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    • It began as a screenplay called Utopia that I wrote in 1996 while studying screenwriting at Tel Aviv University—plot-heavy and built for momentum. Action and then some more action, and a villain who explains their scheme to the hero just before the climactic, you guessed it, action. For a student project, the screenplay was pretty creative. At the centre of it was a pandemic…

    • In 2000, I finished an MA in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University and did the next most logical thing. I built a software company. The internet was new and exciting at that time, and I had a problem at my nonprofit marketing job that I knew the internet could solve. How do you connect people who care about the same causes and help…

    • There is a kind of reader who reads fiction not to have their existing judgments confirmed but to test them. Someone willing to stay inside moral complexity long enough to understand it, rather than resolving it quickly into a verdict. If you’ve read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and felt unsettled for days, or read Frank Herbert’s Dune as a study in how power…

    • I’d been having so much fun and frustration writing A Frictionless State, including many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. There was just one problem. I am an unknown novelist asking strangers to trust me with their time. How I addressed that challenge shaped everything about how I decided to publish. The traditional approach is:…

    • In the summer of 2025, I was advising founders at a business accelerator in Vancouver on how to incorporate AI into their companies and products. I had thoughts about workflow and the categories of use that were likely to produce real returns versus the ones that were mostly theatre. What I did not have was a personal use case. I had founded and sold…

    • When I decided to adapt Utopia, the screenplay I had written in 1996, into a novel, I expected the challenges to be structural—updating the story for the intervening decades, expanding the world, converting a screenplay into prose. I didn’t expect to discover how much the form itself would change what the story was able to be. Utopia had qualities worth keeping. It moved. It…

    • I sent the first three chapters out on a Thursday in April. A few hundred people I knew got a personal email from me, people who would open it because they recognised my name in the subject line. Whether they’d read it I had no way to know. What I’m actually waiting for, though, are the moments when strangers arrive at the site with…

    • 13 — Deprecated Cover
      by D.M. Barach A common error of economic liberalism was the equation of morality with preservation. A rational economist understands that the preservation of the system is the highest moral good. To sacrifice a single component to ensure the function of the whole is not a failure of compassion; it is the ultimate expression of systemic utility. —Naomi Feld, The Economic Renewal Fallacy: A Theory of Replacement The phantom sensation of Santo's hand tearing from his grasp looped throughout Ari's fitful REM cycles…
    • 12 — Firewalls Cover
      by D.M. Barach In the dominant economic models, purpose is an individualistic pursuit of passion and as such a net drain on societal resources. In a harmonised economy, purpose is redefined as the fulfilment of one's optimal function. The individual who is useful—the farmer, the manufacturer, the scientist—is the one who achieves true integration. It is only in serving our designated function that we find true economic and social peace. —Naomi Feld, The Collective Balance: An Introduction to Macro-Societal…
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      09 — Core

      09 — Core Cover
      by D.M. Barach The greatest threat to a harmonious system is not open rebellion, but private misalignment. An individual may continue to perform their assigned function, speak the approved language, and move within the prescribed channels, yet still become destabilising if they permit grief, suspicion, or personal dissatisfaction to supersede trust in the whole. Systemic failure begins as a minor divergence in perception long before it manifests as material disorder. —Naomi Feld, The Frictionless Economy: Principles…
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