On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.
As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.
I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.
At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.
I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.
Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:
Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).
Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."
Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"
Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.
It burned.
The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."
Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."
The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.
That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:
The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:
The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:
The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."
The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:
What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."
If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.
The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:
This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.
They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.
And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!
This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.
Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.
The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.
But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.
But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.
When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.
The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:
Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:
They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."
Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.
While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.
Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.
Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.
Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.
Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.
The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"
But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.
By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Reset your nervous system with this exercise. Stand with your feet hip width apart and take a slow breath in through your nose, followed by a long, breath out. Firmly press your feet into the floor for 10 seconds, then completely relax. Repeat this three times. Next, cross your arms over your chest and gently alternate tapping your shoulders from left to right while breathing slowly for 60–90 seconds. Finish by shifting your weight from one foot to the other, allowing your body to naturally relax. Then pause and notice the difference. Is your breathing calmer? Do you feel more grounded? Sometimes the body doesn't need more stretching or more effort, it simply needs the right sensory input to help the nervous system recognise that it's safe, allowing tension to release and regulation to return
As adults, we sometimes have to go back and learn what we missed out on learning as children. That's okay. Those who were meant to teach us back then were not equipped to teach us what we needed to know. In most cases, they themselves didn't even know what we have the ability to now learn for ourselves.
Give yourself some grace. Reparenting is not easy, but it is very much worth it.
Growing up, I watched a lot of Disney movies. I watched princesses who were soft, kind, misunderstood, but always chosen, always found, always saved. There was always a Prince Charming, someone who arrived at the right time, said the right things, and made everything fall into place. And even if I didn’t consciously believe it, a part of me internalized that story. That love would come, that it would feel right, that it would soothe everything restless inside me.
For most of my life, I believed quietly that love would steady me, that somewhere, someone existed who would understand me deeply enough, meet me fully enough, and stay consistent enough that something inside me would finally quiet down. That I would feel less overwhelmed by my own mind, less intense in my emotions, less aware of everything all at once. Because I’ve always been that kind of person. I feel deeply, I think deeply, I analyze, reflect, and question everything. And I don’t see that as a flaw. That is how I make meaning, that is how I grow. So I thought love would be the place where all of that would finally make sense, where I would feel seen, met, settled. But reality is not a fairy tale.
At some point, through experience, through discomfort, through moments I couldn’t ignore anymore, I realized something that shifted everything. There is no one coming to save me. No Prince Charming, no perfect counterpart, no person capable of carrying my inner world for me. People have limits, love has conditions, everyone is dealing with something I cannot see. And sometimes, the person I once imagined as “the one” is simply another human being trying to manage their own life, their own struggles, their own limitations.
That realization didn’t come with drama. It came quietly, a kind of grounded disappointment, the kind that doesn’t break me but sobers me. Because it removes the illusion of rescue and forces me to face something much more honest. No one is responsible for my emotional stability, and no one is capable of fully holding it for me. And once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t go back to the fantasy.
For a moment, that truth felt heavy because it meant letting go of something comforting, the idea that somewhere out there, someone could make everything feel okay. But almost immediately after that disappointment came something else, a sense of responsibility, and strangely, a sense of power.
I began to understand that what I had been looking for externally was something I had to build internally. Not through control, not through perfection, but through discipline.
Detachment started to make sense to me in a completely different way. Not as coldness, not as distance, but as clarity. As the understanding that everything outside of me, people, relationships, timing, outcomes, is inherently unstable. Temporary, unpredictable, not mine to control. And because of that, I cannot build my emotional foundation on it. I cannot depend on it to keep me steady.
So the question changed. From what do I need from the world to feel okay, to what do I need to become so I can hold myself steady regardless of what the world does. And that question is not comfortable. It doesn’t give immediate relief, it doesn’t offer softness, but it is honest.
This path is not easy. It asks me to sit with discomfort instead of escaping it, to feel without immediately reacting, to pause before I speak, before I act, before I project meaning onto things I cannot control. It asks for restraint, for awareness, for discipline, again and again, until it becomes who I am.
And the more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t just about relationships. It’s about everything. Money, success, validation, romance, all the things people chase believing they will finally feel complete. But none of them are stable, none of them last, none of them can carry the weight we expect them to carry.
Maybe this is where my beliefs come in. Maybe this is where Buddhism resonates so deeply with me. The idea that attachment creates suffering, that everything is impermanent, that chasing external fulfillment will always leave me grasping for more. And maybe this is also where philosophy, Stoicism, eudaimonia, grounds me. The idea that a meaningful life is not built on pleasure or ease, but on virtue, discipline, and alignment with who I choose to be.
I don’t want a life that is just happy. I want a life that is intentional. A life where I am in control of my actions, my words, my responses, a life where I do not harm others out of impulse or emotional instability, a life where I can trust myself, even in discomfort, even in uncertainty.
At the end of the day, I have to face the truth. No one is coming to save me. And that is not something to fear, it is something to accept. Because once I accept it fully, I stop waiting. I stop expecting the world to organize itself in a way that makes me feel safe. I stop outsourcing my peace.
I become responsible for myself, for my emotions, for my reactions, for the way I choose to live.
I am not a damsel in distress. I do not need to be rescued. If anything, the most important thing I can learn in this life is how to rescue myself.
Not in a dramatic way, but quietly, daily, through discipline, through awareness, through choosing, again and again, to return to myself.
Because maybe that’s the real version of the story. Not a prince who arrives, but a person who becomes.
Transforming stress into creativity and relaxation, one Fidget Bloom at a time! 🌸🌺🌼 Check out my latest DIY video on how to make your own fidget bloom - the ultimate fidget toy that can transform into a variety of shapes to suit your mood and various needs! Not only is it a great tool for stress relief, but it's also a fun and creative outlet to keep your hands busy. Give it a try and let me know what you think! :)
Shop dozens of colours and styles:
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Voting ended onApr 12, 2023
I've been asked where I prefer customers to shop my products from, and tbh whichever platform provides them the most convenience for them, I'd say. Etsy is nice because you can shop for other amazing handmade products as well, and have a cart full of awesome things. Shopping from my website introduces you to me and my products a bit more, and it's a more personalized shopping experience. There are pros and cons, but overall, I'm just happy to have my handmade fidget flowers up and available for sale, anywhere!
This Stress Balls item by MerakiSphere has 2 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from Canada. Listed on Apr 4, 2023
Ways to enjoy this include: Sensory Fidget \\ Candle Holder \\ Hair Accessory \\ Vehicle Ornament \\ Office Stress Ball \\ Unique Gift Idea \\ Fruit Holder \\ Christmas Tree Decoration \\ Focus Tool \\ Birthday Gift \\ Egg Stand \\ Wedding Favour \\ Concentration Aid \\ Fidget Bracelet \\ Stim Necklace \\ & More!
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Deane H. Shapiro, Jr. - Meditation: Self-Regulation Strategy and Altered State of Consciousness - Aldine - 1980 (book design and typesetting by Virginia Owens)
Co-Regulation vs. Self-Regulation: Why It Matters for Trauma Recovery
When it comes to healing trauma, one of the most overlooked—but essential—skills is learning how to regulate the nervous system. In psychological science, regulation refers to the ability to shift out of states of hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, overwhelm) or hypoarousal (shutdown, numbness, dissociation) into a place of balance and safety. The two main pathways are co-regulation vs self-regulation—and both are crucial for trauma recovery.
What Is Co-Regulation vs Self-Regulation?
Co-regulation refers to how our nervous system settles in the presence of another. From the moment we are born, our brains and bodies are wired to seek safety through connection. A caregiver’s voice tone, facial expression, or touch communicates to the infant nervous system: you are safe here. This relational soothing creates the foundation for attachment security.
Self-regulation, on the other hand, is the capacity to restore balance on our own. It involves being able to notice when we’re stressed and use tools—like breathwork, grounding, or meditation—to return to a regulated state. In adulthood, both co-regulation and self-regulation form the twin pillars of resilience.
Why Co-Regulation Is Vital for Healing Attachment Trauma
When someone has experienced attachment wounds, their nervous system may not have learned reliable co-regulation early on. This can create difficulties in relationships, where closeness feels threatening, or where independence becomes an armor against vulnerability.
In trauma recovery, healing attachment trauma often begins with co-regulation. Safe, attuned presence—whether with a therapist, a loved one, or even within supportive group settings—can repair old patterns. As Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory emphasizes, co-regulation helps re-train the vagus nerve to respond flexibly, restoring a sense of relational safety that is foundational for deeper healing.
Somatic Nervous System Tools for Trauma Recovery
While co-regulation creates the relational template, somatic nervous system tools strengthen self-regulation. These practices focus on the body as the primary site of healing, since trauma is stored not just in memory but in physiology. Examples include:
Breathwork for vagal tone: Slow, paced breathing regulates heart rate variability (HRV), calming both body and mind.
Grounding practices: Orienting to the environment through sensory awareness re-establishes presence.
Movement: Shaking, stretching, or gentle yoga help discharge excess energy from the sympathetic nervous system.
Floatation REST + frequency support: In the float tank, external stimuli are minimized, allowing the body to naturally shift into parasympathetic dominance. This creates an ideal environment for trauma recovery methods that deepen nervous system coherence.
Trauma Recovery Methods That Integrate Both
The most effective trauma recovery methods combine co-regulation and self-regulation. In therapy, a trusted relationship provides co-regulation, while clients also learn somatic tools to regulate independently. At Quantum Clinic, Floatation REST amplifies this process by creating a state of non-sleep deep rest, where the nervous system can “reset” without external pressure. When paired with somatic coaching, clients practice moving between states of co-regulation and self-regulation fluidly—building resilience in both relational and individual contexts.
Why This Balance Matters
Healing is not about choosing co-regulation vs self-regulation—it’s about learning how to weave both together. Trauma fragments the nervous system’s ability to trust, respond, and adapt. Recovery restores this adaptability, so the body knows how to rest in connection and stand strong in independence.
Float therapy, combined with somatic support, offers a profound pathway to re-pattern the nervous system. In learning to regulate with others and within ourselves, we step into the deepest level of freedom: safety in both solitude and connection.
The Art of Stimming: Why Movement and Expression Matter for Neurodivergents Stimming, short for self-stimulatory behavior, is a natural and
Stimming is a natural and essential part of being neurodivergent. From rocking and hand flapping to fidgeting and vocal stims, these behaviors help with sensory regulation, emotional expression, and even creativity. Let’s break the stigma, celebrate stimming, and create spaces where everyone feels free to express themselves.
