What I am is a writer

I'm making a compromise with myself: I can continue to share thoughts and ideas on ecosocialism, climate change, transitions, internationalism and leftist organising, while still hating social media.

Striking a balance

In the past few years, I shared my work with an audiences of hundreds of thousands, in Portuguese, English and Spanish. I swam in the deep waters of social media and communication platforms to find myself a YouTuber, a streamer, instagrammer, podcaster and, mind you, for a few months a TikToker - which was definitely not my thing. In fact, none of it was my thing, but I'm proud of the seriousness and professionalism behind my now defunct stint as a scientific and political communicator.

Since ending Tese Onze, I've been trying to figure out how I want to be online. I used to love the versatility behind instagram, so I kept a personal account available to followers, but even that bothers me now. I thought about keeping X as the place to share my research and make political commentary, taking advantage of a established international audience there, but that place has gone to hell. I set up a BlueSky account and it's all fine for now, but I still feel trapped in all of these spaces. What saves me is publishing.

I began writing articles for online audiences over ten years ago, both through US and Brazilian outlets, but long before that, in my teenage years, I played around with blogging as a way of thinking out loud. Social media used to let me think out loud, collect feedback, engage in fruitful discussions, and later translate the bubbling thoughts in my mind into structured pieces of research and writing. I honestly can say that my second book, Se quiser mudar o mundo, wouldn't have been written if I had not been exposed to the constant demand to explain things in a direct way to those who want to know about radical leftist politics, but never find a proper introduction.

I'm writing a new book right now. It will be out in Brazil next year and I hope to make it the basis for another book, to come out in English. I think I've written a lot for the past few years, but I also failed some of my commitments. Personal and health issues got in the way and long-form writing is definitely not as simple when you're tired at the end of the day due to a full-time job and other life tasks. This new book is my chance to get my writing habits back on track.

1. But why a Substack?

Knowing that online engagement helps to keep my brain going and exposes me to critiques that I can build upon, I've tried some kind of soft exit of the online comms world. My online project was over, but I was still the person, the researcher, the writer, who could exist online, talk about climate and politics and, the next day, post a nice photo of a street or mention the latest reggaeton hit. Still, the vices of aggressive replies, judgment, and all of the toxic elements of social media that lead people to mistake the desire to debate with the right to be hostile, keep getting in the way. I swear some people are cut for surviving this kind of environment, but each passing day shows me I'm not.

So I decided to go back to the basics. How about we can keep in touch but in a format that reminds us of what's really important and why we connected in the first place? Blogging and newsletters can help build tight-knight communities that don't end up so lost in the dynamics of social media. They can also let me disappear and come back as per my needs and not the schedule of engagement expected to maintain a certain reach (or go viral). I never handled the viral thing well - something about the dose of sexism and condescendence that always polluted the comment section and this focus on quantity over quality.

2. The Ecocene

When I was a postdoctoral fellow in Guadalajara with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, in 2023, I began developing an inquiry into the Ecocene, a term actually developed from design studies (I go over some of this in a forthcoming book chapter). I was part of a research group on the Anthropocene and my research focused on sacrifice zones and perspectives for just transition that would move us away from the Anthropocene, which is marked by expanding sacrifice zones, and into the Ecocene, an era of concrete utopia, post-transitions.

I like the idea of the Ecocene because while we keep debating in the social sciences alternative names for the Anthropocene (and I stand by Ian Angus’ defense of the term), we can always go further and start thinking of alternative eras to the Anthropocene.

It is quite disturbing how moved we are by dystopia. It's one of my favourite literary genres and I actually learn a lot from dystopian pieces of fiction, but it bothers me that we've come to embrace dystopian politics as a reality. As we debate if we're in the Anthropocene yet or no (in geological or sociological terms), I figure we should also debate the need to shorten the Anthropocene, independently of its start date. If I assume that the Anthropocene may be the shortest era of our planet, given the perspective of climate and ecological collapse, so that damage may lead into a drastically different set of conditions - warranting yet again another era classification - or to such demise that we won't even be here to re-classify anything, it's easy to just stop there at Anthropocene studies and perhaps only look for formulas on how to navigate it the best we can. But if I also assume that we have the agency as a species to shorten the Anthropocene on our own terms, then I'm talking about an actual strategy.

Having worked on transition of some kind since my undergraduate studies in Canada, when I first engaged with false energy transitions and its contradictions in Brazil, I know I can't let go of it as my primary field of thought. But it's easy to feel pessimistic about the present and the future in ways counterproductive to the utopian energy required to feed any work on transition strategies. The Ecocene troubles the horizon in a way that we're required to embrace the end of capitalism while rejecting the end of the world, also meaning the construction of post-capitalist futures that are indeed sustainable and respectful of the Earth's limits. It's the reminder that it's not enough to end capitalism, but that we have to do it while there's still time.

And there's still time.

3. The best use of time

Time is the general motif of the new book. It's also something I explored in a long essay back in 2022 on multiple transitions and their contradictions. This essay has been translated into Portuguese, Spanish and French, and I must say I go back to it often to organize my thoughts.

I plan on using this space here to organise my thoughts too. Should be helpful during book writing, while keeping us connected somehow, compensating for my personal battles with social media and the public eye.

It will also allow me to share things I'm doing, such as events, interviews and other pieces of publication, in a more organised way - complementary to the stuff I upload to sabrinafernandes.com. I might share things done by other people and movements too. And I'll be using this space at least in English and Portuguese, with separate sections, so people can choose which ones to stay subscribed to and to ensure that auto-translation plugins and functions work well.

4. Before I go

Since this was a post about writing, I'm going to share a photo I posted on Instagram the other day, with most (though not all) of the stuff I wrote/contributed to that came out in print as well. There's something nice about seeing your arguments on paper and I should really try to get the physical copies of some of the other chapters and articles too for the collection.

I also need to write an article for online audiences before the end of the year, for my column at The Intercept Brasil, picking up on something I developed for Nacla here, and I'm happy to share that we're slowly launching the articles for the dossier I edited at Alameda titled “Energy transitions: just and beyond". The first piece is an interview with Lala Peñaranda from Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, and it's out in English and Portuguese. The full dossier will be out in March - can't wait to share with the world!

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