The subtitle of Slackville Road is "Lazy Dudes, a Dummy, and an Armored Car." That should tell you most of what you need to know about the tone.

It's my first novel, written in 2004 in Bellingham, Washington, about two friends who rob an armored car for reasons that make perfect sense from the inside and look insane from the outside. The protagonist, Jack, is a small-time thief who steals for the thrill. His friend Ricky is a Louisiana runaway who became a beach-fire philosopher and weed dealer and, eventually, the brains behind a very bad plan.

There's a woman named Karen who complicates everything, as women named Karen often do.

What I love about this book, revisiting it now: the people in it are not stupid. They're not tragic victims. They're people who looked at the deal being offered and decided it wasn't worth taking — and who eventually made a different kind of deal that turned out to have higher costs than advertised.

If you like crime fiction with actual philosophical weight, or just a good story about friendship and bad decisions in a rainy Pacific Northwest city, this one's worth your time.

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A question I get asked sometimes: out of everything you've written, what's your favorite?

I always say Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance. I always watch people try to decide if I'm serious.

I'm serious.

It does something structurally that I hadn't seen done before: it runs a manifesto — the actual Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future — as chapter epigraphs through a romantic comedy about two people whose names have destroyed their lives. The comedy is load-bearing. The romance is genuine. The manifesto is the argument. By the end of the book you've read all three simultaneously and they've done something to each other.

The protagonist shares a name with Ted Kaczynski. His entire adult life has been shaped by this. Not metaphorically — professionally, socially, specifically. He's 48 and still waiting for a break that keeps not coming when he meets a woman on a blind date. She also has an impossible name. Their recognition of each other is immediate and completely earned.

What they build together — nominally a dog waste startup, actually a mesh-networked alternative internet designed to dismantle surveillance capitalism — is where the book's real ambitions live. But the love story is the reason it works. You need to believe in them to believe in what they're building.

I think it's my favorite because it's the book where the formal ambition and the emotional core lined up exactly. That doesn't happen every time. When it does, you know it.

Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance — on Amazon now.

There's a moment most people recognize, even if they don't have words for it.

You're scrolling. You've been scrolling for twenty minutes. You were going to check one thing — a notification, a message, a headline — and now you're somewhere else entirely, reading about something you never intended to care about, mildly annoyed, mildly entertained, not sure what you were originally looking for.

You close the app. You pick up your phone again three minutes later.

That's not an accident. That's the system working exactly as designed.

I'm not here to tell you that social media is evil or that technology is ruining us. I've lived in too many places and watched too many systems collapse and rebuild to think anything is that simple. What I will say is this: most of us have quietly outsourced something important. Not just our attention — our values. Our sense of what matters. Our answer to the question: what am I doing with my time?

I've been calling the alternative Baoism. It's not a religion or a movement or a course you can buy. It's more like a posture.

Why "Bao"?

A bao is a Chinese dumpling. Plain on the outside. The treasure is inside. It's also a tree under which enlightenment was found. And it sounds like a gesture of respect — bowing — or the beautiful branch of a tree, a bough. The name carries more than it looks like it does. That felt right for what I was trying to point at.

Bao Ji — Bring Your Own

Bao Ji isn't an acronym. It's a principle.

Bring Your Own teachers. Your own practices. Your own answers. Not because other people's wisdom is worthless — it isn't. But because you're the one who has to live your life. You're the one waking up tomorrow in your body, in your circumstances, with your specific history. No guru lives that. No algorithm knows what you need better than you do, if you're being honest with yourself.

The problem isn't that people lack access to wisdom. If anything, we're drowning in it. The problem is we've been trained to consume wisdom instead of apply it. To add more frameworks instead of cutting what doesn't work. To optimize instead of choose.

Baoism isn't about adding. It's about stopping.

Stop Adding Poison

Here's the actual practice, stripped of mysticism:

Most people already have most of what they need. The obstacle isn't ignorance — it's the stuff layered on top. Obligations that were never agreed to. Comparisons that serve someone else's business model. Noise that fills the space where a decision could be.

Stop adding that.

Not in some dramatic gesture of total opt-out. Just notice what's poison and stop putting it in your mouth. The rest, strangely, mostly takes care of itself.

The Question Hassan-i Sabbah Asked

I've been writing about this for years, in different forms. My historical novel about Hassan-i Sabbah — the founder of the Nizari Ismaili movement in 11th-century Persia — is really a long exploration of the same question Baoism asks.

Hassan took a mountain fortress in 1090 with forty men. He held it for thirty-five years against every empire that tried to take it back. He built a network that rewrote the political map of the medieval Middle East.

Not with armies. With a single question: who decided you had to obey?

That's Bao Ji, nine centuries early.

The complete story is free to read on Royal Road. All of Volume 1: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/159403

The Anarchist Manifesto Project

In May, I'm releasing a different kind of book about the same question.

The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 features twenty-six kinds of anarchism — from Anarcho-Communism to Crypto-Anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet. Each tendency gets a fictional persona created by Grok (xAI), an original manifesto written from inside that life by Claude (Anthropic), and a portrait generated by Claude Code.

Three AI systems. One human director/editor. None of them were told what to say.

They don't agree with each other. The Christian Anarchist thinks the Egoist is spiritually bankrupt. The Crypto-Anarchist thinks the Anarcho-Communist missed the whole point. The Queer Anarchist is doing something the others don't have a framework for.

That's the point. Every one of them is asking the same question from a different starting position. None of them have the complete answer. Neither do I. But the question — who decided you had to obey, and why are you still obeying? — that one doesn't go away.

Presale is open. The book drops May 1st: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C

Xcrol

The reason I'm building a social network called Xcrol (pronounced SCROLL) is the same reason I wrote both of those books.

Your time is the only resource that doesn't come back. Your attention is something other people have decided to monetize. That's not neutral — it has consequences for what you think about, what you feel, what you decide matters.

Xcrol is a network that doesn't do that. No algorithm. No data sold. No engagement trap. It's not finished yet. But it's coming along nicely . xcrol.com

The Short Version

You already have most of what you need. The question is what you're willing to stop adding.

That's Bao Ji. Bring Your Own.

Everything else is details.

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The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 is available for presale now: amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C. Hasan i-Sabah, Volume 1 is free to read in full on Royal Road: royalroad.com/fiction/159403. More of this kind of thinking, three times a week, free: indignified.substack.com