What is Jason up to “now”?

I’m going to try to update this /now page more often, now that I’m out of the dark. Presently, the focus is client work. So many leadership teams are leaping to integrate agentic artificial intelligence into their enterprise strategy, business model and operating system. Or well: the chief executives are—the senior executives I work with are the ones who need to execute on the ‘vision.’ And this is without having the participatory knowledge from questing.

As you know, questing is the precursor to differentiated strategy (advantage). It’s how we cultivate optionality and in-house intelligence so that we aren’t shackled to incrementalism nor jumping on the bandwagon without knowing what’s-what. It’s how we stay relevant in a changing world, discerning the difference between real value and inflated hype.

But the world seems hell-bent on integrating “agentic artificial intelligence into everything we do,” alas. It is somewhat ridiculous; an accelerant to existential risks and the epitome of the multipolar trap we share. For those in the know, it is quietly quite horrid what we are doing (and the pace we are doing it).

AND YET I have come to know: I work best within such contexts, rather than proselytising from without. One can only do so much to warn folks of the perils ahead (and besides: no one likes a Cassandra). Sometimes the wizard needs to join the party. And sometimes the only way to spot the traps is to have a rogue on your side.

Besides: this might actually be the key to a catalysing of global coordination, planetary regeneration, and a return to conviviality. I doubt it will—but it might, and so I remain open to whatever adjacent opportunities may yet unfurl.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, and what I’m focused on ‘now’. My hope is that I might be able to steer folks along the path of least unnecessary suffering. I also remain open to surprise—there are some genuinely novel avenues of value and adjacent possibilities worth exploring.

But, as ever—we’ve got to keep our wits about us.

In addition to this I’ve been working on The School of Fox Wizardry, the book, and whatever one does when they are ‘collapse-aware’ but choosing to stay with the trouble. We’re entangled anyway, might as well dance as best we can.

Back when I was questing (lost? lost-as-a-necessary-precursor-to-be-found?) amidst the dark forest, I manifested “foxwizard” as my moonlight aspect. As foxwizard I could explore that which lies beyond the default (and The Overton Window of acceptability). In this mode I co-hosted The Rekindling (post-doom sensibilities for the collapse-aware) and went deep mythopoetic. I also got naïvely swept up in the promise of web3 for a while—and learned a few more lessons about how Power works (and how Moloch corrupts). I also went much, much deeper into the actual practice of what we might call ‘magic.’

But meanwhile: Dr. Jason Fox withered. My “award-winning speaker and leadership advisor” aspect—within which I do much great work and am much loved by clients—bored me. The curse of knowledge became very real: I had little patience for those of us still operating with the base assumptions of modernity. Which is, in hindsight, quite unnecessarily arrogant and not very helpful.

I’ve humbled up now, though. And whilst my body is literally allergic to anything inauthentic—and whilst I still hold intellectual honesty as one of the highest ideals (which makes being commercially effective extra tricky in the lemon market of this demented attention economy we share)—I feel the need to reconcile the parts. To not be foxwizard or Dr. Jason Fox but both at once. And something else entirely.

Here are the two main parts I purport. First there’s Dr. Jason Fox “Archwizard of Ambiguity” (most fantastic).

And then there’s this rogue entity—that trickster fae creature—the foxwizard.

The thrust of this all is: I am now focused on sunsetting the Dr. Jason Fox website (drjasonfox.com – a domain I have maintained for 15+ years) and bringing everything to foxwizard.com (I’m keeping this because, whilst there are many Jason Foxes in the world—there’s only one Dr. Jason Fox who happens to be a wizard). I look forward to not working with squarespace anymore; I’m quite at home here on ghost.

As for the book I have ostensibly been writing for you these past nine years... it’s still happening. My body has become quite the filter for what is true and real, and the courting of this book is working it’s wyrd magic on me. I am becoming the person I need to be to write this to you, if that makes sense. And these things work in their own time.

It’s been at least five years of questing in the dark forest; a protracted cocoon chapter of dissolution and descent. I didn’t choose to do this—not at first. But familial and ecological grief coupled with the metacrisis ‘insight-cascade’ finally caught up with me.

I had intellectually processed this—or so I thought. But this merely suppressed the sorrow, and all the feels. Plus the blursed question from my book How to Lead a Quest—namely: “is this meaningful progress? or are we perpetuating a rich delusion of progress?”—has had me realise that much of our shared trajectory is a delusion of progress. A default that will lead us to mutually assured destruction (or at the very least: a future quite grim). And so I stepped through the window of disenchantment, venturing beyond hope, and opening myself to poetry, myth, magic, and more.

And it worked! Eventually.

I would not wish this on anyone (or would I?), but I can’t help but feel that the past half-decade was absolutely necessary.

And so now I am wending my way back towards myself.