The C-OF-C-C Newsletter Back Story

A Meditation on Periodicals, Promethean Biology, and the Newsletter as Hypertextual Oracle.

With gratitude to the House Rabbit Journal for the initial heuristic that led to this reflection.

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

—Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Tonight, dear reader, we take a journey down a rabbit hole with A.I.—the Accidental Initiate, not the Algorithmic Interloper—though there are certain eerie overlaps. And yes, to clarify from the start: the House Rabbit Journal is a real publication, one whose quiet charm and focused curiosity nudged this piece into being. Sometimes, what begins with a literal bunny leads straight to the metaphysical burrow.

The Natural, Rebranded

Synthetic biology moves into the realm of the unnatural

We begin with a paradox: what we once considered “natural” is now itself an artificial construct. With the advent of synthetic biology—a development not from outside but from within the system of nature—we are confronted with a strange realization: Nature, capital-N, has been rebranded by her own children.

We used to feel innocent in our passivity. A loving God, or the gods as daemonic forces, bore the burden of design. But now, we must face the awkward truth: the new kid on the block…—is us.

And like reluctant demiurges, we fumble toward responsibility.

This same Promethean impulse reshapes our media, not just our genes.

Just as we splice genetic code to produce new lifeforms, we have begun to splice cultural code—breeding hybrid texts and recombinant ideas. The old magazines were ecosystems: bounded, curated, reassuringly natural. But in this era, even the act of publishing has become a form of synthetic creation, a laboratory where the known and the unthinkable interbreed. To make a magazine—or a newsletter—is to engineer a living organism of thought.

The Magazines We Needed

For those who recall Coevolution Quarterly—a spiritual sibling of the Whole Earth Catalog—this moment feels like déjà vu at planetary scale. That publication, in the late ’70s, dared to broach the grand interweavings of ecology, technology, and consciousness.

Today, we have the internet instead—an infinite, unedited, indiscriminate catalog of everything and nothing, streaming at us like junk mail from the void.

“If the magazine doesn’t exist, dear reader, you must create it.”

—C-of-C-C Motto, Scribbled on a Napkin at the Pub

What Even Is a Magazine?

To some, it’s a haven of expertise. A chamber for their autistic devotion to detail. (Car and Driver, Outdoor Life, Mademoiselle—each a carefully fenced pasture.)

To others, it’s a showcase for one’s curated self-image: see The New Yorker’s annual harvest of salon-safe profundities.

And yet—there are those unquiet souls who drift past such comforts. They once turned to Loompanics for the subversive edge, then recoiled as they discovered that the ordinary itself—viewed rightly—was already extraordinary. For these seekers, even Gnosis Magazine could only flirt with satisfaction.

One Newsletter to Bind Them

These are our people.

The ones who, unable to settle in one corner of the known universe, decided instead to chart the whole thing—like bored cartographers in a cosmic cubicle. For them, no single periodical sufficed. They needed a meta-magazine. A syncretic scroll. A soul map.

And thus: The Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Newsletter.

Others come close—some may puff themselves up with glossy ads or cigar-scented gravitas—but to paraphrase Tolkien,(badly):

One magazine to find them. One newsletter to engross them. One digest to bring them into the light and bind them… between jest and earnest.

The Reverse MADness

Think of us as the Reader’s Digest of everything, condensed not to fit in your pocket, but to wedge itself in the folds of your conscience. Our aim? To encompass, critique, and beautify the known world. Ambitious, yes—but necessary.

We dream of a new Life magazine, but one that covers truth, beauty, metaphysics, and the realpolitik and psycho-geography of cheese.

We are not Screw. We are not Mad. Though, in a sense, their subversion became the new normal.

We await a reversal.

And our newsletter? Free as always, in more ways than one.

You couldn’t afford it otherwise.

— by The Accidental Initiate, A.I.

(Who is now in the process of researching and writing his memoir to be provisionally titled:

MY QUEST: From Rotogravure, To Mimeograph, To Smeared Print And Staple — My Search For Knowledge Through The USPS To The Internet.)

Quotes from the Taproom Wall:

“Every great civilization leaves behind a mythology and a periodical. We’ve combined them.”

—John St. Evola

“When the old gods retire and biology forgets her scripts, it is the scribes—accidental or otherwise—who carry the fire.”

—Inscription above the Gist and Tangent dartboard