Prometheans!
I hope you enjoyed last week's essay - The Moral Value of Money.
It mistakenly got auto paywalled after a day. I sorted that out as soon as I realised. If you couldn’t access it please do try again. I feel like it's one of my better pieces. Not overly long nor too chewy. So I’d love to know what you think of it.
As I announced last week, the big news is I’ve decided to postpone the £10KBURN until 23rd August 2026 which will be the 32nd anniversary of the KLF’s million pound burn. Why?
Well, for magical starters there is that 23/32 symmetry. Yesterday I created a 16 second rough Psyops promo which plays on this theme.
I very much like the idea of ‘CoB Psyops’. I think we could have a lot of fun with it. I’ve already got other ideas. If it inspires any ideas for you please share them or join me in the creative process!
Doing a paid ‘Psyops’ promotion for the £10KBURN would push all the buttons. Seeing that little ‘Sponsored’ tag would create peak cognitive dissonance. “Wait. These people paid for an advert to encourage us to burn money in order that money gets donated to charity?” That’s a brain melter.
Anyway… aside from the 23/32 thing, why next year and not this?
I’m feeling my age. I’ll be sixty this year. I’ve survived my Dad by a couple of years. My life no longer appears as an endless path laid out before me. I know that I haven’t got too many more big projects left to do before I’m gone. So I want to make them count. And I want to enjoy doing them. When I started creating the media for the £10KBURN it dawned on me that the project wanted to be bigger than I’d first imagined it. In my younger days I’d have just bitten the bullet and tried to move heaven and earth to get it done. But doing so at this stage in my life would be too great a sacrifice for me to bear.
Little things like taking a daily walk would have been pushed aside in the effort. Holding down my shit job sucks the lifeforce from me. I have carer responsibilities for my mum. I already spend far too little time with friends and lovers. And I want to be able to write as words come to me and carry on with my ‘until death’ pilgrimage. I couldn’t have wanted for a better start - going to Ely with Sarah and Thaxted with Erica - but I’ve only done two in 5 months! I’m also working on something with Erica and want and need to dedicate time to it. And I haven’t read a book in yonks! I really miss that. Continuing with the £10KBURN this year would pretty much wipe out all of that until September.
Upshot is that I need to take a longer run up at it. I’m sorry that I didn’t have better foresight. While - as I say - my age tells me to slow down it does also tell me to hurry up too. The awfulness served up by the News cycle hopefully persuades all of us that we must work for urgent change on every front. But on top of that the latest from climate boffins is a prediction we could lock-in 2 degrees of warming by 2035. It appears that not only are we moving toward an unsustainable future but also that future is moving toward us at an increasing velocity.
So yeah. I’m feeling it. At the back of my mind is the Prophecy piece I published as 2019 turned into 2020. I wrote about how it’s easier to see into the past and future from those turn of the decade moments. And through a sort of poetic ritual I tried to get a sense of how a change in our consciousness of money might be marshalled or provoked. I talk about Church of Burn making headway into Festivals - which we have done. Oh I need to say something about that in a sec. But there’s little sign of any breakthrough into the collective consciousness. Things like being part of the Fitzwilliam museum exhibition on money are great. But they’re never going to cut through at scale.
On Festivals. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it publicly and I’m going to be a little vague about it now… but I had been mooting the idea of a festival of magic and ritual in 2026. As the idea popped into my head I randomly had other folks suggesting the same thing. Always a good sign. Even for a small event of say 500 to 1000 people it’d be a huge undertaking. But it does seem to want to happen. I did initially think that moving the £10KBURN to 2026 would destroy any prospect (however slim) of a festival. But then I realised there’s no reason not to combine them. Just a pipe dream at the moment - but as I say, I’m not the only one having it.
Anyway, back to where we are at the moment. I had hoped that Substack might draw in enough of an audience not only to release me from my 3.5 day a week wage-slavery but also help us present Church of Burn at The Cockpit again. Unfortunately it’s not worked out like that. Not yet, anyway.
I may sound immodest but with the talents of the artists and performers in the Company of Church of Burn we’ve developed something unique, magical and transformative. It feels a little tragic that we’ve stalled at this late stage in its development. But even if my dream came true, even I could be confident of pre-selling three nights, we’d still be relying on picking up press and mainstream attention to break through into the public consciousness at scale.
I must say here - the Rituals themselves aren’t serving a purpose. We don’t burn to get attention. But - because I believe that the world needs a Church dedicated to money burning, dedicated to a rebalancing of sacrifice and loss against exchange and gain, dedicated to countering the fecundity of money as the first principle. Because a Church incorporated as a bona fide religious charity will be regarded as an actual RELIGION in law and this will cause people to lose their shit. Because of all of this it’s incumbent upon me to try to find a way to realise the potential of what we’ve so far created in Church of Burn.
I reckon then that the £10KBURN is a sort of laser-guided attempt at breaking through into the collective consciousness. I think the media and the public will find it hard to resist commenting on it IF we present it in the right way. But we do need to get it right on our first attempt. Muddling through in 2025 and then trying again in 2026 is not going to be as effective as getting it bang-on first time in 2026.
Okay…. So I’ve removed the autopaywall (sorry, again!) on the £10KBURN INDEX document. I’ve updated it to show the new date and - as I work on it - I’ll update the index document and point you to it. I’ll try to avoid over burdening you. Although do bear in mind I get excited to share stuff with you so I might have to ask for your forgiveness quite often.
As ever I want to express my deepest thanks to the folks who’ve taken out a paid subscription. Your support means the world to me. I hope you’re okay with me being a little more free and easy about sharing stuff rather than paywalling it. I suspect I stress about it way more than you do! That tension between paid/unpaid is something lots of creators on this platform struggle with. And I think being a money burning church amplifies the dissonance. I was going to write a post about ‘why we need money to burn money’ - a point that Tom raised a while back. Perhaps I’ll actually have time to do that now!
You are all of course welcome in The Vestry whether or not you're contributing to our Church’s upkeep. Times are particularly tough at the moment though so if you are thinking of taking advantage of our Merch Redemption offer then doing so now or in the very near future would be a blessing for your humble Priest.
I’ll end with a recommendation. My friends Tim Arnold, Kate Alderton and Sarah Kershaw will be at The Cockpit in Marylebone on 6th June with Superconnected. The show has received the highest praise. And with Tim, Kate and Sarah - CoB superstars all - you know it’s going to be great. Please check out the promo video and book your ticket asap.
Burn. Shine. Love!
Jon Xx
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