying and unsolicited advice to the team until they kick me out.

This project has been incubating for the last two years as the fiction track of , the magazine of the Protocol Institute, and has been a particular personal priority of mine. We’re spinning Monstrous Times out as a separate publication because we aim to seriously level up what we were doing during the incubation phase. While PI will remain the main focus of my attention, I’ll be doing everything I can personally to help MT succeed.

We will continue running AI-friendly fiction contests, conducting writing workshops (regular and centaur), scouting for emerging talent, soliciting pitches, posting bounties, and producing print anthologies. Putting out great protocol fiction stories remains the core mission.

There’s an active Monstrous Times contest going on now, The Interregnum Story Contest (deadline November 15th).

But we will be venturing way past what we were doing before.

We will be conducting creepy and horrifying experiments with emerging AI-native media like generated video, and procedurally extended universes. We will do other nameless things that will horrify and disgust the ordinary villagers substack writers fearfully clutching their pangrams and muttering humanist incantations.

We’ll even try to build entirely autonomous robot writers 🤖🤖 deliberately designed to take away the jobs of human writers.

👹 Muahahaha! 👹

I highly recommend subscribing here on Substack if you want to make it out of the Gramsci Gap alive in the next decade.

Warning: your sense of your own humanity might not survive this parlous journey intact. Like me, you might need to choose what sort of monster you want to be for the next decade. As Nietzsche once observed, “how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”

Here’s an emoji-tldr of the ride you’d be signing up for if you subscribe to MT. It’s a whole Monster’s Journey.

😱😰—>💀💀+🤖🤖—> 👹👹

If you’d like to support what we’re trying to do, we would really appreciate paid subscribers ($80/year, or $500/year if you feel inclined to become a founding member). Subscribe here.

While this project was incubating in the Protocol Institute, we were able to pay our writers well thanks to the generous support of the Ethereum Foundation. This allowed us to take interesting creative risks as we laid down the intellectual foundations of this new genre, cultivated a stable of interesting writers, refined an AI-friendly approach to the craft, and developed critical momentum over the last 2 years.

As a result we’re able to launch with a solid body of work and capabilities already under our belts. Not to sound overconfident, but I think we’re starting to understand what we’re doing now. It’s still an experiment, but it’s no longer an entirelyfragile experiment, at least on the creative front. Financially, it’s another matter :)

We would like to continue doing everything we’ve been doing and more. But now this effort has to move out of the proverbial parental basement, get a job, and earn a living in the real world. So paid subscriptions will really help, especially early on while we explore more complex revenue possibilities. I’ll be personally helping fund this initially, within my modest means, but it will require significantly more than that. If you’re interested in supporting beyond a Substack subscription, get in touch and I’ll introduce you to the team and set up a conversation.

While this was incubating, we published dozens of stories, held 4 contests, conducted multiple workshops on 3 continents, and produced 3 anthologies. Several more are already cued up, almost ready to publish for sale (this is one of the things we’ll need money for).

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve worked out the conceptual bones of a genuine new genre, with interesting artistic commitments, fertile doctrinal premises, and unique craft conventions that distinguish it from adjacent speculative fiction genres like traditional SF, fantasy, and weird fiction.

My two small contribution were the idea of Chiang’s Law (“strange rules over special people”) and the Gramsci-monsters motif. But much of the hard thinking so far has been done by Sachin and Spencer, who have been running a protocol fiction research group for a year, carefully working out and teaching the governing principles and methods of this new genre. The group continues to meet regularly, is open to all, and will continue to act as both the backroom brain trust for Monstrous Times, and the liaison with the Protocol Institute.

With my Protocol Institute research-director hat on, I hope Monstrous Times can help us address real-world research questions through creative fiction investigation methods. I’m hoping the team can do things like conduct futures workshops designed using protocol fiction techniques.

As I said, this has been a personal priority for me, not least because this might be what finally gets me writing more fiction myself. I have quite a few ideas I hope to work on as fiction contributions to MT, as well as thoughts on science fiction and protocol fiction I hope to explore through nonfiction essays.

I’m exploring these interests in other venues as well. I just did a dialogue with artist Simon Denny on “Monstrous Liveness vs. Human Deadness” at the Venice Bienalle, where we have a collaborative exhibit titled Monsters Between Worlds, as part of the Strange Rules protocol art exhibition curated by and .

But the idea of monstrous times is bigger than particular efforts like a magazine or art exhibition. It’s a planetary condition that, all my monster jokes aside, requires vastly more serious thought, reflection, and resources to make sense of and navigate well, via multiple creative angles. I’m hoping MT can become one important node in what will hopefully be a plurality of interesting projects and efforts. I’d personally like to do what I can to catalyze much more action in this nascent scene, so if you’re up to something that sounds monstrous-times-ish, and you think I can help, get in touch. We’re going to be stuck in this Gramsci Gap for a while, so we might as well have fun with it.

So consider subscribing to Monstrous Times, tell your friends, and if you’re in Austin next week, join us for the launch party.

Choose your own monster, and let’s get this Gramsci Gap party started!