『Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future』のカバーアート

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

著者： Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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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 科学
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  • Citizen One S2-E16 – Suburb City

    Citizen One S2-E16 – Suburb City
    2026/07/22
    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 ...
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    25 分
  • 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
    2026/07/01

    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
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    7 分
  • I Will Take the Ache

    I Will Take the Ache
    2026/06/23
    There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered.I went to the National Gallery of Victoria on a Sunday afternoon in June expecting a museum of empire — another British Museum, another V&A, the spoils of the world hauled home and hung where the light is good. I expected the Grand Tour paintings on the third floor. What I didn’t expect was to meet their counterargument first, on the ground floor, dressed up as a yellow pumpkin. It took me three hours and three floors to understand that’s what it was.Reading a city by what it sells and what it buriesI got there the way I always start in a new city: a tram to the market. Melbourne’s trams are the green of a billiard table and the cream of old piano keys, and within the downtown grid they cost nothing — you step on, you step off, no tap, no fare, no questions. A man raised on American cities, where the middle class treats the bus as a sentence the poor are made to serve, stands on Swanston Street watching the free tram stack up and pull away and thinks: so it can be done. They simply chose to do it.The Queen Victoria Market is one of the oldest arguments Melbourne has with itself, and it doesn’t advertise the fact. I didn’t know, walking the sheds, that I was walking on the dead. Seven hectares of fruit stalls and fish halls sit on top of the city’s first cemetery, closed in 1854 and paved over when Melbourne decided it wanted the land more than the memory. They moved 914 bodies out in the 1920s — give or take what the record admits to — and they did not move all of them. Sir John Monash himself called it a disgrace, and the work went ahead anyway, because the work always goes ahead. What gets paved over gets called progress, then heritage, then it gets a plaque. I’ve written that exact sentence about a dozen towns. It was restful, in a grim way, to find it waiting for me at the bottom of the world.So I did what the living do: I poked around on top of all of it. Secondhand booksellers, a Turkish woman who sold me a coffee and a borek without looking up, butchers calling out to women they’ve sold to for thirty years. The market does both things at once, openly — the dead under the floorboards, the living haggling over flathead above them.Then I walked several kilometers down Swanston Street, which runs through Melbourne’s memory in strata: the boom-time bluestone built to look like temples because money prefers to be worshipped indoors; Chinatown, the oldest continuous one in the country, planted square across the city’s central spine rather than tucked off to a margin; St Paul’s and the buttery clocks of Flinders Street Station; and finally the river, brown and patient and in no hurry to explain itself. A street keeps its own minutes. I read buildings the way I read court files. Rivers are the only honest archive — they take everything and keep none of it where you can reach it.The pumpkin and the thumbThe gallery announces itself low and long, no dome, no columns — Roy Grounds built it in 1968 to look like a fortress that had made peace. Out front, amid the fountains, stands David Shrigley’s Really Good: a bronze thumbs-up the height of a house, the thumb stretched like taffy past any bone that could hold it, approval cranked so far past sincerity it curdles. It greets you the way a city greets a man who’s been gone a long time — too friendly, slightly wrong, the gesture held a beat too long. It’s the most honest thing on the lot, because it admits the performance.Inside, dead center under the glass roof of Federation Court, stood the pumpkin. Yayoi Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin — yellow as a caution sign, eleven splayed legs, pocked all over in her graduated black dots. Kusama has painted this same gourd for more than eighty years, since she was a girl on a seed farm in Matsumoto, and the dots are the obliteration she’s spent a lifetime fighting, the pattern that wants to scatter the self into infinity. The pumpkin is the homely anchor she sets against it, painted and repainted so it cannot float away. A woman who stayed mostly in one room her whole life, painting one thing until it filled the universe. I filed it away without yet knowing what it was the answer to.The painting was never a souvenir. It was a credential.Upstairs, the Grand Tour. The wall text described it as a charming custom — young aristocrats off and away across Europe and other continents to learn their art and culture. The honest version: a young man of the right family sent abroad to acquire the finish a country house couldn’t supply, returning with a canvas to hang in the hall so visitors...
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    29 分
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