A few weeks ago I had a great conversation with Dr Tomislav Karačić of the London School of Economics, who had just lead a webinar titled “Developing Catholic AI: How to Balance Values in Design”. Most of the time we talked about “the world’s leading Catholic AI” I have just discussed in my previous post, and of Catholic Open Source. This is a “collaborative initiative empowering Catholic technologists to develop digital tools in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission” coordinated by the Texas-based Catholic Digital Commons Foundation (CDCF), whose mission is to coordinate community efforts for the common good and contributes to a shared digital patrimony for the Catholic Church.
The first part of this post summarizes what I dare say everybody, not just Catholics, should really know about the goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. The second part, that is primarily but not exclusively aimed at Catholic OS, CDCF and any other similar community, explains why I am in a special position to care about these issues and, hopefully, also to contribute.
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Here are what I consider the most important points of the Catholic OS Manifesto (”M”) and CDCF Bylaws (”B”), rearranged and labeled by me for easier reference:
M-1: The Church’s social teaching offers a compelling vision for lifting up human dignity: a digital commons to serve the common good, strengthen families, democratize economic opportunity, inspire new evangelism, and empower human solidity.
M-2: Technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.
M-3: We build against the reduction of the person to a data point or a mere instrument of production.
M-4: We cannot allow algorithms to limit or condition respect for human dignity, or to exclude... the hope that people are able to change.
M-5: [We also] commit to a human-centered pace of change... [and] advocate for a digital environment that respects the natural rhythms of human life and the “analog” requirements of a healthy soul... [because] “Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear. -- Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)”
M-6: The Catholic Digital Commons is a “builder commons.”... Across countless repositories, there are tools built in the quiet of parish life - identity systems, liturgical calendars, and workflow engines- awaiting the nurture of a supportive community... Our mission is to aggregate, vet, and communalize these gifts. We transform scattered code into a durable architectural spine that outlasts any single volunteer, providing the Church with a discoverable and adoptable commons of open infrastructure.
M-7: [We want to preserve] each institution’s independent ability to use, contribute to, and govern its own data and tools.
M-8: We must learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age.
M-9: To guide our development, we adopt the full “algor-ethical” vision of the Rome Call for AI Ethics.
The Bylaws of CDCF state that the foundation is organized exclusively for charitable, educational, and religious purposes which include:
B-1: to coordinate, develop, steward, and disseminate open-source software, data repositories, technical standards, and digital platforms in service of the Catholic Church’s evangelizing mission
B-2: organization, structuring, preservation, and ethical use of ecclesiastical data [of all kinds]
B-3: Academic research coordination, data standards, academic advisory roles, joint initiatives, and educational programming.
B-4: fostering interdisciplinary exchange between theology, pastoral practice, and technology.
B-5: promote the ethical development and governance of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in accordance with Catholic social teaching.
Me, arguing that Catholic Social Doctrine is so advanced that only now technology has catched up to it.
Backed by that work, I sincerely wish CatholicOS and CDCF every success because I think they are great. I mean, look again at the first five points of the Manifesto I selected above, just scraping “inspire new evangelism” if you’re not Catholic or religious in general: how could anybody of any political creed but sincerely wishing to make the world a better place disagree with them?
More specifically, I seriously think that anybody doing software should carefully read that manifesto and imbue any software they write with its principles, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. This said, I have three concerns about what I read - or sometimes did not read - in that Manifesto and Bylaws.
If you build it, they will come. Maybe. Maybe not.
My first concern directly follows from the fact that building great Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is not enough to make people use it. Not at all. “If you build it they will come” seldom works as in the Field of Dreams movie. Social inertia is always huge, especially about something like software that for 90% of the world population is still undistinguishable from black magic. In my experience, the hardest part of “making Catholics use FOSS” never was its quality. It was to make clergymen at any level get that they should care in the first place, instead of going “oh, this is about computers? Talk to my system administrator then”, or ignoring me altogether.
Thanks for sharing this as much as possible, especially outside Substack!
Even more important, the license of any software is much, much less important than what one creates with it, and how. In all my research and popularization work I routinely make this point with these three slogans:
“YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you”“
“You can build the perfect police state using only Free as in Freedom Software”
A Gnu/Linux user publishing documents in MS Office formats with LibreOffice makes more harm than a Windows user publishing documents in ODF formats with MS Office, because file formats are more important than software
So my first concern is seeing that education of ordinary users and calls for them to adopt free as in freedom formats and software aren’t the first goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. That is, I fear that they develop great products that won’t be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
The second concern is restriction of both stakeholders and of the “playing field”.
Shouldn’t the Catholic Overton Window for AI be wider?
I criticized the Rome Call for AI Ethics that guides Catholic OS and CDCF (point M-9 above) as soon as it appeared, but not because I think the Vatican should not make such calls. I did it because that Call seemed to me too restricted to Big Tech representatives and top catholic scholars with the best possible theological preparation and intentions, but not deep enough knowledge of the technologies involved.
That was in 2020. This month, I discovered that the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted last November a “Builders AI Forum” that, at least from the outside, appears to have the same limits. The motto of that forum was “Uniting to Build & Scale AI” and its goal to “foster a new interdisciplinary community of practice dedicated to supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission”. That’s why its sponsors included:
“a dynamic investment firm backing visionary founders committed to building with purpose”
the “For Schools” branch of a company develping “AI-driven Teacher Tools that guide educators toward efficiency and impact”, letting every student “embark on a personalized learning journey with an on-demand AI tutor”
With those premises, I should have not been surprised (and yet I was) to see among the participants... none other than the canadian branch of Palantir! Yes, Palantir, the company led by the very Peter “Better Jesus” Thiel who was here in Rome just a few days ago to lecture a few elects about the antichrist.
The bigger restriction I worry about here, however, isn’t about who is invited to these talks - only the powerful, not the meek who should inherit the Earth. It is the restriction of the agenda: “Build & Scale AI” and “supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission” seem to me too close to acritical acceptance of both AI into and for everything just because it’s AI, and of the “builders” primacy I already criticized around Magisterium AI.
First, let me repeat it: I sincerely wish Catholics OS and CDCF every success, because what they want to do is necessary for the Common Good, regardless of religion. I am only concerned about two things, the first being that promoting development of the right software in the right way cannot be enough.
The other is the possibility that certain positions unwillingly end up favoring, instead of containing, forces that are only driven by profit or that confuse technology with religion. Remember point M-8 above? The one saying that Catholics must “learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age”? I am worried that as it is, that pointt can be exploited by those forces, instead of boldly being what surely is already in the heart of every Catholic OS and CDCF member, that is
“learn to speak the language of technology to make adoption and deployment of technology speak the language of the Gospel”.
Enough with concerns! Let me make some concrete proposals now. What about Catholics, Catholics grassroots communities, Catholic NGOs and Catholics institutions explicitly working to, in no particular order:
for the same reason, campaign as if there is no tomorrow to make everybody “get news online” in the only way that minimize stress, tracking and echo chambers, that is straight from the sources, the Open Source way
education!, that is: teach and popularize the general principles and technology-related concepts behind all these proposals in Catholic seminaries, schools, universities and dioceses worldwide
I and other Catholics first tried to propose a Catholic approach to Information Technology with the Eleutheros Project twenty years ago. I have never stopped to fight these fights in the widest ways I could, as everybody can see from my main publications, Foss Force column, main blog and its current Substack proxy.
I will continue to do it, but I would really like to work more, much more on everything I’ve mentioned in this post. If anybody is interested, just email mfioretti@nexaima.net.
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Magisterium AI is a chatbot (free for 10 queries) that’s presented as “the world’s leading Catholic AI”. Its developers obviously present it as something unconditionally good, because it’s about True Faith. Its opponents call for its destruction, because it’s about True Faith.
What is truth here, about Magisterium AI or any other religious chatbot for that matter? That’s a question everybody should consider and, unlike Pilate, here you can stay for an answer.
With Magisterium AI, what’s the basis? For which charge, exactly? And what should the penalty be? (Image source: John 18:38 in Bible Hub).
Magisterium AI offers “instant, trustworthy answers rooted in Catholic tradition to explore faith with clarity and depth, get accurate answers to specific questions about faith and morals and clarify complex doctrines (like the Trinity or Sacraments) faithfully”.
Longbeard, the company that develops this chatbot, says it trained it exclusively on the world’s largest database of Church documents: almost 25,000 magisterial documents and (in Scholarly Mode) over 4,333 Catholic theological and philosophical works from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Fathers of the Church, etc.
This, says Longbeard, makes Magisterium AI avoid hallucinations and provide answers “grounded only in authentic Catholic teaching and tradition with specific citations to every assertion it makes, minimizing the risk of doctrinal error and giving confidence that the information aligns with the mind of the Church”.
Should Magisterium AI be deleted?
In January 2026 Marc Barnes, editor of New Polity, published his reasons why Longbeard should delete Magisterium AI. Some of those reasons are purely philosophical or theological. Barnes argues that conversations about faith should only happen between humans, but no AI chatbots can really converse about anything and that, regardless of the quality of the sources of Magisterium AI, it cannot use them properly anyway because “faith should never be probabilistically specified. A dice-roll is still a dice-roll even when it always lands on precisely the “6” you want... The Holy Faith is never simply “the right words in the right order,” but a Credo, an “I believe in”“ that no machine could ever say.
One part of the answer by Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, isn’t enough for me to agree with Barnes, but really rubs me the wrong way: “I leave the deep metaphysical distinctions to the scholars who are far more learned than I. I am a builder.”
Sorry, but... isn’t that the same, stale “Move Fast and Break Things” Big Tech religion that had already made a mess of society and political discourse before AI? “Trust we who can code because we can code and code we will, will ye, nill ye”? Thanks, but no thanks, on principle.
Sanders, certainly in good faith, also insists that Magisterium AI is “just a tool”. Sorry again, but no, no technology is just a “neutral” tool, especially if it’s digital. One year ago, I explained that current digital social media are toxic because they just repeat the same architectural and urban design errors that make physical cities mentally toxic.
This year, Barnes said something very similar: the very design of any machine, including chatbots, presumes and contributes to mold a certain kind of human being and society, regardless of how much its “builders” realize or want it. Since the philosophy behind chatbots is not really compatible with the Catholic one, Barnes says, they could never be neutral “tools” completely adaptable to Catholic ends. I tend to agree, but even this wouldn’t be enough for me to call for an outright deletion of Magisterium AI.
The other two main arguments in Sanders’ defence of Magisterium AI are one implicit (”every digital technology is great”) the other very explicit, that is FOMO (”Fear Of Missing Out”) and TINA (”There Is No Alternative”), which is well represented by these three almost literal quotes from his reply:
We are already crossing the river that separates the world before AI and the world with AI. The question is: who will write the code that governs the other side?
If we “delete” our presence in this sphere, we don’t stop the sphere from existing; we simply ensure it remains godless.
We must have the courage to baptize the tool, not bury it.
There are plenty of good things we should do as soon as possible with a saner version of AI, starting with agriculture. But accepting AI everywhere for everything just because it’s here is the same mistake already made with IoT, NFTs, the metaverse and soon, if we keep being dumb,humanoid robots.
But even if AI everywhere was truly unavoidable, so what? If some version of some technology or practice is objectively unavoidable but also bad or dangerous... shouldn’t Catholics and everybody else still strive to limit as much as possible its usage in every form? If “unavoidable” were a sufficient reason to make one’s own version of something, the Catholic solutions to prostitution and smoking could be Catholic brothels and cigarette factories.
Those are paradoxical examples of why “just make a Catholic version of something and it will be fine” isn’t a great strategy, but Barnes makes the same point much more seriously.
“Let’s make a Catholic version”, he notes, is the same thing lay people have been always encouraged to do with any other media before chatbots: newspaper, radio, television, computers, the Web... but in the end the only places where Catholicism grew instead of just slowing down its retreat are those “with the least and tardiest access to each new technological instrument of mass communication” but bigger size and strength of families, or stronger missionary presence. Here is another way Barnes puts it: “Places that have good things don’t need technologies which produce online versions of good things.” That is, social innovation is always much more powerful than technology alone. Even when the task is to make places “not remain godless”.
My extra reason to dislike the defense of Magisterium AI
Sanders passionately rejects any conclusion that “we must delete this technology to preserve our humanity [because doing so] confuses the medium with the mission [and] the mechanics of language with the intimacy of conversation..., [Q]uerying in natural language is [not] the same as conversing”, and Magisterium AI just offers “intellectual clarity, not sacramental grace”.
the belief, absolutely detached from reality, that since software “builders” were born with the capability to write and use software in a certain way, everybody else will eventually do the same and love it, will he, nill he.
I don’t doubt that Sanders never confuses clarity with grace, or querying with conversing. I am just equally sure, because that’s what I’ve seen happening every day with Gnu/Linux, Web 2.0, social media, AI bots and every other software since the mid-1990s, that 90% of real people are not like him, and WILL indeed confuse themselves. Especially after having been dumbed down by 20 years of social media designed with the very purpose of isolating and dumbing everybody down.
This is not judgment or criticism of anybody. This is just an acknowledgment that there are millions of different types of human brains, all equally worthy, but those wired to react to software exactly as Sanders pictures are a tiny, tiny minority.
Sanders’ other statement that Longbeard is not replacing authority, just amplifying access to it thanks to the “instant, trustworthy answers” of Magisterium AI is just as weak and worrying: “Trust us, human brains and souls will only benefit from always-on media and super-fast information with instantaneously amplified feedback and amplified, worldwide exposure!”... is exactly what Zuckerberg, Altman and Co have been pushing on the world for two decades now, and we all know how it worked.
So. should Magisterium AI be deleted? No, it should just...
In spite of everything I wrote, I don’t think there is a need to delete Magisterium AI as Barnes wants. I think Sanders himself unwillingly showed what to do in his answer, when he wrote that:
When a student queries Magisterium AI, they are not seeking “communion” with the software any more than a scholar seeks “communion” with the card catalog or the index of the Summa Theologiae. They are seeking access to the patrimony of the Church
Magisterium AI acts less like an author and more like a paralegal. It locates the precedent, summarizes the specific text, and places the document in front of you.
Exactly! Thanks Mr. Sanders! Paralegals are legal professionals who do legal research or drafting legal documents only for, and under the direct supervision of a lawyer!, not for her clients. Nobody (OK, nobody in his mind...) who needs legal help would hire a paralegal instead of a lawyer, even if paralegals were allowed to work as lawyers. Paralegals cannot have clients.
On top of that, anybody who’s really, deeply competent in some topic will tell you something like “I regularly see AI chatbots making mistakes about that topic; therefore, I exclusively use them for that topic, not for any other purpose where I couldn’t spot and avoid errors by myself”.
Add that fact to the limits of paralegals, and the solution is simple: instead of deleting Magisterium AI,
immediately change its name to something more sincere like “Magisterium Assistant”. In 2026, “AI” is already attached to way too many product names to look anything but FOMO marketing, and once the bubble pops it will become a liability anyway
only, only license the “Magisterium Assistant” to priests, or people like theology professors with at least five years of experience and the knowledge to properly evaluate Barnes philosophical objections
In other words, it’s practically certain that the general public will misuse and abuse Magisterium AI just like it has done with ChatGPT and any other “know-it-all” chatbot since 2022. Therefore, there is no reason why Magisterium AI (or any similar service for any other religion, of course) should not be treated as I already recommended two years ago for every AI chatbot like ChatGPT: just block universal access to it.
While I’m at this, everything Sanders says is for me further proof that the future of AI - that is of AI applications that make sense and don’t bankrupt a whole planet or suck up all the energy it needs, is not AGI, but SMALL, single-purpose AIs. Which hey, is just what China is doing, unlike the US.
Final note: the next piece will also be about Catholics vs (open) software in the 21st century and why everybody should care, so stay tuned!
Creation of Humanoid Robots, experts say, is “driven by the simple fact that our world is built for the human body”. Rather than reshaping the environment to suit machines, Humanoid Robots offer a way to adapt automation to the world as it is, especially when labor-intensive, dangerous, or repetitive jobs are concerned. The two most significant rationales for robots actually shaped as humans (i.e. two legs, two arms, one torso and one head) that I’ve read so far would be:
Compatibility with any already existing infrastructure designed for humans (stairs, doors, shelves, elevators...)
“Labor Augmentation”, that is taking over the most strenuous or alienating tasks, and consequently empowering humans to “focus on more complex responsibilities (addressing the infamous “alienation of labor” Marx had an issue with)”(source)
Concretely, the sectors of the economy most frequently quoted in which Humanoid Robots would work would be:
Manufacturing and Assembly
Logistics (moving goods, pushing carts, and inventory management)
Equipment Maintenance, especially in hazardous areas
Construction (carrying and positioning materials)
Healthcare and Medical Applications
Is that so?
Except in healthcare, that deserves a separate post, the idea that it’s better to adapt machines to the human world rather than doing the opposite does make sense. Probably not always, but often.
But labor “augmentation” MY ASS. That’s not the plan. The plan is to replace “HR as in Human Resources” with “HR as in Humanoid Robots” in every company’s org chart. This is why I’m always capitalizing “Humanoid Robot” here: to make the next, intended meaning of “HR” stand out: Humanoid Robots enable executives to dream (reality is another matter) they can let go even the workers who aren’t already replaceable by ordinary desktop computers or data centers alone.
Never forget that fact, but don’t let it make you too angry either. More robots in manufacturing and other economic sectors may be good, if we only learned to finally put the need for money and the need for “work” (note the quotes) in the right order! Let’s look at the real problems and real stupidity behind Humanoid Robots instead, because they are not in the workplace.
Elon Musk, self-appointed master thief of our night sky, said in January 2026 that he expects Tesla to begin selling to the public Humanoid Robots, which would be eventually “capable of performing innumerable human tasks”, by the end of 2027.
Musk’s vision is that “you can basically ask [those robots] to do anything you’d like” and that there will be “more robots than people” because he thinks that “everyone on earth is going to have one and want one”.
Other fine experts explain that “while most envision Humanoid Robots cleaning, cooking, or gardening, the possibilities go much further... unlocking a new level of support and creativity in everyday life.”
That’s because, since robotic hands are still too clumsy for most jobs, “today’s humanoids are not capable or cannot consistently manage full household routines yet... So, instead of focusing only on chores, let’s imagine what else Humanoid Robots could do for us at home.”
That piece then goes on to list Five Really Cool Things that Humanoid Robots could “do for us at home”:
Dog Walker and Carer
Robot Cameraman and Content Creator. Imagine having your own humanoid photographer to film your next business pitch, document your trip to Napa, or help you shoot content for socials.
Dance Partner and Coach
Multilingual Cultural Guide: Finding a good local guide is hard—so why not bring your own? A humanoid that speaks the local language, understands cultural nuances, recommends nearby five-star tapas bars, and carries your shopping, like a modern C-3PO+...
Personal Stylist who could catalogue your wardrobe, understand timeless style rules and current trends, and choose outfits that flatter your body, suit the occasion - and match your mood. Bonus: they can help zip up the back of that little black dress. Now that’s an investment!
I kid you not. The five bullets above are literal quotes from a company doing “advanced robotics solutions”, not a satire website. More on them below.
The truth about Humanoid Robots for everybody
Let’s assume that personal Humanoid Robots can be mass made without fighting even more wars to procure the necessary raw materials.
Let’s assume personal Humanoid Robots would soon be so cheap that everybody could actually afford one.
Let’s assume that the homes, sidewalks, cars, subways, planes and tourist attractions of the whole world could indeed contain twice the bodies that already fill them, because this is exactly what Elon “more robots than people” Musk said.
Let’s also assume that the guys pushing personal Humanoid Robots for profit wouldn’t be allowed to repeat the same abuses they did with phone chargers, phone cables and countless other products, that is: programmed obsolescence, lock-in, incompatible spare parts, overpriced or just impossible repairs, kill switches, and selling personal data.
Even in that physically impossible world, what would be the real reasons for any sane adult not brainwashed by internet pressure to have their own Humanoid Robot? The Five Cool Things Listed Above? Let’s look at them again:
Dog carer? what’s the point of a pet if something else gets all its time and affection?
Traveling with a personal cameraman whose air ticket would come from your pocket, to be filmed hidden by the robots of all the other tourists? In places already overflowing with humanoid human tourists? To get the same translation, bar recommendations and carrying services that your trolley and smartphone already do, for a fraction of the cost and physical size?
In other words, becoming a pretend Kardashian (servant included) who, besides paying for all your robot’s energy, tickets etc... should still pay a human to do all the household chores beneath a Humanoid Robot’s station, because if you did them yourself what would the robots of your friends say?
Those are use cases? Stuff that could never happen in our real world or that doesn’t require at all to put the necessary software inside a body-shaped computer, because any smartphone can already do it without requiring its own plane ticket?
If I may get personal for a moment, I find it very, VERY depressing that people so shameless or clueless to write such manure get any money. Fund me instead.
Screenshot of Google search for “humanoid robot doing household chores”: does any of those scenarios makes sense to you?
I am well aware that my “nobody would need a personal Humanoid Robot” sounds a bit too much another “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” , but let me ask you: with the possible exception of healthcare and caring for disabled or senior people, which as I said deserves a separate post, what could be the only real, concrete reason to have personal or family Humanoid Robots? What could it be when, besides all the other issues, the dwellings that most people can afford to live in become smaller every year?
Let’s be honest: maybe that reason is to do stuff that would work well only if done by human bodies or to humans bodies: that is sex, of course or (as I already warned five years ago) bossing around something that looks and feels like human, but will never complain.
Using robots for such purposes would be surely better than forcing other humans to endure the same abuses, especially because it would only be a temporary measure: after one generation living like that there would be no humans left to worry, or to worry about. If there are meaningful reasons to have personal Humanoid Robots, they apply to a world so different than our present one that nobody has been able to imagine them yet. Besides…
Do you remember really autonomous cars? The ones that, according to the same good old Musk are, like Humanoid Robots now, “coming next year” since 2013?? HumanoidRobots are autonomous cars all over again: the same industry that has failed for years to put really autonomous cars everywhere because roads are messy now wants you to buy machines that, as nVidia itselfpoints out, have the same AI-related needs (”situational awareness, interaction efficiency... context-aware responses”), just at a much larger, much more varied, much more unpredictable scale.
Do you remember AI? Of course, how could you possibly forget it? HumanoidRobots are AI all over again: good, sometimes badly needed for “professional” applications, ridiculously expensive and toxic as a a consumer technology.
Thanks for sharing this post as much as you can, both inside and OUTSIDE Substack!
Point is, after AI-controlled weapons, Humanoid Robots may be just what I warned about, that is one way in which “AI” could actually kill us. Nate Soares said it well: “as long as [AI] systems remain in the form in which we are currently most accustomed to them, which is a chat interface, there might be ways of stopping them from accessing the physical world. But [what about robots that] are meant to be able to manipulate the world, that are meant to be in your home and do your cooking for you and do your laundry for you and so on. It is once the intelligence of a GPT-style system meets the physical ability to manipulate the world that it will acquire with robotics that [AI could actually kill].”
If they are so stupid, why are “Humanoid Robots for everybody” pushed so hard?
This is easy. “Humanoid Robots for everybody” come from two needs that industries and organizations alone could never satisfy: one is the pathological urge to never have other real humans around that has driven so much software development in the last twenty years.
The other is the DESPERATE need to create another huge bubble, because the AI one is popping soon (never too soon, I say) and personal Humanoid Robots are the only way in which Musk or anybody else could sell enough robots to make the amount of money they keep thinking they are divinely entitled to have.
That’s the business strategy of 2026: “real artificial intelligence is impossible, if it were possible it would consume more energy and money than actually exist anyway, and we have nothing else left to sell. So let’s put the fake AI we got into puppets instead, and claim that everybody needs one”.
I bet you anything that this is one of the reasons why the nVidia CEO “predicts” that humanoids will be “one of the largest industries ever”. Again, fund me instead.
To conclude, as far as real adults alive today are concerned, Humanoid Robots are - like the AI that will remain after its coming crash - technology that can do a lot of good if it’s restricted to professional applications, not forced down everybody’s throat just to improve somebody else’s bottom line. So, stick to reality:
Don’t get fooled by “visions” of what life may be like five or ten generations from now thanks to robots and AI
Laugh at any political candidate who promises “at least one full-sized humanoid robot” (yes, they exist!)
Don’t let your pension fund touch anything related to Humanoid Robots
Oh, and of course fund both me and the many others who are trying hard to keep some sanity in the world, instead of the usual Pied Pipers
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screaming I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments.
(I got massively sick again, and them slammed with blizzard after blizzard after depressive episode after deadline. This winter wants to kill me, I swear.)
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Is there any real point in yelling into the Universal Void-Equipped Vomitorium that the internet has become about a thing many, many unconnected people say every day?
Not really, I guess.
Am I going to do it anyway?
I mean, have we met? Of course I am.
Now, when we all found out that Trump had gone ahead and bombed Iran, killed its leader, seemingly without any plan whatsoever other than YOLO, did I shake my head like I was a hundred fucking years old, which is what it feels like these days, and think about all the other times my country bombed the shit out of another one and either kidnapped or killed their leaders?
And when that video of the violent cartel enforcer caravan going by the street name “ICE” cheerfully murdering Alex Pretti started going around LITERALLY FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS AGO IN MEDIA TIME, did I think: well, now people will care, because that looks like a very nicely-groomed white man with a concealed carry weapon they shot in the back and not literally any other kind of human person, because all the other kinds have been getting killed for some time now and/or the whole time?
Sure did, friends.
When everyone, even conservatives, started actually finally (temporarily) pushing back against the sweaty, meth-blistered, right-wing romantasy the White House instantly pitched to their eager agents in the press room, like the President, with all the authority that office still drags with it, presenting to the public as fact, a full narrative of who is to blame, who is innocent, and what the victim was thinking and doing, let alone a totally fabricated one, is anything like a legal, normal thing to do, did I think: Wow, so even Renee Good wasn’t enough for the Great American Id, because white doesn’t fix woman and queer in that shrunken, desiccated hive-mind, but now we can actually see and understand very clear high definition video? No nasty nicknames like AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) for Alex’s entire demographic this time? What a shock, view and behold how shocked I am.
And then, when the phalanx of Renfields, Wormtongues, and groveling Trashcan Men that have ruined everything for everyone received permission from their masters to, very gently, poke at the edges of the utter reality-shearing fugue state that allowed anyone anywhere to ever believe Donald “Father of All Bombs In My First Month Because Big Beautiful Boom-Boom So Fun” Trump was the candidate of peace, a sentence I can’t even write without cringing it’s so pants-eatingly stupid, did I tap my feet to a nasty song I’ve been forced to listen to all my life?
Yeah, of course. We here in Garbagetown are not, as they say, brand new.
Did I then go online, see people being genuinely horrified and trying to figure out what to do about it, and start splatting into their replies yelling about how they shouldn’t be surprised because America has always been like this for everyone who isn’t [insert demographic here] and if they weren’t so privileged they’d know that?
Despite the existence of yesterday’s not-at-all-funny essay about Baby’s First Foreign Intervention that I definitely did write (carefully not including that very sentiment) no I fucking didn’t because it’s one of the most unhelpful, unproductive, pointless, performative, actively harmful to any kind of movement toward getting out of this eternal shit-shower sentiment I can even think of and I’m beyond tired of hearing it.
Even if it’s kind of true.
Bear with me, friends. No, I mean there is bear with me.
Note: The way this Substack works is that each public essay, like this one, has a follow-up for paid subscribers for spicier-than-prime-time screaming. The follow-up to the last essay on ICE malfeasance was delayed by a brutal bout with the flu, several blizzards, a strike, and a major depressive episode. Plus the fact that insane clown policy keeps happening and every WTF is out of date as soon as its posted.
The next essay will be a follow-up to both that piece and this one.
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One of those childhood memories that gets etched in glass, permanent lasered onto the inside of your skull, sometimes for good reason, sometimes just a moment that stands out among other moments, a redheaded memory in the long fog.
It was early winter and I was in fifth grade. I caught the school bus before 7 am, as everyone in our neighborhood did. Everything was wet and sunny and pale, slick and blindingly bright. Outside the bus smelled like pine trees, mucky leaves, and ozone. Inside smelled like cheap lip gloss, hairspray, permanent markers, and sour socks. I unshouldered my backpack and slid into the second cracked vinyl seat next to my only friend, a blonde girl with big glasses named Leigh. The door made that signature hydraulic-piston-creaking-hinge noise combination as the driver shoved the lever closed and the engine started complaining about the hills again.
I was quiet for a minute. Stared out through the hoarfrost of hearts and initials and misspelled swear words scratched into the bus window behind Leigh’s frizzy head. I was quiet because I didn’t know what to say. I felt like everyone must know. That’s why the boys in the back row were so rowdy, the older girls in the middle were whispering, that’s why the driver seemed so tired and sad. They must all be feeling what I was feeling. Angry and afraid and sad and confused. They must all not know what to say, either.
But I had to say something to someone or one of my organs was gonna just pop. One of little ones you could stand to lose, hopefully. Maybe not pop. Maybe ooze. Like one of those old crappy snake-bomb firecrackers that sludged out coil after coil of horrible black rope but never made any noise.
“Leigh,” I whispered. “We just invaded Panama.”
She turned to look at me with those huge pink-translucent rimmed glasses taking over her whole face. I even remember the sunlight glinting on the little gold cross she wore. Leigh’s parents were super religious and ran a Bible camp out of their backyard every summer. I was dying to go, not because I was so hot for God, really, but mainly because I wanted to spend the summer at Leigh’s house.
“What’s a panama?” Leigh said.
And that’s it, that’s the moment that crystallized so perfectly that I remember it in total detail thirty-five years later. What I remember isn’t that the US invaded Panama in December of 1989, though I do remember that.
What I remember is that none of the other kids knew or cared what the hell I was talking about.
I thought the world was coming apart that morning when I saw it on the news. I’d been raised a good patriotic little Leslie Knope red, white, and blue bunny, gone with my parents to vote every year. Believed all the things about what America stood for and what kind of person I should try to be because of it. I loved saying the Pledge of Allegiance. I named my puppy after Abigail Adams.
Be gentle. I was ten. We all think a lot of strange things when we’re ten. I still believed in Santa Claus, too. The Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and fairies in the English countryside and yes, justice and progress and the promise of America.
And when you are ten, you may not know a lot of fine details about world events, history, political philosophy, or varying systems of governance, both social and economic, but you feel like you have a handle on a couple of big-picture concepts, enough to get you through a bus ride, anyway.
Like, for example, the simplistic, childlike, but kind of fucking true notion that good nations full of good people with good intentions do not preemptively invade other countries.
Even if they give the operation a neat little nickname. (For Panama, it was “Operation Just Cause,” and let’s take a moment to give that one a big wow.) Even if the leader of that other country is a horrible person who does all kinds of illegal stuff and kills his own people kind of a lot and nobody likes him, not even, or maybe especially, his own people. Even if everybody plays a bunch of word games about how it’s not really preemptive or an actual invasion, just a sparkling strategic operation.
Invading other countries is wrong. Kidnapping or killing the leaders of other nations is wrong. How could my country do that? Was my home bad? Was I bad, too? Weren’t there rules about war? We had a whole color-coded system just to go to the bathroom at my school. Wasn’t there a system for this? Aren’t you not supposed to be able to just do war because you felt like it? Were all the grown-ups who taught me to be proud of my nation and work for its future lying or did they not know?
What’s a Panama?
I was a child. The nature of childhood is partial understanding. Or none. Every year everything you know is washed away by the fall rain and filled in again, with a little more detail every time. I was a little girl who knew too much and not enough. A little girl who geneuinely thought everyone on that bus must be just as upset about all of this as she was, and now realized they didn’t have the first idea, or even know that there was a country called Panama. They were just yelling and throwing pencils on the bus for the same reasons kids yell and throw pencils on the bus every day.
I was just little girl on her way to school.
Like a lot of little girls in Iran. Only that day in 1989, I got to come home from school. That day in 2026, those other little girls didn’t.
And I’m sure they believed a lot of pretty, simplified, half-formed things that weren’t true, too. I’m sure they believed there were rules, like I did.
All these years later, another century, another winter, another war. And I still don’t know what to say. Now I know that in fact my country does do this, pretty frequently. It had done many times before I was ten and did many more times afterward.
They did, once, feel they needed to lie about it, to dress it up so it looks like something anyone would want. And I also know that it is a profoundly dark sign that they no longer bother with the effort.
I know that the men who make these decisions are so far removed from the world of school buses and mucky December leaves and black snake firecrackers that they might as well not be human, and they don’t think of us or anyone else at all. I know that some grown-ups are lying, and some don’t know. Some do know, but are all for it. Some know, but they can’t figure out how to explain to a kid that everything is a mess but it’s still worth believing in what a country can be even when you can see its ugliness with your own eyes every day, because that belief is the only way out of the dark.
And some know, but are just as stuck as the rest of us inside this machine that won’t stop just because the people inside it are screaming for it to stop. It’s all drowned out by the screaming of the people crushed beneath its treads. And it doesn’t matter anyway, because the people who run the machine love both sounds and crave them.
And though I frequently forget, I do know that no matter how upset I am, no matter how axiomatic it seems to me that everyone around me must know what’s going on and be just as horrified by it, just as desperate to fix it, for the most part, everyone’s just stuck on the same shitty bus, barely chugging up over the hill, cracked seats and vandalized windows and a muffler from the depths of hell, not thinking about anything but their own worries and needs, all headed toward the same destination, not because they want to go there, but because that’s where the machine is heading and the doors are locked, for our safety, of course.
I’m one of the grown-ups now. And I didn’t tell my second grader about Iran. Just like Leigh’s parents didn’t tell her about Panama, if they knew. I’ve participated in the generational lies of this place. Because I still don’t know what to say. It’s wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong, even the people doing it. But they’re going to keep doing it, not because there is a goal to be achieved, but because they want to, and they like it, and, at a very distant third, they might think it will give them more power and allow them to keep what they have. But that part isn’t really that important. It isn’t the reason, any more than God was the reason I wanted to go to Bible camp that summer. The people driving the bus just want to feel the way they feel when they push a button in a comfortable room and other people they don’t know or like die. They want to feel that way forever.
How do you explain that? To children? To grown-ups? What’s a Panama?
Maybe I don’t even know anymore.
I hope for a better outcome than I expect. I hope there are answers on the other side of this. I hope to find a little optimism at the bottom of this very deep box.
But I’ve spent thirty-five years staring out that long-vanished bus window repeating a non-sensical question in my mind. Staring out at the same moment happening over and over again even though it’s not supposed to happen at all, at America catching fire, hissing and sputtering as endless coil after endless coil of hideous black smoking dead rope spools out onto the cement in silence while claiming to be something of value, something to enjoy, claiming to be a firework.
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In case you missed it, there is a growing trend that, since last December, is making angry and concerned parents happy: Australia mandated by law a minimum age (16) for having social media accounts and, answering a call to governments that keeps growing, Finland and other countries are seriously considering doing the same. Is this good news, bad news or, as I suspect... news that’s not relevant anymore? Let’s find out.
Weak objections to age limits
As surprising as it may seem, not everybody is convinced that social media does way more harm than good to kids, but I fail to find their arguments valid. Claims that this or the next one or two generations of real children may do wonderful things with a smartphone invariably come from people so smart they can’t understand they and their own kids are needles in haystacks.
A more concrete objection is that banning social media may isolate and ultimately harm both kids with disabilities and adolescents who are at high risk for suicide. While I do agree that social media can be quite beneficial in those special cases, I find all certain concerns quite ill-thought-out, for a simple reason: socialization benefits come, by definition, only if all the non-special kids are in the same environment.
But if something that - however you call it - is very often harmful to the majority of children does benefit what’s surely a minority of them... why on Earth should we keep the majority in harm’s way, instead of finding other solutions for the special cases???
You may have also heard that it’s wrong and counterproductive to call and treat social media as real addictions, instead of less harmful “bad habits”. That’s an argument that strictly speaking may have some merit, but I personally find almost irrelevant at this point.
While I’m at this, I’m also unable to trust reports that kids with smartphones are less likely to find life meaningless and get angry, because that’s the same thing opium addicts surely reported of their dens. Duh. If something makes you forget, or prevent you from ever learning how happier you’d be playing with peers in the sun... of course it also diminishes your anger and depression. Until it doesn’t.
The real problems with age limits for social media
Since the beginning of social media, if not of the web itself, proposals of setting age limits online by mandatory identification or automatic profiling have shared the same problems.
First, age limits alone just kick the can down the road, because they don’t touch toxic features like infinite scrolling, that afflict everybody over 16, starting from older adults. To solve the problem instead of just delaying it, we’d also need to outlaw all those features.
This said, here is the real bad news: in 2026, these other issues are still valid, but they are also quickly becoming irrelevant.
It almost doesn’t matter anymore if “social media” are good or bad
Forget social media, for a moment. Let’s look at something that, in spite of all the hype that keeps its investors alive, is much more invisible and ubiquitous. That is AI or, more exactly, the effects of universal, uninterrupted, unavoidable exposure to AI chatbots and other services. The first and easier to see result is... hardly any real productivity: OpenAI itself reports that 73% of its user prompts concern non work-related topics, very often by young people. Many of those requests are to write (that is, to conceive on behalf of the user) some sort of finished product (homework, dating profiles etc..).
Unsurprisingly, this is an habit that can lower cognitive activity and is only going to get bigger, because every online interaction that can happen through written words or spoken words is, or will soon be, vulnerable to AI. Problem is, this affects much more than practical activities.
Without AI, social media would “only” influence and shape human-to-human relationships. AI bots replace that with a direct, exclusive connection, on equal footing between individual humans and machines. Such forced or even voluntary immersions in AI personal services don’t merely shortcut brains together like social media do: they engage every single individual relationally and emotionally, by grabbing and offering emotions instead of just data.
All this can only shape one’s thinking less visibly, but much more effectively than social media. Double that for children and adolescents, for whom by far the likeliest outcome of AI interfering with their inner development is to:
Summing up, leave concerns that AI will destroy all jobs to people who still get AI and the meaning of work and money backwards. Worry about personal growth and social interactions, instead, because unrestricted dumping of AIs inside people brains and feelings as it’s allowed today does everything bad that social media do, just much more, much better. Of course, that’s no accident.
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Current AI does all this by design
The reduction of the effort and emotional load of managing human interaction summarized in the previous paragraph is there by design, driven (as most digital tech from Silicon Valley in the last decade at least) by two urges. One is money, obviously, not just for greed but out of desperation. This AI is just the software side of peak capitalism, and “Hail Mary” AI investments the only thing keeping the US out of recession. The sooner it crashes, the better.
The other, deeper force driving AI like this is the urge, by challenged kids who only knew how to code, to limit any physical interaction with other humans, making them optional. They want to “democratize” - that is: to force on everybody - the soul-destroying convenience that before digitization was only accessible to rich people: the capability, thanks to fences, butlers, guards and secretaries, to notice and meet only the humans they wanted, when and how they wanted.
Those two urges are the reason why every company now is an AI-powered company seeking to replace communication and interaction with family, friends and pets with solitary people using AI products. But they offer no way for kids to grow up decently, or for adults to stay sane.
Even the main advocates of the 16 age limit for social media have no idea of why their call succeeded so quickly, after decades of both governments and parents looking the other way. I think the answer is quite simple, and has two components.
One is that governments finally got that such laws are excellent proxies for generalized internet censorship and datafication.
The other, more serious reasons is that the childish sociopaths that run Big Tech don’t really need social media anymore. AI is the new social media, that is their new, and much better tool to control people and avoid bankruptcy. In their present scheme of things, social media on smartphones was just an appetizer and marketing strategy that opened the way to plug AI into everybody’s skull, and is less needed every day. Age limits for social media are yesterday’s battle.
What to really ban under 16 and why
In general, I already wrote two years ago that universal, unrestricted access to AI chatbots should stop yesterday, even for adults.
Speaking of kids, growth happens by doing stuff for real, and often by making mistakes. We must preserve space for kids to screw up socially and learn how to solve concrete problems by themselves. We also have a way to do just that that’s been field-tested worldwide for 120 years now, a way that is still unexplicably ignored by the gurus of child protection online. I already introduced that way before, so as I said, let’s stick to digital bans here.
Advocates of age limits for social media explain 16 is the right age because puberty is a crucial period of brain re-wiring and identity formation, and the ability to self-regulate increases throughout adolescence, only reaching a plateau in the mid 20s. Consequently, parents should be most careful about how their children spend their time and who (or what) is influencing their developing brains and identities, that is until the end of puberty, fixed at 16 for practical purposes. I fully agree with that. What I find wrong is what to be careful about.
The point that most parents and gurus alike continue to ignore because it’s uncool, bad for GDP and too simple is that what really “influences developing brains and identities”, and would do it even if social media and AI bots didn’t exist is the damn smartphone dropped into kid laps years before they are ready.
Smartphones are not the Internet. It’s perfectly possible to get all that’s good online with desktop or laptop computers or smart TVs, and the sooner children learn how to do it with those tool the better, I say. But smartphones, or any other mobile, pocket-sized or wearable device with Internet access and a camera, are wildly different, for two reasons that’s easy to miss because they are too big and simple.
One is that, even if porn, social media and predators didn’t exist, smartphones before 16 years old would still facilitate sleep deprivation and myopia epidemics. Above all, they would still be synonyms of unrestricted, uncontrollable access to questionable websites, uninterruptable peer pressures and other pressures and surveillance by... overzealous parents. Plus, of course, unrestrictable, continuous exposure to all sorts of “personality-shaping” AI services. Please notice that even when (not “if”) the AI bubble will crash, all the other issues will remain.
The other reason is that banning personal smartphone before 16 it’s hugely easier (not to mention orders of magnitudes cheaper) than enforcing age limits, and without side effects.
I’ve read learned people opposing smartphone bans because “Why would anyone want to deprive children of such a remarkable tool as a smartphone?” The one-sentence version of the really easy answer is: because (NO offense meant, this is a systemic, generational issue beyond any parent’s control!!), unlike the experts who ask such question, 95% of the real children and parents existing today are able to do it properly.
Never ask governments to ban or restrict internet access. It cannot work, only backfire, and when kids are concerned, certain actions are the parents’ job anyway
If you have kids, don’t give them a personal smartphone before 16, period. Give them any kind of home-tied computer as soon as possible and, if you really really must, a dumbphone. They’ll grow up just fine, practically for free, without missing anything important, and without anybody controlling them as today
If you have no kids, loudly support the parenting style in the previous bullet. Again, keep governments out of this, not just for-profit companies. Social pressure is the way
All the bullets above were already valid ten years ago. In 2026, AI is just giving parents and everybody else a billion more urgent reasons to do them now
Image Source: Google search results for “smartphones are like cigarettes”
UPDATE, 8.03pm GMT+1, 23/2/2026
I only noticed this instant that Afterbabel too had warned about “AI chatbot for kids” six months ago: But the most effective strategy remains the same: before (not instead!) struggling to reform AI chatbots as they suggest, make it impossible for them to reach kids through smartphones!
(This is the first sample of what I will write here from now on, beside digital issues. Please do read why, how and how to support mehere)
I grew up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a New York trip with stops in stores like “Dal Triestino” to buy every symbol of American coolness one could afford was the ideal holiday for many Italian teenagers, me included:
Founders of “Dal Triestino” General Store besides their shop: “a haven for the most coveted brands among Italians arriving in the United States for work and pleasure, from Ray-Ban to Samsonite, from Max Factor to Levi’s and Wrangler blue jeans” (source)
Back then, for me and most other Italians, Americans were the good guys. Yes, they did look clumsy and weird sometimes: here in Italy, we call “americanata” things or behaviors “eccentric, naively grandiose, exaggerated, tacky and kitch”. But “americanate” or not, Americans were likeable. They were the people with the most inviting places to visit, the coolest movies and music and the most effective army. Most of us also considered Americans the guys who, even if they were doing it primarily for their own advantage, mostly did the right things on the international scene.
I also worked almost two years in Silicon Valley in the mid 1990s, when the Valley was still building software and hardware that did make sense, and I really enjoyed it.
In other words, throughout my whole life, I’ve almost always lived with lots of reasons to appreciate “the American way” and wish Italy was, for some things at least, a lot more like America. I still do.
Now, however, I am sad and pissed off because on one hand, there are plenty of wonderful places and people in the US I almost surely won’t see anymore in my life, and on the other hand I’m still forced to care about America. I am sad and pissed off because...
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Crossing an ocean to be kicked back? Of course not.
First and foremost, I am not willingly going to land, not even for an intermediate stop, in airports where the stupidest thing outside my control may send me back home right away on my own pocket if I’m lucky, or block me there for weeks before doing that.
Travel-wise, China, Russia or even Iran seem safer to me these days. By this, I mean they look as places where, if a visitor knows and follows some clearly defined set of rules known in advance, everything will be all right. Not so in current America, where misfits who never learned or understood that Europe and Mexico aren’t neighboring places have more chances than everywhere else to work as Custom officers. Or, out of airports, deliberately badly trained ICE guys could shot or harass me just because I don’t look scandinavian, or speak with a local accent. You loathe me for no real reason? No problem whatsoever, as long as you stop me before I buy the plane ticket.
More in general, I’m sad because today’s US are a place that lost itself so much into infantilization, assorted extremisms, self-adsorbing identity issues and other kinds of virtue signalling of both colors to lose both any interest in their own people and, which is much more relevant, any perception of their weight in the world, and any responsibility for it.
The US of these times are a country doing a terrific job of making itself despised and ridiculized at the same time. Greenland? As arrogant and clownish as he was, had Berlusconi been in the Oval Office instead of Trump, with his same powers, he’d already have Greenland by now, just thanks to better manners and higher maturity. Ditto for, to name just the most recent events, kidnapping foreign Presidents abroad or, at home, (potential!) migrants not cute and blond as the foreign trophy wife of their Presidents. Tom Clancy novels like “Executive Orders” are fun to read, not to live in.
Feelings and perceptions like these may be exaggerated, or based on incomplete information. I am aware of that. Fact is, these are all feelings that, until very few years ago, got no news stories to spring from, and above all no US administration so happy to see them arise.
The same US which I’ve liked a lot for decades is doing all it can to make me wish for a world where I can finally - finally! - afford to ignore, if not their actual existence, at least everything they trouble themselves with at home. That’s what looms largest in my mind these days, more than debating, or proving, which system is better.
Looking the other way now
This America is doing all it can to make me accept, if not really like, a Heartland 2.0 world: a self-sufficient Eurasia, in which food and other physical goods don’t travel on sea lanes that US warships may block, but on electric trains powered by nuclear plants done right, and nothing is paid in dollars, or through US-controlled systems (for the latest EU steps in that direction, read here).
Can you imagine an Eurasia in which each part is free and content to live in its own way within its own borders because...
China, India and their neighbors make cars, processors and other stuff
Russia (without Putin) provides raw materials and energy to do it
the Middle East is poorer but pacified at last, because its remaining fossil fuels and anything else there don’t matter enough anymore to stir trouble, and...
the EU (possibly self-reduced to its current western part, with a cultural and military Intermarium buffer block) is...
in the worst case, a new edition of “Graecia Capta Ferum Victorem Cepit”: that is, a vassal backwater, politically, but one with such a huge cultural soft power and legacy to shape its rulers for centuries, as Greeks did to the Romans
Left: Intermarium, as conceived after WWI - Right: member countries of NONATO): looked from the right point, Northern Atlantic doesn’t necessarily need the US, does it? (Image sources: the Intermarium and Greenland Wikipedia pages).
I am well aware that the list above may be a mix of naivete and cluelessness from my part. By all means, do (politely!) tear it apart, if it deserves it, no problem. My goal here is to convey a feeling, not to promote any specific geopolitical doctrine.
It’s the feeling that matters, regardless of which place is “best”, if there even is one “best”: the US of the 2020s is strongly pushing me to consider as the lesser evil, if not as an intrinsically positive outcome, a world that doesn’t need to keep America happy and American dollars at the centers of every issue because - finally!- what happens inside American borders doesn’t matter anymore for the rest of the world.
As things stand today, I’m sure the number of Europeans who would accept such a world - if not actively ask for it - is already large and can only grow. And again, this is happening because America went off the rails first, not us. This is what the First in “America First” looks like from here.
Had the US become a modern, limits-aware version of what its movies and leaders said it was in the 1980s (yes, I know that’s a contradiction in terms), I wouldn’t have any real issue to keep thinking as I did back then, and accept them as THE Big Guy.
But that’s over now, and things won’t change anytime soon. As far as I am concerned, I know a lot of Americans who are wonderful people, and want to stay in touch - and possibly work - with them all. But politically and culturally, it will take at least one generation, probably two, before trust and admiration for all that’s STILL great in the US return as they were just a few years ago.
By then though, it will be too late to rewind whatever version of “Heartland 2.0” will have actually happened.
And by then, of course, Africa will rise anyway. But that’s a topic for another post.
Bonus “it’s not just me!” quotes
You may say I’m a (naive) dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Here are a few quotes from some posts published in the last year, to prove that point:
“Historically, America does not care if countries collapse and in fact enjoys it. Chaos is a ladder, and as a reserve currency, they’re at the top.”
“I don’t think America can vote their way out of this, and I hope they don’t. In fact, I hope America crashes so completely that it just disappears as an entity, an identity, and as an enemy that holds deaths and debt over everyone.”
“There’s nothing overly imaginative about Trump’s and Musk’s unbridled attack strategy. They’re using the nation’s bigness and control of the jobs and money to intimidate - primarily friends.”
“The developed world made a deal with America 80 years ago. So long as we operated under the cover story of our stated values, other developed nations were willing to live under the American corporate and military umbrella. We’ve broken the deal. You can say it was Trump, but that doesn’t matter. We broke it.”
“there’s the world asking: can we still trust America? Remember, it hasn’t quite arrived at an answer yet. It’s sort of stunned. It can’t quite comprehend this weird... explosion-implosion”
“The point is that [right now, the world still] wants to [trust America]... But at some point, and it’s coming soon, America will finally lose all credibility.”
“[and then], nobody will bother even attempting to “deal” with [America]”
“go ahead and ask a European or Canadian if they’ll trust America again just because it elects someone nicer. They’ll tell you: so what? Now the problem is that you just might do it all over again, at any point, and how do we know you won’t?”
I still believe that YOUR rights and quality of life depend every year more on how software in all its forms, including robots, cryptcurrencies and AI, is used AROUND you.
From now on, however, I will also write here about all the other, many faces of the current crisis. That is, in more or less random order: climate change, families and parenting, overconsumption of natural resources, inequality, mental health, pollution, education, and other major obstacles to a fairer society.
This multi-faced look at things will be very likely bad for finding and retaining “followers”, because many people seem to prefer very specialized, single-topic “sources” these days.
But on one hand, I find it necessary, because a recurring topic here will be that those crises are all related, and cannot be solved independently. For example, I do think that climate change is real and man-made. But I also see it is only a symptom of something bigger and deeper inside us, which must be fixed first.
On the other hand, I just don’t care anymore about extending my audience with all the usual tricks.
I’ve stopped caring about any form of Search Engine “Optimization” because, in an age when search engines use one’s SEO efforts to find which sources to leech first with “AI”, but keep them hidden from people, it just doesn’t make sense anymore.
I’ve stopped caring about social media optimization too. I do try to remain and advertise my work on social media, because I accept that if I want people to hear my message I need to go where they already hang out... but I refuse to play by their rules:
unless it’s some really throw-away thingy, I will always POSSE, that is “Publish (on your) Own Site (1), Syndicate Elsewhere”
when I’ll post on social media, I may sometimes add a picture to each post even when it wouldn’t be necessary, and (usually) surrender to the totally idiotic practice of putting “link in the first comment”, but nothing more
and I will try to post as little as possible, not whenever the algorithm says I should do it
Ditto for Substack, of course. I’ll try to post here once a week, but sometimes it will be more, sometimes (as lately) much less. Without AI generated images.
What you can do / your part in all this:
I have stuff to say that several competent people agree it’s worth knowing. But I don’t want everybody to agree with me. I want everybody to know the issues I write about, instead of ignoring their existence and interconnections, so they have no excuse to not make their own informed decisions about them.
This, plus my dislike for the subscription economy (see “unusual request” here for details) is why none of my writing is paywalled, and will remain such (1). But of course, the more concrete support I get, the more I can write. So, thanks for helping with any combination of:
comment my posts and recommend this blog (NOT “substack” (1)!) here on Substack
Much more often than not, on the Web a thousand words is worth more than an image or video. Text is hugely easier to reuse, share and preserve, and more respectful of users’ time too: skimming text to get its gist is way faster than doing the same with its audio or video versions.
Besides, while I have spoken around the world many times, I am good at writing. I was definitely not born a video or podcast person. Should I ever set up a podcast or YouTube channel, it could never be much more than me repeating my written posts vocally. If you think that doing so would still be enough to significantly increase my reach and are willing to share detailed advice, by all means please do it, and thanks in advance!
This week on my podcast, I read All laws are local a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the ephemerality of our seeming eternal verities.
In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
This week on my podcast, I read “Threads’ margin is the Eurostack’s opportunity,” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the tactics that digital sovereignty advocates can deploy to counter Meta’s (further) enshittification of Threads.
The funny thing is, the OG App creators were just following the Facebook playbook. When Facebook opened up to the general public in 2006, it had the problem that everyone who wanted social media already had an account on Myspace, and all of Facebook’s improvements on Myspace (Zuck made a promise never to spy on his users!) didn’t matter, because Myspace had something Facebook could not match: Myspace had all your friends.
Facebook came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they offered Myspace users a bot. You gave that bot your Myspace login credentials (just as OG App did with your Insta credentials) and the bot impersonated you to Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and it grabbed everything queued up for you on Myspace (just as OG App did with Insta), and then flowed those messages into your Facebook feed (just as OG App did with Insta).
Note: the way this Substack works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one nice and civilized and not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments. Sign up to scream along and support my work.
You can only watch a man get blown apart by the government on the daylit freezing streets of a major city for the crime of trying to help a woman off the ground from so many different angles before you feel like you should say something. Everyone is yelling in the desperate hope that yelling can still be enough, the least you could do is use that word thing your brain is good at to make some small attempt at helping the country off the ground.
But I just haven’t known what to say. Silly gifs and the services of Sir Swears-a-Lot Bear don’t really cut it. To say, as many have, that it’s wrong and fascist and evil and grotesque has felt so small and useless—and it’s not like we haven’t all been saying that for really, quite some time now. Saying this exact thing was coming. Saying once it started, stopping it would be a lot harder than checking a box that didn’t have a man invented in a fucking Antichrist factory that mass-manufactures clearly-labelled Antichrists for the highly-competitive international Antichrist market next to it. To say, as many have, that now that they’ve done this to a white man exercising his second amendment rights, a whole lot of people are finally finding a last crumpled, lonely, half-frozen fuck to give between the couch cushions of their discontent, has seemed too cynical and unhelpful. At least there was one to find. I guess.
To say, as many have, that I am afraid, so afraid, for my family, my loved ones, my child, my little world almost entirely filled with what these smirking, plastic-masked carcasses of humanity would consider the Wrong Kind of People, has seemed both selfish and redundant. Another helpless cry of fear to add to the maelstrom.
And my god, I’ve been afraid. We all have. For so long. Many much more than I. I don’t remember what it felt like to not begin each day by swallowing a dark lump of existential dread. I don’t know how many more layers of fear you can Jenga onto the pre-stacked tower before it just doesn’t make any difference anymore. Fear is just where you live. What you eat. What clicks on in the morning with the heat. What you do to relax. What you work on on the weekends. What makes up the cells of your body.
I started writing this piece about ICE about a week and a half ago for an entirely different reason. Before we all knew the name Alex Pretti, but after we knew the name Renee Good. And every single day something new would happen to make it all worse and what I’d written out of date. I’m pretty sure this will be out of date before I get to the last paragraph.
I wanted to tell you what’s been going on in my state, not because I live in Minnesota, because I don’t.
I live in Maine.
It’s very hard for me to tell how much of what’s happening here has penetrated media outside of our local bubble at all. My feed is full of it. Signal has been a constant hyperactive Pachinko-machine rattle of speculation, ideation, planning, paranoia, and actual news. But my feed would be full of these stories. Maine is my home. Many people I follow also live here. The engagement algorithm that, bizarrely, may well be most singularly responsible for the rapid unspooling of just about everything, makes sure I see it. But yours may well make sure you don’t, just as it makes sure I don’t see over the garden wall of my own pre-existing interests.
Now, ICE has been in Maine before. They have taken people before. But over the last two-ish weeks, they’ve surged into the state and ramped up operations here while everyone’s been paying attention to Minnesota. Hundreds of people have been arrested. According to the governor, there are many more arrests being kept secret. People have been removed from running cars, beaten on the street, taken in front of their children, or their children taken from them. And they do not give a fuck and aren’t checking anything—one of the people “detained” was a correctional officer.
And I’m pretty sure (but would love to hear otherwise from your experience—I don’t expect it, but it would be nice) we’re not the only city getting hit while the media is focused elsewhere. Well. Maybe not so much focused as begrudgingly being forced to look because the people are already looking, then comfortably repeating whatever the government says without question, commentary, investigation, or concern until the designated Mildly Criticize a Minor Official programming bloc from 1-1:06 am EST.
I say two weeks ish, because we’ve been hearing about them coming for quite a few weeks longer than that, and it’s fairly unclear when, on that timeline, they actually arrived and began the state violence they’ve given the nastily cutesy yuk-yuk name of Operation Catch of the Day. GET IT? BECAUSE WE DO SEAFOOD HERE IN MAINE HA HA PEOPLE ARE MEAT WE ARE GOING TO EAT IMMIGRANTS HA HA GET IT GOLLY GEE KEVIN YOU AND ME ARE SUCH GREAT GUYS! Or if it even matters when ICE got here.
After all, the desired effects of their presence took hold long before they did.
I’m not sure how to express the level of fear that took hold of my state in the days and weeks after it was announced that ICE intended to begin significant operations here. Everywhere I knew that Mainers talked online was a frantic mess of rumor, speculation, paranoia, and occasional fact. People announced ICE agents were staying in this hotel or that, only to have employees of those hotels insist it wasn’t them. Sightings were frequent but doubted even by those who posted them. They’re in Portland, no, Lewiston, no Wiscasset, no the Target in Scarborough, this car in this parking lot has government plates, that guy in mirror glasses was staring at everyone who walked past. Everyone trying to figure out what the MO would be, what kind of cars they would drive, where they would go to try to find targets, what could be done, what businesses were or were not supporting their presence so they could be shunned or supported. It reached this fever pitch of Crucible-like posts every minute and more. I saw them on Congress St, I saw them in Riverside, I saw them at Hannafords.
Which is what happens when they don’t wear uniforms, drive government cars, or show ID. Everyone jumps at their shadows before their bodies even catch up. Which, in turn, is precisely whythat shit is fucking illegal.
So for a long time, it was pretty unclear whether or not ICE was actually here in new numbers at all—until they definitely were, and are now. And in that strange, unreal little window between coming and here, I saw my city pre-emptively change. Contract, look around every corner, change where they shopped, ate, how often they went out and where, businesses unable to operate because so many employees are afraid they’ll be ambushed. People changed the routes they drove, how they got their kids to school, or didn’t, as taking parents and children at public schools’ pick-up and drop-off has been going on for several months already, so people are fucking terrified of school and their own jobs now.
Oh, but don’t worry, anyone right wing and white hasn’t changed a thing. They sail happily along through public life as they always have. I can’t help but think that’s the point, really, and it happened before the new operation even began. That anyone brown or liberal/leftist or gender non-conforming or otherwise vulnerable retreats from public life and public view so that MAGA can believe we’re all just vaguely, unaccountably, finally, miraculously, gone.
If they can’t see us, we don’t exist, which is the goal. Just like the masks and their raging, apoplectic insistence that not only would they not wear them, no one else could either—if they didn’t have to see other people wearing masks, they could pretend there was no pandemic. No world-shattering event changing everything in unknown and frightening ways that their perfect idol, Mr. Only I Can Fix It, couldn’t handle even a little. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. And just gone is perfect for them. Most conservatives still feel a little twinge at the idea of full-on death camps for 49.7% of the country (and counting!). Not a large twinge. But a twinge. Alligator Alcatraz was a threat of death if you tried to escape, but they could tell themselves it was only a regular prison in Florida; then they made it a joke because it had to be a joke for them to cope with not actually believing it was only a regular prison in Florida.
But if they just don’t ever see us again they don’t have to think about it, they can just enjoy the New Recipe America: Oops All Whites edition and imagine that it all happened naturally so they’re still awesome people being awesome awesomely.
There’s too many of us Wrong Sorts to full-on snatch us one by one off the streets just yet. But if fear can take back the streets for white assholes, then they get what they want anyway.
They can pretend we’re gone. Not just pretend, believe. Not just believe, know. Snakes their shit-smeared saint drove into the sea.
And yes, with the fear and the contraction there was and is organization, too. Protests even in subzero temperatures. A local strike Friday. I barely remember the last time anything else was posted on any of the local sites, forums, subreddits, servers, etc I follow. There have been rallies and events and food delivery volunteers and spotters. There have been businesses refusing to serve ICE agents. There have been helpers, helping, and trying to do more. The laser-focus of it, even before that poor fucking man tried to help a lady up, both gives me hope and makes me indescribably sad. I wish this focus and putting aside of all other differences could happen at any time other than the direst hours. I wish I didn’t know it’s going to vanish as soon as people feel like it’s over, which is why Bovino got punted and Noem might have to sit in the naughty chair or whatever the fuck Trump is doing instead of firing everyone on Twitter this time, so that people can feel like it’s over and stop making conservatives uncomfy by not wanting to be murdered.
And for the record, absolutely none of this in Maine is about immigration. We’re 46/50 for immigrant population numbers, the literal lowest-crime state in the union, the most elderly, 9th least populous. We share a border with Canada and way more of us are native French speakers than anyone realizes. We’re a blue state that almost always gives an electoral vote to Republicans—and one they often need to make their bloodmath work. It’s not even about white supremacy primarily, except in the sense that this is all about white supremacy: except for sometimes when it’s Vermont, Maine is the whitest state in America. Portland itself has a somewhat sizable Somali community and a fair number of asylum seekers, but Portland Maine is a tiny fucking place. Even if you include all the outlying towns. Hell, even if you include Lewiston. “Somewhat sizable” means a blip on an even medium-sized city’s fact-sheet. And it’s January, this city is quiet and frozen and half-closed down even on the weekends.
This is about terrorizing people under the assumption that such a small city will not stand up for its own folk—and pathetically, about how much Donald Trump hates our governor, a lady named Janet Mills most of the state doesn’t even seem to like all that much. But Janet said no when President Trunchbull told her to ban all two trans athletes from playing high school sports, then tried to remove funding for lunches and education generally, and she still said no, so he hates this state he knows nothing about.
It’s started to get weird in recent days. ICE agents have gone a step further than “uniforms are a liberal plot” to trying to “blend in” with the most laughably stereotyped idea of what a Mainer wears you’ve ever seen in your life. Yes, indeed, it is a state of 1.3 million Brawny Paper Towel Mascots. With Arkansas accents. Bro is that beard even real? I’ve seen better beards on Drag Race.
And since this is all very depressing, please take a break to feel a deep sense of cheer watching two of these fuck-ass bubs get drummed out of a bar in the Old Port because when the massive storm came, ICE agents went out on the town to kick up their heels and enjoy the Portland nightlife.
It’s been quieter since two feet of snow blanketed everything. I guess ICE takes snow days, too. Poor babies need rest from all that Call of Duty cosplay id-fluffing. But I do think it’s intentional, that this is all being done in the extreme cold, even if the Walmart SS can’t handle it. In the off-season when there is emptiness to work with. When people are easy to corner without the tourist crowds. To control the response. To limit the number of people able to protest. Minnesota and Maine are two frigid states. And I think smaller places like mine are being raided very deliberately, stress-tested, chest-checked, while attention is focused on Minneapolis because other ICE news can’t break through the roar. So here, and I assume elsewhere, ICE feels it still has impunity.
Minnesota casts a long shadow, and in such shadows devils will play.
No one’s been murdered here yet, that we know of, but I shouldn’t fucking have to write that sentence at all, should I? Just like Mainers shouldn’t have to volunteer to deliver food to people of color because they’re afraid to leave their fucking homes.
But they do. And I do. And one of these days I probably won’t be able to write that sentence anymore because people here will be dead, too. Please don’t be fooled by Trump backpedalling or punting a Greg for the masses. It means nothing and he doesn’t care. At this point, I shouldn’t have to type that sentence, either. But I do. Trump backpedals when and only when he feels his personal popularity wobble. But none of this is going to stop, not in Minnesota or Maine or anywhere else. If there was even the most wavering diaphanous gleam of a chance this was a real breaking point with change in tow, you’d know the names of Alex Pretti’s killers by now.
I haven’t known what to say because I don’t know how to make it sound like this is all going to be okay, and I really do try very hard to find a way to say that about most things, even if I don’t believe it. Especially if I don’t.
I can say vote in the midterms, but they’re a lifetime away. I can say be a helper, protest, strike if you can. And it’s true. But if I have to dig deep for something to make it better I don’t have a lot in the tank. “State actors in masks abducting and murdering citizens of that state in public with impunity and explicit cheerleading from all corners of leadership” is one of the few things everyone can point to and say fascism, but Trump’s approval rating is still 36%. And it’s not like Good or Pretti were the first, they’re just graphically on video, then graphically lied about instantly by a government that’s supposed to know you can’t just announce guilt and innocence from the White House Press Room, and in Alex Pretti, these ghouls finally managed to stumble on the legendary “perfect victim” that even GOP Joe can’t quite find a way to laugh about—but they’re working on it.
I have two bits of optimism. Maybe.
The first is that Trump does backpedal when he feels his personal popularity wobble. Always. And it wobbles when people are angry enough, loud enough, often enough, and in enough numbers to break through the algorithmic silo and start rolling up critical mass. As much as I Grandma on about how posting on the internet feels like making a difference but doesn’t…it can when the President is a fragile little fucking makeup-caked engagement-farming influencer who can’t psychologically bear his follower count going down by even one digit. This administration does outrageous things to find out where the boundaries are, like kids pushing against the pieces to find the soft one that will give. So there has to be push-back, or they’ll just light the boundary on fire. And here in the FUCKING UPSIDE DOWN, Trump actually seems to care more about online fury than real-world protests. This specific dictator is uniquely vulnerable to internet bullying tactics, which might be his only silver lining.
So say something. You have to say something. Even if it’s not very different than what everyone else is saying. Say it often. Say it everywhere. Say it loud.
If you stay loud, you don’t have to get loud.
The other one is just the pool of lava I dissociate into regularly. I find myself drifting off and thinking more and more about The Oklo Reactor these days, all the things the fact of its existence made me feel, all its majesty and strangeness and the messy weird burning garbage we all are because of it. I think about it all the time now. Maybe I keep trying to think big, to think in terms of historical eras and massive currents of time and energy, because if you think big enough, this too will pass. Into a molten inferno of agony, maybe, but pass.
But still, I just haven’t known what to say. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been having the same that’s fascism, they’re fascists, they want fascism/shut up stupid lib it’s not like they’re disappearing people on the streets you’re crazy the only fascism is if I have to be nice to people who aren’t me conversation my entire adult life. Seeing the same disingenuous smirk on the same satisfied, untroubled faces as they raise their opera glasses and/or Oakleys to view pain they believe will never touch them as entertainment and personal validation. In some morally corkscrewed sense, as their own salvation. Oh, now it’s bad? Cool. Still won’t vote for anyone but these exact people who love doing this and love telling you how much more of it they’ll do. Great. So no change, then.
Do you know what the word fascism means? I don’t mean the political system, I don’t mean the endless bad-faith internet arguments over whether this or that act of insane clown political malevolence is technically fascistic or not when it didn’t take place in Germany in the 30s. I mean where the word itself comes from. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
It comes from the word fasces. That’s Latin for this:
It’s a bundle of rods that either did or did not have an axe stuck through the middle of it. It was carried before magistrates to symbolize the unity of the state (the bundle), the ability of the state to punish its citizens (rods), and the presence of the axe was meant to wordlessly that the state has invested this particular magistrate with the authority to execute you with no cause but the passing judgment of their own whims.
It’s not a technicality. It’s not a warning. It’s not a neat little political science definition. We are here. They are here. And the fear they bring does half their job before you ever see them. Which doesn’t mean they don’t love the other half. That fasces is what ICE carries before them into your city and mine.
You might not be able to see it, but they feel it in their hands, and oh, how they exult in its weight.
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This week on my podcast, I read “Code is a liability (not an asset),” a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog, about the bad ideas behind the drive to replace programmers with chatbots.
Code is a liability. Code’s capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn’t even wear down.
I recognize that this is all very abstract, so let me make it concrete. When you buy a printer from HP, it becomes your property. What’s property? Well, let’s use the standard definition that every law student learns in first year property law, from Sir William Blackstone’s 1753 treatise:
“Property: that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”
The printer is yours. It’s your property. You have sole and despotic dominion over it in exclusion of any other individual in the universe.
But HP printers ship with a program that checks to see whether you’re using HP ink, and if it suspects that you’ve bought generic ink, the printer refuses to use it. Now, Congress never passed a law saying “If you buy an HP printer, you have to buy HP ink, too.” That would be a weird law, given the whole sole-and-despotic dominion thing.
But because HP puts an “access control” in the ink-checking code, they can conjure up a brand new law: a law that effectively requires you to use HP ink.
Anticircumvention is a way for legislatures to outsource law-making to corporations. Once a corporation adds an access control to its product, they can create a new felony for using it in ways that benefit you at the expense of the company’s shareholders.
Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech. Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!
Enshittification wasn’t an accident. It also wasn’t inevitable. This isn’t the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.
Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.
And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of “felony contempt of business-model,” where it’s literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn’t want that).
We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.
In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There’s plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there’s also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.
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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a cyberbullying seminar for parents. Two police inspectors and a psycho-pedagogists specialized in these matters came to explain to about fifty parents what online or offline bullying is, how it thrives, and which laws and structures are available in Italy to deal with it.
Among other things, those experts mentioned several times how phones and social media actually alter the brain of children and teenagers.
On one hand, the meeting was great. It was thought provoking, and concretely informative. All the speakers know their stuff, and all pointed out, gently but clearly, that it’s parents, not schools, the first agents who must educate kids about these matters.
On the other hand, I found the meeting really frustrating. With all respect for those experts, there were several moments when they really felt like Mark Zuckerberg’s lawyers. I say so because they:
started from, and never questioned, the same wrong, 100% wrong, unacceptable equation that (besides and before AI of course) Big Tech desperately needs us believe for its own survival: Internet = social media = smartphone
said that smartphones are inherently neutral, “what matters is to use them well”
the worst part: they spoke for more than one hour of the dangers of social media, getting closer and closer to the one real issue and its really easy solution, without ever calling it out.
That is, three experts speaking for more than one hour about the dangers of cyberbullying and social media for kids never questioned that what, 80%? of those problems - would just disappear if kids younger than, say, 14 years old had no personal smartphone. Does it happen in other countries too?
I have already explained here and here why personal smartphones for kids aren’t neutral at all, and why banning them (by parents, not governments!) is the only solution for certain problems that could ever work in the real world. That seminar, plus a rising trend of late 2025, confirmed to me that certain things are never repeated enough.
The trend I refer to, which may be even more dangerous in the long run, consists of laws like the one recently approved in Australia, which mandates that children must be at least 16 years old to create a social media account.
“Australia has just taken one of the most important steps yet in the global effort to protect children online. Beginning today... This reform finally corrects two major mistakes made in the early days of the internet: the United States (and then much of the world) set the age of “internet adulthood” to 13, and companies were given no responsibility to verify age at all. As long as a child could type “13,” companies could treat them like adults.
“Australia is the first country to correct those mistakes. Under the new policy, children under age 16 can still watch videos, read posts, and look things up online. What changes is that some of the largest companies on earth can no longer form business relationships with young children or use their personal data to keep them hooked on feeds, likes, and alerts. The policy will reduce the social pressure on kids, give parents back their authority, and help restore a healthier childhood. It may feel like a challenge at first, but it will quickly become the new normal.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Here is the truth about that law, and any other law like it: there is no need whatsoever for such a policy to protect children while leaving them free to “watch videos, read posts, and look things up online”:
children can - and should - do all those things on desktop or laptop computers, that will never be so addictive and uncontrollable as smartphones for the simple, non-circumventable reason that they can’t be carried around all the time.
In practice, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned they may be, in the long run any law like that one in Australia is only going to:
strenghten the concept that the only way to communicate digitally is through top-down, centralized social media, that is through structures that both states and for-profit corporations can easily watch, censor, shut down and generally use to influence public opinion
be actually used to enforce and legitimate more online censorship
de-legitimate parents, depriving them of the responsibility to deploy the only policy that would really work: no smartphones before 14/15 years old
be a Ruby Goldberg machine, born from some combination of ignorance of how the Internet works, and unwillingness to conceive the really simple solutions
fail anyway, because, besides being uselessly complicated and expensive, defining social media (that is, the environments in which the law should be applied) is more difficult than it sounds
Parent trying to clean his mouth with the table equivalent of age-limit laws for social media. Source: Wikipedia
Haidt says we “know social media can harm children”, and he’s right, but what about any instant messaging app with support for read receipts and image attachments? Even if it never collected and share any user data, any app like that would still be usable, by design, for cyberbullying, sexting, body shaming and so on.
If, quoting Haidt again, “The goal is to shift the environment so children are not pressured into digital spaces they don’t want, simply to avoid being left out”, laws that require a minimum age to be on “social media” work in the wrong way, in the wrong places, at the wrong level and for no good enough reason.
I’m not saying that age limits for using certain digital services shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that without age limits for smartphones any law mandating age limits would be half useless, half harmful.
Minimum age limits should be enforced above all for smartphones because it’s them, not software, that makes “social media” and “internet” impossible to monitor and regulate, and because physical devices are infinitely easier to keep away from children, at hugely smaller costs, than software apps usable 24/7 on something that, for all practical purposes, ends up attached to a child body like a Matrix plug.
Parent, giving his 11-year old son a new smartphone for Christmas. Source: Reddit.
“But social media and smartphones CAN be good for children, I know a child who...”
No. Thanks, but no thanks. I’m sick of “success” stories that, instead of being acknowledged as rare exceptions, are used as alibis to make and keep almost all the other kids dumber or more stressed than they could be.
Can social media and smartphones as they are today be actually good, and worth the parental effort that’s necessary to make a child handle them? Yes, but only for children in one of these two really rare conditions:
children who suffer from some concrete, serious malaise or disability for which nobody, from states to parents, could implement an authentic solution (if such children were many more than one in a thousands, it would almost surely be proof that real solutions that would work much better than social media are needed as soon as possible)
children born to that one one in a thousand families in which parents actually have the astonishingly rare combination of money, time, real digital competence and will to make themselves (not schools or laws) effective mentors, for years, of using intrinsically addictive social media
But I MUST be always in touch with my children. It’s for their safety!
If you still religiously believe smartphones for children are necessary because children must be in continuous contact with their parents, please...
Wake Up, already! You and every other generation before you since Pleistocene grew up well enough without electronic tags, and any mental problem surely wasn’t due to lack of such tags. Your kids - and their mental health needs - are no different. If you really, really believe they should be always reachable in real time, burden them with a camera-less dumbphone instead: that’s all the reachability needed to make you feel safe, with none of the dangers and temptations for your kids.
The solution is really simple. It isn’t used yet only because it does require almost every parent to acknowledge that, 100% in good faith, they did the dumbest, self-harming thing by giving smartphones to their children years before it would have made more good than harm. But it’s simple.
Let’s make laws like that one in Australia useless. Let’s save both parents and states lots of money. Let’s make life harder for wannabe censors.
Let’s progress to giving smartphones to children as socially acceptable as giving kids a packet of cigarettes, that is something that will make both those kids and every other kid breathing around them sick.
It’s much simpler than any other solution, much more effective, and it’s possible. Any time someone tells you it’s impossible, remember them there was a time, well within our living memory, where this:
Note: The way this Substack works is that every public post has a follow-up for paid subscribers only to hold the overflow: things I ran out of room or relevance to say or, usually, thoughts too spicy to not have some kind of barrier between random click-bys and telling me I’m full of shit.
This is the follow-up to Schrodinger’s Democracy: Why Isn’t Anyone Doing Anything? There wasn’t room, but also if one more person tells me I’m an ableist asshole for calling Trump a narcissist (he is) I’m going to hurl myself into the cold embrace of the depthless sea.
Well…it was paywalled. But since yesterday, several people contacted me to tell them how much this piece affected them and how much they wish could be widely read, that they felt it was important for others to read.
So I’ve unlocked it. Because I hope that’s true. That it’s important enough to help.
But…times are pretty tight around here, which is why subscriptions are a thing at all, so though it’s free and free to share, consider supporting me here, on Patreon, or through my tip jar anyway maybe.
Remember way back in 2016, before the election, when there was some leftover Scrooge-ember of warmth still innocently traipsing around the place and making jokes about elections could feel somewhat cozy and not like punching a baby, then guffawing in its face about how it has no future and never will? When Tom Hanks went on SNL and did a monologue as America’s Dad giving us a concerned talk about what we’re doing with our life?
That one.
Well, this is that. Only I’m not America’s Mom by any means. No one is, because America hates the absolute bunting out of anyone who even vibes like she wants to be our Mom.
I’m not even America’s drunk auntie. No, at best, I’m your weird out-of-town cousin no one really invites to things who talks too much and makes everything awkward by caring way too much and too bluntly about shit that’s not my business. And I’m not really talking to America, but to individual Americans, my fellow Americans, even. Except that I don’t think this vast pain really stops at our borders. It’d be nice if it did, in a way.
But when you’re in real trouble, I’m the black sheep cousin who’ll take you to a bottomless-booze brunch and lay out what that man is doing to you.
Welcome to the Girl What the Fuck Bar and Grill. Have a seat right over there, cousin. In the smoking section because we all already have the same cancer, so what difference does it make?
Hey, sweetheart. Order whatever you want. It’s on me. I just want to talk.
How are you feeling these days? Not great? Yeah, I get that. Not great in a weirdly specific way that, when you wake up and look around every single day, it really seems like everyone is also weirdly, specifically, feeling?
For quite a few years now? Say, just to pull a random number, nine or ten?
Have you, for example, felt, oh, I don’t know, overall kind of frozen and numb? That is, when you’re not completely emotionally unregulated with anger or pain or frustration or panic even though, before all this, you’d gotten pretty good at regulating those things?
Felt like you were walking on eggshells all the time? Paranoid? Anxious? Suspicious? Had trouble trusting others or believing they actually care for you? Really struggled to let your guard down at all?
Have you had memory problems? Like, with things that didn’t even happen that long ago, but are suddenly hard to recall at all? Brain fog? Confused all the time, unable to focus, concentrate, even on things you used to enjoy? Have you had trouble with your perception of time? Felt like you were just drifting through the days without really experiencing them, let alone relishing them? Felt distant from your own life, like you’re not the main character of your own story?
Hypersensitive to criticism but also feeling like you’ll never be good enough to actually feel okay, or even deserve to? Finding it tough to make decisions, even small ones? Replaced your sense of self-worth with being brutally hard on yourself and becoming convinced that even trying is hopeless? Felt isolated, lonely, lost? Maybe a little self-destructive, nihilistic, lashing out? Or hypervigilant, unable to not expect the worst? Deteriorating health for unclear reasons? Overspending what you don’t really have or clinging to every penny when you don’t really have to? Unsure of what’s real and what’s not? Have you felt like you need to apologize for your own existence, or had trouble feeling safe even when there’s no direct, imminent danger? Have work and relationships, even hobbies and ostensible fun, become difficult to manage or give much energy to? Maybe constantly felt like you’re not doing enough even though you’re objectively at your limit?
Everyone I even know of is feeling some or all of those things. Most everyone I hear about, even statistically, is going through it to that exact tune.
Funny, that.
Because it’s not long COVID. (Okay it might also be long COVID.) Those are all symptoms of having suffered or currently suffering narcissistic abuse.
I came across an article about recovering from a narcissistic relationship and how difficult it can be to stop feeling like a fucking husk all the time (of course, I really don’t want anyone to think I’m speaking from experience or reading such articles because of said experience or know anything at all about this sort of thing. I’m just talking shit on the internet about topics I’m utterly ignorant about like we all do don’t worry about it), or to escape the cycle of behaviors that used to be necessary to survive but are just bonkers maladaptive when your world isn’t being ruled by an insane clown who hates you for breathing.
I mean, it’s not subtle. The President of the United States goes on TV every day and tells more than half of the nation we’re worthless, evil, horrible, at fault for everything he does, lazy, stupid, weak, ugly, and that all we deserve is suffering. Then he tells us how great he is. Then back to how the rest of us shouldn’t, and have no right to, exist here.
And I thought: Well, shit, all of us are doing those things and feeling that way. All the time. That’s a bullet point dissection of That Thing Everyone’s Been Suffering and Trying to Talk About. That suffering we usually chalk up to cost of living, working too much, COVID, AI, the modern world, enshittification, the wrong timeline, pick your cause, it’s the Great Malaise.
Because Donald Trump and his Skeletor-horde of dipshit cryptids, but mostly Donald “The Mule” Trump, have subjected all of us to the cycle of narcissistic abuse for a fucking decade, and that shit sucks the life out of you. It takes what you were and sticks it in a blender to puree so your abuser can gulp it down and take whatever power you had left. It makes you forget what joy even was, or if it was. Your brain literally gets so overclocked with fear and shame and confusion and constantly strategizing and re-strategizing some kind of methodology that would stop what’s happening that it can’t handle anything else. It can no longer fully brain, because its functions have been permanently epoxied into fight/flight/fawn mode.
And it doesn’t stop when you get out. It can actually get worse. It can stay worse for a long time, because your abuser re-wired your consciousness to serve his or her needs. And, oh, America, honey, baby, it’s vanishingly rare for a victim of narcissistic abuse not to go back to their tormentor at least once.
Sigh. Nailed it. I’m still mad at you, though, don’t get it twisted.
We really thought we’d made it out in 2020. We danced in the fucking streets like an 80s music video about humanity coming together to rock. We were sure we were safe. That we knew better now. That we’d see the signs next time. We wouldn’t let ourselves be hurt like that again. We’d learned. We’d grown. We’d escaped.
But we’d been rewired. Rewired to serve the needs of a sadist who was no longer in charge, whose needs were suddenly gone. We’d beaten him, but we hadn’t beaten ourselves. We hadn’t beaten the vacuum left when he went, not in power, but in needs to serve—and America simply doesn’t and never has known how lean into the same work and devotion to serve our own needs the way we lean into serving the needs of cruel authority figures.
It’s not completely our fault. Our own parents never taught us any better.
Oh my god, Chuckers, I can’t breathe. It’s simple amazing how little blame we get for the state of the world! Yes, yes, go on, everyone, truly it’s all the fault of our dirtbag kid!
As we stepped out from his control in the early 20s, we could see and understand and correctly place the blame on Trump and some few of his flying monkeys for their actions, but none of us had any real interest in looking, long, hard, or otherwise, at our own enabling, our appeasement, our willingness to isolate and self-mutilate for the sake of either his approval or at least a brief reprieve from his rage, at our complicity in our own torture. We thought we’d just go right back to Life Before Him, but the problem with that is the Paradox of Narcissistic Aftermath: the people we were then were already gone, but the problems his full technicolor surround-sound 24/7 drama-inferno distracted us from were still sitting there, unsolved. Worse than that, his entrance into our lives had already been greased by a deep, unspoken desire to avoid solving those exact problems, a longing to be distracted from them.
In 2020? 2021? 2022, 23, 24? We figured we’d dealt with the problem. We didn’t even try; frankly, we didn’t much want to even start, to deal with what we’d allowed ourselves to become to survive him. Of course, never just him, but everyone who came before him to lay the groundwork for us to accept his cruelty. Which, you know, not for nothing, is called grooming.
We couldn’t shake all the habits we’d formed just to get through each grueling, stupid, impossible day. Doomscrolling was always millions upon millions of people anxiously checking in on their abusive parent/spouse/orange overlord’s mood every morning to see if we’d be able to have a semi-rational, not even good, just neutral day, relatively free of pain-hurricanes and pride-buckling disasters he spun up out of thin, wholly unnecessary air to feel a little more alive watching us scramble to contain the damage. We didn’t just let, but actively shoveled blame onto our own side for anything that went wrong because it was never safe to blame our unbalanced, unpredictable bully—because after so many years of being blamed, blaming ourselves and never him became an ingrained habit.
And we couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop feeling like nothing mattered, like everyone was just waiting for a vulnerable moment to let their mask fall and show they’d always hated us. Resource-guarding, snapping at everything, snarling, backed into a corner that was suddenly open air—but still felt like the walls closing in. Couldn’t remember how to socialize or build things or function in public because we’d been forbidden to for so long. Couldn’t stop instinctively centering him in every conversation, every news story, looking for his opinion, anticipating his plans, speculating about his reactions to every little thing. Lashing out at ourselves, our friends, our rebound relationship. Blaming ourselves—of course it was always our fault, we are stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse, he said so all the time. After long enough, the human heart just starts to nod along to the beat. And then the beat becomes a truth we don’t know how to reject anymore. Stupid, useless, weak, powerless, groveling, embarrassing, just as bad if not worse. Oh, we Democrats brought it on ourselves, didn’t we? Look what we made him do.
And then, well, once we were out, once we had a moment to dance in the sun and take a breath of our own, he didn’t seem so scary anymore. Still horrible, still a monster, but it’s not like we’re getting back together so it’s sort of okay to laugh at his jokes again, right? He looks so successful on social media! PRETTY FUCKING CLEARLY a whole lot of people started remembering the “good" times, forgetting the fear and pain he put us through because that’s what the hurt brain does for us. It’s gross and fucked up to admit that the fight/flight/fawn years at least had energy to them. Adrenaline, cortisol, these are incredibly damaging stress hormones to have rocketing through your system long-term, but in the moment, they do make you feel…purposeful. Energized. In motion. Sharp and clear.
Distracted from all those other problems, at least. Problems that are a lot harder to solve than ditching one bad man.
And as we went into withdrawal from those constant stress-chemicals and the corresponding dopamine and seratonin that compensate when you either do something that feels like it met the moment (you know, like posting about it online) or at least get a pause from the madness, we started looking around for somewhere to get our fix again. Someone to hurt us so we can get back to the oblivion of a familiar pattern of pain.
Our friends don’t look like friends anymore. We only see faults. That’s what love is, right, finding fault and lashing out? That’s what our bodies learned. And this new guy/girl we’re with is boring, he/she doesn’t activate our burnt-out receptors, and he/she seems to genuinely like us so he’s worthless. Or he’s a secret demon vampire because that’s all we deserve.
And then Narcissus comes waltzing back, looking for his supply again. Which had to be us, now. All of us. After he’d gotten four years drinking from the firehose, nothing else would do. Even, maybe especially, if you’ve dealt with real narcissists in real life, it’s hard to even get your head around one so utterly definitional of the disorder that their basic maintenance dose of narcissistic supply is the entire planet’s attention.
In the myth of Narcissus, we are not Echo, begging for love, to be heard. We are simply the water in which he sees himself reflected forever.
And that beast was fucking thirsty by 2024.
It’s hard for anyone left of President Snow to characterize Trump’s behavior from 20-24 as lovebombing, but that’s what it was, just like 15-16, when he was pretending to be cool with the gays and the minorities and the ladies and everyone the GOP wants to drop-kick into a black hole. Whatever else is specifically wrong with that guy, he’s also such a pure, limit-break narcissist that those two periods are his mask-on good behavior. Before he had to pretend to be some kind of fun to some kind of person, he was just openly partnering with Jeffrey Epstein to run child beauty pageants and raping with impunity, and that’s just what we know about so far. Not screaming into a camera every single day that every liberal needs to die is, in fact, Trump and his party being charming on a first date.
What mask? This is my real face.
But I said he’s done it to all of us several paragraphs ago. Because his followers have really been stuck in the classic cycle. Lovebomb/Idealization—Devaluation—Discard. Sometimes all of them in a single day.
And I suppose I can force my Empathy Hat on long enough to say that must be a real mindfuck. It’s probably understandable, from a certain point of view, that so many of them have given up and bellyflopped into pure fiction and insanity. When you’re being gaslit about basic facts every day, the mind starts to fall apart. It truly can’t tell the difference between real and His Perception of Real anymore, because this huge person in their life keeps telling them what they know happened, didn’t, and what they know didn’t happen, did. Where else was there left to go but disconnection from reality? Where was there to put all that confusion, shame, fear, disappointment? The narcissistic cycle is impressively fine-tuned to scramble your logical processors and squeeze out your sense of selfhood so it can be replaced with a sense of his selfhood.
He promises them the moon, tells them he loves them, acts like a funny, cool (what they think is cool), successful guy who’s gonna give them the life they always wanted. Or acts like a victim so he’ll be pitied and babied and fussed over as the most harmed person in the world or history and also multiverse (there’s the covert-type, and while everyone armchair diagnoses him as malignant, to me he’s clearly a c-c-c-combo of all three NPD presentations) or slaloms back and forth, often in one sentence. Then he turns around and tells them they’re dumb overdramatic fuck-ups he doesn’t give a shit about and they keep cheering because they’re still hung up on the rush of the first part, waiting for that time to come back, that guy, that feeling of belonging and release and possibility. So it must be a joke! He’s just joking. He loves us really, that’s just what he’s like, you wouldn’t understand our relationship, it’s so special, so unique. You don’t understand him like we do. That’s just his sense of humor, we don’t mind. He doesn’t mean it.
Some of us fight. Some of us flee. Some of us fawn.
Then he gets elected and starts eating their faces for breakfast every day, telling them he fucking loves eating faces, but complaining about the taste of theirs already. On Day One, so to speak.
But he’s good at this, if nothing else. Whenever his malevolence gets close to actually breaking the spell and losing them, he goes right back to lovey-dovey language, writing checks and subsidies, even drug rescheduling because an unexpected present goes really far with people starved for something that feels real. Or, more often, he opts to do some mean horrible bit of anti-social sadism, just the way he knows they like it. Just like the old days, when they were courting.
And round and round it goes.
Conservatives feel the malaise, too. It’s just a different flavor, because they’re the golden child, and the rest of us are the scapegoat.
Here, have a laugh with a pretty genius while you take that one in.
The fact is, it’s completely fucking exhausting. Ennervating. Stultifying. To spend a decade—A FUCKING DECADE—in a world where every single conversation involves him, every personal choice has to take his judgment and eventual reaction into account (I know couples, gay and straight, who chose not to have children because they couldn’t be sure of their own rights in Trump’s world, let alone those children’s. Human beings do not exist who would have otherwise, just because he might react badly). Every time you tune into any kind of media it will orient itself around him or the effects of his deeds like the protagonist in a comic book movie, to the point that no one has to specify to what the pronoun him refers anymore. This fucking guy ate a whole pronoun! That used to belong to half the species!
The gravity of that, once it’s weighed on you for years, is so hard to escape. And harder still to cope with not having that weight crushing down on you while still bulging with the muscles you built to carry it. Still needing to feed that new bulk.
Of course, when someone does slide back into a nuclear-blast site of a relationship with an abuser like this, they pretty quickly remember why they left.
Oh yeah, I forgot! This sucks.
But now they’re stuck right back at the beginning of the labyrinth with a different 80s guy with weird hair saying fear me love me do as I say. And it feels so much more overwhelming to leave all over again, to do all that work you already did, to dig yourself out when you just watched yourself fuck up all that progress like the piece of shit he always said you were. So much more impossible to get out from under it, especially when the friends and family who supported your exit the first time are a lot less sympathetic the second time around. Or maybe it seems so much more possible the good times will return, since he was just acting like he cared again. All depending on what “good times” means to you, I suppose. Plus it’s far more embarrassing to admit you went back to the guy who hurt you and used you than it was to just get fooled once by a guy who’s quite good at fooling people.
But he didn’t learn to appreciate his position in your life and treat you better. He learned exactly what you’d accept from him without consequence. So the second time is always unfathomably worse.
Obviously, many of us did not choose to go back.
I mean…sort of.
We definitely chose not to commit to our new political relationship. The media, which is just made of people in the end, all the more so since journalism has been outsourced to literally everyone with a pulse, chose to express apoplectic anger at anyone else displaying even the mildest versions of Trump’s river of toxic sludge. Everybody on the left chose to inflict a lot of the abuse Trump shat down our necks on Biden, Harris, and their administration—plus also just a lot of people on our own side, over any disagreement on anything at all. Good lord, we canceled anyone who got any traction or influence as soon as humanly possible, and it was only ever somewhat assisted by bots and bad actors.
Which is…wait for it…also one of those symptoms of having suffered narcissistic abuse. Becoming hypercritical, but also hypersensitive to criticism. Blowing small disagreements way out of proportion and over-reacting, then finding oneself unable to back down because your literal physical endocrine system learned backing down does nothing to stop the attacks, it just shows weakness and weaklings get fucking eaten. These are usually behaviors learned from the abuser, because imitating someone with power over us, subconsciously, can feel like a logical way to get some power back, or at least appease the creature who loves only himself by appearing more like him. Doesn’t work, but it feels like it might.
That, and once you start feeling like nothing you do matters anymore, well, nothing you do matters anymore.
And once it came time to reject old patterns and move on with our lives, to show that we’d done the work, it turns out a huge number of us didn’t really have any energy left for that, or even protecting ourselves or our loved ones. Or doing anything. Voting for a regular politician regularly, but not in a way that felt like being a paladin in a life or death battle against MegaSauron, didn’t light up our adrenaline pathways or flood them with sweet fulfilled dopamine.
I guess sometimes, when you’ve been asked to be the only one doing the right thing for years, being selfish can feel like the morally right thing to do. And doing nothing feels even more right, because nothing matters, you’re so tired, and you don’t even know how to go back to normal life without a monster in it. You can barely remember how that worked, so now, the monstrous feels familiar but you feel like a stranger, and you really, really need therapy about that, but group therapy for a couple of hundred million is tough to put together and you don’t want to even think about the co-pay.
I guess that day was November 4, 2024, huh, America?
We’re all suffering the way children of narcissistic parents, spouses of narcissist, employees, anyone who has to live a huge portion of their lives connected to someone who requires all the oxygen in any room to even begin to exist, suffer. And we continue to hurt ourselves and each other because we’ve been taught by example that the ability to hurt is a valid measure of personal freedom—which is a whole nine-ring circus of fucked-up. But humans just want to feel safe, and rarely do, so they’ll take anything. That’s what narcissists want, too, it’s just that whatever happened to them when they were kids to break them this specific way means they can only start to feel safe when others are powerless and devoted only to them.
After all, if you’re the only one with power and everyone is desperate to please you, you won’t be abandoned. Won’t be hurt. Can’t be invisible as you always feared, always knew you were to the people with power over you.
Ugh. This Empathy Hat is itchy.
To the dark side of the brain, the animal instinct side, Trump seems mighty safe. Even from bullets. Even from the law. Seems like the only person with agency anymore. So people either cling to him in hopes that safety and freedom rubs off, or dwell in a daze of unhappiness and hopelessness, helplessness and anxiety, a forever Now in which no long-term plans even feel possible because our brains know a new trauma is gonna hit in the next minute.
He could die tomorrow and it would take years upon years for our brains to not know that, if they ever did.
I can’t even tell you how often I use this gif these days. It is, in fact, not great out there!
Now, we can’t you-go-girl our way out of this, at least not for a few years, if the Nothing allows elections ever again. And even if the regime ends, we will 100% go through all these stages and symptoms and malaises and reactionary behaviors all over again trying to figure out a way to recover without actually working on ourselves at all. In some ways, I hope Gavin Newsom does pull it off, because I don’t like him that much, so I kind of feel fine letting him take on the chin the absolute level of misplaced hate and anger we’re definitely going to aim at the next Democrat with any power because we couldn’t aim it at the shitheel who actually hurt us. He seems good for it.
The only thing that’s actually going to get your groove, back, America? I hate to say it and you hate to hear it, but darling, you’ve got to believe in yourself. You’ve got to get your pride back. I’m not talking about patriotism or military parade bullshit or singing I’m Proud to Be an American with a trembling lip. Because fucking barf.
But a whole lot of people, for a whole lot of decades, have poured a whole lot of energy into convincing everyone of every party in this country that America itself is worth nothing, not even standing up for. That we’re bad, either for a legacy of hatred and violence or a legacy of not enough hatred and violence, either way, we’re corrupt garbage, we’ve always been corrupt garbage, so we deserve what we get. That we could never be or do any good, we are completely unredeemable and disgusting, that we should never have existed, that no part of our system or anyone in it has the smallest merit.
If no one believes in the system, if no one, for a moment, will stand up for the system, the system crumbles. It’s crumbling now.
And yeah, we’ve been bad. A lot. We’ve done some heinous fuckery to ourselves and to others. I’m not saying history didn’t happen. I’m not that white. Nor am I blind or an idiot. So everything I’m about to say is actually quite hard for me, because I, too have spent most of my life laughing at the idea of the promise of America. Quoting George Carlin, being cynical, hating most things about this place I was born.
But it doesn’t work.
A country that thinks itself incapable of virtue will utterly gorge itself on vice.
People who believe they deserve nothing will allow anything to be done to them, through them, with them, and in their name. And the people who yell loudest about how much they deserve are always the ones terrified to their marrow that they don’t deserve anything at all, even a single crumb of grace. The phrase America Sucks knows no political side. And if it sucks, why not burn it down? Does it matter that much who’s holding the match?
And that’s how these leeches slither in. On a road slicked for them by apathy, self-loathing, and masochism.
If you convince anyone they are wrong and bad, incompetent, monstrous and undeserving to the core, you teach them it’s okay to act as though that’s true. That it’s okay if they’re treated as though it’s true. You remove their ability to believe they can change or grow or become anything but more rot from a rotten root.
And that’s what a narcissist ultimately does. They leave you feeling like a husk because they used you as one. As the vessel they needed to pour all their own self-hatred and pain and fear and insecurity and loneliness and darkness so they didn’t have to own it or process it, so they could say you were the bad one all along and walk free.
We have to find a way to stand up for ourselves, to reject what is, admittedly, horrendous, but claim what has been good and what could be good again or anew. To start imagining new shapes tomorrow could take and reject the patterns we’re stuck in. To not just react, but act. To remember that an immigrant is a guest, and one of the most ancient rules of civilization is we do not harm guests. To remember that difference is just reality, no two of anything are the same and cannot be. To defend each other, stand for something, say no to the void. To redefine the promise of America and genuinely give a shit about it, about ourselves, about how we treat ourselves, what we’re willing to accept.
To make our escape plans and bide our time. Like so many trapped souls have had to do on the individual level. We must do it on a mass scale.
Something like national self-care. Not a spa day, but self-care nonetheless. Because we haven’t been taking care of ourselves. We let ourselves get sick, we let ourselves get hurt, we let ourselves suffer and starve. We let ourselves hurt others, because we stopped believing it was in us to stop. We’ve let everything that we used to care so much about slide. We have to remember, not who we are, which is a mess, but who we wanted to be. Once upon a time.
And until we do, there will never be an end to the men and women who want us hopeless, who want us frozen and numb and confused, who want us scrambling for their regard, who want us bone-tired from working to keep them happy, whose highest goal is to walk on our backs so their precious feet need never touch the ground.
Baby, honey, America, Americans, humans, Earthlings, I love you. You’re better than that. You do deserve better.
Someday, I hope you believe that as much as I do.
As much as I’m trying to believe it. Really fucking hard. Every day.
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Imagination is one of the features of authentic intelligence, and a collective loss of imagination - and consequently, of hope and motivation - is one of the big problems of our time, if not a major cause of many of them.
Here, as a tiny stimulus to keep imagination and quests for a better future alive, I list twelve things that today may seem part of the very fabric of reality, but I feel will disappear, or at least be much smaller than today and unrecognizable to people of 2025, in just a few decades. Possibly very, very few decades.
Here are those twelve things, divided in two main groups, for reasons I’ll explain at the end of the post.
Group A
Addictive social media
Mobile phones with cameras
App stores for phones and all other computers
Online matching for dating
AI chatbots for everybody
Physical billboards, if not all advertising
Hundreds of choices for every consumer product
Group B
Air conditioning and buildings that need it
Falsely smart cars
“Smart” consumer products, also known as consumer-IoT
Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies
This is a surprise, keep reading to see it
Why things in group A will disappear
The social media of today will disappear because they are a major cause for a major increase in public levels of anxiety, depression, misinformation and political polarization and inability to concentrate and think clearly. The good news is that this would be possible with a few, really concrete actions like this and these.
Cameras in mobile phones will disappear because, together with algorithms designed to mess with people’s minds, they are a major aggravation to the above-mentioned mental health pandemic. Just think about it: would teenagers and adults alike be as stressed as they are if they had no possibility to show off everything they eat, wear or do, every minute, as if everybody else had a duty to care? Sometimes, I think that the only truly revolutionary act everybody could really do is covering with tape the lenses of their phones now.
Screenshot of Google image search.
Centralized App Stores will disappear because, while we will never all become programmers like Free Software advocates dream, something as stupid as letting a handful of companies castrate and turn into mind-sucking probes inventions as powerful as mobile or stationary computers cannot go on forever.
Online dating that directly matches people through data, not love will be replaced by apps organizing “real-life events in every major city every week” where every group of people who could be good matches for each other will see every other participant how they really are, without AIs to cheat, or possibility to swipe left. That may still be a bit too close to eugenics, for my taste, but will surely be much, much healthier and fairer than today.
Unrestricted access to AI chatbots will end because... it’s already painfully obvious that it is not for the masses.
Excessive choice is what Scott Adams popularized as confusopoly: companies with similar products who, in order to prevent customers from making informed decisions, intentionally confuse them instead of competing on price.
Confusopoly deserves a bit more space because we “First World” citizens suffer from it in every field. We have scores of foods that only differ in their marketing, scores of offers for utilities and mobile contracts that take days to compare with minimal gains, cars with scores of options that all too often cannot be combined just like we’d want, or would cost much more than advertised...
What about sportswear? Today, thanks to changed social norms, machines and healthier working conditions for most jobs, it’s almost impossible to figure out in ten seconds whether someone is a train conductor or an accountant just from his clothes, hands or gait, as Sherlock Holmes could do in the 1880s. But everybody can immediately tell the exact sub-category of sport someone engages in, and how seriously, by looking at which combination of shoes, jacket and pants he’s wearing. The result is that anyone who could and would have occasionally practiced three different sports with the same “equipment” two generations ago is now pushed - to make them spend more, of course - to get multiple sets of gear to practice just one:
One last example of excessive choice that will end because is both wasteful and cruel is pets. We have created scores of cats and dogs with torture breeding, just to get the literal opposite, that is, of appreciation for choice, diversity and uniqueness: dogs and cats that all look alike, and a really expensive but sadly booming pet cloning business.
This explosion of choices is a wrong turn, not an enrichment : even letting self-gratification aside, when there is too much to choose from, it becomes almost impossible to make the optimal choice. This is why all this choice will disappear, to be replaced by many less models for every product, but all much more customizable and repairable than today.
Energy-intensive healthcare and single use medical supplies will not disappear, but they will be substantially downsized, because the connection between their price or energy use and human health and longevity is not as strong as it seems. Did you know, for example (see previous link for details), that comparisons of cataract surgery in the UK and in India have shown that the same treatment produces only 5% of the emissions and 6% of the solid waste (that is, much lower costs) in the UK?
The common reason why the stuff and practices listed in Group B will disappear, at least in their current forms, is really simple: they consume so much energy, money and material that they will increasingly become unaffordable (more on this in a moment).
The services in Group A, instead, will disappear thanks to a combination of collective mental fatigue and increased awareness of their toxicity. If we are smart, that is. If you think that’s impossible, remember that people, including pregnant women, used to smoke indoors because it was addictive and glamorous just a few years ago.
But even if we aren’t smart, the services and products of Group A will disappear anyway because the “surprise” member of Group B that I didn’t name before is... all of Group A: that’s all stuff that requires too much money, energy and material to last much longer.
Much sooner than you may wish, if several forecasts I’ve seen recently are even half right. The coming bust of the AI and data centers bubble, which can never happen too soon but is surely close, may set things straight all by itself. But even if that issue didn’t exist, the shortage of diesel fuel that several experts (see list below) say will be enough to severely downsize every sector of the economy - including deployment of renewables or nuclear power - may “happen as early as... 2030”.
And now the good news
Here’s the best part of all this, the one that really matters: with the exception of air conditioning, if missing where and to the extent it would be actually needed, none of the changes I listed will decrease authentic quality of life, and most of them will concretely improve it, by decreasing our current levels of stress, loneliness and personal debt. Read the list again, and you’ll agree with me.
Reading suggestions about the coming diesel crisis
Note: the way this Substack works is that for every public post there is a follow-up for paid subscribers to hold everything too spicy to not have a barrier between people who want to scream at me and said screaming.
You know what, 2025? Everyone hates you. You have no friends. Not only are you not invited to any holiday parties, but I talked to Everyone, and Everyone actually went out of their way to make a You Are Cordially Uninvited Forever card and the production value was actually really lovely. Embossed and everything.
January seems like another, also shitty, lifetime ago. Every day is simply so much unhinged bullshit it’s impossible to keep up with just the three or four worst things that happened to the most people before end of business, let alone the smaller disasters waiting to meet you in your area. Yes, it’s by design, but knowing that the Great Overwhelm is being done by design doesn’t really help, or do anything at all. Bad Times Always is an amazingly effective paralytic, as it turns out.
It is, in fact, not.
Everyone I know is exhausted. And depressed. Not in a normal basically maintainable Adulthood Sucks Ha Ha Insert Boomer Joke Here way, but in a Life Is Now Being Slowly Digested By a Gelatinous Cube way. And alternating dissociating from the endless tire-fire around us and screaming into the void hoping to hit on some magical combination of eldritch syllables that stops all this. Unfortunately, we’re all using our phones to do both of those things.
Was it better in 2024? I mean…yeah, a little! Up until November, anyway.
America’s Christmas Card
And I keep thinking about all those “Young” Republicans we got to read about a few months ago, and then, like everything else, had to promptly forget because something exploded. Giggling like schoolboys vaping in the bathroom over how dreamy Noted SuccessMan Adolf Hitler was and calling themselves Nazis (so brave, so cool) in their shitty little private Bratz Boyz Group Chat. And everyone doing the same fucking brainless shambling square dance they always do when Republicans openly and obviously do super-public Nazi shit while repeating YES WE ARE ACTUALLY FOR REAL NAZIS five times in that self-same school bathroom mirror hoping Stephen Miller appears and brings them all an early Christmas. Normal people all point out that this is clearly Nazi shit, Republicans pretend we’re crazy while smirking their way through still more Nazi shit, the media asks no questions and investigates nothing, but does run stories on how over-sensitive liberals are keeping the government shut down. Lather, rinse, ingest conditioner.
Their ease. Their relaxation. Their casual fun.
That media dance has been repeated many times since. But it’s always the same. And it makes us feel even more helpless, because we all watched that media drum a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign a year ago; we know they can still be a media and still make things happen, they could still help us, but they don’t and they won’t. So then we all just go back to work because what the fuck else can you do? Ground beef is $8 a pound. People are dying everywhere. Decisions are being made that none of us have any control over at all, and half of us will only become aware of next year when vaccines are illegal and you have to present 2.5 white babies to pollsters as valid ID to vote.
And all the while, through the careful steps of this endless monstrous dance, all over the internet, I see all these people, most of them even organic, from inside and from outside this country, looking at a TRULY grotesque pantomime strip-tease where the dancers keep taking off bits of clothing and pretending they’re going to reveal something other than just a shit-ton of swastikas under there and ask the same question phrased a hundred million different ways.
Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Why aren’t you Americans rising up? Why aren’t we Americans rising up? Why are people just letting this happen? Someone should do something! It’s going to be too late really, really soon! Surely this time, this act will be enough and someone will do something!
I remember, back in the Before Time known as January 2025, people asking why Americans weren’t marching in the streets. And everyone saying it’s cold, wait for summer. But then nothing really materialized during the summer, either.
And now it’s cold again.
There have been protests. But the Dance of the Sugar Plum Media doesn’t report much on them, they convene and disperse and are forgotten. And the gelatinous cube gurgles as we dissolve just a little more.
Hell, even Trump has said out loud, into a microphone he knew was on, looking at a camera that he was fully aware was likewise rolling live, to people who allegedly work for the press and not him: “Wow, we actually really thought this was gonna be a lot harder and y’all would fight back but I guess not!
And then that pustulant undead Hamburglar laughed. At us. In disbelief.
Nauseatingly, he has a point
Many answers to this question have been barfed up into the hive-mind’s overused airbag of the soul over the last Spy Hunter oil-slick-and-nail-dump of a year. And they’re all true.
It is cold. We are demoralized from years of “resistance” meaning absolutely nothing except blood-wrestling in a pool of grifters, liars, and bots. (God, remember all those White House “insider” accounts that got so huge in 17-18 because people really believed they were who they said they were and their every breathless cheerleader-screech that the end was right around the corner oh and also they all fucking vanished and were always nothing?) It is a geographically gargantuan country without an obvious central city or focal point to protest around (I mean sort of. Trump Tower is right there, and I never see anyone picketing it). It is more difficult to find the fire when (barely) a majority did, allegedly, vote for this. Everything is so expensive there’s little time or energy left over to fight with. The media is complicit, and algorithmically siloed so that people aren’t receiving the same information more or less ever. Whatever the left is in the Year of No God 2025, it’s profoundly divided and hates itself more than anyone on the right. The pandemic did take the wind out of everyone’s sails, maybe especially those who refused to believe it was happening.
And we do very much expend our energy and receive our dopamine in exchange for just openly weeping into the festering sore of what the internet has become, which sure does feel like doing something, even though it isn’t. Oh, don’t we ever.
Look, I’m doing it now!
But I don’t really think any of those very valid reasons are the main problem. Other than the tech issues, all of those factors have been around for quite awhile and didn’t result in this deep freeze of the mind.
No one’s doing anything because no one knows what to do.
Seriously, what exactly is it we’re supposed to be doing to fix this? No one has any idea what might even begin to be effective in this bicameral hellmouth of a situation. Protest? My siblings in solidarity, we’ve been protesting. For decades. It has rarely, if ever, made one sad little bubble-wrap pop of difference in government policy. My generation protested Iraq and inequality on the backs of our parents teaching us that if the government does a bad, that’s how you fix it, just like they did with Vietnam. And it changed nothing whatsoever, pretty much like they did with Vietnam, because the protests weren’t why Vietnam ended, they just drummed Johnson out of office, water-slide swirled Nixon in, and scared the conservatives so bad they worked for 50 years to make sure nothing like that could ever force them to share oxygen with a dirty liberal ever again.
I remember so clearly coming home from an absolutely gargantuan protest of the Iraq War and watching George Bush look into the camera and say he did not care how many people protested, this was happening. And I’m not sure I ever really believed too much in American democracy again. If it doesn’t matter how many people protest, everyone could and the government would do what it pleased anyway. Which lined up with actual events a lot better than the utter canonization of the 60s protests ever did.
As with most things, Kurt Vonnegut said it best:
“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
Well, what the hell are we every day people supposed to do with that? You cannot motivate people with: HEY KIDS! IF YOU DROP EVERYTHING IN YOUR LIVES AND TAKE TO THE STREETS, RISK YOUR LIVES AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND LOVED ONES, AND DO IT EVERY SINGLE WEEK AT A MINIMUM, PROBABLY NOTHING SIGNIFICANT WILL CHANGE AT ALL (MIGHT GET WORSE THOUGH!) BUT HEY AT LEAST YOU’LL LOSE YOUR JOB!
The women’s protest of Trump’s first inauguration was the biggest in history, until the next mass protest of Trump’s administration, and almost every protest after that. And nothing happened. There isn’t one single thing that can be pointed to as a victory that grew out of those events. So yeah, we go, we make a sign, we protest, and then everyone yells about how Americans aren’t doing anything during nationwide protests—which is completely fucking fair because protests clearly don’t amount to much more than a flyer in a landfill. Don’t forget all those protests in France amounted to just about precisely fuck-all, the retirement age was still raised. But watching online, you’d think they won.
It is, in fact, not.
Support Democrats? I mean, come on. We’re just not going to do that. If we were ever going to do that, we’d be bitching about eggs again and the media would be roasting the President on the daily. There have been more articles about how thoroughly the Democrats are useless trash than about Trump wandering around the White House roof talking to the fucking trees and clouds, and everyone just goes along with the meme.
And are they useless trash? Maybe. Definitely Fetterman. But they’re also human beings (so I’m told) and I’d bet they’re as psychologically bodied by the dissolution of the system to which they’ve devoted their lives as we who did not devote our lives to any system we could avoid are. I don’t think they know what to do, either, because nothing they have done, and they have, because court cases stopping executive orders don’t actually just spontaneously generate like mice in a haystack, people have to prepare, file, argue, pursue them, and that thankless bullshit is where a lot of Democrat effort has gone, but no need to acknowledge it—and hey, don’t worry, no one will!
Remember that whole government shutdown? Remember those 8 senators (and fuck you very much, Angus King) who voted with the Republicans and we’re all super mad at them only not really because everyone’s already forgotten? Well…when Democrats were holding out, did anyone support them? Praise them on social media, drum up awareness and energy for them to keep going? Tell them they were fighting for all of us and not to give in because we had their backs? Say anything positive at all? Did you?
So maybe we just put that one aside because I don’t know that there’s anything Democrats could do to get people to speak positively of them anymore, even their own members. And no, Bernie Sanders doesn’t fucking count, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Full revolution? Well, I’ll tell you something about that eternal eschatological pipe-dream. If people don’t believe protesting will help, they’re definitely not going to abandon their entire existences to get immediately shot storming whatever facility people imagine will result in instant victory where conservative elements don’t get to have a say in the New Republic. Especially when no one can so much as organize a general strike, let alone a revolution. For fuck’s sake, we can barely convince the depressed progressive set to go out and do something fun with other humansafter work, let alone the actual grueling carnage and privation of a kind of conflict almost none of us can imagine.
Because revolutions, and protests, require enormous plans. Logistics, personnel, consensus. Not just consensus on how to revolution, but what the revolution will replace the system with, a task at which the left is notoriously clownshoed. Babies, we can’t agree on what name to call ourselves. Other than the fucking People’s Judean Front.
And enormous plans require leaders organizing people into following them. Not just leaders like your local charity or PTA has leaders. I mean people with the reputation, charisma, public trust, and organizational ability to have huge swaths of people actually twitch a toe when they say jump. And by people I mean men, obviously, because we’ve seen what happens when a woman tries.
On the left? We have no plans and no leaders. And I’m not just talking about Democrats in office. I’m talking across the board. Partly because we on the left don’t like to do hierarchy or giving/following orders, it’s antithetical to our whole thing. But you don’t get a whole lot done without them and oh look, we’re not getting a whole lot done.
There is no one stepping up to be a leader right now. To tell us what to do to fix this and how—and maybe most importantly when and where to do it.
And I mean no one. Name the leader(s) of the No Kings protests without looking it up. Go ahead. Or Occupy. Or even your local Democratic Party chair. I’d say I’ll wait, but we all know I’d look like the guy who chose poorly at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by the time someone who definitely looked it up pretends to know.
I’m not talking about what Gavin Newsom and Bernie Sanders are doing, either, because when it comes right down to it, they’re doing exactly the same thing, which is JUST. FUCKING. TALKING. ABOUT. THEMSELVES.
Live footage
I’ve been wondering for months why Bernie Sanders was touring the country giving the same speech he’s always given to the same people who’ve always listened instead of…using that same tour to plan, organize, and disseminate the details of a general strike.
Because he could do that. He might be the one person who could do that without getting blasted into space by the internet cycle of bitch/moan/grift. But he doesn’t even suggest it. Or any specific action. Neither does Newsom, but I’m not sure anyone really expects President Kenough to. But none of the lefty influencers or podcasters are making any attempt to organize people, either. Anyone who could be a leader actually making a movement and doing an action is just making memes and booking speaker fees.
I suspect because those things are all upside. If the meme or moment or particular phrasing takes off, they make money and gain fame. If not, no big deal, new media cycle incoming in about 30 seconds. Hell, the pervasive meme that capitalism is the root of every single problem, no matter how big or small, has an incredible, and god, I hope unintentional, numbing effect on anti-establishment energy. After all, if we can’t get rid of capitalism in one fell swoop, why even bother? Tackling any other problem is useless when it’s only capitalism that’s to blame. In fact, whispers the commentariat, voting and working to make incremental progress is actually bad and supports the evil system!
It was, in fact, not
But if Bernie Sanders called for a general strike on a specific date and it didn’t happen, or it did and was very small, or it did and was huge but made no difference, or any number of failure conditions, his political leverage and reputation, as well as that of the progressive movement at large, would nosedive directly into the all-swallowing sea. If Newsom did, any Presidential hopes would be reduced to a single, long note from the world’s saddest trombone. If Hasan or Destiny or PickUrManWithAHeadphoneMicSurgicallyGraftedToHisSkull did and it wasn’t a massive success with real results, their personal cache, income, and brand would suffer, so in very real terms, fascism is a better result for them individually…right up until it isn’t. Because that’s how fascism always rolls, but people keep charging at that football anyway.
And when people who actually hold office and/or influence won’t risk their personal brand to take action other than speaking truth to their own power then congratulating themselves for being the best and rightest, when they’re the ones that actually could, what the fuck are the rest of us supposed to think? How are the rest of us supposed to organize when none of the people who are respected and well-known enough to organize are doing anything but talking? Kamala tried to be that someone and we couldn’t even be bothered to vote to not suffer horribly. The right is dark and full of terrors but they do take action and initiative, even if it’s mostly knocking down everyone else’s blocks because blocks are gay and then shooting each other in the neck because another podcaster said to.
And until someone does decide it’s worth all the shit-nados that come a leader’s way, everyone else is stuck in the cube of Schrodinger’s Democracy: is it alive or is it dead? Is now the moment, or is it the next one? Will the system hold against this violation or not? We can’t know until the guardrails get smashed, until the box is opened.
And if the cat might still be, just barely, alive? Then most people will keep buying cat food and hope for the best. Making most of us believe the cat might still be alive is far more advantageous to the Feline Murder Party than displaying its corpse.
These people truly excel at the dance I talked about earlier. Are we Nazis or are Democrats paranoid? Just little closer to the full reveal every time, but never quite there. It’s almost impossible to know which of the garbage they say they’ll do is the garbage they’re actually going to do, so everyone is frozen in place not knowing what’s even real. We haven’t invaded Greenland yet, have we? As yet, there are no Neurodivergent Buddyfriends Super Fun Time Healthy Sunshine Camps. We’re terrified all the time, but we can’t know whether this particular rich man blowing his own brains out of his blowhole about whichever issue he knows about as much about as he does his wife’s deepest dreams and ambitions is saying this is happening or lol I dreamed about this in sixth grade so imma say it to a microphone and see what happens.
So we all walk through this insane clown maze of illusions trying to figure out which one is the real Pennywise, and as it turns out, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t might be the most effective nerfing of the revolutionary impulse ever devised.
Because, though for those of us already in their targets, it’s very hard to get our heads around, for the majority of Americans, most of the horrors Trump and his little mean boy gang are giggling their way through are still abstractly coming through their phones and not their direct experience unless they or their loved ones belong to a scapegoat group—and will continue to, right up until they don’t because a new group's number is up and it’s their turn to suffer. The majority of us are not ourselves LGBTQ+ or immigrants or neurodiverse or even, for a little while longer, other than whatever white means these days. That’s why we’re called minorities. Many more are connected to someone in danger because of Trump but, well, people are selfish assholes, I don’t know what to tell you. A little more than half of us are women, but plenty of women aren’t on women’s side. Everyone promised if they took Roe away America would be in the streets, and look around at the vast landscape of fucks most people didn’t give about it. The media siloing and disparate populations very understandably self-segregating for safety means that the administration has to do very big things very loudly to reach everyone.
And they prefer the dance. Of course they do.
The only things that have gotten through across the board at all are the cost of living and the Epstein Files. The only thing that got through across the board last time was COVID-19. They’re betting nothing that big will happen again, and so are we. It’s a horrific bet, but apparently we’re all-in.
And abstraction is just very hard to turn into direct, confrontational action. Most people are concerned with themselves above all, most people are just comfortable enough that death on the barricades is not a clearly better choice than keeping your head down and hoping this will pass. Until something that hits every single household directly, and hard enough that no media narrative can convince people it isn’t happening, you simply aren’t going to see any real uprising.
As the year winds down, there’s not much comfort in any of that. SORRY. I do agree a general strike would be the most effective single action. But all the bad AI flyers on Facebook won’t matter until someone respected with power and skin in the game starts organizing in earnest. And they’re all much more than comfortable enough in their world of podcasts and memoirs and fundraising to risk looking unsuccessful at revolution. We all keep waiting for someone to do something because until Someone with a capital S does, there is no way for mass action to begin accreting mass.
And in the end, it’s impossible to convince people that it’s worth throwing away whatever we have left in this life on an abstract idea of “doing something” when the very leaders whose business is telling us how very serious this is, how awful the fascistic future is going to be, how deeply in danger we all are, won’t risk even a sliver of their comfort to do much of anything but continue talking about how brave they are to talk about how brave they are.
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I am sorry for the absence. It has been a ridiculous autumn around here. I spent most of it sick, so sick I couldn’t even sit up or focus my eyes enough to doomscroll endlessly, feeling, in addition to mucus, mucus everywhere, the actual physical sensation of my life’s energy slowly dripping out into a depthless pool of quiet tears.
First it was COVID (FOURTH TIME’S A CHARM!) for almost a damn month, then, less than a week after slowly slouching toward recovery, some other horrible bug knocked me on my already knocked-upon ass, and thus I drifted in the Void of Lost Time until just about Thanksgiving!
And, well, the other thing that turned life into a circus of stupid is so unbelievable and unrealistic I can’t bear to go over it all again, so I’m going to reverse the usual course and cross-post the Holiday Tale of Horror from my Patreon by way of apology and explanation for where the fuck I’ve been.
Because I only just found my notebook with all the notes for the next essay in it. So I’m working on it; see below.
Nevertheless, as it is on Patreon, this is locked to a paywall for reasons that are about to be very obvious—I live in a small place and I’m about to spill some beans on the snowy ground, and I don’t want anyone who isn’t onside enough to be part of one of my little clubhouses waggling their face about it.
Saints and ministers of grace defend us, let’s dive into the chaos vortex.
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