The Editing Continues (In the Cold)!

Time for another irregularly scheduled Kickstarter update!

I've been living in St. Petersburg — aka Leningrad, the city of my birth — for the past several months, escaping New York's insane rents while I work on editing the book. And let me tell you, it's been cold and dark over here. The sun barely clears the horizon before slinking back into darkness. The Fontanka River that runs along my apartment building has long frozen over, and my wife and I frequently wake up to men ice fishing right underneath our windows.

The dark, depressive days have one upside: work on Surveillance Valley continues without much interruption or distraction. Like everything else with this book, the editing is taking longer than expected. I'm almost done doing a second pass on the first half of the book, which tells a darker, alternative history of the Internet going back to the 1950s. In the next week or so, I'll be moving to part two, which brings that dark history into the world we inhabit today.

Other than editing the book, I've done a few radio and podcast interviews (which I'll link below). I also wrote an article on the cyber war hysteria that engulfed America following Donald Trump's victory. That should be out in The Baffler sometime in the near future.

That's it for now. Take care. Stay warm. And thank you for your patience!

—Yasha Levine

• My interview on "Steal this Show" about corporate surveillance and spy-funded privacy.  
• I talk about the cult of crypto and protest culture on Doug Henwood's "Behind the News"
• I talk to Gary Brecher and Mark Ames on Radio War Nerd about cyber attacks and the cyber attribution scam.