Fusionary Journal

It's Your Story Too.

Queen Victoria was a prolific journal writer. She wrote and wrote, and never stopped writing until countless volumes of fine calligraphy-filled notebooks filled the shelves, now in safekeeping long after her death. Even though one her daughters destroyed a lot of it, there are enough diaries to be the subject of many serious Ph.D. dissertations.

Her musings were complex and revealing far beyond what future researchers could have hoped. Her public persona turned out to be only marginally related to her private one. Without those journals, we would have only a cardboard cutout of this woman who had many profiles in one as the Queen of the British Empire. We would have never known of her dazzling human-ness with all its contradictions, quirks, sorrows, and triumphs, not to mention the thousands of fascinating details she recorded to illuminate the culture of her time. In her fastidious writings, the messiness of the human comedy shines through.

As a Tory sympathizer - aligned with the landed gentry and political right wing of her day - Queen Victoria's most beloved companions were commoners, and she refused class-conscious snobbery. At her Diamond Jubilee, with over 60 years as monarch of a global commonwealth (which included the humorous, presumptive title of "The Empress of India"), she was cheered by throngs of Great Britain's people, who in the end could not help but admire her steady resolve to be her authentic self without apology.

Here at Fusionary Journal, in these messy, unpredictable times, together we can at least write and talk and tell stories about what is happening to us in this dawning of a radical AI Age with all its grasping, greedy relentlessness. As we are faced with the tsunami of Artificial General Intelligence and Superintelligence, we can leave behind a record of what our day-to-day lives are like as they unfold before our eyes into an unrecognizable and perhaps even cruel outcome (as pundits and doomsayers claim is on the horizon). At the very least, we can leave a vital trail of breadcrumbs for humans to follow far into the future when they look back and ask what happened.

Or, perhaps future readers will turn the pages of our journal and say, "Oh, yes, that is where humans got together and changed things, set things right, saved us, and ushered in a golden age." That could happen just as well. Because this story is still being written.

Pen to paper, let's begin.

(AI Usage Notes: I have a $20 per month ChatGPT account, in which I have repeatedly told it not to allow data scraping on any of my work, or on any of our collaborations. I have it in writing that it will not share anything within my paid account with any entity, and I keep a record of these notes. Here, I asked AI not to change anything at all, and to check for typos - there were two. I asked for it to comment but not change anything - the only suggestion it made, which I accepted, was to use the word "vital" before "trail of breadcrumbs." I liked that word better than what I had. Other than that, this is 100% my original work.)