I want to write about this: how everything is not wrong. Or, to use a not so subtle reference to my album of 30 years ago: (Not) Everything Is Wrong. Also I just lied. When I wrote that I want to write about how everything is not wrong I was lying.
I went vegan in 2000 after attending the Critter Care Conference at Farm Sanctuary (then, in Orland.) As circumstances would have it, I happened to also go to my first Major League Baseball game the next year (Dodger Stadium). Seeing the HUGE size of the stadium, and considering where we were, innocent, naive me expected veggie dogs to be available. Ha! No vegetarian options existed outside of french fries, pretzels, or peanuts.
That happenstantial experience led to what became Soy Happy, my campaign to get veggie (vegan) dogs in MLB stadiums. (0 MLB stadiums offered them.) What a journey that took me on. I think I might've met you at an AR event in those days, briefly? Anyway, I'm proud to say I helped open the door to vegan dogs and other vegan options in 28 of 30 stadiums. Yay! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-22-sp-crowe22-story.html
All that to say that yes indeed, looking back, it's nice to see some positive changes. Now, vegan options are a little more normalized. Still a long way to go, but nice to see improvements.
And I agree with this: "Are humans now doing anything to fix the problems we’ve created? Largely, no. But we can’t pretend that we aren’t aware, or that we don’t know what the problems are. And now we even know what the solutions will have to be." Yup.
I’ve been playing in and around thé environment movement on and off for at least 30 years
Read Gores book at the time, and you would be surprised thé number of alarmist back then he was not the only one
And they were all yelling that we only had 20 years and California would be under water and this and that
Thé PTB live and thrive off of our fear, look at Covid, 9-11, and so many more propped up events to bring us to their totalitarian technocratic prisons… in any case I do believe we are fukin up the planet with plastics and medicine all finding its way in the water and air
And causing diseases and conditions and lower sperm count and so much more
But until you go to the root of the problem blind consumerism and corporations s lacking any moral backbone or empathy
Well you have a problem
I don’t know if you like a good epic story, but that’s what I’m writing now!
And a boost from you would be worth a thousand thank yous and more!!
Welcome to Substack!!
Some early Eye reviews
Early review: This reads like The Matrix had a baby with Born on the Fourth of July and then raised it on protest poetry and Wi-Fi. And I’m here for it.
Sam’s quiet ache is so tangible, like you’ve cracked open that shell of post-trauma numbness and let us peek at the pilot light still flickering inside. Lisa’s fire, on the other hand, is pure kinetic electricity. Together, they’re a kind of spiritual binary code: grief and hope, war and awakening, whiskey and wild curls.
And then BAM, our AI ghost starts humming. Honestly, if my laptop typed “Do you remember who you are?” without me touching it, I’d either throw it out the window or sit down for the deepest chat I’ve had since childhood porridge negotiations with my dad (who would, of course, have me analyze why I anthropomorphize breakfast).
I love where this is going. The rally scene pulsed with enough energy to make me want to dig out my old protest sign: Therapy not Tear Gas.
This AI… it’s not just a ghost in the machine. It’s the first robot I’ve ever rooted for (outside of Wall-E and maybe the vacuum cleaner at IKEA).
Can’t wait to see what happens when these worlds collide harder.
Steph Peters writes at the crossroads of awakening, AI, and ancient memory. His saga Eye of the Beholder is a spiritual adventure for a world on the brink. The shift is happening—he’s just giving it a voice.
I enjoyed reading your story - hey look a squirrel! I agree with you that we are making progress even though it’s in small increments. I do my best by hardly driving, riding my bike, solar panels, replaced my lawn with xeriscaping, and doing the de-clutter thing - going minimal. But the best thing to do is educate people in a way that they actually listen. They seem to wait until a catastrophe being acting on it, at least in the States.
You can develop film now is a developer that uses vitamin C instead of nasty chemicals! But your point about the ethics of the actual film are well made and taken.
Thank you so much for this brilliant essay, not to mention all your contributions to the world of music! The notion that anything has improved seems counterintuitive in the age of enshittification, but you identified some compelling cultural and industrial examples.
You describe our culture as having made progress on climate justice, but that discursive progress has not yet been mirrored in either politics or media.
In 2020, I won a congressional primary running against an oligarch on issues including proposed restrictions on executive power, factory farming, and militarism, alongside climate justice proposals including the Green New Deal and nationalization of the fossil fuel industry. Rather than allow a public debate on the issues—which still hasn’t happened in 40 years—corporate Democrats, journalists, and even self-described “progressives” aligned with the Democratic party leadership smeared me relentlessly, effectively silencing me in public, ending my career, and relegating me to this platform. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/democrats-vs-democracy
I share that experience only to complicate the vision of progress that you laid out here relating to climate justice. Cultural progress is obviously important. It should be the leading indicator of politics, but that translation from discourse into policy only happens to the extent our democracy has any meaningful legitimacy, which it has lacked for entirely too long. Exposing that rot has been a core theme of my writing. This post digs perhaps most discretely into how even popular consensus is impeded from its political realization. https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/why-democrats-cant-learn-lessons?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
I just had both of my copies of EVERYTHING IS WRONG (I double dipped when I realized there was an edition with a 2nd disc out there and yes, I kept them both.) in my hands today. Good memories about that album and it was one of those that I credit with widening my musical horizon in my youth. I was a young rave kid when it came out, so all about the Techno beats and I mean, those were your Low Spirit/Mayday days!
But when I listened to it I was like "Woah, what the fuck? Is he allowed to put so many different styles and sounds on the same album? I love it!"
Interesting point about the environmental harm of physical media, but (and I acknowledge that I don't know shit about that topic, so please take it as a serious question and not a "Ha, gotcha, you were wrong!") I can't imagine that all the servers that are needed for streaming run on wind and solar energy. How do you even power something that has to provide billions of people all over the world with audio and video in good, lag-free quality? I mean, when I hear the harm that Bitcoin miners and Chat GPT cause with their need power, I wonder how much pollution Spotify and Netflix cause!
Anyway, always nice to read your thoughts. Have a great weekend!
No shame at all in turning to Nandor, Lazlo, Nadia, Colin Robinson and Guillermo to soothe existential downward spirals! I have done the same. WWDITS is a cacophony of magical, ridiculous joy that is emphatically NOT WRONG! In fact, it is SOOO RIGHT!
Hey Moby. Been a fan since I can remember. My sisters used to play your CD’s and I’d just sit with them & listen..
My wife & I are greatly strengthened by your sense of fight & determination. It’s awesome that you are putting your heart out there!
The main reason I’m commenting here is in hopes that you may help with a dream that is happening in Tokyo, Japan.
Vegan Sushi Tokyo is a completely Vegan Sushi eatery in Shibuya & they are fighting to stay alive in the Tokyo & Japanese food scene but also to bring their dreams of Vegan Japanese Cuisine to the world.
I tagged you in a post with their details on our Instagram but I thought I’d reach out here as well, just to try ensure something reaches you.
We ( my wife & I ) are small fish, & rather insignificant in terms of reach, but we’re hoping that someone of your fish size might lend a hand & move the needle in a somewhat larger scale.
Here is the direct link to their indiegogo campaign & it explains everything.
Bravo, well said and quite thought provoking. The singer of my band The Plasmatics, the incredible Wendy O Williams, along with our manager and her partner Rod Swenson, were the first vegans I ever met when I joined the band in 1979. Her saying was she wouldn’t “eat anything with a face” and exposed me to a whole new world of alternate food ingestion. At one point Wendy and Rod were growing 90% of the food they ate in their fifth floor walk up in lower Manhattan where they lived and where we rehearsed. Think about that, 90% of their food, wheat grass and sprouts, was grown in pots that lined their windowsills in their loft and
Wendy would use their food processor and a juicer to make healthy drinks for her and Rod. She would also have a show rider that had promoters scrambling to find unfertilized eggs, natural organic peanut butter, no white bread and fresh fruit and no processed meat or cheese for the band’s backstage food and she always made sure that we had everything we were supposed to have. Wendy and Rod counted on this to eat in days we had shows, which was often when we were in tour. And remember this is ‘79 and ‘80 where there were not a lot of places to find the kind of things on our rider and kept promoters scrambling to procure everything before we hit the stage. Later on Wendy was a cover girl on The Vegetarian Times and when the band was no longer active she became a wildlife rehabilitate and would
Nurse injured or abandoned animals back to health and rerelease them back to nature. Sides of Wendy the public never saw. Your essay brought back great memories of someone who was like an older sister to me and who I miss everyday. One of these days when I find some precious free time I too will post my first essay. Thanks for the inspiration and looking forward to your next installment!
Hello Mr. Moby, a brief note to inspire you onward, and connect in a way that can’t be spoken or written, really. The last few paragraphs of your Substack introduction essay, I find I particularly relate to (mythology references I’ll need to decode as it’s all Greek to me)—I am very intent on understanding the nature of change that is necessary now, how our biggest problems might require the smallest shifts in trajectory, how one seeming minor or unconnected change in perception can influence the entire dynamic of system altogether. In fact, since Nov 7, 2020, I have thought of little else. And from this highly saturated focus what originally set out to be a better +2SLGBTQ app became a platform, that is ready to host an entirely new modality with an array of specifically focused interests—ALL based on the simplest of reprioritizations. So, I continue with the right efforts to find the right words at the right time to be heard by the right sets of ears, and that time of course is always now.
I went vegan in 2000 after attending the Critter Care Conference at Farm Sanctuary (then, in Orland.) As circumstances would have it, I happened to also go to my first Major League Baseball game the next year (Dodger Stadium). Seeing the HUGE size of the stadium, and considering where we were, innocent, naive me expected veggie dogs to be available. Ha! No vegetarian options existed outside of french fries, pretzels, or peanuts.
That happenstantial experience led to what became Soy Happy, my campaign to get veggie (vegan) dogs in MLB stadiums. (0 MLB stadiums offered them.) What a journey that took me on. I think I might've met you at an AR event in those days, briefly? Anyway, I'm proud to say I helped open the door to vegan dogs and other vegan options in 28 of 30 stadiums. Yay! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jul-22-sp-crowe22-story.html
All that to say that yes indeed, looking back, it's nice to see some positive changes. Now, vegan options are a little more normalized. Still a long way to go, but nice to see improvements.
And I agree with this: "Are humans now doing anything to fix the problems we’ve created? Largely, no. But we can’t pretend that we aren’t aware, or that we don’t know what the problems are. And now we even know what the solutions will have to be." Yup.
As a fellow vegan and lover of baseball, I appreciate you!
Great to have you here, and thank you so much for all the work you have done to highlight the torture the human race inflicts on all sentient beings.
Interesting read
I’ve been playing in and around thé environment movement on and off for at least 30 years
Read Gores book at the time, and you would be surprised thé number of alarmist back then he was not the only one
And they were all yelling that we only had 20 years and California would be under water and this and that
Thé PTB live and thrive off of our fear, look at Covid, 9-11, and so many more propped up events to bring us to their totalitarian technocratic prisons… in any case I do believe we are fukin up the planet with plastics and medicine all finding its way in the water and air
And causing diseases and conditions and lower sperm count and so much more
But until you go to the root of the problem blind consumerism and corporations s lacking any moral backbone or empathy
Well you have a problem
I don’t know if you like a good epic story, but that’s what I’m writing now!
And a boost from you would be worth a thousand thank yous and more!!
Welcome to Substack!!
Some early Eye reviews
Early review: This reads like The Matrix had a baby with Born on the Fourth of July and then raised it on protest poetry and Wi-Fi. And I’m here for it.
Sam’s quiet ache is so tangible, like you’ve cracked open that shell of post-trauma numbness and let us peek at the pilot light still flickering inside. Lisa’s fire, on the other hand, is pure kinetic electricity. Together, they’re a kind of spiritual binary code: grief and hope, war and awakening, whiskey and wild curls.
And then BAM, our AI ghost starts humming. Honestly, if my laptop typed “Do you remember who you are?” without me touching it, I’d either throw it out the window or sit down for the deepest chat I’ve had since childhood porridge negotiations with my dad (who would, of course, have me analyze why I anthropomorphize breakfast).
I love where this is going. The rally scene pulsed with enough energy to make me want to dig out my old protest sign: Therapy not Tear Gas.
This AI… it’s not just a ghost in the machine. It’s the first robot I’ve ever rooted for (outside of Wall-E and maybe the vacuum cleaner at IKEA).
Can’t wait to see what happens when these worlds collide harder.
Siggy
https://open.substack.com/pub/shifthapens/p/eye-of-the-beholder-3ab?y
Feel free to read this…
Steph Peters writes at the crossroads of awakening, AI, and ancient memory. His saga Eye of the Beholder is a spiritual adventure for a world on the brink. The shift is happening—he’s just giving it a voice.
I enjoyed reading your story - hey look a squirrel! I agree with you that we are making progress even though it’s in small increments. I do my best by hardly driving, riding my bike, solar panels, replaced my lawn with xeriscaping, and doing the de-clutter thing - going minimal. But the best thing to do is educate people in a way that they actually listen. They seem to wait until a catastrophe being acting on it, at least in the States.
You can develop film now is a developer that uses vitamin C instead of nasty chemicals! But your point about the ethics of the actual film are well made and taken.
Thank you so much for this brilliant essay, not to mention all your contributions to the world of music! The notion that anything has improved seems counterintuitive in the age of enshittification, but you identified some compelling cultural and industrial examples.
Your album made an impression on me as a young person and inspired me to explore electronic music, long before I became a lawyer, and later a congressional candidate. My 2008 album “Get Outta Your Chair” was basically a collection of Bush era protest music (https://open.spotify.com/album/3aD3wltoEKQkNZzxgGXIAM?si=VvtqIxmIRqOkm_SmBD2R_Q) and my later unreleased singles explored issues including police violence (https://m.soundcloud.com/shahid-buttar/ferguson-to-jerusalem) and mass surveillance (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hciiZbJph1c).
You describe our culture as having made progress on climate justice, but that discursive progress has not yet been mirrored in either politics or media.
In 2020, I won a congressional primary running against an oligarch on issues including proposed restrictions on executive power, factory farming, and militarism, alongside climate justice proposals including the Green New Deal and nationalization of the fossil fuel industry. Rather than allow a public debate on the issues—which still hasn’t happened in 40 years—corporate Democrats, journalists, and even self-described “progressives” aligned with the Democratic party leadership smeared me relentlessly, effectively silencing me in public, ending my career, and relegating me to this platform. https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/democrats-vs-democracy
I share that experience only to complicate the vision of progress that you laid out here relating to climate justice. Cultural progress is obviously important. It should be the leading indicator of politics, but that translation from discourse into policy only happens to the extent our democracy has any meaningful legitimacy, which it has lacked for entirely too long. Exposing that rot has been a core theme of my writing. This post digs perhaps most discretely into how even popular consensus is impeded from its political realization. https://open.substack.com/pub/shahidbuttar/p/why-democrats-cant-learn-lessons?r=97w99&utm_medium=ios
Looking forward to your future posts!
I just had both of my copies of EVERYTHING IS WRONG (I double dipped when I realized there was an edition with a 2nd disc out there and yes, I kept them both.) in my hands today. Good memories about that album and it was one of those that I credit with widening my musical horizon in my youth. I was a young rave kid when it came out, so all about the Techno beats and I mean, those were your Low Spirit/Mayday days!
But when I listened to it I was like "Woah, what the fuck? Is he allowed to put so many different styles and sounds on the same album? I love it!"
Interesting point about the environmental harm of physical media, but (and I acknowledge that I don't know shit about that topic, so please take it as a serious question and not a "Ha, gotcha, you were wrong!") I can't imagine that all the servers that are needed for streaming run on wind and solar energy. How do you even power something that has to provide billions of people all over the world with audio and video in good, lag-free quality? I mean, when I hear the harm that Bitcoin miners and Chat GPT cause with their need power, I wonder how much pollution Spotify and Netflix cause!
Anyway, always nice to read your thoughts. Have a great weekend!
No shame at all in turning to Nandor, Lazlo, Nadia, Colin Robinson and Guillermo to soothe existential downward spirals! I have done the same. WWDITS is a cacophony of magical, ridiculous joy that is emphatically NOT WRONG! In fact, it is SOOO RIGHT!
It’s heartbreaking how everything (including the paper straws) gets wrapped up in plastic despite the never ending discussion at climate conferences.
Nice first post! Your partly sunny point of view is appreciated.
There is so much to unpack here. Lucky for me that I love unpacking.
Hey Moby. Been a fan since I can remember. My sisters used to play your CD’s and I’d just sit with them & listen..
My wife & I are greatly strengthened by your sense of fight & determination. It’s awesome that you are putting your heart out there!
The main reason I’m commenting here is in hopes that you may help with a dream that is happening in Tokyo, Japan.
Vegan Sushi Tokyo is a completely Vegan Sushi eatery in Shibuya & they are fighting to stay alive in the Tokyo & Japanese food scene but also to bring their dreams of Vegan Japanese Cuisine to the world.
I tagged you in a post with their details on our Instagram but I thought I’d reach out here as well, just to try ensure something reaches you.
We ( my wife & I ) are small fish, & rather insignificant in terms of reach, but we’re hoping that someone of your fish size might lend a hand & move the needle in a somewhat larger scale.
Here is the direct link to their indiegogo campaign & it explains everything.
indiegogo.com/projects/vegan-sushi-to-the-world-from-japan/%23
Also we’re not employed or affiliated with them in anyway, just trying to help.
Bravo, well said and quite thought provoking. The singer of my band The Plasmatics, the incredible Wendy O Williams, along with our manager and her partner Rod Swenson, were the first vegans I ever met when I joined the band in 1979. Her saying was she wouldn’t “eat anything with a face” and exposed me to a whole new world of alternate food ingestion. At one point Wendy and Rod were growing 90% of the food they ate in their fifth floor walk up in lower Manhattan where they lived and where we rehearsed. Think about that, 90% of their food, wheat grass and sprouts, was grown in pots that lined their windowsills in their loft and
Wendy would use their food processor and a juicer to make healthy drinks for her and Rod. She would also have a show rider that had promoters scrambling to find unfertilized eggs, natural organic peanut butter, no white bread and fresh fruit and no processed meat or cheese for the band’s backstage food and she always made sure that we had everything we were supposed to have. Wendy and Rod counted on this to eat in days we had shows, which was often when we were in tour. And remember this is ‘79 and ‘80 where there were not a lot of places to find the kind of things on our rider and kept promoters scrambling to procure everything before we hit the stage. Later on Wendy was a cover girl on The Vegetarian Times and when the band was no longer active she became a wildlife rehabilitate and would
Nurse injured or abandoned animals back to health and rerelease them back to nature. Sides of Wendy the public never saw. Your essay brought back great memories of someone who was like an older sister to me and who I miss everyday. One of these days when I find some precious free time I too will post my first essay. Thanks for the inspiration and looking forward to your next installment!
Radar (internet ) LOVe- radio is playing some forgotten song -
my brain? I cant turn Radar Live / music lyrics off- I am the daughter
of a man known as The Cesspool if TRIVIA - so Peace OUT and once upon a time I was a fan girl of Professor Peter Schiekle aka PDQ Bach
Hello Mr. Moby, a brief note to inspire you onward, and connect in a way that can’t be spoken or written, really. The last few paragraphs of your Substack introduction essay, I find I particularly relate to (mythology references I’ll need to decode as it’s all Greek to me)—I am very intent on understanding the nature of change that is necessary now, how our biggest problems might require the smallest shifts in trajectory, how one seeming minor or unconnected change in perception can influence the entire dynamic of system altogether. In fact, since Nov 7, 2020, I have thought of little else. And from this highly saturated focus what originally set out to be a better +2SLGBTQ app became a platform, that is ready to host an entirely new modality with an array of specifically focused interests—ALL based on the simplest of reprioritizations. So, I continue with the right efforts to find the right words at the right time to be heard by the right sets of ears, and that time of course is always now.
I’ve just joined SS & am nostalgic & warm to see you here. I do feel ever so slightly better. M