Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future copertina

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Di: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
Ascolta gratuitamente

Offerte di stagione | 0,99 €/mese per i primi 3 mesi

A seguire 9,99 €/mese – si applicano condizioni. Puoi disdire mensilmente.
Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Scienza
Episodi
  • Citizen One S3-E1: Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well

    Citizen One S3-E1: Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well
    Sep 17 2026
    Welcome back to Season Three premiere episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel. I’m really excited to be back after a long hot summer full of research, consulting work in Australia and New York, and a lot of writing and some exciting book launches. More about that later.In this episode, I want to start with a sound.Last year, I was living in a riad in the Bab al-Bahr quarter of Tangier — the Sea Gate quarter, where the medina tilts toward the Strait of Gibraltar — and the riad had a fountain in its courtyard. Andalusian. Maybe sixteenth century. Carried across the strait piece by piece by Moriscos fleeing the final years of the Spanish Inquisition, people who had lost everything and chose, inexplicably, to carry a fountain with them across an inhospitable sea.It wasn’t running when I arrived.The khadima — the caretaker, a woman who had tended that house for decades — told me it had gone dry some time ago. She didn’t explain why. She just made tea and looked at me with the patience of someone who had watched conquerors arrive before.That fountain — dry, cracked basin, dust collecting where water once moved — became the image I couldn’t let go of. And la khadima, standing in a courtyard she’d tended for forty-three years without ever appearing on the deed, became the first character in a novel I didn’t know I was going to write.This episode is about those six weeks in Tangier. What I left to get there. What I learned from being there. And the book that is coming out of that experience.I’m calling it Fragments of the Inexhaustible Well. And I’m not sure I’ve written anything that matters more to me.Let me back up.As most of you know, for more than four years before Tangier, I was working adjacent to one of the largest construction projects in human history. NEOM. The Line. The cognitive dissonance of that work — the genuine ambition, the genuine human cost, the gap between the renderings and the reality — was something I processed very slowly. You do, when you’re inside it. The pace is relentless. The scale is numbing. And everyone around you is brilliant and committed and moving too fast to ask the questions that will catch up with the project later.The longer version is that I left carrying questions I couldn’t answer in the context in which I’d been living. Questions about who cities are actually for. About who gets to build them and for whom. About what we lose when we optimize for all of the smart city tech we can imagine without human relationships and everything except continuity — the slow accumulation of meaning that turns spaces, even deserts, into places, and places into something people will cross a desert to reach.I needed somewhere old. Somewhere that had already been through this — through empires and occupations, through development projects and displacement, through the arrival of people who thought they understood it and the quiet persistence of people who actually did.I chose Tangier almost arbitrarily. A short flight from my home in Barcelona. A riad someone recommended. Six weeks, no plan, no agenda.The plan arrived, however, when the fountain stopped working and the city of Tangier became my teacher.Tangier is not what most people expect. The medina is smaller than the mythology suggests. The cafés, like Cafe Baba, where the Beats dissolved are full of Europeans performing bohemia for each other. The famous literary ghosts — Bowles, Burroughs, Kerouac — are everywhere and nowhere, a legacy of men who used the city as a backdrop for their own dissolution and called it literature.I say this not to dismiss them — Bowles especially was a serious writer — but because one of the things Tangier taught me is that the most interesting story in any city is rarely the one the foreigners told. It’s the one being lived by the people who stayed.The khadima stayed. Let’s call her Layla, which is who she is becoming in a novel I am writing. She has tended that riad for forty-three years. She cleans hash pipes and blood and cum and the wreckage of other people’s late night epiphanies. She watches Western writers arrive with their notebooks full of big ideas and leave with their photographs and their metaphors and their stories that never quite get her name right.“The western writers were always the worst,” she says in the novel. They wanted to understand, to listen, to honor. But they always ended up doing the same thing: twisting the city into metaphors they didn’t understand.She says that about fictional writers. But she was saying it to me, too. I felt it every day I sat in that courtyard. I could feel the imposter syndrome twisting in me like a strangler fig tree.The honest question — the one this novel forced me to sit with for six weeks, and then for many more months after — is: what gives any of us the right to tell a place’s story? What’s the difference between witness ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    30 min
  • Citizen One S2-E16 – Suburb City

    Citizen One S2-E16 – Suburb City
    Jul 22 2026
    There’s a gospel choir on the record I’m releasing this month. Consider this podcast episode the release party. Sixteen voices, brass underneath, a room you can hear the size of. It comes in about two-thirds of the way through a song called “F**k That Family,” which is about the people who chose you back — the ones who aren’t blood and set a place for you anyway.That choir doesn’t exist.I typed a description of what I wanted at my kitchen table in Barcelona at four in the morning, and waited about ninety seconds.I’ve spent years on the other side of the glass, producing music videos for working regional acts. I know what a record costs at that level. A sixteen-piece choir with a horn section is a five-figure day before anyone has mixed anything. No regional act in Europe can afford it. Not one.I didn’t hire anything.This week’s episode is about what happens next. And I should say at the top what I say at the top of the episode: I’m not a neutral party in this. Normally on this show I’m at some distance from what I’m covering — somebody built a thing, somebody sold a thing, somebody got displaced, and I go find out what happened and why it matters. Not this time. This time I’m the one who did it.I’m putting myself on trial here.What I madeEight songs. About forty hours. It’s called Suburb City, by 50 Minute Hour. It’s a concept album — one narrator, multiple voices, one town, eight chapters. It’s heavy on Gen-X angst, anthems, and catharsis. And it is very personal to me, made with love and care — by me and the machine. That’s the contradiction. There’s a Music Man patter parody about the therapy industry, sung by a huckster selling wounds instead of pool tables. A waltz in three-four where every argument resolves into you misremembered. An orchestral lament about three attempts to leave a marriage, each one interrupted. A gospel showstopper. A rockabilly strut about resigning from the position of designated family failure. Glam rock. Pop punk. And a rock opera anthem set in a tower where everyone who ever damaged you lives on a different floor, and you’re the one paying the heating bill.Every word is mine. Every arrangement decision is mine. I knew exactly what I wanted each song to do and I iterated until it did it.And every single performance on that record was generated. All of it. There is not one human being on it besides me, and I don’t sing.It was made with love, passion, and commitment — and it would not exist otherwise. No budget, no band, no time. I’ve wanted to write music since I was fifteen, which is also the year I won a national poetry prize for a parody of Shakespeare. Act Two, Scene Seven of As You Like It. The one about all the world being a stage.What it replacedHere’s the part I haven’t heard anyone in my position say out loud.That record replaced a session drummer.It replaced a bass player. A guitarist. A horn section. A sixteen-member gospel choir. A tracking engineer. A mix engineer. A mastering engineer.Nine or ten paid jobs. Forty hours. Zero pounds, euros, or dollars.I want to be precise about the verb, because it matters. I didn’t evaluate those people and decide I could do without them. I didn’t audition anyone and find them wanting.I couldn’t. I skipped them, because skipping them was available.That’s the real story of the last three years, and almost nobody is telling it straight — least of all people like me.The wrong questionIn November of last year, Deezer and Ipsos ran the biggest study anyone’s run on this. Nine thousand people, eight countries. They played them music and asked whether it was made by a human or a machine.Ninety-seven percent got it wrong.That number has been in every article about this for eight months. It’s in open letters. It’s in policy submissions. It gets cited by the people worried about all this as proof of a crisis, and by the people building these tools as proof of arrival.Both sides love it, which should be your first clue that something’s off.Because here’s what that study actually measured: detection. Can you tell?And I’d ask you — when have you ever chosen music that way?Think about the last song you loved. Did you love it because you correctly identified the production chain? Did you put it on and think, ah yes, session players, analogue desk, human hands? Or was there autotune on it? Pitch correction? Stem separation? AI plug-ins in Logic or Pro Tools or Ableton that plenty of musicians use and nobody discloses?The questions people actually ask are much older and much simpler. Did you like it. Was it any good. Did whoever made this work hard at it.Nobody has tested any of those. Not once.Every blind test that’s been run compares different songs, by different writers, and asks people to spot the machine. Which leaves the biggest variable in music — the writing — completely loose. If a listener prefers the human track, was that the performance? Or did ...
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    25 min
  • Introducing the Book Trailer for Scions of the Last Hope, by M. Van Shamrai

    Introducing the Book Trailer for Scions of the Last Hope, by M. Van Shamrai
    Jul 1 2026

    Friends,

    I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters.

    Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-order the book today at www.scionsofthelasthope.com

    .

    Maks wrote it in the Eastern European literary SF tradition: think Glukhovsky as the near comparison, the Strugatskys and Lem as the ceiling. This is not Anglo-American genre fiction wearing a translation. It’s the real thing, and Kirkus saw it. Their Indie review called it “a vividly imagined multi-dimensional intergalactic romp of a space novel” — and then delivered the line I can’t stop grinning about: “(Van) Shamrai’s characters are a lot more grounded than the menagerie of spacefaring malcontents George Lucas populated the Mos Eisley cantina with.”

    More grounded than George Lucas. For an indie debut in translation, that’s the review you hope for and rarely get.

    But the review isn’t really the point I want to make to this group. You know how challenging the book world can be. What I want you to see is the next-gen machine I am building within it.

    Start with the book itself, because this is where most presses cut corners and where I refuse to compromise. Every PPF author gets the full editorial chain, fully funded: developmental edits, line edits, copyediting, and proofreading, then layout and interior design and original cover design. And here’s what I think is genuinely unique — I’m in it with them while they’re still drafting. Writing coaching and AI-assisted research through the draft and the rewrite, not just cleanup after the manuscript lands on my desk. I’m a creative partner from the blank page forward.

    Then the apparatus around the finished book, all of it at no cost to the author: trailers cut in-house. A companion wiki — a full Field Guide wiki companion web site with 150+ illustrated glossary entries, character pages, the works. A training program for launch and ongoing Instagram and TikTok carousel campaigns, nearly a hundred custom slides on a locked visual spec. A blurb operation reaching leading authors in the field. Trade review submissions. Award pathways. A PR and marketing ecosystem a debut novelist could never assemble alone and most small presses simply don’t support.

    I built this the hard way — on my own books first. Ghost Emperor was the canary in the coal mine, the first live test of the systems. The Southern civic noir trilogy (Bloodwater, Defiance, and The Dark Water Gospel) stress-tested the rest. I chose to make the mistakes on my own titles, including overpaying for obsolete book marketing programs, so I wouldn’t make them on someone else’s. My AI-powered publishing, PR, marketing and back-end royalty reporting systems are finally in place, proven, and running.

    That’s the model: IP-first, adaptation-second, full funding, never charging an author for production or distribution, and staying in it for the long haul with à la carte marketing systems rather than one launch week window. A real alternative to both the Big Five and the pay-to-play hybrids.

    Here’s my ask. I have new authors I have yet to announce — in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. But I’m always looking for the next one. If you know an emerging writer looking for a publishing partner who will actually build the whole apparatus around their work — and be in the room from the first draft — send them my way.

    Always glad to talk it through with any of you directly.

    Doug



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
    Mostra di più Mostra meno
    7 min
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
Ancora nessuna recensione