
About The Interim An Elaboration of the Methods and Goals of This Journal Louis 4 July 2026 What Is a Journal? For most, I have to imagine this is something to do with the 'editorial point of view', that is, the vetting and curation of specific ideas with a certain level of quality and care taken to the writing process. A 'Blog' for instance is differentiated because blogs are taken 'less seriously' by their authors, not involving an editorial team, a particular attention to spelling or grammar in many cases, or any number of other markers of professionalization. In traditional publishing, a 'Journal' however represents a few things which set it apart from the mere presence of vetted and editorialized articles, a feature also seen in 'Magazines' and 'Newspapers'. First of all, a Journal is a type of periodical, particularly one which, like the Magazine, and unlike the Newspaper, would not engage in revision of its contents within a single workday, and which would not engage in the re-use of content across multiple editions (like the 'morning' and 'evening' editions which typified traditional news publishing). Second, a Journal engages heavily with several of the industrial arts; a print Journal hires typographers, typesetters, layout editors, and other technologists not as a mere subordinate of the 'editorial point of view', but as a fundamental part of that viewpoint. Finally, a Journal contains various 'support structure' around the reading process which are often taken as seriously as the content of the articles; the 'Front Page', the 'Table of Contents', a 'Letters' section, etc. In sum, great concern is taken to the appearance of the Journal as a 'fixed artefact', something which cannot be simply taken out of hands or homes once it has been published. The best Journals tend to not just have good written content, but also a particular, editorial concern to how the text should be read. I believe that to treat the sort of 'stock' experience offered by platforms like LiveJournal, WordPress, or SubStack as 'good enough' represents a significant regression from the Journal as a form. As such: The Interim will pay great care and attention to the act of publishing in itself, and will not take for granted that publishing schedules, surrounding text, navigation, and support of the act of reading are 'solved' problems with simple solutions. Publication Itself Although it's easy to blame The Web for causing a certain transition in how publishers approached their written content (and I certainly do), there's also the fact that many publishers today don't really care if your experience of reading articles, papers, letters etc. functions particularly differently from a Blog. If I go on the website of any major Newspaper right now, I will receive an automatically generated 'Front Page' which reflects the priorities of an algorithm, and therefore does not present any particular article as the 'most important' for more than about 30 minutes or take much care to correlate a collection of articles into an 'Edition'. For Newspapers, this was undoubtedly always their dream, that 'The News' could be delivered instantaneously, immediately after any particular article was finished and deemed fit for publication. Prior to television, there were many newspapers which put the 'Morning' and 'Evening' cycle to shame, publishing several editions throughout the day to catch commuters at different times and stay on top of breaking news, stock prices, and sports results. This model, however, is antithetical to the Journal as a form; Journals do not rush to publish as soon as an event occurs, but instead stay publication to the next regular edition in most cases. I have consistently read some Magazines in the past, and the 'Special Editions' which lay outside the usual publishing rhythm were always something of an added bonus, not tacked on due to some pressing need for immediate publication. When you get down to it, a Journal is not merely a collection of articles in a 'stream' of publication, but a consistently patterned set of 'Editions' or collections of articles in complement and juxtaposition to one another. Many web publications lack any notion of this consideration, and certain basic questions therefore about their contents cannot easily be answered at a glance. What edition was an article a part of, what other articles were published in that same time, what articles were published in the previous or next edition? As it stands, these are questions I would have to answer very manually, by creating my own list of a site's contents arranged how I find best answers these questions; which is an undertaking that is not worth anyone's time. Insofar as this collation of articles into published editions may be seen as a 'requirement' of traditional publication, it represents what I see as a significant advantage of Print over the usual treatment of The Web, and fortunately not one which The Web actually prevents you from leveraging. I believe that the 'Edition' is not merely a mechanistic limitation, but a matter of extratextual communication, and therefore editorial concern. It creates an ultimate, final, editorial perspective glimpsed at a certain moment in time, and therefore a historical artefact worth analysis in its own right. Editions can have certain tones, deal with specific subjects, seek to move discourse in a particular direction, and generally sway and lead audiences by the presentation of similar matters. This does not have to be a dry affair; I plan precisely the opposite. As well, as an affordance to readers, editions create a 'break' or sense of finality between various periods of publication which allow us to see the Journal in a set of complete 'works' which can each be read cover to cover. It becomes much less suitable for a person to ignore certain articles, especially once a publication has gained real cache in a particular movement. The desire to 'keep up' with what's going on is generally blunted, rather than enhanced, by an editorial absention from collation, which treats any article as just as important as any other and just as relevant to all others regardless of time of publication or type. As such: The Interim will correlate collections of articles into specific 'editions' released on a quasi-regular schedule; that is, articles will not be published as soon as they are ready, but rather when more substantial groupings of articles seem ready. The Interim will provide unique pages for each 'edition' in which every article which exists as part of that 'edition' is linked; this will include discussion and elaboration of the contributions provided to the journal, and not merely serve as a dry presentation of materials in a list. Content & Form The 'Edition' becomes a launching point for further consideration in 'support of the act of reading'. The 'Edition' for example offers a space for the editorial team, to within their own rights and not merely according to the whims of social media, place emphasis on certain articles or provide a written reason for which the editorial team believes each is worth the readers time. The extratextual space creates room for more minor snippets of text which can enhance the reading experience. That is to say, a support structure is created, articles cease to be individual entities in an etherous 'database', served upon the demand of a particular HTTP request by an assemblage of 'contents' into a premade 'form', but must themselves unify Form and Content as fixed artefacts. The usual decree of The Web, that Content and Form are 'separable', and thus can be recombined in arbitrary ways (the same article in several styles, the same style for all articles, etc.) becomes unworkable in this context. In effect, when an article is an entry in a database, it cannot contain within itself or work within the structure of a publication to become the bedrock for further support in the act of reading. The now commonplace practice of algorithmic recombining of articles into arbitrary front pages, arbitrary and non-deterministic search results, and arbitrary stylings across multiple websites, goes against the entire notion of the reading of a 'publication', and harms the overall ability of the human brain to retain information via context. Form goes beyond the mere diagrammatic structure of a text however, beyond the supporting words, tidbits, directions, links, ordering, and collation of a collection of chapters or articles. Form involves the literal "look" of a text as one experiences it during reading, but outside of the actual act of reading itself. This involves choice of font, visual layout, functionality and positioning of navigable elements, margins, borders, document flow and hierarchy. The overall structure of a document thus, in the grand scheme of things, is not Content on the one hand and Form on the other, but a unification of both into a single whole; and this applies to a collection of documents as well, or our notion of an 'Edition' as it concerns this journal. The usual Web practice of treating these as fundamentally separable is even baked into the very structure of web documents themselves, though they go by different names depending on the context they are viewed in. On the one hand, you have a separation between HTML, the language of Content, and CSS, the language of Form, and on the other hand you see that these are divided in HTML into the Body, or Content of a document, and the Style, or Form of a document. Therefore, this separation is hard to escape, it exists, unlike in traditional print publishing, from the very moment you attempt to author documents. The way this page will ultimately be presented took several weeks (though from a position of general inexperience) to hammer out. Ready-made solutions, especially those that promise your articles will be infinitely malleable 'database entries', offer a simple solution; author your documents in a 'what you see is what you get' editor, publish to a website Formed from a premade mold, and forget about your troubles. To reject this decree then, seems to me to be no small feat, not some trifling idea, but a wholesale rejection of the practice of 'Web Design' as a whole. It is a rejection of the knowledge and expertise of an entire industrial art. The rejection of 'search engine optimization', the rejection of 'monetization' (in the simplest sense of displaying ads), the rejection of 'frameworks' and 'backends'. To commit to authoring documents in the style of print, is to put the written language itself back on a pedestal, not merely as Content which can be served under any auspicious offer from outside parties, but Documents in full, as permanent, inalterable records of human thought, snapshots in time. As such: The Interim, as it appears on the web, will serve as a mirror to or representation of print, and not serve as a philosophically "web-native" project of the social media era. The Interim will have a single, cohesive visual style that does not lean into the modern web-native idea of minimalism (which generally fails to be minimal anyhow); careful concern to typographic design and visual style as elements which inform the act of reading, and therefore elements which are not strictly separable from the textual contents of the journal, will be taken. The Interim will not modify the stylesheets or navigation elements of any previously published contents except to resolve bugs, such as broken links, as modifying of previously published contents is revision of history itself. What Is The Interim? This name probably seems strange at first, or arbitrary. To me, it has a dual meaning, and many more can be read into it as the concepts and ideas found within are developed over time. The Night In premodern times, a practice in sleep not all together like our current solid eight hour block was far more commonplace, wherein a person would enter their 'First Sleep' in the early evening, awake in the very early morning much prior to sunrise, spend an hour or two engaging in mild sociality or handling light household tasks, and then retire once more for their 'Second Sleep', which ended at dawn. The period between these two sleeps however, is not often explicitly named. I have seen reference to precisely two names for this period, alternatively 'The Watch', as a person may be expected to stand guard during this time to protect their tribe, and 'The Interim', which is nothing more than a description of the event. The Interim, between the First and Second Sleep. The Interim between one day and the next. The Interim between periods of waking life. What this odd habit, the interim, shows us, is that even the relation of ourselves to our biological functions is itself historically contingent, dependent on the modes in which our society functions and in which it produces things. Man does not relate to himself and his own consciousness in simplistic manners, handed down from the orders of society, but by friction between his faculties and society. Thus, our own experience of ourselves, our lives, our brains, our faculties, is an object of inquiry that forms the basis of our thought. There is no simple answer to the human condition, no way in which even sleep can be seen as lacking sociohistorical content and relevance to our self-consciousness. What is the interim, why did we practice it, why did we lose it? How do we develop knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us? Beneath ourselves often there is no firm grounding, a lack of finality in systems of thought, a lack of ability to complete our understanding. We must always then seek to question why we question things, to know how we know things, and organize how we organize things. The pursuit of understanding itself begets these times of uncertainty and rupture, interims between one understanding and the next. As such: The Interim will deal in the subject matters of consciousness, awareness, phenomenology, knowledge, conceptualization, intellection, cognition, ontology, and the self. The Day In my periodization of the modern world, nothing is prioritized more heavily than the Industrial Revolution itself, which is commonly stated to have occurred once, and recurred again, and which I state has in total occurred now three times in the course of human history. The First Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1760 to 1840, and was typified by the development of the Steam Engine, the first ever invention to free living biological labor from necessity in the application of raw mechanical power to tasks on a mass scale (far beyond that of the Windmill for instance). Machines became a sacrosanct component of the development of the productive forces for the first time in human history, a breakthrough sometimes seen as on par with the introduction of agriculture. Textile production in particular became one of the major industries which saw an explosion of productivity in this time. Cotton, linen, and other natural fabrics, could now be spun and weaved into flat sheets with haste, so much so that they were often sold by measures of distance from one end of the sheet to the other. Iron smelting too began to be undertaken in mass quantities, as hot blast furnaces became a major industrial reality. The steam engine also enabled new modes of transportation such as steam locomotives and steamships. As well, the first serious undertakings to light homes and factories at night (mostly via coal gas or 'natural' gas), as well as provide electrical means of communication via the telegraph, began in the later stages of this period. However, paradoxically, the First Industrial Revolution caused the general living standards of the average urban resident, or in actuality the urban working class, the burgeoning Proletariat, to plummet rapidly. The new industrial processes were dirty, unsafe, toxic, poisonous, noisy, and would literally, not figuratively, grind the bones of the working classes to dust. As well, the processes had not cast off the need for many natural products of the earth and its non-human inhabitants, such as mass quantities of lumber, leather, animal fats, guano, and a great litany of other such produce, to be used as inputs. Indeed, as productive capabilities grew, so too did the pressure on the biosphere, which in no small part informed the theories of Malthus and thinkers like him. By 1840, the industrial project, though it showed no signs of stopping, could seem as a failure in that present time and as a careening project of human extinction within the near future. The Second Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1870 to 1915, and was typified by the development of electrical motors and generators, and the transportation of electrical energy across vast distances, as well as massive breakthroughs in the chemical sciences. The internal combustion engine is developed, and electric lighting becomes commonplace for the first time. As well, the first technologies to fix sensuous reality in place, via photography and sound recordings, such that culture could now be transmitted in previously inaccessible fidelity far into the future, were developed. It is in this period that humanity first develops a secure understanding of the second fundamental force of nature; electromagnetism, particularly via the genius of James Clerk Maxwell. Telecommunications became a major industry, especially after Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876. As well, Oliver Heaviside's solution to the Telegrapher's Equations in that same year enabled transatlantic communication, which had been attempted at great cost and with little success prior. Peculiarly, the discovery of petroleum c. 1859, and its mass exploitation in the decades following replaced much of the need for raw animal product seen in the First period. Petroleum oil replaced whale oil, synthetic rubbers eventually replaced leather belts, etc. The expropriation of mineral rather than living animal and plant resources delayed the collapse of the biosphere by what has now proven to be over 150 years time. Yet the advances of this industrial revolution, now clearly seen as in the distant past, have saddled us with another, less directly visible, and therefore more pernicious issue; the warming (often softened as 'change') of the Earth's climate in response to the introduction of Carbon Dioxide and other similar, usually more potent, 'greenhouse gases'. What on the one hand appeared as our savior, petroleum, has become a force to be reckoned with, a destructive entity which in the modern day threatens the habitation of large swathes of the Earth's surface. The Third Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1945 to 2010, and was typified by the development of the transistor, and all its subsequents in "information technology" and "human machine interfacing", as well as the development of the nuclear, medicinal, biological, and cosmological sciences entirely beyond the limitations of the first half of the 20th century. The computer is developed, as well as its descendants in the Mainframe, Supercomputer, Digital Signal Processor, 'Personal Computer' (which material culture informs us truly begins with the IBM Model 5150), the Programmable Logic Controller, the Microcontroller, etc. For the first time, humanity understood all four of the fundamental forces of the universe, including Gravity (developed in Einstein's full theory of General Relativity prior to the revolution), and the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces, which govern, along with electromagnetism, the behavior of atoms. For the first time in human history, especially via the advancement of Quantum Mechanics as a slowly maturing theory in this period via the 'Standard Model', humanity could grasp both the microscopic and macroscopic elements of the universe with unforeseen clarity and purpose. These advances come to cause an explosion in the pace and breadth of manufacturing. No modern factory operates without computer control, no industrial workshop operates without 'Computer Numerical Control'. Both 'outer-space' and the infamously dubbed 'inner-space' become accessible frontiers of material progress, as humanity begins to probe our own solar system with actual objects, rather than mere telescopes, for the first time, and we begin to understand the structures at various levels which compose all of the matter which surrounds us. The power at the heart of the uranium atom was leveraged for beyond use in explosive devices, in the development of ever more sophisticated 'nuclear reactors'. This began to enable not just ever more manufacturing, but ever more specific manufacturing, smaller features, more precise control of silicon processes, more precise viewing and manipulation of all things 'small'. This would come to include not only silicon, but DNA, chemicals, biological processes of all sorts known and unknown. On the opposite, we also begin to see in this period wider, broader, and more capable 'networks' bridge together disparate places, not just via human speech and vision, but by machine to machine and human to machine interfacing. Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Augmentation Research Center at Standford unveil their 'oN-Line System' in 1968, at an electrifying presentation that has been dubbed the 'Mother of All Demos', displaying for the first time a complete Graphical User Interface as we would come to know it. The NLS, as well, becomes the first computer to participate in the ARPANet, the antecedent to the modern 'Internet' you are likely using to access this document. Strangely, the NLS also sets the precedent for the very form which most usage of the internet now takes, by introducing 'Hypertext' as a complete system for the first time, it presages 'The Web'. As such: The Interim will deal in the subject matters of technology, production, automation, labor, capital, the general intellect, industry, engineering, science, cybernetics, and alienation. The Twilight The Revolutions though, are historically limited periods; 'innovation', 'invention', the dynamism of human knowledge itself flows, and ebbs. If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed these odd gaps already; what of the period from 1840 to 1870, 1915 to 1945, what about 2010 to our present moment (whenever that might be)? This seems a question of great concern. First, for clarity's sake, despite the protestations of the likes of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, or the 'automation' industry more generally, no such thing as the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', sometimes childishly dubbed 'Industry 4.0', exists. This is not a real periodization which can inform our view of the world and our view of the decisions we must make within it. The first such gap, c. 1840 to 1870, was marked by the first truly explosive conflicts premised on the collision of Capitalism with forces that sought to subvert it. Capitalism waged the First Opium War, The Anglo-Sikh Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War. Capitalism navigated threats to its dominance in conflicts no less totalizing than the Revolutions of 1848, which ravaged Europe in the throes of the possible overthrow of all existing structures, the American Civil War, where industrial Capitalism clashed with an alternative, slave-based class structure seeking (doomed) dominance on the American continents, and the Taiping Rebellion, which attempted to deshackle China from European colonial rule. The second such gap, c. 1915 to 1945, starts off with a bang in 'The Great War', now more commonly known in English as World War I. The imperial powers of Europe, unable to make sense of the world shifting beneath them, explosively destroy themselves and each other, and bleed off an entire generation of young men. Nearing the end of that conflict, the first truly 'Communist' revolutions take hold, in Russia, creating the USSR, in Mongolia, and in China, kicking off the Chinese Civil War which will rage for two decades. As well, the odious ideological notion of 'Fascism' develops, first in Italy, followed by the Nazis in Germany, and other such germs of reaction. The period is marked by the single largest, most destructive, and by far the single most important conflict in human history, the Second World War, dubbed frequently in China as roughly 'The Global Anti-Fascist War'. America, the USSR, China, and a few pre-fascist holdouts in Europe (namely the United Kingdom), band together under duress from the global forces of reaction, and spend the seven deadliest years ever, deadlier than any plague, fighting off the existential threat. Beginning in the earlier parts of the period, a new form of man-made suffering rears its ugly head: Genocide. The systematic eradication of entire people-groups is attempted time and again by reactionary and progressive forces alike, the Young Turks attempt to kill the Armenians, the Nazis nearly succeed in killing all European Jews. Slaughter moves from a personalist, or militaristic notion, to an inseparable component of industrial society itself, as slaughter, of men, women, children, families, villages, neighborhoods, ghettos, cities, indeed entire nations becomes possible under the might of advances in metallurgic and chemical manufacturing. The third and to now final such gap, c. 2010 onwards, has been marked by increasing global instability, as the peace achieved after the resounding defeat of global fascism slips so far out of the liberal memory that the use for structures such as the 'United Nations' becomes less and less clear. Having lost the USSR in 1989-1991, the US and China become bitter and confused economic rivals, and the direction of the US on the world stage becomes fatalist, since 2023 even directly aiding and abetting a genocide by the nation of Israel against the nation of Palestine. Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Niger, are all ravaged by civil war. The material needs of well over a billion people continue to be the subject of conflict, genocide is no longer imagined to be possible to thwart in full, no longer possible to put in the past. Thus, The Interim is the period between industrial revolutions, the waiting between times of great upheaval in the sciences, where great upheaval in the political and material structures of our world occur. It is in this veil, this veil of failure, of stagnation, of ignorance, of reaction, one which we now find ourselves in, that Capitalism itself appears to be its weakest, the least capable of reproducing itself. It is in this Interim, that conquest, war, famine, and death ravage our world, threaten the very existence of the human species. It is in this interim that we are told, screaming, by the oppressed peoples of the world, 'dear god, turn back!' As such: The Interim will deal in the subject matters of geopolitics, commerce, power, society, nationhood, state, warfare, demographics, economics, class, and history. The Project Itself How then do the two sides of this interrelate, that is, The Interim, the organizing concept, the sensuous and intangible thing that drives our lives, and The Interim, the Journal? The very goal of The Interim, as in the world as in the journal, is to elaborate the failures of Capitalism, the failures of previous traditions, of old ideas, of outdated structures, of false idols and false concepts, to clean the slate of that which seek to destroy us, ruin our minds and our livelihoods. Thus, the project of The Interim is to elaborate precisely where we find ourselves in history, work towards the benefit of our faculties in the arts, the sciences, and the self, to critique the political economy and philosophical forms which are our forebears, to stand on the shoulders of our teachers and reach for our human purpose, to utilize humanity itself the fullest extent. This is no small undertaking however, and it is never taken alone or without careful thought in as various areas as seem to be demanded. Our intellectual tradition itself must be clarified, extended, we must not see ourselves as passive objects of history, but as its agents and operators. We must build networks, build ideas, build analysis, build our understanding of the science of knowledge itself, build our understanding of all things present in the material world, build our understanding of humanity, clarify our view of all the beings and objects of the Earth. We must have common organs for our elaboration, common places for this education and re-education, common sinew which binds us to a larger mission. To undertake this as an act of semi-professional publishing is to say, nothing is sufficient except that we must learn and we must teach, we must be more capable than we were yesterday, nothing comes close to the demands placed on us. We must come to know the world and ourselves, in their full florid forms. This requires that we view the project not as an ends unto itself, but as the means of self-actualization, the means of our own self-consciousness, the means to a community of self-development. It will serve ourselves as much as it serves the public readership. As such: The Interim will serve as a gathering place and network for new writers to express and formulate their ideas in conversation with other contributors to the journal. The Interim will concern itself with the self-actualization of its contributors as socialists, writers, analysts, economists, scientists, and philosophers. Myself & The Journal Finally then, what remains is to lay out who I am, and what my hopes are for this project. I am a reasonably educated engineer who works, at the time of writing, in the semiconductor industry in California. My education was not in the humanities, nor any natural, social, or economic science. As such, I am at current fairly early in my own theoretical development, I have not read most major works of socialist analysis and literature, I do not have the best or most widespread awareness of all tendencies or developments in the history of the movement for worker emancipation. I have however, come to realize, that the works of Karl Marx, and thus the theories of "Marxism" which he founded, are of the utmost importance and genius. To say that we today live and work in the shadow of Marx, and thus the shadow of all his antecedents, precedents, and descendants, could not possibly be overstated. Thus, my hope and ultimate goal for The Interim is to leverage it to develop my own understanding of the world, to put every tool in our hands. What is materialism, what is dialectics, what is humanism, how do we understand the world, society, and ourselves? These are questions I am no longer satisfied to sit idly without an answer to. I must read many of the works that already exist of course, but I am not an isolated person in an isolated study who can afford to do nothing to recruit other people to this process. I have friends, I have colleagues, acquaintances, I see myself as a part of a social sphere which tries to deal with our relation to each other and the world as a collective entity. In this regard, I feel the need, the drive, the desire, to hear more from other people, to see the theories and ideas at play, to read what we all have to say to each other in a more dignified format. What this means for myself in the total scheme of the journal is that I hope to acquire two main roles, that of Technologist and Facilitator. First, Technologist, because I will maintain the journal publicly on the internet, I will code it, I will format submitted manuscripts, and whole editions, and I will ensure that our writings can be shared and enjoyed with the seriousness I think our efforts deserve. Second, Facilitator, because I hope to become something of an arbiter of discussion, an interested and curious mind driving things one way or another, putting people into contact who may not otherwise have been in contact, encouraging people to write who may not otherwise have written (and also because I will pay for hosting and other costs). Thus while, at the time of writing, this will be nothing more than some static webpages announcing the project, I plan to integrate email systems, for submission of manuscripts, internal discussion, and dissemination of editions as a newsletter. I also plan to integrate a deterministic search system of journal content. The scope of these technological considerations could surely grow over time, as well as the sophistication of the visual and layout aspects of the publication, and I don't plan on ever calling the endeavor completely done. It will evolve as the scope of the community of interested socialists grows. I feel without at least making an attempt at this sort of project, I otherwise have little to offer the world that does not flow through my career. This is a bold and broad step for me, and one I dearly hope I will come to see as important in the coming years. If there is one thing I have learned from observing the methods and life of Marx, it is that we must write, we cannot pretend we are too lowly for it. We must write, and write, and write, we must produce and read a dizzying array of texts for our own self-development. Nothing else is sufficient. As such: I will act as the Technologist and Facilitator for The Interim. I look forward to having The Interim's first edition, with the contribution of several friends therewithin, ready in the following months. — Louis

About The Interim

An Elaboration of the Methods and Goals of This Journal

4 July 2026

What Is a Journal?

For most, I have to imagine this is something to do with the 'editorial point of view', that is, the vetting and curation of specific ideas with a certain level of quality and care taken to the writing process. A 'Blog' for instance is differentiated because blogs are taken 'less seriously' by their authors, not involving an editorial team, a particular attention to spelling or grammar in many cases, or any number of other markers of professionalization.

In traditional publishing, a 'Journal' however represents a few things which set it apart from the mere presence of vetted and editorialized articles, a feature also seen in 'Magazines' and 'Newspapers'. First of all, a Journal is a type of periodical, particularly one which, like the Magazine, and unlike the Newspaper, would not engage in revision of its contents within a single workday, and which would not engage in the re-use of content across multiple editions (like the 'morning' and 'evening' editions which typified traditional news publishing). Second, a Journal engages heavily with several of the industrial arts; a print Journal hires typographers, typesetters, layout editors, and other technologists not as a mere subordinate of the 'editorial point of view', but as a fundamental part of that viewpoint. Finally, a Journal contains various 'support structure' around the reading process which are often taken as seriously as the content of the articles; the 'Front Page', the 'Table of Contents', a 'Letters' section, etc.

In sum, great concern is taken to the appearance of the Journal as a 'fixed artefact', something which cannot be simply taken out of hands or homes once it has been published. The best Journals tend to not just have good written content, but also a particular, editorial concern to how the text should be read. I believe that to treat the sort of 'stock' experience offered by platforms like LiveJournal, WordPress, or SubStack as 'good enough' represents a significant regression from the Journal as a form.

As such:

The Interim will pay great care and attention to the act of publishing in itself, and will not take for granted that publishing schedules, surrounding text, navigation, and support of the act of reading are 'solved' problems with simple solutions.

Publication Itself

Although it's easy to blame The Web for causing a certain transition in how publishers approached their written content (and I certainly do), there's also the fact that many publishers today don't really care if your experience of reading articles, papers, letters etc. functions particularly differently from a Blog. If I go on the website of any major Newspaper right now, I will receive an automatically generated 'Front Page' which reflects the priorities of an algorithm, and therefore does not present any particular article as the 'most important' for more than about 30 minutes or take much care to correlate a collection of articles into an 'Edition'. For Newspapers, this was undoubtedly always their dream, that 'The News' could be delivered instantaneously, immediately after any particular article was finished and deemed fit for publication. Prior to television, there were many newspapers which put the 'Morning' and 'Evening' cycle to shame, publishing several editions throughout the day to catch commuters at different times and stay on top of breaking news, stock prices, and sports results.

This model, however, is antithetical to the Journal as a form; Journals do not rush to publish as soon as an event occurs, but instead stay publication to the next regular edition in most cases. I have consistently read some Magazines in the past, and the 'Special Editions' which lay outside the usual publishing rhythm were always something of an added bonus, not tacked on due to some pressing need for immediate publication.

When you get down to it, a Journal is not merely a collection of articles in a 'stream' of publication, but a consistently patterned set of 'Editions' or collections of articles in complement and juxtaposition to one another. Many web publications lack any notion of this consideration, and certain basic questions therefore about their contents cannot easily be answered at a glance. What edition was an article a part of, what other articles were published in that same time, what articles were published in the previous or next edition? As it stands, these are questions I would have to answer very manually, by creating my own list of a site's contents arranged how I find best answers these questions; which is an undertaking that is not worth anyone's time.

Insofar as this collation of articles into published editions may be seen as a 'requirement' of traditional publication, it represents what I see as a significant advantage of Print over the usual treatment of The Web, and fortunately not one which The Web actually prevents you from leveraging. I believe that the 'Edition' is not merely a mechanistic limitation, but a matter of extratextual communication, and therefore editorial concern. It creates an ultimate, final, editorial perspective glimpsed at a certain moment in time, and therefore a historical artefact worth analysis in its own right. Editions can have certain tones, deal with specific subjects, seek to move discourse in a particular direction, and generally sway and lead audiences by the presentation of similar matters. This does not have to be a dry affair; I plan precisely the opposite.

As well, as an affordance to readers, editions create a 'break' or sense of finality between various periods of publication which allow us to see the Journal in a set of complete 'works' which can each be read cover to cover. It becomes much less suitable for a person to ignore certain articles, especially once a publication has gained real cache in a particular movement. The desire to 'keep up' with what's going on is generally blunted, rather than enhanced, by an editorial absention from collation, which treats any article as just as important as any other and just as relevant to all others regardless of time of publication or type.

As such:

The Interim will correlate collections of articles into specific 'editions' released on a quasi-regular schedule; that is, articles will not be published as soon as they are ready, but rather when more substantial groupings of articles seem ready.
The Interim will provide unique pages for each 'edition' in which every article which exists as part of that 'edition' is linked; this will include discussion and elaboration of the contributions provided to the journal, and not merely serve as a dry presentation of materials in a list.

Content & Form

The 'Edition' becomes a launching point for further consideration in 'support of the act of reading'. The 'Edition' for example offers a space for the editorial team, to within their own rights and not merely according to the whims of social media, place emphasis on certain articles or provide a written reason for which the editorial team believes each is worth the readers time. The extratextual space creates room for more minor snippets of text which can enhance the reading experience.

That is to say, a support structure is created, articles cease to be individual entities in an etherous 'database', served upon the demand of a particular HTTP request by an assemblage of 'contents' into a premade 'form', but must themselves unify Form and Content as fixed artefacts. The usual decree of The Web, that Content and Form are 'separable', and thus can be recombined in arbitrary ways (the same article in several styles, the same style for all articles, etc.) becomes unworkable in this context.

In effect, when an article is an entry in a database, it cannot contain within itself or work within the structure of a publication to become the bedrock for further support in the act of reading. The now commonplace practice of algorithmic recombining of articles into arbitrary front pages, arbitrary and non-deterministic search results, and arbitrary stylings across multiple websites, goes against the entire notion of the reading of a 'publication', and harms the overall ability of the human brain to retain information via context.

Form goes beyond the mere diagrammatic structure of a text however, beyond the supporting words, tidbits, directions, links, ordering, and collation of a collection of chapters or articles. Form involves the literal "look" of a text as one experiences it during reading, but outside of the actual act of reading itself. This involves choice of font, visual layout, functionality and positioning of navigable elements, margins, borders, document flow and hierarchy.

The overall structure of a document thus, in the grand scheme of things, is not Content on the one hand and Form on the other, but a unification of both into a single whole; and this applies to a collection of documents as well, or our notion of an 'Edition' as it concerns this journal.

The usual Web practice of treating these as fundamentally separable is even baked into the very structure of web documents themselves, though they go by different names depending on the context they are viewed in. On the one hand, you have a separation between HTML, the language of Content, and CSS, the language of Form, and on the other hand you see that these are divided in HTML into the Body, or Content of a document, and the Style, or Form of a document.

Therefore, this separation is hard to escape, it exists, unlike in traditional print publishing, from the very moment you attempt to author documents. The way this page will ultimately be presented took several weeks (though from a position of general inexperience) to hammer out. Ready-made solutions, especially those that promise your articles will be infinitely malleable 'database entries', offer a simple solution; author your documents in a 'what you see is what you get' editor, publish to a website Formed from a premade mold, and forget about your troubles.

To reject this decree then, seems to me to be no small feat, not some trifling idea, but a wholesale rejection of the practice of 'Web Design' as a whole. It is a rejection of the knowledge and expertise of an entire industrial art. The rejection of 'search engine optimization', the rejection of 'monetization' (in the simplest sense of displaying ads), the rejection of 'frameworks' and 'backends'. To commit to authoring documents in the style of print, is to put the written language itself back on a pedestal, not merely as Content which can be served under any auspicious offer from outside parties, but Documents in full, as permanent, inalterable records of human thought, snapshots in time.

As such:

The Interim, as it appears on the web, will serve as a mirror to or representation of print, and not serve as a philosophically "web-native" project of the social media era.
The Interim will have a single, cohesive visual style that does not lean into the modern web-native idea of minimalism (which generally fails to be minimal anyhow); careful concern to typographic design and visual style as elements which inform the act of reading, and therefore elements which are not strictly separable from the textual contents of the journal, will be taken.
The Interim will not modify the stylesheets or navigation elements of any previously published contents except to resolve bugs, such as broken links, as modifying of previously published contents is revision of history itself.

What Is The Interim?

This name probably seems strange at first, or arbitrary. To me, it has a dual meaning, and many more can be read into it as the concepts and ideas found within are developed over time.

The Night

In premodern times, a practice in sleep not all together like our current solid eight hour block was far more commonplace, wherein a person would enter their 'First Sleep' in the early evening, awake in the very early morning much prior to sunrise, spend an hour or two engaging in mild sociality or handling light household tasks, and then retire once more for their 'Second Sleep', which ended at dawn.

The period between these two sleeps however, is not often explicitly named. I have seen reference to precisely two names for this period, alternatively 'The Watch', as a person may be expected to stand guard during this time to protect their tribe, and 'The Interim', which is nothing more than a description of the event. The Interim, between the First and Second Sleep. The Interim between one day and the next. The Interim between periods of waking life.

What this odd habit, the interim, shows us, is that even the relation of ourselves to our biological functions is itself historically contingent, dependent on the modes in which our society functions and in which it produces things. Man does not relate to himself and his own consciousness in simplistic manners, handed down from the orders of society, but by friction between his faculties and society.

Thus, our own experience of ourselves, our lives, our brains, our faculties, is an object of inquiry that forms the basis of our thought. There is no simple answer to the human condition, no way in which even sleep can be seen as lacking sociohistorical content and relevance to our self-consciousness. What is the interim, why did we practice it, why did we lose it? How do we develop knowledge of ourselves and of the world around us?

Beneath ourselves often there is no firm grounding, a lack of finality in systems of thought, a lack of ability to complete our understanding. We must always then seek to question why we question things, to know how we know things, and organize how we organize things. The pursuit of understanding itself begets these times of uncertainty and rupture, interims between one understanding and the next.

As such:

The Interim will deal in the subject matters of consciousness, awareness, phenomenology, knowledge, conceptualization, intellection, cognition, ontology, and the self.

The Day

In my periodization of the modern world, nothing is prioritized more heavily than the Industrial Revolution itself, which is commonly stated to have occurred once, and recurred again, and which I state has in total occurred now three times in the course of human history.

The First Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1760 to 1840, and was typified by the development of the Steam Engine, the first ever invention to free living biological labor from necessity in the application of raw mechanical power to tasks on a mass scale (far beyond that of the Windmill for instance). Machines became a sacrosanct component of the development of the productive forces for the first time in human history, a breakthrough sometimes seen as on par with the introduction of agriculture.

Textile production in particular became one of the major industries which saw an explosion of productivity in this time. Cotton, linen, and other natural fabrics, could now be spun and weaved into flat sheets with haste, so much so that they were often sold by measures of distance from one end of the sheet to the other. Iron smelting too began to be undertaken in mass quantities, as hot blast furnaces became a major industrial reality. The steam engine also enabled new modes of transportation such as steam locomotives and steamships. As well, the first serious undertakings to light homes and factories at night (mostly via coal gas or 'natural' gas), as well as provide electrical means of communication via the telegraph, began in the later stages of this period.

However, paradoxically, the First Industrial Revolution caused the general living standards of the average urban resident, or in actuality the urban working class, the burgeoning Proletariat, to plummet rapidly. The new industrial processes were dirty, unsafe, toxic, poisonous, noisy, and would literally, not figuratively, grind the bones of the working classes to dust. As well, the processes had not cast off the need for many natural products of the earth and its non-human inhabitants, such as mass quantities of lumber, leather, animal fats, guano, and a great litany of other such produce, to be used as inputs. Indeed, as productive capabilities grew, so too did the pressure on the biosphere, which in no small part informed the theories of Malthus and thinkers like him. By 1840, the industrial project, though it showed no signs of stopping, could seem as a failure in that present time and as a careening project of human extinction within the near future.

The Second Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1870 to 1915, and was typified by the development of electrical motors and generators, and the transportation of electrical energy across vast distances, as well as massive breakthroughs in the chemical sciences. The internal combustion engine is developed, and electric lighting becomes commonplace for the first time. As well, the first technologies to fix sensuous reality in place, via photography and sound recordings, such that culture could now be transmitted in previously inaccessible fidelity far into the future, were developed.

It is in this period that humanity first develops a secure understanding of the second fundamental force of nature; electromagnetism, particularly via the genius of James Clerk Maxwell. Telecommunications became a major industry, especially after Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876. As well, Oliver Heaviside's solution to the Telegrapher's Equations in that same year enabled transatlantic communication, which had been attempted at great cost and with little success prior.

Peculiarly, the discovery of petroleum c. 1859, and its mass exploitation in the decades following replaced much of the need for raw animal product seen in the First period. Petroleum oil replaced whale oil, synthetic rubbers eventually replaced leather belts, etc. The expropriation of mineral rather than living animal and plant resources delayed the collapse of the biosphere by what has now proven to be over 150 years time.

Yet the advances of this industrial revolution, now clearly seen as in the distant past, have saddled us with another, less directly visible, and therefore more pernicious issue; the warming (often softened as 'change') of the Earth's climate in response to the introduction of Carbon Dioxide and other similar, usually more potent, 'greenhouse gases'. What on the one hand appeared as our savior, petroleum, has become a force to be reckoned with, a destructive entity which in the modern day threatens the habitation of large swathes of the Earth's surface.

The Third Industrial Revolution occurred c. 1945 to 2010, and was typified by the development of the transistor, and all its subsequents in "information technology" and "human machine interfacing", as well as the development of the nuclear, medicinal, biological, and cosmological sciences entirely beyond the limitations of the first half of the 20th century. The computer is developed, as well as its descendants in the Mainframe, Supercomputer, Digital Signal Processor, 'Personal Computer' (which material culture informs us truly begins with the IBM Model 5150), the Programmable Logic Controller, the Microcontroller, etc.

For the first time, humanity understood all four of the fundamental forces of the universe, including Gravity (developed in Einstein's full theory of General Relativity prior to the revolution), and the Strong and Weak Nuclear forces, which govern, along with electromagnetism, the behavior of atoms. For the first time in human history, especially via the advancement of Quantum Mechanics as a slowly maturing theory in this period via the 'Standard Model', humanity could grasp both the microscopic and macroscopic elements of the universe with unforeseen clarity and purpose.

These advances come to cause an explosion in the pace and breadth of manufacturing. No modern factory operates without computer control, no industrial workshop operates without 'Computer Numerical Control'. Both 'outer-space' and the infamously dubbed 'inner-space' become accessible frontiers of material progress, as humanity begins to probe our own solar system with actual objects, rather than mere telescopes, for the first time, and we begin to understand the structures at various levels which compose all of the matter which surrounds us. The power at the heart of the uranium atom was leveraged for beyond use in explosive devices, in the development of ever more sophisticated 'nuclear reactors'.

This began to enable not just ever more manufacturing, but ever more specific manufacturing, smaller features, more precise control of silicon processes, more precise viewing and manipulation of all things 'small'. This would come to include not only silicon, but DNA, chemicals, biological processes of all sorts known and unknown. On the opposite, we also begin to see in this period wider, broader, and more capable 'networks' bridge together disparate places, not just via human speech and vision, but by machine to machine and human to machine interfacing. Douglas Engelbart and his team at the Augmentation Research Center at Standford unveil their 'oN-Line System' in 1968, at an electrifying presentation that has been dubbed the 'Mother of All Demos', displaying for the first time a complete Graphical User Interface as we would come to know it. The NLS, as well, becomes the first computer to participate in the ARPANet, the antecedent to the modern 'Internet' you are likely using to access this document. Strangely, the NLS also sets the precedent for the very form which most usage of the internet now takes, by introducing 'Hypertext' as a complete system for the first time, it presages 'The Web'.

As such:

The Interim will deal in the subject matters of technology, production, automation, labor, capital, the general intellect, industry, engineering, science, cybernetics, and alienation.

The Twilight

The Revolutions though, are historically limited periods; 'innovation', 'invention', the dynamism of human knowledge itself flows, and ebbs. If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed these odd gaps already; what of the period from 1840 to 1870, 1915 to 1945, what about 2010 to our present moment (whenever that might be)? This seems a question of great concern.

First, for clarity's sake, despite the protestations of the likes of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, or the 'automation' industry more generally, no such thing as the 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', sometimes childishly dubbed 'Industry 4.0', exists. This is not a real periodization which can inform our view of the world and our view of the decisions we must make within it.

The first such gap, c. 1840 to 1870, was marked by the first truly explosive conflicts premised on the collision of Capitalism with forces that sought to subvert it. Capitalism waged the First Opium War, The Anglo-Sikh Wars, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War. Capitalism navigated threats to its dominance in conflicts no less totalizing than the Revolutions of 1848, which ravaged Europe in the throes of the possible overthrow of all existing structures, the American Civil War, where industrial Capitalism clashed with an alternative, slave-based class structure seeking (doomed) dominance on the American continents, and the Taiping Rebellion, which attempted to deshackle China from European colonial rule.

The second such gap, c. 1915 to 1945, starts off with a bang in 'The Great War', now more commonly known in English as World War I. The imperial powers of Europe, unable to make sense of the world shifting beneath them, explosively destroy themselves and each other, and bleed off an entire generation of young men. Nearing the end of that conflict, the first truly 'Communist' revolutions take hold, in Russia, creating the USSR, in Mongolia, and in China, kicking off the Chinese Civil War which will rage for two decades.

As well, the odious ideological notion of 'Fascism' develops, first in Italy, followed by the Nazis in Germany, and other such germs of reaction. The period is marked by the single largest, most destructive, and by far the single most important conflict in human history, the Second World War, dubbed frequently in China as roughly 'The Global Anti-Fascist War'. America, the USSR, China, and a few pre-fascist holdouts in Europe (namely the United Kingdom), band together under duress from the global forces of reaction, and spend the seven deadliest years ever, deadlier than any plague, fighting off the existential threat.

Beginning in the earlier parts of the period, a new form of man-made suffering rears its ugly head: Genocide. The systematic eradication of entire people-groups is attempted time and again by reactionary and progressive forces alike, the Young Turks attempt to kill the Armenians, the Nazis nearly succeed in killing all European Jews. Slaughter moves from a personalist, or militaristic notion, to an inseparable component of industrial society itself, as slaughter, of men, women, children, families, villages, neighborhoods, ghettos, cities, indeed entire nations becomes possible under the might of advances in metallurgic and chemical manufacturing.

The third and to now final such gap, c. 2010 onwards, has been marked by increasing global instability, as the peace achieved after the resounding defeat of global fascism slips so far out of the liberal memory that the use for structures such as the 'United Nations' becomes less and less clear. Having lost the USSR in 1989-1991, the US and China become bitter and confused economic rivals, and the direction of the US on the world stage becomes fatalist, since 2023 even directly aiding and abetting a genocide by the nation of Israel against the nation of Palestine. Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Niger, are all ravaged by civil war. The material needs of well over a billion people continue to be the subject of conflict, genocide is no longer imagined to be possible to thwart in full, no longer possible to put in the past.

Thus, The Interim is the period between industrial revolutions, the waiting between times of great upheaval in the sciences, where great upheaval in the political and material structures of our world occur. It is in this veil, this veil of failure, of stagnation, of ignorance, of reaction, one which we now find ourselves in, that Capitalism itself appears to be its weakest, the least capable of reproducing itself. It is in this Interim, that conquest, war, famine, and death ravage our world, threaten the very existence of the human species. It is in this interim that we are told, screaming, by the oppressed peoples of the world, 'dear god, turn back!'

As such:

The Interim will deal in the subject matters of geopolitics, commerce, power, society, nationhood, state, warfare, demographics, economics, class, and history.

The Project Itself

How then do the two sides of this interrelate, that is, The Interim, the organizing concept, the sensuous and intangible thing that drives our lives, and The Interim, the Journal? The very goal of The Interim, as in the world as in the journal, is to elaborate the failures of Capitalism, the failures of previous traditions, of old ideas, of outdated structures, of false idols and false concepts, to clean the slate of that which seek to destroy us, ruin our minds and our livelihoods.

Thus, the project of The Interim is to elaborate precisely where we find ourselves in history, work towards the benefit of our faculties in the arts, the sciences, and the self, to critique the political economy and philosophical forms which are our forebears, to stand on the shoulders of our teachers and reach for our human purpose, to utilize humanity itself the fullest extent.

This is no small undertaking however, and it is never taken alone or without careful thought in as various areas as seem to be demanded. Our intellectual tradition itself must be clarified, extended, we must not see ourselves as passive objects of history, but as its agents and operators. We must build networks, build ideas, build analysis, build our understanding of the science of knowledge itself, build our understanding of all things present in the material world, build our understanding of humanity, clarify our view of all the beings and objects of the Earth. We must have common organs for our elaboration, common places for this education and re-education, common sinew which binds us to a larger mission.

To undertake this as an act of semi-professional publishing is to say, nothing is sufficient except that we must learn and we must teach, we must be more capable than we were yesterday, nothing comes close to the demands placed on us. We must come to know the world and ourselves, in their full florid forms.

This requires that we view the project not as an ends unto itself, but as the means of self-actualization, the means of our own self-consciousness, the means to a community of self-development. It will serve ourselves as much as it serves the public readership.

As such:

The Interim will serve as a gathering place and network for new writers to express and formulate their ideas in conversation with other contributors to the journal.
The Interim will concern itself with the self-actualization of its contributors as socialists, writers, analysts, economists, scientists, and philosophers.

Myself & The Journal

Finally then, what remains is to lay out who I am, and what my hopes are for this project. I am a reasonably educated engineer who works, at the time of writing, in the semiconductor industry in California. My education was not in the humanities, nor any natural, social, or economic science.

As such, I am at current fairly early in my own theoretical development, I have not read most major works of socialist analysis and literature, I do not have the best or most widespread awareness of all tendencies or developments in the history of the movement for worker emancipation. I have however, come to realize, that the works of Karl Marx, and thus the theories of "Marxism" which he founded, are of the utmost importance and genius. To say that we today live and work in the shadow of Marx, and thus the shadow of all his antecedents, precedents, and descendants, could not possibly be overstated.

Thus, my hope and ultimate goal for The Interim is to leverage it to develop my own understanding of the world, to put every tool in our hands. What is materialism, what is dialectics, what is humanism, how do we understand the world, society, and ourselves? These are questions I am no longer satisfied to sit idly without an answer to. I must read many of the works that already exist of course, but I am not an isolated person in an isolated study who can afford to do nothing to recruit other people to this process.

I have friends, I have colleagues, acquaintances, I see myself as a part of a social sphere which tries to deal with our relation to each other and the world as a collective entity. In this regard, I feel the need, the drive, the desire, to hear more from other people, to see the theories and ideas at play, to read what we all have to say to each other in a more dignified format.

What this means for myself in the total scheme of the journal is that I hope to acquire two main roles, that of Technologist and Facilitator. First, Technologist, because I will maintain the journal publicly on the internet, I will code it, I will format submitted manuscripts, and whole editions, and I will ensure that our writings can be shared and enjoyed with the seriousness I think our efforts deserve. Second, Facilitator, because I hope to become something of an arbiter of discussion, an interested and curious mind driving things one way or another, putting people into contact who may not otherwise have been in contact, encouraging people to write who may not otherwise have written (and also because I will pay for hosting and other costs).

Thus while, at the time of writing, this will be nothing more than some static webpages announcing the project, I plan to integrate email systems, for submission of manuscripts, internal discussion, and dissemination of editions as a newsletter. I also plan to integrate a deterministic search system of journal content. The scope of these technological considerations could surely grow over time, as well as the sophistication of the visual and layout aspects of the publication, and I don't plan on ever calling the endeavor completely done. It will evolve as the scope of the community of interested socialists grows.

I feel without at least making an attempt at this sort of project, I otherwise have little to offer the world that does not flow through my career. This is a bold and broad step for me, and one I dearly hope I will come to see as important in the coming years. If there is one thing I have learned from observing the methods and life of Marx, it is that we must write, we cannot pretend we are too lowly for it. We must write, and write, and write, we must produce and read a dizzying array of texts for our own self-development. Nothing else is sufficient.

As such:

I will act as the Technologist and Facilitator for The Interim.

I look forward to having The Interim's first edition, with the contribution of several friends therewithin, ready in the following months.

— Louis