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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 humans after 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.

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!

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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Well, I’m back.

Everything better?

No? Not even a little? Cool.

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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Somehow, possibly due to various cursed objects I have unknowingly acquired over the years, I’m sick again.

And I fucking hate this pigshit elemental, her stupid pig-soul and her nasty pig-fuck feet which are, somehow, the most normal and relatable thing about her. So this isn’t going to be some well-researched 5000 word essay to touch the depths of your vulnerably human heart and fill you with big feelings about humanity.

I’m just going to tell you why Marjorie Taylor Greene is sounding vaguely sane these days, and not quite as much like an Innsmouth cultist wharrgarbling her way through DC like. Well. A white lady space laser.

Ok, so yeah, I get it. She’s sounding vaguely able to be allowed out on her own recognizance and not like the chittering mating grunts barfed up by the Chaotic Evil lovechild of a Beholder and a bottle of peroxide.

And everyone Wants to Believe. Because in the 20s, believing a Republican heart has grown three times its size due to finally seeing the error of their ways requires pretty much the same mindset as actually believing, point for point, Fox Mulder’s pinwheeling, luminous wet dreams in the 90s.

Fucking stop it. DO STOP BELIEVING. SHUT UP, JOURNEY. IT’S FRIDAY AND I’M TIRED.

Is she still insane? Oh, she probably never was. Just an adulterous asshole who loves nothing. Is she still conservative? I mean, is she still the aforementioned pigshit elemental trying to turn the rest of the world into her personal pigshit trough upon which to endlessly gorge? So yeah, still conservative. Is any of this genuine? Shut up. Don’t be stupid.

Is she aiming for a foothold on a leftie grift instead of the infinite rightie blood-money mine that disgorged her? Doing the thing that was so lucrative Back In the Time Known As the Day when any semi-decency-curious Republican was hailed as a Lion of the Resistance? It might be a good thought, but the pipeline is not quite so well-greased anymore BECAUSE WE’RE ALL EXHAUSTED WITH THE LIONS BEING TRASHPEOPLE IN LION-SUITS.

Plus, look, I don’t know how to tell you this if you don’t already know, but the left, being not so much into capitalism, is also not so much into paying for things. And the right is super into that, because they have wild fever dreams every night of they themselves being the One Who Knocks Gets Paid For Being a Superdick 24/7. So…probably not, when MSNBC is the only even plausibly non-rightwing dinosaur-channel and Hasan can’t even electrocute a dog on camera without woke snowflakes quietly wondering if maybe there was another explanation.

Is it all about running for President and/or Senate?

Ehhhh. Maybe that pissed her off. Maybe it was a good excuse. But that’s not what’s up. She’s an idiot, but she’s not actually stupid.

And that’s the most controversial thing I’m about to say.

Come now. Let us be civilized men. We all got the memo that America hates women so much they would literally vote for fucking anyone over a woman. The Xenomorph from Alien. The resurrected corpse of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. An LLM originally trained on Hanna Barbara cartoons and nothing else. Willy Wonka, post-human-trafficking trial. God damned Pennywise from IT. Anyone.

No one doesn’t know that, including the Eternal Ruiner of a Perfectly Good and Universally Recognized Magic: the Gathering Acronym, Marjorie “Tool Time” Taylor Greene. And I don’t really think she gives a shit about the Senate on any level beyond “I’m tired of doing the whole ‘democracy’ thing every two years, six and I always get re-elected sounds way better.”

Nah, here’s what she’s up to.

Hey! Do ya know what’s fun?

Being the very well-paid performatively crazy asshole in a room full of normies who continually clutch their pearls at your antics.

Do you know what isn’t really any fun at all?

Being the performatively crazy asshole in a room full of performatively crazy assholes, each of whom stands to acquire more money, power, and fame the more bugfuck unearthly gibbering lunacy they spout in the direction of the Chief Clown of the Evil Clown Car, who just loves getting sprayed with a firehose of madness on the daily.

When the Jewish Space Laser lady is having to compete—AND LOSING—for the coveted position of the loudest, most uncouth, most unqualified violently fascist maniac in a massive shrieking, writhing pit of unqualified violently fascist maniacs?

Aw. You guys! She has the Sad! She has to actually work instead of just brain-barfing up whatever hot liquid poison she found on 4Chan and calling that policy. Working SUCKS! Especially when you don’t get any credit for all your hard grinding for the master. When he doesn’t even see what you do for him. How you abase yourself. How you sacrifice every part of a normal life you ever valued. When you lay yourself naked on the altar of Satan for the pleasure of His Name and Satan himself looks upon you for just an awkwardly long time before intoning:

Nah.

Poor baby bear! That must suck.

Wasn’t it just so much more fun when any time she randomly mouth-sharted in the direction of a recording device it made the national news and went viral on all the totally-not-astroturfed social medias? Man, what a great gig. I wish I could make millions not doing my job while feeding narcissistic sociopaths the half-digested remains of KiwiFarms like the hideous All-Mother of a Thousand Seagull-Young.

But now?

Lil’ Templeton the Rat isn’t getting any attention. She doesn’t get to rip words she barely understands out of the internet and hand them to someone way smarter to actually make something out of these days. She actually has no voice at all in this administration, and Baby’s First Bratz Doll really thought she would, for the same reason, apparently, FUCKING WAY TOO MUCH OF AMERICA thought they would.

1. When Trump hates the precise kind of human I am (eg a woman, a poor, brown, gay, and/or literally everyone who isn’t him), my big snuggly protective bear daddy doesn’t mean me! I’m special!

2. When Trump specifically looks me in the eye, tell me he fucking despises me, personally, and says no to all my dreams, I still won’t take any actual action against him, even words. Because words can hurt, y’all!

3. It’s gonna be basically like the first time when a bunch of crumbling establishment dinosaurs were running things and I’ll still skate by.

Oh no, my lady! This time, everyone in the administration is an unqualified, constantly-hallucinating, bonkers-racist/sexist/whatever-you-got Temu Renfield who can puke about locally-sourced Atlantis-flavor adrenochrome, and, so sorry for our players at home, that’s not even the current meta anymore!

So she can’t stand out. She can say the most unhinged spatial-anomaly-level battered star-shit and frankly, it’d rank like fifth in the news of the day. She’s been outgunned by Actual Vampire Peter Thiel. When a dude who controls half the internet and is just frankly and publicly acknowledged as a person who imbibes the blood of other persons to extend his own life is building his Barbarossa Dream House inside the right (I mean, what, he’s gonna choose the left?) ear of the President of the United States, where a dumb stegosaurus-toed bleach blonde bad-built butch body bitch gonna go from there?

Well. As it turns out…she did find a way to be the craziest voice in the Electric Bugaloo administration. By sounding vaguely normal and sane.

That IS the craziest thing you can do in TrumpWorld. Just sound a little normal. Get a Business Female Blow Out and wear a Serious Person Black Suit. Go on The Shows and just say regular fucking shit because out of that hellsphincter it sounds like Karl Screaming Marx come back to bless us and lift us to the light.

Also, just between us Normal People, look at those anchors looking at her exactly the way a dog looks like a cat that’s suddenly acting like a dog.

Oh but isn’t it curious how everything that ichor-waterfalls out of her fang-hole like one of the Event Horizon Latin demons makes national news again.

Funny, that.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has not changed her act one fucking bit.

It’s just that sane is the new crazy in the Grand Guignol Theater of Vampires that is the second Trump Administration.

She just can’t get attention for barn owl screeching about Jewish space lasers anymore (in part because half the left would believe her) so she’s done the only thing no one else who works for Trump these days is willing to do, the single bridge too far: pretend to have normal opinions about issues, expressed normally, in normal media, which, coming from the political fucking equivalent of LARGE BLOODY MARGE sounds like soothing nature sounds because we’ve spent the last ten years non-consensually subscribed to WORLDTOILET TERROR TORNADO SOUND EFFECTS.EXE.

The report is this Clairol Zombie is semi, tepidly, tentatively, coyly saying things Bad Dad wouldn’t like if he ever heard about it, which he doesn’t because, let’s be real here, she’s not hot, for Mar-a-Lago standards of hot, and that’s all he cares about, because he told her not to run for Senate.

SO SHE ISN’T GOING TO RUN.

Oh, what a new leaf this fucking stump has turned over! This crawling sycophant, on her belly before the Serpent King. She’s a free citizen! Run, Forrest! But Papa Ubu said no, so she grovels and obeys—but on the school playground, she can’t even bring herself to whisper: Teacher sucks! she just mumbles something about the juice selection at the cafeteria and expects to be seen as a badass rebel who’s really showing true leadership now for some reason.

Yeah, nope. She’s just doing whatever she can to stand out. Not because she’s in danger of losing her office. The empty streets of brainfuck Georgia aren’t going to vote for a Democrat, heaven forfend, am I right, fellow Graboid-spawn? Because she’s addicted to the dopamine rush of being hated like pure fire by everyone who doesn’t worship every twitch of her non-Euclidean feet.

For someone who was stuck as an unemployed CrossFit greaserat (YEP) before sacrificing a lot of really nice goats who loved their babies to get elected to Congress, that dopamine rush is beyond any heroin addict’s deepest fantasies. It really didn’t matter how anyone felt about her, she was seen. She was verifiably real. The existential void of profound meaninglessness was kept at bay, as long as people were saying her name online, every second on-the-second.

Now the existential void of profound meaninglessness absolutely has Trump’s blessing to run for Senate in any state it likes, as long as it’s cool being the little spoon in the ruins of the White House every night. But Margie doesn’t.

Don’t listen to this hoof-brained labubu hanging off the right’s rear-view mirror. Don’t give her the curious-dog look. She is a creature of social media, farming engagement like the oozing algorithm-incarnate she longs to be.

Miss Marjorie’s just finding out what all conservative women (and, on a long enough timeline, men, too) find out: once they’re done using you to hurt everyone like you, you never existed.

OMG LOOK! I got through all that without saying the word Nazi!

She’s a Nazi, though. She just thinks her shirt ain’t brown.

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After the straight-up saga of Velveteen’s incredible journey east, I thought you might like to have the happy ending. In case you don’t follow me on BlueSky where I’ve been uncontrollably...oh god, am I about to use the word “squeeing” for the first time in years? I suppose I am. Uncontrollably squeeing about this magical creature. Wow. I hadn’t really though about how rarely I see the word squee these days compared to ten years ago, let alone fifteen years back. That feeling sort of...retired as things got to be the way things do currently be and look like they’ll continue to be.

But what else can you do when a gorgeous absolutely stained-glass hearted anime wolf-fox is suddenly just hanging out at your feet all the time?

So yeah, it’s been a “wait, what” of a week. Days just...went somewhere. We’ve been so busy making our costumes and other Halloween House Business--AND SETTLING OUR NEW DOG INTO HER NEW HOME.

Not that she’s needed much settling. I am not exaggerating when I say Vell is the most well-behaved, gentle, loving dog I’ve been lucky enough to be around--and the most well-behaved, calm, and quiet husky I’ve ever ever heard of. I’m so used to puppies, and years of work ahead with a new one, I hardly know what to do with myself but just start teaching her new things, because she’s just no trouble whatsoever, only joy. I keep telling my sister-in-law that her dad must have been so good at training dogs because she is basically a human in a fur coat. Last night I even took her to the island bar (American Legion Post 142!) and she was sweet and peaceable and chill until the Chiefs lost, then she had an inexplicably strong number of opinions to share. In a conversational tone and volume that could never bother anyone.

I’ve never met a two year old husky I felt like I could take to a bar and actually relax myself. She can even be off leash (with some guidance, she’s still a sled dog and she always feels like runnin’) in the woods with me. THIS MAGIC DOG.

From the minute our fifth and final leg (Independent Teapot, first names redacted for privacy) brought her home and she laid down on my feet, Vell has just seamlessly made herself a part of our household. By day 3 she knew what time we leave for school in the morning. She’s chosen a spot in the house. Last night my 7 year old hugged me and she gently pawed us to let her in for a group hug--then jumped onto the pile and licked our faces silly. She’s even super respectful to the cats! Who are not respectful to her in any way, shape or form! And are LIVID with me for what I’ve done to the universe itself by allowing a dog in it!

On Friday, one of the kindergartners saw us and SCREAMED to the entire student body: ATTENTION EVERYONE! BASTIAN AND THEIR DOG ARE HERE!

And in about half a second, these kids lined up along the fence, without anyone telling them to, to have a turn petting her. As of today, Vell has started howling greetings to all “her” kids on the playground as soon as we crest the hill between our house and the school.

I mean, I’m sure she’ll misbehave at some point...oh! She did swipe a slice of cheese (aged habanero cheddar thank you very much) off my cracker when I went to get a glass of water. Not the whole thing, she just delicately de-cheesed the cracker and looked around like it was a deep and unanswerable mystery no one could ever explain. That’s the worst thing she’s done. I took her to a neighbors house where they get the neighborhood dogs together to play before work in the mornings and even though the other pups were all young, thus pretty rough, and one puppy continually grabbed her face with her paws, she never so much as growled.

Also, she sings. Well, she’s a husky, obviously she sings. But she only sings to songs she likes, and so far...how do I make anyone on the internet believe that the dog that came to me by chance, tragedy, and magic, who I did not raise or influence at all, loves Rocky Horror and sings along to every. single. song.

The Childe is over the moon in love. I came downstairs a few mornings ago to them petting her gently and whispering: “You are precious as a diamond, more good than good. The most appreciated dog in the whole world.” They’ve been singing a lot of This Is Velveteen to the tune of This Is Halloween as well.

Obviously, we are just beside ourselves with love for this gorgeous mythical beast who lives with us now. There’s times when you just feel so lucky--and I thought I felt lucky that five wonderful people were willing to drop everything and help this dog. I had no idea what a special girl she really was. Every driver said they wished they could keep her--I almost can’t believe we get to.

We are so lucky.

And we’re helping her get over all she’s been through. She’s still grieving. The very first day I walked her to school, she saw one of the dads with a thick plaid overcoat on. Vell howled and bowed and whined to him. I texted my sister-in-law and asked if her dad wore a lot of plaid. She called me at once and asked why I said that. I explained, and she said that her dad always wore this particular plaid overcoat because the cancer treatments left him cold all the time. Little things like that come up and it breaks my heart. She hates going upstairs and avoids it if she can...because her dad had a one-story, no stairs. We’re trying to soothe her as much as she soothes us and convince her that she gets to stay with us forever.

I told my kid that if we’re lucky and take good care of her, she could easily still be around when they graduate high school. This will be who Bastian always remembers as the dog they had growing up. Dogs are funny like that. If you’re a dog person, and I am, they curl up around eras in your life. 10-15 years. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And there’s no remembering those years without the shaggy friends who were your constant shadows. I moved to the island where I live 17 years ago Saturday. I moved here with two dogs, both of which are buried on the island. They were my heart in furry form, and Vell isn’t going to be any different, I can tell. She’s our girl. For always.

There is still some magic in this world. We make it, together, when we care about things outside ourselves just a little more than necessary. When we see how big small things can be. When we try more than we have to. Magic was always small, and quiet, and always hard to pull off, that’s part of what makes it magic. And I refuse to stop believing in the good just because it’s small and quiet and hard. Just because the bad is loud and big and easy to find anywhere you look.

Some of the best things I know about are small and quiet and hard to pull off

I’m gonna try so hard for this dog. For my life and my community and my child and my people, all the little worlds I’m part of. For my family, chosen and blood, for my sister, for the man in the plaid overcoat this dog will never forget. So many people tried so hard for us. Thank you so much to the saints who got in a car (I hope we all stay in touch on the group chat! We’re family now), and thank you again so much to everyone who chipped in to cover expenses when I know all too well how tight all our belts are right now, and everyone who’s followed this saga and taken something from it, because these days, rays of light, in whatever shape they occur, are more precious than a diamond, and more good than good.

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Oh my god what a month this has been!

If you follow me on BlueSky, you may have seen what’s been happening over the last five or six days...and now that it’s really, actually happening, I want to tell you all about it in greater than 300 characters.

Also, I got COVID (again) and have been so brutally sick all month I feel like I disappeared off the face of the earth, so it’s quite understandable if that’s how it’s seemed. My lung capacity is still floating somewhere around month-old birthday balloon and standing up has become a fascinating challenge, but I’m slowly getting better.

Just in time for an old-fashioned internet miracle.

I’ve been so busy organizing the logistics of said miracle that I haven’t had time to post about it for everyone who wasn’t up at 11pm however many nights ago this started.

THIS IS THAT POST.

So my sister-in-law Amanda and I are very close, she is a wonderful human and the “in law” part stopped being a thing awhile ago. And her father died about two weeks ago. We knew he was sick, and that the end was on the horizon, but this was much sooner than expected, and there hadn’t been time to put everything in order.

And he left behind that beautiful baby up there, a 2 year old snow-white husky.

Well, sixish days ago, Amanda called to check up on me because of said falling off the earth, and we got to talking about random things. I mentioned how badly Bastian has been wanting a dog, and that I’m trying to hold out for a year because I just can’t handle training a puppy right now.

And my sister said “uh...how do you feel about huskies?”

Now, she had no way to know this, but my first dog of my own was a husky, and when she was two, a very awful landlord of mine forced me to give her up or lose my housing. I found her a wonderful family and she had a spectacular life on a literal farm, but it broke my heart to lose her.

She sent a photo, and I had such an odd feeling, one I’ve only had once before, when I first saw a photo of Lord Byron. My hindbrain just went oh that’s my dog, the way it had once thought oh that’s my cat. And she’s not a puppy. And despite being a husky, she’s a pretty chill and gentle girl. And I never got rid of most of Sage or Grimm’s things, or the dog bed and toys I had for Fiona, a border collie I was long-term dog-sitting until a few months ago, so I wouldn’t need to buy anything...

But at that moment, I really thought there was no way it would be possible. My brother’s family lives in southern Oregon, it couldn’t be further away. And according to Oregon law, if you don’t own your property, any animals found will be taken to a shelter--my sister couldn’t get there in time to claim the dog. She was on a five day hold, and that’s about all the time we had to figure it out. So the usual ways (cargo plane ride, various non-profits who relay rescues around) were either unworkable because of the needed lead time or so expensive to do on such short notice. I told her I’d look into it but I wasn’t optimistic.

I spent most of the day finding out just how much it would cost to fly her to me in any of the methods I knew of (good god) and was on the verge of calling Amanda to say I just couldn’t manage it when it occurred to me: back in the day you’d ask the internet if anyone knew another way, and someone probably would. You just don’t anymore because it feels like everything has to be politics on the social medias these days.

So late at night I explained briefly to my BlueSky followers and asked if anyone had any ideas that wouldn’t cost me Every Money.

Genuinely, I just wanted some guidance as to how people do this with rescues. I wasn’t trying to get people to solve my problems for me--I didn’t even cross-post to all the other sites I use since the Great Twitter Diaspora, that’s how much I wasn’t trying to rally anybody to my own cause. I just didn’t know what the steps I should be taking were.

I didn’t expect in any way for the Old Millennial Internet Spirit to fucking activate.

People started saying “Well, I can drive her to x if you can get her to y and cover expenses...” and a chain started forming that could almost work to get her here. Except for the middle of the country. There just didn’t seem like any way to bridge between Idaho or Montana and Minneapolis, where the next westernmost volunteer was.

Then Linkwood Anarchy Hub appeared, and said he could take her all the way from Portland to Minneapolis. Stormzand said he could pick her up at the shelter in Eugene and get her to Portland. SimonsFolly said he could take her from Minneapolis to the New York State Line. RisaWolf said she could get the pup from any NY state border to New Hampshire, and IndependentTeapot said she could bring the girl all the way home from New Hampshire.

And these amazing, kind, generous, thoughtful, beautiful human beings leapt into action so fast that that very smug-looking pup up there who clearly knows how lucky she is, left the shelter Saturday afternoon and is cruising through Idaho as I type this sentence.

(If you want to contribute to expenses, and you do not have to, everything is so tight these days, but if you want to, here is Paypal and Venmo)

And to my knowledge, I have only interacted with one of the Pawshank Redemption (credit: Stormzand) crew on a long-term basis and was following before this Incredible Journey started. They just...saw something happening and wanted to help. And love dogs. And might possibly be saints walking among us.

I genuinely can’t believe this is actually happening. I’m pretty sure Bastian doesn’t actually think we’ll have a dog next week, even though they’re excited. But I told them not to set their heart on it when I asked now they’d feel, despite wanting a border collie, about a beautiful white smallwolf. Because I didn’t know and personally doubted if we could really do it in time. So I think they’re still in “don’t get your hopes up” mode.

But the hopes don’t need to be kept down anymore. The Puppy Express has departed on its Reverse Oregon Trail journey and could be here as soon as Tuesday night.

I know it’s not much in the grand scheme of things. It doesn’t solve any part of the hellscape we’re all living in right now. And of course I’m thrilled because I get a puppy, but it also filled me with so much hope. We are still, some of us, who we always were. We are still capable of small marvels and caring outlandishly.

I think it’s gotten easy to forget we used to do this all the time.

Not necessarily the internet at large, and believe me, I’m well aware the pre-algorithm internet was anything but an endless vista of peaches and sunshine, but the geek community part of the internet. Which, believe it or not, hasn’t been all of it more or less since Usenet. The bookish, SFF, community-minded people who identified as geeks, not to make money off a new demographic, but just because that’s what we were. Who used social media to make genuine human connections, to craft things and be silly and make stuff, not because of some grindset, but because they wanted to. Before the incredible waterfall of human creativity the internet allowed to come into the light of day became just more content. Before the proto-oligarchs saw what little people were doing with their free time and saw the possibility of using it as bait to lead us all into the data-gobbling joy-disposal algorithm-driven online life keeps trying to become.

There was a time that you’d see crazy stories like this on Livejournal or Facebook or Twitter really often, people going out of their way for each other. To save someone’s house or business or pet or child. To get a faceless corporation to listen to someone they were screwing. To get help and information during disasters of all kinds. To tell each other about things we loved and find others who loved them too, or who might if they heard about it. To try a new way of doing art and making delight. I’ve been part of so many of these stories, sometimes as a helper and sometimes as a person who needed help.

But as more and more of the world has needed much bigger help than any small group of kind hearts can do alone, and as corporate grey goo has spread further and further into every digital space to enshittify, monetize, and exploit genuine human connection and creativity, and as so many scams of so many kinds have crowded out real voices, it’s gotten hard to find sparks of that old internet “let’s put on a show in the old barn and save Christmas” spirit. It’s easy to be cynical, and what’s shoved into our faces by the algorithm is meant to create that cynicism, to keep us separate and alone and too anxious to look away from the data-gobbling joy-disposal that online life is becoming.

I was having coffee with a new friend in town as this was all starting to come together, and she shook her head and asked me: “How are you doing this? How is this happening?” I laughed a little. It’s been so long since I made a new friend who doesn’t know my whole history! And I explained what was happening, and why I have the kind of followers I do online, and finally said: “I don’t know, the internet used to be a different sort of place, and when it was, I was a different sort of person, who made and did a lot of things and built a little universe or two...and when you pour your soul into something for a long time, sometimes it comes back to you in strange ways...so I guess maybe somewhere deep down, that place didn’t go anywhere.” And I thought to myself: maybe that person didn’t, either.

Maybe those little universes didn’t. Maybe nothing went away. They just got older and sadder and buried by the algorithm for being insufficiently profitable. Not gone. Just sleeping.

Maybe we can just choose to have it back. In small ways. On our own terms. And the thing about small ways is that they tend to add up.

Maybe unshittification is possible.

So I know one lonely dog whose owner died doesn’t change the world. It doesn’t make anything better on a big scale. It’s just a dog and a writer and her kid struggling with everyone else. But it’s changing my world. And helping me to remember that little, small, connective actions like this is what built that online life and made anyone want to be part of it in the first place. Which is, so sadly, what made all those techbro Decepticons want to eat up all that energy and enthusiasm so they could digest it into numbers in their bank accounts.

They saw what it was worth, and have done an excellent job making us forget that.

Thank you, Puppy Express Gang, for reminding me. For being amazing. For helping my family--my sister Amanda is so relieved that not only is this good girl getting an absurdly spoiled home, but she’s staying in the family. And I hope that somehow, somewhere, in some tiny way, a part of her dad sees how many people came together to look after his dog.

Thank you all, for putting on a show in the old barn.

I am so humbled by all of this. This care. It’s the little light of Fantasia in the dark. At least, that’s how it shines to me.

I’ll end by telling you about that little wolfie’s new name. Because to me, it says all of this in one syllable.

See, I had every intention of naming my next dog Pilot, after the Brontes’ dog and the wonderful Farscape character. But I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really feel quite right for this dog.

Yesterday, as I was wrangling the Puppy Express Group Chat whilst also chatting with the bartender at the place all the islanders go to wait for the next boat. We talked about the music playing, which was prime vintage 2010 indie rock, and about the old internet. Everything I’ve been talking about. We laughed about how no one wants to admit they liked this music now, it’s too sincere and banjo-y to be cool. And, you know, not often does a Good Thing just come out of my mouth without editing and rewriting, but I said: “For a little space, between irony and despair, we were very briefly allowed to like things. We thought things were going to get better now, for about half a second.”

So we were already Deep in Feelingsville when I told him about the dog and he started sharing stories about his own childhood dog--and offhandedly mentioned The Velveteen Rabbit.

And it came to me.

Some of you may remember the story of my then-6-year-old’s reaction to The Velveteen Rabbit. Not in all my days will I ever forget it.

Before I read it to them, I warned them: “Just so you know, I love this book a lot, but the ending is super sad, okay? Just don’t want you to be shocked.”

But when we got to the end, Bastian had the biggest smile on his face. “Mom, why did you say that was a sad ending? That was the happiest ending ever!”

I stared at them. The Velveteen Rabbit devastated me as a child. I cried for hours. In my tiny mind, back then, I was the rabbit, abandoned and alone and unremembered.

“But why is it sad?” The little one who has never been abandoned said. “Everyone got what they wanted! The rabbit got to be Real, the boy didn’t die, they got to see each other again, the rabbit got to meet that AMAZING fairy and the other rabbits accepted him when they were so mean before! Where is the sad?”

Later that night, I thought about that dumb dress from the Late Modern Internet. The one that some people saw as black and blue and some saw as white and gold and they’d all go to the mat for the colors they perceived. And the thing was, if you remember, that if you looked long and hard enough, or switched your angle on it in just the right way, you could see the other color, but it was almost impossible to switch back once you’d done it.

And for me, The Velveteen Rabbit will never be black and blue again. It will always be joyful gold. Everyone got what they wanted. And they did, at that. It doesn’t escape me that this dog could easily still be with us when Bastian graduates high school. That we’ll look back and say: wow, remember when all those people crossed the continent to bring her to us? Remember when you loved The Velveteen Rabbit?

God, what a story. And stories are all there is. Moments and stories add up to a life.

I bought my child a necklace made from the illustration of the fairy in the book. I put it around their neck and said: “I got you this so that you never forget that the way you see things is precious and unique. Sometimes in this world it’s hard to hold onto that, to hold onto such a big heart when everyone is telling you to make it smaller. But the way one person sees things can change everything. Can even change sadness into happiness.”

This is Vel. Short for Velveteen. Because if you look at something a little differently, something you really thought you knew and understood, and try to remember believing in things and in people, just one little shift can change sadness into happiness.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this breath of magic and connection blowing some light under the door in this dark, uncertain time. I will never forget this. Neither should you.

It’s all just us. The internet, the world. It’s just us, and if we choose to, in the tiniest ways, we can choose to keep our focus on each other instead of wherever it is the money men want us to look this week.

Maybe sometimes the tiny ways are all we have. Just because they’re tiny doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

Tiny adds up.

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I loved roller coasters when I was a kid. And I mean loved. What’s not to be completely fucking hyped about when you’re nine? Adrenaline, loud noises, crazy lights and music, speed, and the weird awesomeness of feeling like you’re in danger while knowing you’re actually totally safe, you paid money to ride this ride, and your mom is waiting outside the gate with your funnel cake and a shitty toy from the fishing game.

As an adult, while my brain still thinks FUCK YEAH LET’S DO THE DEVIL’S COLON, my body now knows full well how it feels to be seriously injured, knows it’s mortal and machines are fallible, and it’s no longer a blithe and bonny idiot made of bubblegum, stem cells, and superballs concerning the answer to the equation of speed + gravity + fragile sack of talking blood. So I always think I want to, and then when the ride tips over into freefall my stomach tenses up so hard for the impact it’s sure is coming that it physically hurts. I still go. Obviously. My kid-self internalized roller coasters are awesome don’t be a wimp just as hard as my grown-up self has internalized but I do not wish to ow.

But it’s not the same.

And more importantly, my love of roller coaster was always firmly rooted in the idea that I wanted to ride the ride. The restraints were for my safety, I had cleared the height requirement, we came to the carnival on purpose to do this, and if I chickened out while waiting in line, I could just leave and go pet a goat or something.

But now we’re all strapped into Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth’s janky fucking 19th century Imperialism-a-Whirl, the restraints are to keep us from doing anything about what’s about to happen to us, nobody is tall enough to handle this shit, and if we don’t want to do this anymore because the loop-de-loop track is clearly shredded, shooting sparks into a pile of dry leaves, and ends in a fifty foot drop into a puddle of spent nuclear fuel, well, too fucking bad for us, the operator sold the control board and drank a fifth of Dr. Prepper’s: Supermeth Splash.

These fucking people.

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It’s been a fantastic 24 hours, I’ll tell you what.

When I put the previous essay, on Charlie Kirk’s shooting (because what else are we even allowed to talk about right now) under the subscription paywall, I felt bad. I always want to give everything away for free, but do enjoy eating and sleeping under a roof, and this time, more than anything else, I was already feeling a bit weird about the utter Cujo-ness of the right leaping tall buildings to seize their Reichstag moment.

Turns out, it’s both a good thing I did, and also didn’t really matter anyway, because speaking at all was enough.

On Friday night, when a tsunami of unhinged violent Purge-hooligan shit came flying at me on X, a site I barely use except to crosspost the occasional quip or promote a new piece of work, I genuinely thought it was because of what I’d posted an hour before, which was this: White on white crime is a tragic epidemic sweeping the country. How many more will we lose to white gang violence and rightwing turf wars?It’s the culture, you know. These white celebrities glamorize a criminal lifestyle & young inner-suburb kids get trapped in the school-to-influencer pipeline.

And I sighed, and chuckled, a little ruefully, because of course that riled them up, the people who cry IT’S JUST A JOKE when their lord and savior tells a reporter about a new group of people he wants to murder can’t recognize satire even when it’s wearing an oversized sombrero with SATIRE stitched on it in neon green fuzzy yarn.

Yeah…so that wasn’t it.

Somehow.

What had happened was—and I say this with an exhaustion no simile can encompass—Mr. Elon Musk his own full-chested self quote-tweeted someone compiling a list of “Microsoft employees” who had “celebrated” Kirk’s death to be marked for retribution.

And my name was right there in the screenshot.

Now, first of all, was that screenshot, or literally anything I’ve said on the topic, celebrating anything? Absolutely fucking not.

It was a screenshot of Andrew Tate calling for Civil War (because that’s perfectly all right) and a comment on influencers freaking out as CEOs did post-Luigi, and a link to the Charles In Charge, Apparently essay right here on Substack. An essay that they definitely didn’t fucking read, because it was under a paywall, so I know exactly who the new folks who got a subscription to read it are (hi guys!) and I don’t think any of the Garbagetown treehouse kids are…uh…regular visitors to FUCKING CLOWNTOWN. We are garbage, not clowns. Sheesh!

Second…do I work for Microsoft? Well, I guess, sort of, if you’ve warmed up and you’re ready for a stretch?

I’m a freelance writer. I have been for 22 years. I’ve worked for all kinds of people—that’s how freelancing works. I don’t work for Microsoft per se, but I have written three short stories, in three years, for World of Warcraft, and thus, Blizzard.

You see? It all becomes clear. Gamergate, as, I suppose, was always inevitable, never left our basement, psychologically speaking. I touched a game or two while being a woman, so I am very fun to try to carve up online. The list started as Blizzard employees (still not an employee) and I guess someone thought that didn’t sounds serious enough.

So long story short, I’ve received a number of threats in the last 24 hours, ranging from hopeful prayers for my personal ruination and “firing” from “Microsoft” to full on death threats. Ooh, and I’ve been called a cunt more in 24 hours than ever before!

I’m a big girl, I’ve been on the internet longer than 22 years, and you know that means I’ve had my share of death threats, rape threats, every kind of threat. I’m used to it.

But this has been…unsettling. X is a much darker place than Twitter was, and I don’t even just mean the amount of porn that poured in with the threats. And what’s happening right now, where the right is calling for wholesale slaughter of any and all liberals and having zero repercussions, but people are being fired for being insufficiently sad about Charlie Kirk on Al Gore’s internet, is through the fucking looking glass, even for America, which hasn’t ever really seen the proper side of the looking glass to begin with.

I’m a tough bitch, but I’ve been shakier than I’d like over the last day.

Has Musk deleted the tweet? No, but the person he was quote tweeting has. Microsoft tweeted that they were taking it seriously and investigating. Have I been “fired”? Not yet, and I can’t be, because again, I’m not an employee, though I certainly could lose my contract. Am I particularly worried about that happening? I’d rather not lose a contract, but if my work for Warcraft was a huge part of how I feed my kid I’d probably…you know…have worked for them a little more.

Am I worried I’m going to be killed, or that the people tagging in the FBI to hit the alarums over a link to a Substack essay that, once again, they definitely didn’t read because it was under a paywall? Not…really? They’d have to take a boat and that’s too hard even for appliance repairfolk out here. And these people clearly have no idea who I am or what I do and just think I’m some random Microsoft DEI hire because they’re all gloating about how fired I’m going to be come Monday, which, even if it happens, isn’t exactly going to devastate my life the way they hope.

But it sure throws me for several recursive loops. I guess I thought that paywall kept me a little safer than it does. Remember how I always “joke” that I do it so you have to pay me if you want to call me a stupid bitch and tell me you’re going to strangle me? Much like everything a Republican says, it’s not so much a joke as the dead-ass truth with no punchline. And I guess just being a woman and talking is enough, they do not in any way have to hear what I say to want me gone.

There’s more but I don’t feel like looking at their dumb jerkoff fantasies anymore. If someone can, without a flicker of dissonance, call me a terrorist while literally trying to terrorize me into silence, get me “fired,” and dox me to groypers because they don’t like what they imagine I must have said…well. What is there to say?

It’s died down somewhat. I haven’t engaged or apologized, because that’s how we do now. We’ll see what happens Monday, I guess. We’ll see what happens now that the shooter, shockingly, turned out to be a white straight right wing terminally online weirdo sheriff’s son who hated Kirk for not being Nazi enough.

In the meantime, I just feel very quiet and anxious. Not as anxious for me as I am for all of us. I’m not sure it matters who Tyler Robinson is (and he’s not dead, at some point people will just…ask him) when the right went so mask-off so quickly and elected officials were publicly tweeting about killing all Democrats. Half the nation. More than half, as there’s more registered Dems than GOP. Because they imagined in their dreams that one liberal killed a podcaster.

They aren’t going to put that rabbit back in the hat. Mostly because they don’t want to, and when I said no one was as excited about Kirk’s death as MAGA, I wasn’t fucking wrong, was I? They’re celebrating. We’re terrified.

This is just…what celebrations look like to Nazis.

They didn’t even read it. But I need to die. I simply cannot get my head around that. I could’ve said Charlie Kirk was my very best friend under that paywall. They have no idea. I’m used to being blasted into space for daring to speak—but usually the blasters do actually know what they’re mad about. No longer necessary, it seems. And that is where we are now. I don’t see a lot of routes back.

Does that means I’m going to stop yelling about fascism? No, and go fuck yourself, fascists. I started this Substack specifically to have a place to vent about all this that was separate from the positivity I try to bring to the world in the rest of my work. And they’re not done being murderous psychotic hypocritical assholes with the emotional regulation of an electrocuted cat in heat, so I’m not done calling them out.

Back in the time known as the day, if you weren’t getting a death threat every once in awhile, you were barely using the internet. But no one used their real names, so they usually stayed at about the volume and efficacy of a fart in the wind.

But I’ll tell ya. Being told how you’ll die does hit a little different when you have a small child.

So unless the goldfish use their typical attention span and forget about this in a week, I’ll likely put the next essay under a prophylactic paywall as well, just until they forget my name. And how fat and ugly I am. It didn’t stop it, but it did remove a lot of ammo, and I feel safer that way, just for the moment. I do apologize. I’m not even going to link to this post on the socials, I’ve had my fill of the abuse and I don’t want them to see me addressing it as some kind of victory because I noticed their lunacy.

Nevertheless, that’s about all I’m willing to give those bastards who pretty notably aren’t calling Nick Fuentes a cunt. I’m not going anywhere. You can’t be fired from being yourself. At least not yet.

Wouldn’t it be cool if that were funny?

For now, I’ll leave you with the ray of hilarious hope that was the most recent piece of poo flung at me on that nasty smear of a website. Because, baby, you go right ahead. I love that for you! In fact, I invite all your friends, every single conservative in the world, to do the same. Royalties is royalties no matter what you do with it. Please do go ahead with your powerful, manly, devastating plan to pay me for your piss-baby tantrum.

Keep biting those boots, friends. We still have each other.

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Let’s get this out of the way: Charlie Kirk was shot last night while specifically talking about, and, as usual, not giving a shit about, gun violence. Yes, I’ve seen the video. No, I’m not a monster, I was shocked, and disturbed, and still am.

See, but then five fucking minutes passed.

I find it just terribly interesting that within minutes of that shot being fired, all I saw anywhere online was a tsunami of scolding about “the left’s” reaction. Stop celebrating! Show empathy! This is a national tragedy you MUST feel deeply about! You can’t make jokes or not care! IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU CARE. (Just let us hide the leftover balloons and streamers from Melissa and Mark Hortman getting assassinated two months ago super quick.)

I swear to whatever gods get it done for you the word empathy was suddenly everywhere.

I saw thousands of words of this before I saw one word of anyone “celebrating,” which consisted of…mostly posting Kirk’s own words about not giving a shit about gun violence, hating empathy, expressing fear about the right’s retaliation, and then conspicuously moving on to other topics.

DAMN, THE LEFT SURE KNOWS HOW TO PARTY.

In the cold light of the next damned day? Apparently Charlie Kirk was the most impactful and significant political figure in America today! Who knew? And despite it being 9-fucking-11, a day the right has turned into its own personal Anger Holiday, the only thing to be mourned or spoken of is…this guy, who was an influencer yesterday and today, I’m informed, is the most beautiful, illuminated pinnacle of the American intellect.

Frankly, over the last fourteen hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that absolutely no one is as excited about celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death as MAGA.

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While I was writing about the beautiful dream of Trump probably dying and how the media is handling it, which is to say barely touching it and enjoying a refreshing cool drink on the porch while still basking in the dopamine jacuzzi they filled to the brim by having hounded a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign for much less hyenashit insane behavior; I wrote a line, then kept moving it down the essay hoping to find a space to explore the idea…until I ran out of room entirely.

But that’s what the follow-up posts are for!

So here goes.

The line was this: legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are no the presumed audience of the fourth estate.

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GOOOOOD MOOOOORNING, VALE OF TEARS!

Things are going great, aren’t they? All those problems we were having, the problems that were so bad, so intolerably painful, so fucking urgent we just HAD to turn to Insane Clown Fascism because there was no time to lose waiting for actual policy to work, those problems are all gone now, right? Inflation, crumbling infrastructure, cost of living, wages and the jobs that hate them, Gaza, Ukraine, broken immigration system, broking electoral system, broken media, broken real estate market, broken educational system, broken healthcare system, inflation again, AI creep, homelessness, mass shootings, the Epstein files, gas prices, ancient and crumbling husk of a President, and also inflation?

All fixed, right?

No? Absolutely all of that is way, way worse and no one is even working on any of it, nor will they ever? It’s just been nine months of arresting and torturing random people, yelling fucking cartoon nonsense at microphones, cancelling things that are so basic and fundamental ten years ago hardly anyone realized you could get rid of them, like vaccines and rights, various incredibly famous people clearly and obviously stealing huge sacks of money and data then tip-toeing off with a dramatic shhhh like old-timey bandits, and people wandering through it all in a daze while the media just COMFORTABLY FUCKING RETIRES FROM BEING A THING I GUESS?

Oh, man, that’s so fucking crazy, because I was repeatedly told, by people of all socio-political-economic persuasions, that these issues were so disastrous and so pressing we simply could not elect anyone but…the guy whose only plan for anything is to lower his own taxes, then murder an immigrant.

And I feel like…oh, gosh, it’s just so hard to remember, but I feel like the idea that the President was dummy old, couldn’t speak right, and might secretly be dying was a huge deal a year ago. And also a few months ago. And also Jake Tapper is still yelling at random passers-by about it—because not so very long ago, the age and health of the President of the United States was so cosmically fucking important a household-name national newscaster kicked his own entire career down a well about it, well after that guy wasn’t even President anymore.

Oh well, at least you guys over there festering on the right got your super duper massively important issues addressed by Big Daddy, right? You got Disney to only make exclusively and only Big Strong White Boy Uber Alles media, trans kids banned from JV softball in all 50 states, all women executively ordered to stop excelling and do a pregnant with the nearest 8chan shitposter, and the Epstein files released for all to see, right?

Oh, none of those, either, really?

SO WEIRD.

It’s almost like this whole Ten Years at Donnie’s ride through the fucking Wonka Tunnel of Nightmares wasn’t about anything real whatsoever, apart from securing the freedom to act like a total dick to everyone at all times, which we already had. At least nothing philosophical, ethical, moral, or even particularly political.

Now don’t get me wrong, Project 2025 is a thing and it has been for a lot longer than it’s had a name. Progress has been made on the “what happens if we just take everyone’s rights away?” front. Shit has been going down, and it is terrible, reeking, authoritarian, bugfuck bonkers shit.

Look, if I said today the administration announced it’s banning all vaccines because vaccines are gay wokeism, you wouldn’t immediately dismiss that at all. You might not even fact-check me. And there’s a whole strain of conspiracy theory that definitely does insist vaccines make you gay and trans, and since the country is by and large being run according to the contents of early internet chain emails and misspelled grandpa memes, that’s not even a particularly wild possibility. Certainly not for RFK (the F stands for fucking brain worms!) who looks and behaves like a mini-Thanos just super excited to snap them kids.

But most of it has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump himself. You know he doesn’t actually give a shit about any of that (other than mild interest in the murder parts) He clearly cares most about the monumental task of spray-painting every available surface with Home Depot brand metallic “gold.”

And he’s, you know, pretty obviously dying.

Or at least having some kind of allergic reaction to existence. Seriously, this guy is stumbling around puffed up like a demonic shar-pei that ate several thousand bees and his entire government keeps growling shut the fuck up he’s fine and anyway the bees were Democrats we’ve already begun construction on Bee Buchenwald and yes we are officially calling it that you’re a Democrat bee aren’t you, admit it, admit it! at anyone who so much as peruses the Get Well card section at CVS too long, except for J.D. Vance doing the chicken dance on camera and yelling I’m feeling fantastic, thanks! every time he does the stupid wing-flap.

Truly, you have done a spectacular job at life if the entire world starts putting champagne on ice and warming up the fireworks because you didn’t post on social media for a few days.

But something bothers me about how this is all going down—other than the 3-5 obvious things.

Is Trump actually at death’s door? Probably? Maybe? He looks like Violet Beauregard stuffed into a half-inflated rubber mask of James Austin Johnson, but evil just loves not dying when it should. Presidents have access to whatever Roswell-derived super serum medicine any lab could dream up, so he could go on for years as a vaguely human-shaped Franzia hooch-bag full of steroids, statins, stem cells, and probably adrenochrome, given the absolute state of GOP projection, that wobbles alarmingly whenever lightly grazed. (SCOTUS would decide that said wobbles constitute legally-binding Executive Orders, 6-3.)

Maybe that’s just what an old overfed vampire looks like past a certain point.

What bothers me is that if the last newsweek had happened in 2019, we’d know.

The first Trump administration was a constantly-rotating zoo display of monsters, to be sure. But they were, by and large, known monsters, who’d monstered their way through previous administrations monstrously, and rolled up their sleeves to kick it up a lil’ notch. They were creatures, but creatures of a long-standing system, invested in that system, with half an eye on where they’d stand in that system in the After Times. I mean, yeah, it’d be totally awesome if they could bring the whole thing down and crown themselves Kings of Eternity, but every step down from that goal was also a win, so they focused on partying while the party was hot.

Which is why they all leaked like fucking colanders.

They wrote tell-all books, they placed blind items, they whispered national secrets to anyone who even faintly smelled of social media clout. And as soon as they were fired, which was all the fucking time, they couldn’t repress their giggles about what an idiotic asshole Large Marge truly was for a second before running to blab it all to the first camera they could find. To the point that regular human people, neither part of the media nor the government, knew about a lot of things before they happened, things it’s literally insane for everyday citizens to know about, like January 6th.

Back a century or two ago when Trump was shot, I dismissed the various conspiracy theories about it being staged because I couldn’t believe a scheme that big wouldn’t instantly spew leaks like a football field full of sprinklers. None of them could keep a secret, surely we’d hear whispers the way we always did about everything.

But we didn’t. So it must have been real.

Oh and by the way, it’s sheerly astonishing how we’ve just helplessly accepted this empty-tabled no-chairs potluck of dork-ass potato-water-blooded failsons corralling us into a corner where we cannot even allow ourselves to consider any idea that remotely resembles a conspiracy theory, even when CONSPIRACIES SO MELODRAMATICALLY BLATANT THE WORLD’S RICHEST MAN IS OPENLY GIGGLING ABOUT DOING BIG CRIMES ON LIVE TV WHILST HIGH AS A CUMULUS CLOUD IN THE OVAL OFFICE are happening right in front of us, with only the most half-hearted attempts to hide them behind THE OCCASIONAL FUCKING HALF-DEAD POTTED PLANT. The President of the United States has repeatedly said Elon Musk secured the election for him with those gosh-dang computers he’s so good at and we just sigh and tell ourselves we can’t think about it or we’re just like them. Trump constantly panics, incredibly loudly, about the Epstein Files and hysterically screeches for people to forget they exist at least once a week, but we’ve voluntarily forbidden ourselves to even entertain the thought that, since he must know his base can’t stop slobbering all over him for longer than five seconds about anything, and everyone already knows he likes young girls, maybe there’s more to this than him being one of many customers. So now we just live like this, refusing to consider that several conspiracies might be underway from the exact kind of people who love doing conspiracies, and have done them before, over and over again, is a required demonstration of not being a fascist. So much so that I’ve almost deleted this paragraph three times because I don’t want to sound like those loose pinballs, either. FANTASTIC WORK ALL AROUND.

Anyway, the point is, that was my first tiny little alarm-bell ringing in the back of my head. It’s not 2019 anymore. It’s the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, and this administration isn’t like the last one. Nobody’s been fired yet. I doubt they’re going to be. The people working for Trump Two: Apocalyptic Boogaloo mostly don’t have any real interest in government at all, unless you thought Linda McMahon just really passionately cared about education. For the most part, they don’t come from previous administrations. They’re not keeping their eye on a future in which the system goes on. They’re unearthly-rich tech oligarchs who are betting on AI removing the need for the masses entirely and parentless nineteen year olds named Big Balls and 80s celebrities trying out wildly off-label uses and a festive assortment of nepobabies and just Stephen Miller again because I guess he’s the squirrel-flaying little boy whose Christmas wish created this timeline in the first place or fucking something.

They don’t leak. Because they’re in this for themselves, not America or the GOP or even Trump specifically, except as the car the clowns came in. They’re all on their own individual grift and/or crusade for whatever (evil) cause they (evilly) dreamed about one time at (evil) band camp and felt a new tingly sensation suffusing their souls, which was all the evil.

Last time around, Trump was an unexpected limo appearing out of nowhere to pick up the hitch hikers of the old Republican party and get them to the church on time just when they thought they might have to change. The limo was rented, payments past-due, the muffler was barely holding on, and the floor was covered old stains everyone knew not to ask about, but no one really knew that yet, so they called it the best and most beautiful car ever and off they went.

This time, Trump is a crumbling meth-camper up on cinderblocks with a racial slur spray-painted on the side that will never move again but keeps pumping out product that keeps the addicts coming back: power, pain, and profit.

And I’ve started to wonder if the new Rogues’ Gallery knew it the whole time. That this was less an election than the handshake on a deal.

Because what’s happened here is REALLY odd. Trump is a storebrand freezer bag full of id-ichor, but he is actually the President of the United States, and the White House let rumors that he was fucking dead light up the planet for days before posting a hilariously hamfisted, half-assed, zero effort proof of life photo that made him look, somehow, more dead despite technically standing upright.

If you or I didn’t post on social media for a few days, and people started seriously speculating that we’d DIED, most of us would immediately log on and say we were fine, stop being weird. And the Trump we all know and hate would absolutely respond to any kind of rumor that he was anything less than the star of the new Superman franchise with a full-court media-barf of swaggering, pustulant Garbage Pail Kid villain-monologuing.

But that didn’t happen. Nothing happened, really. Other than things that made it worse, like clips of Trump whimpering about going to heaven and Vance volunteering that he was hyped to do Trump’s job, which, not for nothing, but Pence would never. Why, he’d rather actually have sex with his wife! And if by some chance his room-temperature water got spiked, there would’ve been severe consequences once Pizza the Hut heard about it.

But there weren’t.

It might’ve only been a few days, but that’s SUCH a long time for the Trump administration to let us laugh and rejoice at the prospect of his death. We all know they don’t care about the national security problems with that, but the psychological problems should’ve sparked some kind of response other than “nothing to see, it’s whatever” then “meh, here’s a shitty picture,” if Trump being active, in charge, or alive at all mattered to any of the people he brung to the ball.

The passivity of their side of it is genuinely remarkable. And I don’t think it’s about a distraction from Epstein or anything else, because Trump would never agree to look this weak, no matter how advantageous it might be. He hasn’t even done anything to punish us for openly cheering for his death for days on end. Anything he wasn’t already doing, anyway.

Then again, remarkable passivity seems to be a catching sickness. It would seem to be the motto of the era. It’s almost impossible to believe this quiet, unconcerned media is the same one that utterly detonated over Biden’s debate and continue to throw out wild theories about him even now. But the media is just…fine now. Fine with all of it. With their jobs being boiled down to copy-pasting social media posts for however long it takes for their bosses to figure out how to use ChatGPT and the President zombie-walking across the White House roof looking like RFK’s dead, decapitated whale isn’t even interesting enough to investigate.

If Biden, at any point, looked anything close to what Trump looks right now today, the uproar would blow out your fucking eardrums.

Instead, it’s already out of the news cycle.

Something isn’t right here, but not the way it hasn’t been right for a long time. Either he really is Reaper-adjacent or there’s some other reason he is or will be neutered enough that his own government (and their cute little three-legged rescue media) is acting like whether he lives or dies is none of our business, and barely theirs.

Look, I doubt he’s gone any time soon. I’m sure they’ll pump him full of orphan’s tears or whatever as long as possible. But it’s either bad enough that no one’s talking, or it doesn’t matter enough for anyone to feel like they have to talk.

That deal I was talking about? NOT TO SOUND LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST BUT I wonder if, beyond the ego-wound of losing the last election, this entire downfall of America was a handshake between an already-dying old man who needed to keep his secrets secret, and a dozen different (evil) agendas crammed into an Amazon.com trenchcoat, who all knew that as long as the meth-camper crashed directly into the White House, it didn’t matter whether the driver lived. They weren’t going camping anyway. They never considered any of those problems up top, or any problems at all. They just wanted to get together with their internet buddies and steal everything, hurt some people, and have a go at forcing a future even they don’t want, but fancy they’d enjoy watching from afar.

And you know, much like those gay woke vaccines , now that I type it out, that doesn’t even seem like much of a leap.

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I know, I know. I’m so sorry, guys.

It’s been a real fuckwit of a summer, and between no childcare, a novel deadline, home repair catastrophes, and a bunch of life drama, I've done an insanely bad job with the whole regular upddating thing.

BUT!

The novel is DONE. School has STARTED. The house is STILL STANDING. And peace has returned to my little world. I mean, except for the entire lake of flaming sewage that is my nation and many, many parts of the world. EXCEPT FOR THAT HA HA THINGS ARE FINE.

So this is just a note to let you know I’m not dead (awkward unpleasant proofs of life are SO HOT RIGHT NOW), and I’ll be actually corralling my shit and not letting things slide slowly into the sea so much from now on, starting with a new piece here tomorrow, and every two weeks after that.

AFTER ALL, IT’S ALL STILL FUCKING GARBAGE OUT THERE, ISN’T IT?

See you on the flipside, faithful Garbagetowners. Thanks for sticking around.

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Welcome back to literally everything falling apart around us!

Hope you’re all having a great summer watching everyone be bizarrely chill with an ancient (guess that never mattered!) dementia-riddled President Pedo governing via ChatGPT and a half-drained Magic 6 Ball stuck on Tariff Again Later, roving masked gangs of money-choked secret police grabbing people off the street, the government fighting the weather, the government fighting the economy, the government fighting itself, the government fighting the planet, and the government fighting Superman, apparently. Turns out we were all just terribly silly biscuits because there isn’t and never was an Epstein list, and that, too, is miraculously super totally fine with the media and the exact same people who made sure we had nine thousand Congressional hearings to view Hunter Biden’s tool of the establishment. Looking out the right side of the flaming plane crash of all our lives, the word “deportation” has been redefined to mean all sorts of things it doesn’t, but mostly “alligator torture.” The Secretary of Defense openly slams whiskey at press conferences while abandoning Ukraine without texting the group chat and actively planning an invasion of Greenland at least, and the President’s personal advisor/Twi’lek dancer gleefully tweeted about feeding every Latino in the nation to alligators. The Temu Trujillo on his throne of skulls has decided to end satire forever and just hold a UFC cage match right on the White House lawn, shoved a bill through Congress that no one read except to get mildly concerned about the line items involving setting the entirety of rural America on fire, defunding trans hurricanes, and mailing every child an envelope full of neo-measles personally signed by President Mola Ram. Oh! Then he threatened to deport/alligator torture a Democrat for winning a primary and take personal control of New York City because we live in the shittiest straight-to-Betamax Bond movie. And again, no one’s really that upset. At least, not a tenth as upset as they were about ending a war in Afghanistan, the price of eggs, having a cold at a debate, or the existence of a new Superman movie!

Plus, while a brown person holding a job a white person imagines other white people (not them) should be doing is an affront so intense it must be answered by ripping each and every one of them apart until the Atlantic turns to a sea of blood, it’s very completely awesome for every single human profession and activity to be outsourced to a couple of billionaires’ poorly-socialized neopets that can’t pass their bite test, even though we can all see them being actively manipulated to spew hatred in real time right in front of us. Don’t worry, one of them is calling itself MECHAHITLER, and hundreds of thousands of people are actively using fucking MECHAHITLER as a goddamned therapist and/or life partner.

Am I caught up? Probably not. Hours to go before end of business, after all. I don’t know what to tell you, man. It’s weird living in whatever luxury living sub-development of hell managed to sprawl into reality. Every time I try to finish this series, something so fucking Jacobean happens, so dredged from the ultraviolent nethermind of Gargamel’s id, that I feel like my brain is being sawed in half with a broken spork. And all anyone does in response is get absolutely apoplectically furious with Democrats.

So I’ve been thinking about magic lately.

I’m not going full woo on you, relax. I’m fully vaccinated and this is still about the internet unintentionally ending human civilization. But I am a professional fantasy and science fiction writer, most of the time. I’ve invented a magic system or two. And it’s as good an explanation as any. Honestly, between you, me, and the ever-watchful eye of Mechahitler, if I didn’t know better, I’d say magic is the only explanation that makes any coherent sense.

Not crystals-and-potions magic. Not sparkly spells cast at the dark of the moon by elves of great power.

But maybe abracadabra magic. Maybe slight-of-hand. And, you know, maybe some light demon-summoning.

Because we all know none of this is coming from a place grounded in realism.

And while we all make jokes about Trump having made a deal with some devil or other to be able to, without seeming to actually try at all—in fact, occasionally attempting to try not to—mind-flay millions of people and turn them into extensions of his fish-greasy will, and still be converting new ones right now, even with all the alligator torture and public brainmelts and unforced economy-impaling, to be able to turn every single conversation to the topic of himself, every piece of art to address him first…he kind of did. We just didn’t understand the technology had already sufficiently advanced to become indistinguishable from magic.

And the thing about magic is, there’s always a price. A trade. For power, for ease, for plenty, for the objects of divers desires. For every magical gain, there must be an equal and opposite sacrifice.

If you let something out, you have to let something in. If you let something in, something will escape.

So yes, we worshipped assholes, told two and a half generations to study STEM and nothing else (definitely not rhetoric or history or critical analysis because fuck the blue curtains am I right fellow cool kids ha ha teachers suck thinking about stuff is dumb!) or they were wasting the lifeblood of their ancestors, removed, first the necessity, then the possibility, of having to interact with other people on a daily basis, got a huge percentage of humanity to spend all their free time in the same intangible, easily-manipulable place, and wrapped the whole thing up in a pandemic-colored bow that forced everyone who wasn’t living like that yet into their homes, away from other people, and glued their eyeballs open while they observed the unfiltered vortex of the internet 24/7.

But it’s not just that we replaced human life and activity with the internet at approximately the same time that a living (mostly), walking (sort of), talking (I guess technically) low-res edgelord meme failed at failing to get his burnt-out hamburger heat-lamp of a frontal lobe elected President.

We did do that; slowly, without a plan, excitedly perusing points-of-interest on a technological roadmap-cum-skill-tree for an entirely other country, one we were gonna speed through at the speed of loneliness, following the siren-song, not of Pleasure Island, but Convenience Island—where we could see our troubles were all monetizable and everyone knew our names because they’d stolen our data before we were born. By the time anyone clocked the donkey ears, they were trending on TikTok, the hottest red carpet accessory, required to qualify under business-casual dress codes, knock-offs for the plebs available from Temu in bulk, shipped to your door.

But as we let the internet into our deepest selves…we also left the door open, and the internet escaped into the real world.

And that’s what’s going on right now. What’s been going on for a some time. You can see it with almost every single scandal that hits the mainstream hive-mind—and it is a hive-mind, a constant feed of everyone’s most random, formerly private thoughts, good and evil, mundane and bizarre, running constantly in the background of every simple action we ever take? Yeah, that’s a hive-mind, and primitive as it is, we weren’t even close to ready to handle knowing everybody’s lunch order, let alone the nasty crawlies clicking around the brainpans of people who had never felt seen or valued until clickingcrawlies.com gave them an unlimited dopamine drip.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t a wrecking ball coming in for a kiss.

See, some of us have seen all this before. It just didn’t matter then.

Because we allowed, nay, encouraged and cheered on, the internet metastasizing into every corner of the real world and take it over, the problems we who lived online before it was decidedly not fucking cool, during the awkward adolescence of the internet, had to deal with in the 00s became the problems that are, right this very minute, dissolving this world in acid and dancing through its slowly liquefying flesh like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.

Power mods gone mad, lolcows, fandom flamewars, sockpuppets, trolls fed and unfed, dogpiling, meme wars, scams, images having been pastede on yay, lies and facts being mostly interchangeable, walled gardens, weaponized irony, parasocial relationships, the economy of attention, viral everything, sea lions, slacktivism, hacktivism, the endless September…all of these have been ported directly into real life, where they are happily chewing away at the deepest root of society: the ability to connect to another human being in some way other than bashing their head in on sight.

What is Elon Musk but the ultimate Power Mod gone mad? He runs his little message board as he pleases, banhammering away, boosting those who praise him and running multiple sockpuppet accounts while insisting lurkers support him in email, making random shit up on the internet, calling his minions to dogpile anyone who suggests any of it isn’t the precise truth, and accidentally roping in a lot of lonely people who just want to feel something bigger than dread about work tomorrow…we’ve been through all of this when it was about Harry/Hermione fanfic or Slenderman or poorly photoshopped images of Dominic Monaghan and if you don’t know what I’m talking about THAT IS SIMPLY WONDERFUL FOR YOU.

But all that, in the early 00s, was going on online while the real world was real worlding along separately. The run-up to the Iraq War did not take place on Livejournal. Dick Cheney did not buy YTMND.com or SomethingAwful and turn it into a Nazi petting farm (real talk: wouldn’t have been necessary, really). But millions upon millions of young people who are far past youth now, and millions more all over the age spectrum, were super busy laying down dopamine mechanisms in their brains that they’d never escape. They were just too intense, too immediate, too randomly-reinforcing, too easy to refine into money, power, fame, and an infinite narcissistic supply of praise.

Sadly for the future of humanity, the early 2000s were not an overly kind time on the pimply, awkward internet, and one of the easiest ways to get that attention was through trolling, which did originally mean posting things you didn’t actually mean just to get a reaction. But the problem with irony is, if you do it often enough, no one can tell the difference between you being a dick for a laugh and you just being a deep-down dick. Not even you. After a couple of decades of saying the opposite of what you mean being the marker of a Cool and With It Person, FUCKING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE. The Epstein Files fiasco is classic power mod behavior—lie, delete anything contradicting the lie, refuse to engage, ban everyone, change your username, and pretend it never happened. My god, how many times, in how many places you loved, has that shit gone down?

Elon Musk is 53 years old. He was part of that early internet boom, and as utter whaleshit as his version of his role in that is, he very clearly got hardcore addicted to internet attention long before ketamine. What he does is to get his fix, however he can. He will never stop, because it’s been 30 years of wiring his psyche to digest only the adulation and approbation of strangers.

Even the tsunami of bots, troll farms, and AI slop is just the industrialized Pokemon evolution of sockpuppet accounts, forum trolls, and shitty Photoshop wars. ChatGPT is a great chatbot, but it’s literally in the name, my friends. That’s all it is. A jumped-up Furby who fucked a Clippy.

My friends, the Blair Witch Project kids had real human adults totally convinced they released genuine footage of a real supernatural witch murdering people into theaters near you for $5 on matinee Tuesdays. And my siblings in Satan, that was in 1999.

And then there’s Donald fucking Trump. My god. If I hadn’t grown up hearing what a piece of shit this guy was, a hundred million years before I knew what a modem sounded like, I might think the internet had just invented a person. It’s so easy to forget that he was there from fairly early in the game, gossiping about celebrities and being a general-issue bloviating dork on social media talking shit about rubbish. The reality TV show was a big deal in terms of putting him in the living rooms of Americans, but—and when I say this, I am not meaning to downplay in any way how dangerous, horrific, or murderous this long, dark shart of the American soul truly is—but I think his real power, the reason his grip is so unshakable, is that Donald J. Trump is the Apotheosis of the Lolcow.

If you’ve never heard that word, or if hearing it in 2025 merely wakens something deep within you from a dark slumber, a “lolcow” is the subject of particularly fierce internet drama. Someone whose activities can literally be milked for laughs, both because they never, ever stop fucking up, and because their fuck-ups are so positively Byzantine in their elaborate, over-the-top, pants-on-Pluto stupidity that you simply cannot look away. More than that, people often encouraged the lolcow into even further, messier, more dangerous acts of life-ruining idiocy, simply to enjoy the show and consume the popcorn, literal and metaphorical, that accompanied watching someone ruin their own very real lives and others’ for entertainment.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

I honestly don’t even want to give examples because severe mental illness is a constant factor, some of them were deeply abusive people, others true victims, and either way, milking said lolcows was almost always an act of intense cruelty. It doesn’t feel kind to drag any of these actual human beings (or their victims, or their enablers) up again. But the fact is, Trump’s swollen udder has overflowed with unceasing bounty for over ten years, and will never dry even after his death. Chris-Chan could never begin to compete with the dairy production of the Little Caesar’s Caesar and his gang of edgy, edgy trolls.

Lolcows provide adrenaline to themselves and dopamine to everyone involved in the drama, whether they invited that drama or not. That’s why the big ones go on and on. Why people followed their trashfires so intently, why it became addictive, why to this day there are people all over the Chan boards still milking lolcows from twenty years ago. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it really did tend to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of stupidly dangerous clownshit and stealing his userbase. There was always a huge microeconomy of weird activity around a lolcow, pushing them into more extreme behavior, forming fake friendships and narratives with and around them in order to have access, outside sites documenting the whole thing and commenting on it—each one is a little industry.

Or a big one.

Back in 2015? The people who did support him almost always said they did because he was funny. The young Trump voters in 2025 often say the same.

And a lot of both groups are still laughing. They do actually think Alligator Alcatraz is hilarious. Because it’s abstract to them. It barely registers as real; they treat it as a meme. Our government goes on television and laughs about feeding human beings to alligators and the media barely yawns and that’s just life now.

Those who aren’t laughing have joined the document and commentate portion of the lolcow cycle—and because the internet got way better at monetization streams than it was in the aughts, shittons of the Fandom Wank mods of today rely on this lolcow for their entire income. They won’t stop, either. It’s how they get what they need, too. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it tends to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of malignant fuckery.

What is Donald Trump but the infinite lolcow that now dominates and nourishes every moment of the media cycle with his antics. No one can look away—because the internet got out and now online drama is threatening our lives and livelihoods instead of our fandoms. We replaced our everyday lives and connections with the internet, and then the internet poured itself into a carcass called Trump, the walking embodiment of the worst shit that went down on the worst sites you ever knew about. 4Chan, and later 8Chan, made the Trump Presidency. He was their lolcow first. Now he;’s our nocow to, and the nos and the lols define the whole being of the country..

And now we’re fucking stuck. Every newsday is about him. Every sporting event. Every movie release. Every fucking half-time show. Every holiday. When it’s not about Elon Musk or one of the other Big Name Fans on the periphery of the constant, constant drama. It all swirls around what he’ll do next. And even those of us who hate him beyond words spend the precious hours of our lives doomscrolling and commenting, dissolving into the adrenaline (fear at the next disaster for us, fear of the other for them)/dopamine (validation at others sharing our fear for us, Trump’s IV line to their entire endocrine system for them) combo it seems impossible for so many to turn away from. We aren’t enjoying this on any level—but we’re stuck. We’re engaging. All the time. We want it to stop. We need it to stop. But they don’t. They need it to go on. A lot of Trump’s most fervent followers were never really online much before his rise—they have no natural defense or suspicion of this stuff, because by the time they logged on, the engagement algorithm had already made a shitstew of the concept of the truth, and people who’d cut their teeth lying and manipulating on the internet were ready and excited to screw the noobs.

Now, please understand I’m not trying to make jokes by calling him a lolcow, it’s deadly, grimly serious. It’s a disaster that might very well be the end of us, and I am afraid every day. The other ghouls behind Trump aren’t anyone’s lolcow—they’re the same fucking assholes who were pulling puppet strings on the internet back then, too. And Stephen Miller. I’m just trying to explain why this wet sack of a man has become the hemlock of the masses. We’ve trapped ourselves in a forum flamewar without end, and the billions of words spilled on actual forums back then should tell you how truly long this can go on. Even though it truly seems that no one, least of all the trolls themselves, is having any fun whatsoever these days. Well. Addiction is like that. You always need more intense highs to feel anything anymore.

Gotta bomb Iran or send the army into California or kill the concept of schools and weather. I do think Trump, deep in the dim corners of his alleged mind, understands one thing with crystal clarity: his power comes from engagement, just like the demonic algorithm. If he lets things get boring, even for a few days, he’ll begin to lose ground. He has to produce for his audience, and yesterday’s drama will never be enough for today’s maw.

And when you combine that “one good trick” with a clear, step-by-step agenda from the Republicans who’ve always been sociopathic Christofascist white supremacist monsters in Project 2025, you get July 16th, 2025.

And it does matter now. It is serious now. Very real people are dying, families are being torn apart, the economy is exsanguinating jobs and every one of those jobs is a real person’s next dinner. But the problem is, for a very significant number of both left and right white, straight, cis, privileged, vaguely Christian-ish Americans, which demographics are still in the bare majority, all of that, and the resistance to it, is only happening online. It’s happening through a tesseract of screens and performances that occlude reality just enough to paralyze almost everyone in either horror or delight.

Politics, for those with the privilege to only experience them through screens, is precisely fandom drama. People all the fuck over the place refer to themselves as fans of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, AOC or DeSantis (not so fast, Vance) rather than supporters, and that poisonous toadshit’s been going on for a minute. What a victory for the media to finally fully be able to smash politics into a fire3hose of turbogruel with sports and Hollywood and spray it in our faces without too much of that annoying pretending to be serious about anything or anyone. The horrors of the Texas floods, alligator torture, Palestine, assassinations, loss of rights everywhere, it all flows by in the same font, on the same background, as news of the latest Marvel casting or skibidi meme, and it directly affects most of those groups just about as much—so far. As long as they’re not one of the targeted groups yet, it’s all just fodder for the machine, that now pays out not only in “lols” (which were always somewhat sadistic), but in money, power, attention, praise, and brain chemicals real life has struggled to supply with the same overwhelming intensity, especially since we all got together, held hands, sang fucking Imagine, and worked very earnestly to come up with a holistic method of running society without human beings interacting directly with one another during the pandemic.

Is it absolutely revolting? Yes, of course it is. It’s fucking gross. But I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I’ve seen people bend themselves into Escher’s own pretzels justifying their participation in these lolcow orgies of shame. People like watching others suffer. Some a little (heh that young fellow was struck in the testicles with a sporting implement, eh wot?) some a lot (Alligator Alcatraz). But most people have that in them. They come up with a way to feel it’s deserved. That they would never be the sufferers on display, since they don’t deserve it. Cancelling, outside of people like Weinstein and Spacey, is really just this sort of behavior with a superiority complex. And so they kept, and keep, watching, and participating, even though it’s clearly grotesque.

And Trump is the zenith of this. The one true talent he actually has, and has leveraged his entire life—because he was a much more benign lolcow in the 80s, too—is letting people laugh at him or seethe at him for money and attention. And I don’t believe it truly matters to him which one.

Is there a way out? I’m…not sure there is. Because it’s been way too long. Multiple generations have been trained to expect this cycle of adrenaline and dopamine to be the main service government provides. Back in the time known as the day, lolcows ended when enough people got banned effectively enough, someone got very seriously hurt, and occasionally, when people got bored and wandered off. I’m not sure analogues of any of those are really on the table at the moment. It truly is something to be the man to enshittify liberal democracy and simple every day life. The only thing that ended that adolescence of the internet was this. So where we go from here, I struggle to say. Except that finding some way back to each other in the real world, to connecting, to talking, not to the FUCKING VOID THAT IS AI, but to other actual people face to face, is probably the only possible road, not out, but maybe, just maybe, through.

Trump pulled off his deal for power by trading the rules of the internet for the rules of real life. He stands in the middle of a planet full of pain like a sloppy, drooling Virtuvian Man, gorging on the left dogpiling him with rage and the right dogpiling him with worship.

It’s all the same to him, just as long as he’s covered in bodies.

It’s going to be the work of the rest of our lives to dig our way out.

Epilogue to follow on Thursday (promise this time, it’s already done)

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I am alive!

Is the book done? No. About ten chapters left, because everything that could go hilariously wrong last week, from a massive heat dome in New England to my ceiling flooding and falling through, did indeed happen, plus more outlandish rubbish on top of it. Thus, I am still drowning in stress, plus more stress, plus bathtub water and it’s still too hot.

So hold tight, I shall not perish, yet. I’m looking to have the last post in Move Fast and Break People up over the weekend.

In the meantime!

I have a new short story out at Uncanny Magazine, and I’m super excited about it, so I’m taking the step of telling my political readers to hey maybe check out a bit of my fiction. The personal, and fictional, is always political, after all.

Plus…the premise is just a ton of cheeky fun and I don’t want to tell you what it is, because it’ll spoil the whole thing, but you will recognize it and laugh some minor, unimportant body part off before the whole thing veers wildly into new territory.

When He Calls Your Name

Give it a read if you want! And I’ll be back this weekend with some more yelling about our grim tech-lich overlords.

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Hey everyone!

I realize I have not yet finished the Move Fast and Break People series. I am often full of failures. However! There are reasons! And not just the totally bugfuck pinwheeling madness that is every single headline every single day!

On top of The Horror of It All, I am not just a Yeller of Swears, but a science fiction and fantasy novelist, believe it or not, and sometimes the Big Job makes Big Demands.

I appear to actually be near to finishing Nobody But Us, the near-future gender dys/utopia thriller I’ve been working on for quite some time, can’t imagine why I’d want to write about that sort of thing these days, total coincidence I’m sure.

I have not disappeared on you, I promise! But I will be a bit quiet for the next 10-ish days while I try to put this beast to bed. Trust I have many things to say and want to say them, but at the moment, I must attend to the world in my head, which is also on fire, only this fire I can fix. Writing books is nice that way.

Thank you all so much for your patience and support! The series will finish around the end of the month once the book is done and my brain can brain reality once more. Lord, I cannot fucking wait to see life on the other side of this.

See you all on the flipside, T-10ish days!

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Please excuse a brief pause in our series on the internet slowly absorbing and replacing all human life with yelling to…yell.

I just have some things I need to say. For my own health, because I’m pretty sure shoving all this what-the-fuckery down into my innards to rot with the absolute tonnage of reeking fucking trash I have to suppress my fury about every single day is bad for you. In fact, I’m pretty sure the entire reason middle-aged people are in such a sour little snit of a mood all the time is the crushing weight of years of bullshit, our own, others’, and most definitely the world’s, accreting directly on our lower backs.

AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER KEEL OVER OR GET A STUPID SPORTS CAR ABOUT IT BUT WE’RE ALL BROKE SO BLOGGING IT FUCKING IS.

Oh, and this one’s going under a paywall. If you want to yell back at me about how super chill and cool the allegedly-lefty internet is being about Biden’s diagnosis right now, you gotta kick me a buck because oh my god, my back is killing me.

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Welcome back to your nuclear hellscape of infinite human torment already in progress! What a fucking beautiful day in the goddamned cursed-ass neighborhood of slowly-deflating dreams, in which the very concept of hope is being pilloried daily in every town square. King Friday just sent a kindergartner to a Salvadorean prison, then slept the guiltless, unperturbed sleep of a baby.

IT’S GREAT HERE. Did you know hell always had the option of adding more rings? That franchise opportunities for torment-expansion and new items on the Value Menu of Breathtaking Moral Putrescence was just…always on the table for us? NEAT FACT!

We last left our dingus century slowly burgeoning into a digital technocracy and blundering through the long process of kicking down fundamental pillars of civilization, replacing them all with apps, and expecting the overall structure to stay totally fine and cool and never, ever wobble despite no one taking care of it, at all, in any way.

But that wasn’t enough for us, oh no. We are such very clever, super rad, bold and edgy futuremonkeys. So we started kicking it, too.

Just a little bit. Not because we hated the basic structure of interconnected human systems. Because most of us never really understood anything about the basic structure of interconnected human systems. The particular pillars we were whacking on weren’t exactly obviously load-bearing. In fact, for quite a long time, a little vigorous boot-smacking seemed to improve things. And a bunch of people who confidently said they did understand those structures insisted it wasn’t kicking, it was industry disruption, and hey, who doesn’t love disrupting nasty fat greedy old industry? Yeah, fuck the system, give it a roundhouse this time!

So when, eventually, the janky societal stud-finder that is the American Electoral Cycle started coming up catastrophically empty, we’d spent so long saying fuck the system and getting rapturous, deafening cheers for it (and absolutely nothing but acidic disdain for maybe system good just need fix?) we never should have been surprised to find the system, well, totally fucked.

This essay concerns one of those not-obviously-integral societal pillars: trends in fictional televisual storytelling. OH WE GETTING HOT NOW.

No, but we kind of are. Everything we thought and taught about these two things was changing throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, converging on a new consensus at the exact same time as people slowly learning how much they genuinely enjoyed not having to deal with other human beings for every little thing and not thinking too hard about how the bedrock definition of society is human beings having to deal with other human beings for every little thing.

The thing is, the kinds of stories we take in on a daily basis and the professions we choose to pursue are enormous, broad-sweeping cultural movements. The issues this series is trying to address, concerning the dominance of the internet and digital living, are not uniformly experienced. How much or how little daily life has been made physically intangible varies from person to person, country to country. (And of course, all these thoughts are heavy on the American landscape because…well, the American landscape has been weaponized against both itself and everyone else plus I live here.) A large rural family, to whose address Instacart delivers only thoughts and prayers, does not have the same relationship with the internet, or daily direct human interaction quotients, that a single, WFH, recent college graduate living in a major test-market city does.

But they’ve all heard that Iron Man is a badass.

Here’s the lede, unburied above the fold: I’m not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment. That’s just silliness.

But I’m not not saying Tony Soprano ended the American experiment, either.

This whole digression started because a friend and I were talking about politics (it’s like doomscrolling! But you do it in person, and maybe there is whiskey, and maybe there is yelling, but yelling together, and at least probably also no one calls you a shitlib) and they asked: how could anyone think these assholes were actually going to be effective at solving any problems? I just don’t get how you can even trick yourself into thinking these are the guys, even if you’re a very devoted Nazi.

And I knee-jerk answered:

Oh, that’s easy! Because we’ve spent the last quarter-fucking-century consuming virtually infinite movies, shows, games, and books in which the Asshole Anti-hero is the only guy who can cut through all the bullshit and get the job done. Then we told everyone growing up or coming of age during that time not to study the humanities or they were a stupid waste of flesh destined to starve to death in a ditch, so they couldn’t think critically about any of it.

If you didn’t experience the pre-2K media environment in real time, it’s hard to express the size and depth of the sea change I’m talking about here. From the advent of mainstream televisual entertainment in the 20s and 30s up through the very late 90s, the heroes of major tentpole media units were many things, but they were almost always…you know…heroes. All narrative has a moral agenda, and while yes, a big part of the 20th century moral agenda was sit down and shut up if you’re not a straight white man or else, for straight white men themselves, the moral lessons of film and television was very much centered on a kind of post-doc Sunday School hey, I know you have this rage without form or focus inside you all the time, but have you considered being a good person about it? Here’s how!

The heroes of the stories America most liked to tell about its Golden Children were never screaming fucking sociopaths quipping the day away cleverly, clothed in the the tattered shreds of the lives they’ve carelessly destroyed, for whom everything more or less works out, even when they die, because when and if they do eat it, their worldview is almost always upheld, and their nihilistic dog-eat-dog death forms a supporting argument, or at least an emphatic underline, for their nihilistic dog-eat-dog way of life, Mr. I-Am-the-One-Who-Knocks SIR.

Before you hop on the comment section to note well, actually The Screaming Fucking Sociopath Show ran from 1971-1974 on CBS—look, there’s never 0% or 100% in media analysis, there’s always exceptions and outliers. GENERAL TRENDS, PEOPLE. Plus, on the rare occasion that an unutterable nightmare of human psychology was the protagonist of a movie or show, that was the point of the story, and they weren’t rewarded for it. For all Hollywood’s heavy breathing over the Italian mafia in the 1970s, Al Capone still dies in prison unloved and unmourned, and hubris was still a fatal flaw instead of a singularly required virtue. While the beginning of the douche-as-imperfect-but-semi-lovable-hero genre might have started with shows like The Simpsons or Married With Children or literally anything Martin Scorsese ever touched, Homer and Al are not effective at life, they aren’t right about very much, most people around them don’t really like them, and a huge number of plot points revolve around the Dipshit In Question learning some kind of basically pro-social lesson.

Pre-1999ish, monstrous, dick-swinging assholes and their tediously identical personal philosophies about how the whole system, whatever the system in question is, should be replaced with the hypnotic motions of that selfsame swinging dick, weren’t often presented, shot, or reacted to by others as attractive, or delightful, or highly competent, or posited as maybe actually a legitimate way to conduct yourself in real life. And the horrifying, violent, anti-social, hate-pickled soul-amputee didn’t regularly end up being pretty much right all along while regular people just moving through life trying to mostly do the right thing are lame suckers or even hateful bitches who exist only to be fodder for or obstacles to This Fucking Guy’s big plans because that’s a fucking crazy thing to embed in the brains of a traumatized post-two-different-world-wars population.

It might not seem important. It might not seem like it could really make much of a difference. But our brains crave stories and the stories those brains gorge on become the way those brains expect life to work, at least on some level. Millions upon millions of people spend more focused, intentional time with their favorite OMG SO BINGEABLE movie and TV show characters than they do with anyone but their actual immediate families, and for many, many more, the math may not actually come out in favor of family. That’s a tremendous amount of influence, whose hypnotic immersion doesn’t even break for commercials anymore. So when the most common archetype of the Successful and Effective HeroMan fundamentally changes, what people expect to find when they go looking for successful effectiveness also changes. Mr. Smith going to Washington starts to look like a gormless boring weirdo who doesn’t remotely understand what’s Really Going On and is defending a shitty system anyway so why root for him? Now, Walter White, Don Draper, Tony Stark, Patrick Bateman, Jack Bauer, Tyler Durden? Jaime/any Lannister, Jordan Belfort? Those guys are so fun—and they get shit done.

This isn’t a post-9/11 nihilism thing, either, though it ramped up a lot after that. I glibly blamed it on Tony Soprano, but that’s not really wrong. Oz has a real claim to starting the trend in 1997, but few shows have ever had the mainstream in the palm of their hand the way The Sopranos did from 1999-2007, and it was Ground Zero for the Age of the Rewarded Asshole.

1999-2001 saw an absolute supernova of televisual stories whose protagonists were dark, edgy, violent, cruel, angry at “the system” (always for denying them the status and rewards they’re clearly owed, never for the specific flaws of that system), totally without empathy, disrespectful and obnoxious to everyone around them, narcissistic, and 24/7 surly without for one second not being the absolute hero of their stories—Fight Club, The Matrix, Boondock Saints, 24, Boiler Room, American Psycho, Dark City, Memento, Snatch, Angel, even comedies like Pushing Tin, Futurama (don’t @ me, I love that show but they’re all assholes), Family Guy, High Fidelity, Black Books, The fucking Man Show…and yes, even my beloved Farscape. Because you could be pretty sure that if the hero wasn’t a complete dickwagon, the rest of the story was gonna work real hard to make you love the villain, think they’re WAY cooler than the heroes, and feel bad for their poor widdle hurt villanous feewings.

Suddenly there was a whole crop of assholes running around being pretty damned successful at solving problems, where before THE archetype of even the Complicated Hero was a basically decent guy put upon by life and doing his best to make the moral choice in an unfeeling universe.

And then, saints and ministers of grace defend us, there’s The Phantom Menace. George Lucas created from the definitional SpaceGood vs. SpaceEvil clear-cut heroic trilogy where decent people try real hard to make decent choices and it works, in the 70s, when nothing was clear-cut or very heroic. Then, before anyone had anything bad to say about Star Wars, spent the entire first decade of the new century spending hundreds of millions and bending everything he’d ever done into unloosesable narrative knots, all to make us love and empathize with Darth Ever-Fucking Vader because reasons. And then Disney built the sequels and almost all their sequel-merchandising around Han and Leia’s psychotic dirtbag homo/geno/patri/regi/avunculi/arguably matricidal son as some kind of “blood-drenched fascism is fine if you’re hot and tortured while you do it” brooding hero and it worked. (not to make a thesis out of it, but the only reason any of these brooding heroes brood at all is that people just inexplicably refuse to treat them with the deference and awe they’re owed by their very nature. Probably because people are bad and need to be punished into worshipful adoration. That sounds right, doesn’t it? It also sounds like a certain voting bloc’s bedrock policy complaint.)

And all those movies were ostensibly aimed at kids. Whose moralities were under construction, excuse the mess.

It’s like there was a meeting and we all just decided good people are boring and stupid and we wanted to hear way less of them for the foreseeable future.

There was another huge explosion of this in 2008-10, not coincidentally as Obama was elected, the shadow of Bush/Cheney, a decade of war, fear, and disastrous Wall Street auto-fellatio seemed to be lifting. A good dude was in the White House, so no need to push hard on stories about doing the right thing to attempt some kind of pressure on the powers that be to maybe think about not being shrieking beholders all the time. It was definitely time to shove our faces right down into Bad People Fiction like a pile of freesia-scented cocaine. Breaking Bad, The Dark Knight, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, Fringe, Luther, Iron Man, Sideways, Inglorious Basterds, Inception (and also everything Christopher Nolan has ever done), on and on.

Gen X had a lot going on. Just…a significant number of issues to work through.

And these heroes are literally all the same person. “Morally grey” always means the same guy is about to fart his way into your psyche.

SEE IF THIS SLUDGE RINGS A SHITBELL:

• Doing pretty solidly at life within the parameters of the socio-economic class to which they belong, but hasn’t gotten to the tippy-top of that class, either, for reasons the story insists are beyond their control.

• Either extremely physically attractive or conspicuously not attractive whatsoever, yet possessing a seriously obscene amount of weird, cruel charisma/affability that comes out most entertainingly during his worst actions

• A consistent garbage asshole to any wife, family, social circle, and co-workers, who gives nothing back for the mountain of love, grace, patience, time, money, and favors showered upon him, yet somehow the shower never ends because occasionally he shows reluctant affection to a child or animal or the memory of a dead wife. Maybe a sled, idk.

• Hates the system, man. What system? It doesn’t matter, he hates it and he’s gonna bring it down. And he’s not gonna do it by being a good boy, no way! Fuck you, DAD! He’s gonna do it with a bunch of crazy shit that looks suspiciously like just acting on your id 100% of the time but totes isn’t that, promise. Whatever plans he has to get rid of the old system or building a new one are nebulous at best, the point is SYSTEM BAD, SYSTEM DOWN, MAN AWESOME. He’s so edgy and cool! He says things you’re not supposed to! He’s above the law! You want him to be above the law because that’s the only way the story continues so FUCK YOU, LAW. And when he does his cool violence the audience isn’t supposed to have uncomfortable feelings about it the way they normally would if anyone else did them, because having uncomfortable feelings about things is just another part of the system, my dudes.

• Because it’s so entertaining, the story has now taught you to fucking hate anyone who stands in the way of this super cool swaggerboss, even if they’re doing that by committing such heinous acts as…asking any questions at all of Broody Mclotsadrugs or politely offering an alternative course of action to Bigjaw Gruntybear’s “fuck everyone who isn’t me” plan.

• Because, you see, the normal rules just don’t apply to this zomg so cool and fuckable and powerful lone rebel, vessel of dgaf masculinity and mechanism of applying irrationality to rational life that he is! Normal rules would actually be taking something ineffable away from him, damaging his soul, making him less of a man, nay, less of a human.

• Has zero hesitation about hurting people (physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, etc depending on genre) to achieve their goals, in fact, profoundly believes their goals are unachievable without hurting people. The story itself usually revolves around incredibly vivid and creative expressions of that hurt, without depicting the aftermath. The story rarely presents any other workable means of achieving the protagonist’s goals, ultimately proving him right without having to say so and letting all the creators do a Dr. Evil pinky-smirk about how they never meant these characters to be attractive role models admired by millions.

• White dude, because obviously we get super uncomfy when any other kind of human acts like this. Straightness may or may not wobble, but if wobble, must wobble at a decidedly masc angle.

Now, it’s never been so concentrated in slower media like books and plays, other trends were also going on, and certainly, in recent years the trend has recoiled a bit in the face of this shit not turning out to be so thrillingly fun in real life, but the visual (i.e. easiest to consume) storytelling landscape of the 21st century was colonized by assholes to a truly clownshoes and their accompanying clownstockings degree. By the end of the aughts, the vast majority of stories committed to film involved some kind of anti-hero, and they were almost always proven effective at their goals in the end, often the only people who could accomplish them, and only by their chosen means. Those means might look insane at first, but they always prove more, or at least more quickly, effective than being good and moral. And then Game of Thrones premiered!

Even Michael Scott was repeatedly shown to be the best salesmen in the company despite his horrible behavior and clear idiocy. (So we get the “even an idiot asshole is more effective at the same job than a competent person” narrative in the most popular comedy of its decade) And Ron Swanson, much as I love him, was regularly a totally heinous shit to everyone around him, at times even approaching malevolent sabotage of the entire local government apparatus simply because it is the government apparatus. And the show made it, and his school of pug-nosed libertarianism, so endearing and cool people were actively disappointed when he grew and evolved. The Marvel movies are absolutely chock full of horrifying narcissists, now with SWEET BRANDING AND MERCHANDISE.

Of course, there’d always been bad people and complicated protagonists—noir wouldn’t exist otherwise. But usually, especially in the period betwen the end of WW2 and the end of the Cold War, when America felt the need to at least appear morally upright to contrast with those nasty communists, those guys got some kind of comeuppance. Citizen Kane still dies alone and unloved, no matter how sick his sled was when he was 8. Michael Corleone doesn’t exactly have a nice time, and his methodologies become obsolete almost as soon as the sequel rolls film. Most people involved in noir stories end up face down in a pool of their own consequences.

The difference wasn’t necessarily that obnoxious bullies were in media, but that they suddenly were the heroes we needed.

Because they always won, even though they had to suffer through one or two Good Person DEI Hires on the way. They always win even when they die in the end. Yeah, Walter White ate it…in the series finale, in very epic fashion, after accomplishing literally all of his goals, none of which were ever “be a nice family man people enjoy spending time with.”

And that’s without even mentioning Reality TV, the Skinnerian Box that disgorged Donald Trump’s final form, in which the villains very often triumphed, and the promise of cruelty meant a great episode.

The worst part is, nobody telling these stories was necessarily doing anything wrong or bad. This was a new(ish) way to tell stories to a massive worldwide mainstream audience in a world with precious few of those. It was exciting and fresh and so fun to write, to act, even more fun to watch and discuss. We liked watching it because it was made to be liked. We liked making it because it feels good to make art that feels challenging and dangerous.

Unfortunately, it also trained us, over the course of almost three decades, to see slick monsters as necessary heroes, victims as suckers, and the smashing of all systems as inherently moral and FUCKIN’ BADASS, no matter what the qualities of the system itself.

Which had also, not coincidentally, been the underlying message of most of the heroes of the previous generation—they were rarely out-and-out psychopaths and monsters, but almost all of them were edgy outsiders with contempt for “normie” life, who could eat 50 eggs, who couldn’t forget about Chinatown, who made offers that couldn’t be refused, who always wanted to be a gangster, as far back as they could remember. Boomer media is FULL of guys raging against the system and being totally unsatisfied with even the richest rewards of that system. That the system existed was enough reason to hate it and punch it in the face while laughing at the dumb rubes who just wanted to have an okay normal time in life and maybe a job. Right or left, it didn’t and doesn’t matter, the only unforgiveable sin, artistically and politically, for the last thirty years, has been to be seen as part of, beholden to, or standing up for any tiny sliver of, any kind of established societal system.

Was it really any wonder no one cared about defending the system by the time we crawled over broken glass to 2025?

After all, the angry, unpleasant, rude, anti-social, obnoxious, violent, capricious, sadistic, unrefined, swaggering, totally emotionally unregulated anti-protagonist who blasts through everyone else like a demented Kool-Aid man always turns out to be right, or at least, the very coolest one of us all.

At least, that’s what I’ve heard. FOR MY ENTIRE ADULT LIFE.

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Good afternoon, this is your very stressed-out captain speaking. Welcome back to the most depressing shit imaginable! We are flying at dangerously breakneck speeds above what appears to be a couple of hundred million Artaxes stuck teeth-deep in a nationwide Swamp of Mudsucking Sadness on our long-haul flight from Normal Fucking Life to the Inevitable Burning Wreckage of Ostensibly-Civilized Society. We hope you’re enjoying our in-flight Long Form Socio-Philosophical Essay service. Out the left windows, you can see just exactly where it all went wrong, but don’t worry, this is a non-stop flight, and we’re not going to do one even half-assed thing about it. We are expecting an absolute rustic pigfuck of a journey through the end of liberal democracy and anticipate noisily facedrilling into medieval fucking feudalism within the year.

Last time on I’m From the Government and I’m Here to Tell You to Get Fucked, Die Broke, and Worship Dear Leader, we talked about how, over the course of thirty or so years, we replaced every part of regular, everyday human life with the internet, and when we couldn’t quite totally replace something with various iterations of a live feed of people screaming at each other about politics, we just went ahead and stapled the internet onto the side of it, whether anyone wanted or needed that or not, we were not fucking fussed.

But we might have sort of kind of basically held together, with wishes, imagination, a lot of caulk and emojis, and people’s annoying habit of actually wanting some kind of social interaction aside from blood relations and toner relations work colleagues. After all, we’ve had malevolent dickvoids moaning over their weird ergot-dreams of total domination running things for pretty much always, in all places and times, forever.

They just couldn’t get us all in one place before. I’m not even specifically talking about the walled gardens of Facebook or X or TikTok, I mean the internet itself. A place whose points of ingress and egress they already controlled, and whose activity they could manipulate for, quite literally, less money and effort than it takes an average consumer to buy a new car.

And now it will become clear how a little musing about hey maybe we shouldn’t have relied on that whole “caring about other people” thing to get us through an election against Goblin Fascism, seeing as how we just got done rearranging all of society to discourage interaction with other people as much as possible and then just let that bin-bag full of trauma-diapers marinate in its own fetid juices for four years turned into a four-part series: it’s all just so much. Once you start pulling at the threads, it’s everything.

(And I swear by the ghost of Usenet I’m not just shuffling around the house being 45 and complaining about how much better everything was back in the time known colloquially as “my day.” A lot of this was not better. That’s why we replaced it with the internet. It was slow and clunky and annoying and unexciting. It sucked up all the extra hours of your day, and then a few more, like a gluttonous anaconda of time and energy. There were definitely nefarious schemes afoot from the earliest of digital days, but the most nefarious of all turned out to be that almost everybody is just a comfort-seeking human animal who would like things to just be a little easier and less scary than they were yesterday, to have just a few more minutes between work and sleep to exist, to be just a little more comfortable, have less on their mind, experience a little more of life. What a bunch of assholes, right?)

So how did we get here? Well, to put it plainly, without jokey profanity?

We tried to use technology to fix our very human loneliness and increasing alienation from the modern world and accidentally got close enough to making progress that way too many of us were all gathered in one place for way too many hours in the day, until it became so easy and convenient for the people in charge of that place to control public opinion that not doing it, to these edgelord minds, was not only lame and cringe, but approached fiduciary negligence.

Plus, being able to control how and what people think and not doing it really annoyed them. Some humans find pleasure in nothing so much as controlling other humans, and if you were that kind of person in the 90s tech boom, you probably gravitated toward the big shiny new thing with no rules that could reach right into the brain of those oh-so-controllable human toys and let you play.

We let ourselves get corralled. Brought in from the prairies and fenced off in one place, where it was trivially easy to get to all of us at once. And it’s just so unbelievably fucking sad that we did it, not entirely, but largely, because we were lonely.

Because, as the digital age ascended and the structures of the analogue world decayed, we went looking for a new third place.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase “third place,” meaning a place humans go to be human at each other which is neither home nor work. The loss of such places has been a subject of great distress, handwringing, and much scapegoating for most of my adult life, even before such places were really lost at all.

I heard the phrase first in 2001, but it was only coined in 1989, by a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg. Before that, such a phrase would’ve been mostly non-sensical, even apart from the fact that, for most of history, it would’ve had to be a fourth place, neither home nor work nor church. But we very intelligent, enlightened lefties only saw the (admittedly terrible) religious part so we already went ahead and ditched that useless thing where you had to go somewhere every week, dress vaguely well, look your neighbors in the eye, talk to them in a manner that wouldn’t get you ostracized from the entire town, hear about their problems, meet their children, let them witness how you treat your family, and be forced to at least pretend to consider stupid shit like hey maybe be nice to each other you leaky fucking bin bags, if you don’t someone’s gonna set you on fire forever, just saying.

The weird thing is, even in 2001, the context in which I heard “third place” was…a bunch of young people bemoaning that they were extinct, and that extinction was dooming humanity forever. The internet was the only third place left; it would be the lone hope of our generation. In the future, they said, the internet would be everyone’s third place.

The irony of this sentiment being uttered by a bunch of young people hanging out in an internet cafe, itself very obviously a third goddamned place, was completely lost on me at the time because I was a dork-ass child. But, in my defense, it was lost on everyone else, too. In comparison to 2024, in 2001, third places were absolutely bloody everywhere. Pubs, clubs, rec centers, cafes, bowling alleys, hell, even Grange Halls were still kind of a thing, if only for the olds. There was literally no shortage at all of places to go or things to do. And those places were packed and they were cheap, even for the young.

So what were we bitching about in our cozy, cheap, easily accessible by bicycle, third place?

Well, none of the third places available except internet cafes, and the internet itself, were meant for, or appealing to, people like us. People who were young or at least not 100% sold on adult conformity, weird, disinclined to participate in things “everyone” liked, maybe not the best at raw-dog socialization, interested in niche culture, not mainstream, possibly overly arrogant in our assessment of our own intellect, often traumatized and bullied or just ignored in real life, depressed or angry or shy or otherwise unable or unwilling to fit in, go along to get along, blend in with the other good workers with good futures, but rarely pretty or charismatic enough to make that an intriguing movie-script-ready personality trait.

You know, geeks. Only geeks weren’t cool yet. Geeks weren’t profitable yet. Geeks weren’t even a demographical term anyone with influence was talking about without a curled lip of disgust. And we found each other online, developed our own in-group lingo, rules for behavior, trends, fashions, ways to spot one another in the real world.

Unfortunately, so did a lot of other folks who weren’t very good at fitting into society before society learned to function without direct human interaction. I’m not talking about your average neurodivergent introvert. Your average neurodivergent introvert is lovely, and made pretty art online, or argued about Kirk and Picard, or got weirdly into reading long recaps of television shows they’d already seen. I am talking about people like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, Curtis Yarvin, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and all the C-Suite Children of Gmork whose names you don’t even recognize because they’re just sociopaths, not narcissists, and they don’t need constant adulation to serve the Nothing.

And those are the people, good and bad, optimistic and opportunistic, who set up the scaffolding for the way online life was going to work before the people who were pretty okay at offline life even knew what was up. They are also the people who have been able to live longest in the antiseptic world of not actually needing to wrangle with the radical concept of “other people” at all unless they want to. (VCs do not count as other people, obviously, the whole ecosystem is literally just a weaponized frat) Every app that kicked another societal pylon down in slow motion piloted in Palo Alto or Cupertino first, or somewhere very nearby.

Not for nothing, but that conversation about third places back in 2001 took place maybe thirty miles away from Palo Alto.

But back then, my age cohort was just a bit too young to have made fortunes in the 90s tech boom, and were, instead, rushing to a terminal in our spare time to take apart this new thing and see how it worked, or could work. We, and everyone else, still had to talk to another human being, in a minimally socially acceptable manner, to accomplish a majority of life’s necessities—and even when you didn’t, a lot of people still preferred to, and could, run their shit that way. Face to face or over the phone, with paper and pen or printed from a computer onto paper and notated with pen, slow as Heinz, exhausting, and yet a lot of people still pretty consistently chose it over the new digital world.

2001 was a seriously transitional time, even apart from 9/11. Conventional wisdom holds that the internet went mainstream in 1997, but the vast majority of people were still not very online at all four years later, and certainly not for daily logistical activities. Not just because the tech wasn’t there yet, but because “normies” vaguely, yet holistically, disliked and distrusted the internet on principle, if they took it seriously at all.

Most regular people were not very active online yet. Vanishingly few celebrities were. No one’s grandparents were—they were too busy having to sit the fuck down in an office with another human person whose demeanor, apparel, personal scent, and manner of speaking determined how much car insurance said gramps was going to buy that day. It was like San Diego ComicCon before it was OMG COMICCON. And that was why we all felt so comfortable being as raw and open and actually bonkers inappropriately personal on Livejournal or Diaryland or our own scattered and be-webringed blogs—none of which we called social media, because we did not yet consider it to be media. Because our parents weren’t looking. Our bosses definitely weren’t. Even most of our IRL friends weren’t. We were still writing emails with full and correct grammar, openings and closings, like 19th century letters, and Google wasn’t a verb yet.

Going online felt like a fucking miracle back then. And the real heartbreak is that most of the moving parts of that miracle were the exact things that, over the years, curdled into the poison we won’t stop chugging straight out of the bottle now, even though we know we could.

We young pioneers had to interface with the meatspace, all the time, in all its difficulty and pressure and how little it seemed to enjoy us, so we valued real life just about as much as famed documentaries The Matrix and Fight Club would lead you to believe. You didn’t even have to use your real name. No one ever had to know what you looked like. You could be whoever you wanted on the internet, which was both an almost knee-buckling blessing and a monstrous curse. It was both those things, but it still is, too.

And one of the biggest draws to that digital world was how obnoxious and separated the real world so often was. Maybe you find the one other kid at your school who has every line of Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide memorized and maybe you don’t, but when you log on to your forum of choice everyone there knew the parrot sketch and where their towel was and someone was working on a full babel fish cosplay and someone else re-wrote the Galaxy Song with more accurate numbers and it felt like coming home.

So that’s where we went. To discuss our interests and relax after work and trade stupid jokes and gossip and learn cool facts and meet new people. A third place. Not work, not family. A new home.

And you trust your home, don’t you? You know it so well. It knows you. It belongs to you. It wouldn’t hurt you. It wouldn’t trick you. Not like the outside world.

The problem is, third places had always been the one realm where the Man, however you should like to define said Man in this, the Year of Depends Adult Undergarment, couldn’t quite get to you. At work, you were subject to management, the business day, pressures to conform and perform, the tension at whatever points in which government entities interacted with your industry. You had to look, act, speak, and deliver in certain stratified and expected ways order to not get fired. At home, you were subject to your spouse, children, extended relations, neighbors, the needs of the home, the need to model your values for the next generation, whatever they were, and television was super excited at all times, eager to sell you acres of useless plastic, convince you you were ugly, encourage you to imitate fake people in fake places doing fake things, and coax you into really committing to getting your whites their whitest. And church-as-third-place never helped at all with this one, because God could get straight at you there.

But at the pub, or the arcade, or the VFW, or the Rotary, or bridge club, or indeed, the internet cafe, you could simply exist, subject to yourself alone and the barest minimum of please do not piss directly on the ceiling, actively rob the place, scream uncontrollably into the face of strangers, or rip the larynx out of any of the other patrons in order to express dominance standards of behavior, for the price of a shitty beer, if that.

We didn’t think about that stuff then, at least not much. We were just happy to find somewhere we could build into a place to fit in. We couldn’t see that, if the internet actually became everyone’s third place, then the eternal abusive spouses that are the 1% would have the societal Triforce fully assembled in their pockets.

Anywhere you can be your own self alone without being constantly fucked with is going to feel precious, more than precious, authentic. You’re going to believe the things you hear there a little more, because they didn’t come from a random media figure, they came from Bob from the grocery store or Sarah who has a kid in your kid’s class. Value the thoughts of the other humans you meet there just a little more deeply, because they’re just people talking, and you trust that Regular Dude doesn’t have the kinds of ulterior motives Work Dude and In-Law Dude might. Get a little more personally attached to the way things work in that place, because it matters so very much to you to have a place like it. React a little more strongly to any perceived change, any possible whisper of a threat. Defend the owners who provide it to you just a little more strongly.

It certainly wouldn’t occur to you that Regular Dude chit-chatting about Star Wars at the pub is a fucking agent of a foreign government or an actual robot. That is nightmare fuel, when you imagine it happening in the meatspace. But online, we just accept that every time we talk to someone we don’t personally know, there’s a solid chance one of those is what’s up. And somehow we go about our day.

It was never possible to manage public opinion the way it is now because after Work and Home, there was a wide, varied field of wildly different places where people existed and formed their identities and found meaning and authenticity.

Slowly, over the course of this century, because everything got scary and expensive and weird and it was just so easy and cheap to log on instead of go out, because the new third place had dopamine on tap and seratonin shots on the bar, we moved toward one place. One place that could be owned. That could be shaped. That could be, at trivial expense and with trivial effort, made to serve.

Almost as soon as anyone whose job it was to notice such things noticed the premium desirable consumer demographics were beginning to put on a kind of DIY authenticity that rose from internet culture specifically because it was separate from, less gatekept, rougher and less stage-managed than mainstream culture, an arms race began among marketers, politicians, and all sort of media entities to repackage all their old shit into something that appeared as authentic as possible, appeared to be coming up from the masses rather than down from above. To very consciously trick a massive audience into believing anything, so long as it looked a little off and unprofessional.

Because the internet itself looked a little off and unprofessional back then, and that was where the people who understand money knew the future was hiding. It was a goddamned hamster-dancing mess of technicolor vomit. A million different fonts and colors and obnoxious braying auto-play songs and animated wallpapers and wonky homespun photoshop images. Which slowly, over time, became two or three fonts, standardized (and muted) colors, profile pics so small it’s difficult to tell who’s talking, and a handful of websites whose graphical layouts became the almost-unseen window through which we experience the world outside our neighborhoods, commutes, offices, and families.

I remember the first time I saw a commercial that put the standard ecstatic housewife belting out a Euripidean paean to laundry detergent inside a jank-ass old school YouTube frame. Other than that, it was a normal commercial. But it all took place inside the insnantly-recognizable grey toolbar and icons of YouTube. The young had already started valuing YouTube over other sources of information—and that simple frame was meant to trick our brains into receiving Big Soap’s buy-begging along the same neuro-pathways that it received the Vlog Brothers and Lonelygirl15 and fucking Dramatic Squirrel.

And it worked.

Thus began the Authenticity Wars of the early 00s. An arms race to be the most trusted bullshit-slinger, to reinvent the vibe of the internet into all other marketing and culture, until the hero’s journey in mainstream films, up to and including animated Disney features—looking at you Wreck-It-Ralph 2—involves having something go miraculously viral to solve all the protagonist’s problems.

Here in these godforsaken 2020s, God appears in the form of the view counter at the bottom of a viral video.

The problem is, when everything gets carefully re-skinned with the New Authenticity, it’s impossible to tell what’s real. When you scroll through a feed, there is no visual differentiation between an actual elected representative notifying their constituency of a legitimate emergency and eaglebazooka1488 notifying their followers that Ozempic is made from the tears of pure Aryan conservative children collected after they saw a trans exist, and no matter how evolved we might like to think we are, our brains receive those two pieces of information the exact same way, and lend it the exact same legitimacy, because they look identical, and both came at us out of the corners of our very precious, authentic, third place megapub where Bob and Sarah tell us the truth.

Ask yourself why the most unhinged accounts have anime profile pictures. IS it because that obscures identity and it’s easier for bots to be mistaken for people that way? Sure. It’s also because geeky shit became synonymous with authenticity, intelligence, and in-group coolness for about ten years and our skulls are filled with electrocuted meat that’s SUPER slow on the uptake. Why, the pink galactic fox with stars in her tail couldn’t possibly be trying to socially engineer liberal democracy into the fucking Sarlacc pit! That’s just so silly!

When the internet is everyone’s third place, that is a very, very big target. Once such a huge swatch of humanity, across country and demographic lines, is in one place, not only does it become trivially easy and trivially cheap to reach them all at once. For quite a long time, the buy-in to become Sarah down at the pub Who Knows What’s Up was fairly high: you had to be able to write interesting long-form blog posts, even if they were just about Julia Child or cats, or you had to be able to produce unique videos quickly, you had to be knowledgable enough to build an audience, to cultivate comment sections. And the second it’s possible to automate that hero’s journey—via AI or bots or fake followers or the utter pure unalloyed evil that is the engagement algorithms—it’s simply to easy to change what people think for the kind of people who like to control what people think to not do it all day every day.

Neuralink is so unnecessary. We’re already there. The neo-oligarchy that grew out of the tech boom got access to the one thing only religion had even managed to sip at before: the little voice in the back of our heads that we trust more than anything because it’s our own voice. The voice of our conscience. Of our most intimate selves.

And then COVID happened, and the last of us who weren’t Doing This Shit had the world reduced to a small glowing screen in their homes for a year. Everyone who’d held out got sucked in.

That’s why it’s working. And that’s why it’ll be almost impossible to put any of the china cups back on the shelves when and if this particular meth-addled fuckbull ever leaves the shop. Fiscal and governmental entities have rarely been able to access the most intimate backwaters of the human mind, much as they’ve tried. And once we all had to stay inside for a real expanse of time…we all logged on.

And they got to replace that little still voice of our genuine selves with an infinite feed of what sure the fuck seems like human beings, but only sometimes are, screaming and selling and fighting and monetizing and attacking and defending and going at each other as though there’s only one pint of dopamine left in the universe and it’s on fucking Twitter. It just hadn’t been possible to access the little voice in our own heads as a megaphone before. Not at scale. You’d have to go on one crazy road trip to seed even a simple idea in every pub, church, rotary, grange hall, barcade, sports stadium, book club, craft night, bowling league—anywhere people could be themselves apart from work and family.

That still little voice got replaced with Gmork. With The Nothing.

The internet will be everyone’s third place in the future! Oh, how optimistic we were, never once considering that “everyone” included Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, all of whom used the adolescent internet to convince people who would never worship a craptastic programmer, a game show host, and a dictator as the risen gods of their world, that they were cool and authentic in a way they never EVER could in face-to-face real life.

You can be anyone on the internet. You’re not chained down by the old ways. But so could they. And neither are they.

Back in 1938, a large part of the nation tuned into the radio and heard a broadcast concerning an alien invasion. It was just Orson Welles reading The War of the Worlds, but people believed it. Because it came through the radio, whence all the other True Things came. Some people—many weren’t fooled. But many were. It took a a bit of effort to convince the fooled to join the unfooled, but it didn’t become a crisis. You could still look out your window and see a startling lack of aliens.

But in this un-brave new world, we live in 1938 all the time. In many more ways than this one. And when we look through the window of a social media site’s algorithmic authenticity-generating machine, we might see a startling lack of aliens…and we might see an AI-generated video of aliens landing. Or the President talking about how serious the alien problem is. Or the richest man in the world blaming the invasion on trans athletes. Or a famous man telling you to vote his way if you don’t want to get eaten by Martians.

And all of them sound as convincing as the voice in your head reading this sentence out loud right now.

Part 3 Next Week.

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This is just a note to say that I know I started this big giant series and a regular posting schedule plan and all and then promptly disappeared for three weeks, like a BOSS.

Welp, I got the flu. The bad one that’s been hopping around and takes forever to get its shit together. I’ve been so sick for so long it’s bordering on the ridiculous. Then my child got it.

Then I got it, or something just as nasty which I suspect might have been undetected covid because the brain fog is so bad, again.

Then we got hit with five snowstorms separated by a few days each time, and school more or less gave up because the ice subsumed us all.

And my instinct, when faced with many pressures and deadlines and guilt piling up and a body not co-operating, is and has always been to hide and say nothing so no one will notice the disappointment of me—which is a very good instinct I wholeheartedly recommend and has definitely never steered anyone wrong.

WELL, WE’RE ALL TRYING TO GET BETTER, AREN’T WE?

So: I am only just now wobblingly back on my feet, still coughing eldritch ichor out of my lungs, and will have Move Fast and Break People Part 2 up very shortly. (Just for this series, each part will go up under for paid subscribers only for 24 hours, then open to the public, as I mentioned in Part 1.)

Apologies again, we will resume our regular programming momentarily. Thanks for your patience.

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Happy International Bloodfeast Season, fellow shattered husks of thinking human beings! Here we are on the flipside of several deranged politico-cultural orgies of pain, and I don’t think it’s a terribly scalding take to say, details aside, in a holistic, big-picture, view from 10,000 feet sense, that shit’s not right.

Really not right. Surreally so. I’ve personally spent this dry-heave of a year so far feeling like Han Solo; not the heroic, dashing, man of action part, no, no, perish the thought. The part where he spent like a goddamned year frozen in carbonite hanging on a filthy bathroom wall while who knows what kind of 24/7 grotesque violent slime-n-crime worm-orgy went on around him.

No one wants to see any of that shit, but it’s happening anyway, it isn’t going to stop, it’s oozing and moaning right there in front of you, and you physically can’t close your eyes or move away or do anything about it until some unspecified time in the future that may or may not actually arrive, so you just hang there stuck in a timeless helldream limbo of unending horror while a fat slobbering barely-verbal rapist crime boss stuffs his face with garbage, shreds people for entertainment, and somehow stays in power despite visibly doing fuck-all to run a government.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE.

It’s hard to know what to say about it all. It’s hard to even know where to begin. It’s hard to keep up with the Macy’s Parade of “unprecedented” pit-sludge that may or may not end us all. Just getting through each and every gom jabbar of a goddamned day around here requires a level of dissociation and compartmentalization the human brain usually reserves for abuse, war, loss, severe injury. Only now we have to go all the way to deep trauma responses just to scan the headlines in the morning, or, occasionally, walk into a restaurant with the pure sadistic audacity to air the news on the TV behind the bar.

So I want to talk about something bigger than the Regular Morning Horror Breakfast that will be out of date by the time I finish writing this. Because really, it’s not just the crusty worm on the big murder-chair. Or his nasty little shrieking sidekick. A lot of shit isn’t right. It hasn’t been right for awhile. It’s easy to point to COVID, that massive unresolved trauma we’re not even allowed to talk about anymore, let alone remember or process in any infinitesimally small way, but shit, in the grand, Sagan-esque, universal sense, was upside-down in its mortgage on reality long before that. COVID just tried to cash a payment on that mortgage and found an account that long ago ran dry.

So what happened? Because it’s not actually Trump per se. Trump isn’t even just a symptom. He’s not the reason we’re so clenched up and angry and self-loathing and paralyzed and isolated from each other, he’s just the baseball bat with a nail shoved through it a bunch of folks grabbed to take it all out on someone. Anyone they can find. Even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what they’re taking out on everyone around them.

Babies, what happened to us?

Well, gather in, children: Granny Minnesota is here tell you another tale of the Internet Olden Times. And it’s a beast of a tale. Approaching a Grand Unified Theory of What the Fuck Happened. I started writing this six weeks ago, and it’s grown and grown until it was forced to become a multi-part series due to Geneva conventions regarding the length of self-indulgent, navel-gazing, insufferably meta blog posts on the internet about the internet.

So. Bear with me.

Once upon a time before the invention of the wheel, we had no choice but to watch commercials to get to our scheduled units of televisual entertainment. And they didn’t just air before and after the show! Goodness no! Repeated every 6-7 minutes, taking up fully one-third of the show’s timeslot! Nor were they specifically targeted to our interests and buying habits by a massive data-mining operation that inadvertently, or possibly advertently, ended civilized society! No, no, my pets, these were the same commercials, blasted out blindly to every household from Manhattan to Modesto, with minor variations for large designated market areas, taking up 23-28 minutes of every single hour of broadcast television. I literally grew up seeing ads for a particular fast food chain that had precisely zero locations in my home state, and dagnabbit that’s how we liked it! (Spoiler: no one liked it.)

But the upshot of all this marketing monoculture was that, every-fucking-body, down to the smallest child, knew the longer-running slogans and jingles by heart, and they became something like memes today, used as punchlines, shorthand, and socially-lubricating references signaling in-group membership.

One of the more famous came from the, at the time, very popular Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Not just plain old iguana-bile Folgers’ Coffee, mind you, but the even more demonically foul instant crystals, made by taking an industrial vat of coffee leavings drained out of the drip-grate below a 7-11 coffee dispenser on the banks of the fucking Styx and freeze-drying it into poop-crumbs of total despair.

I don’t know what to tell you. No one told Americans what a latte was until like 1994. Then Americans immediately said coffee that tasted good was a gay liberal plot. We’ve just…always been like this.

The commercial opened on a fancy restaurant full of linen tablecloths, wine glasses, candles, a rack of lamb served with those white scrunchees on the top bits, and young sophisticates, presumably talking about books or foreign films or whatever while they waited for podcasts to be invented. The announcer walks through a haute-cuisine kitchen, saying in an authoritative newscaster voice, as though we’re about to witness a cutting-edge social experiment: We’ve secretly replaced the fine coffee they ordinarily serve with Folgers’ Instant Crystals. Let’s see if they notice!

You’ll never believe it, but they do NOT notice! All the young professional folk rave about how amazing the coffee is, how rich and robust they find the taste, how they simply cannot believe it’s Folgers’ Instant Crystals omg you guys just empty that can of dry-ass caffeine sprinkles directly into my discerning patrician mouth! Screw the real thing! I just can’t get enough of bitter awful freeze-dried science-droppings!

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about the election a lot lately. CAN’T IMAGINE WHY. Not in terms of what’s going to specifically happen over the next many months and years, or what’s happening literally today, because I think it’s being made pretty resoundingly clear how little any of us down here in the vomitorium can do about that, but in terms of what’s been happening for the last twenty years that got us to November 5th, 2024. To a place where no one seems to particularly care about the concept of any kind of objective truth existing anywhere, accelerationism and nihilism are the Pantone colors of the year, and giving a shit about anyone else is regularly punished at the ballot box. To this carnival of shit in which we’re all now forced to live, an unending janky Gravitron Wheel O’ Chaos spun up to Intestine-Extraction speed and the only music is screams. Every few hours, the wheel spins, and the flashing neon arrow selects a different soul-slurping subterranean clown-wendigo to be in charge of some massively important part of all our destinies, just as long as they know absolutely nothing about that part specifically, and the only person seeing any kind of consequences for doing a chaos is the guy who denied a CEO’s claim to life on the grounds that being a fucking monster is a pre-existing condition.

As the children say, we’re cooked.

Though I’m not sure how many of the people obsessively over-using have considered that once something is cooked, it’s not exactly finished.

Traditionally, the next step is being devoured. With relish.

And that doesn’t exactly seem like a sustainable situation for humanity, but the general reaction to it all, not just post-election, but for awhile now, to a lot of events, even as things start to completely fall apart at the seams, seems to just be minor variations on the sentiment of Maurice Sendak’s Pierre:

And that old coffee commercial keeps popping into my head.

Because I think that’s what happened. The big gnarly rootball at the bottom of the many, many seemingly unrelated branches of what’s still happening. What has almost zero likelihood of slowing down or unhappening anytime soon. Slowly, inexorably, profoundly, thoroughly, and on purpose. We hunted down every part, down to the scraps, of normal human everyday life, down to the most basic social, commercial, political, logistical, financial, educational, parental, informational, psychological, romantic, religious, military, technological, artistic, and familial interactions, and secretly replaced them with the internet.

And for a long time, because it was slow, and because it did make that humdrum normal everyday life so much easier, so much faster, so unfathomably more convenient, and even, god help us all, more diverting and exciting and personally validating, hardly anyone noticed. When we finally did start to catch on, we all sat around raving about how much better it was than the old world, how rich and robust and almost exactly like real life it tasted, how excited we all were to make the switch, how young and urban and professional and haute we all were for taking to it so easily and just vigorously motorboating the future with such uncritical enthusiasm.

Come on, guys! It’s new! It’s Science! It’s fun! It makes everything fast and easy! There could never, ever, be any downside to this, or any, new technology!

Now, this isn’t about enshittification. At least, not exactly. It isn’t about the tendency of all systems to rot and self-corrupt in the presence of dipshits who look at human beings interacting and only see financial opportunity. Because…that’s what dipshits do. They’ve been doing it to every new system that pops up since Uruk and Jericho. Some percentage of humans are just born assholes. You can’t really stop that or change it beyond nudging the Rate of Asshole Production up or down a bit, which is why communism works so nice in your head and so horrifyingly in real life. The existential malfeasance of that problematic population of resource-greedy psychopaths is a problem, but it’s old news. It’s consistent. You can set the watch they sell you by it. And it’s practically boring in comparison to the voluntary wholesale replacement of human-to-human life with intangible digital gladiatorial combat.

We, as a species, simply were not ready for the internet. We, as a species, were not ready to spend our waking hours inundated with the interior monologues of billions of other beings piped directly into our brains as though they were our own. Especially when those thoughts, just because existence is hard and sad and fucked up and weird and no one really escapes that for more than a couple of hours at a go, are more often than not, the thoughts of beings in pain, facing the future with extreme anxiety, desperate to feel seen and loved, desperate to not feel helpless and lost in the face of vast forces, beings who felt invisible and alone for most of their lives, suffering in ways large and small, most of the time.

My first grader has mispronounced “screens” as “screams” since they were three. I’ve never corrected them because it was cute and they’ll say everything in the usual way forever soon enough. But…they’re not wrong. We are being screamed at all the time. We are screaming all the time.

And the screams are our major source of entertainment.

There’s a reason every TV show that does an episode about someone suddenly getting psychic powers depicts it as an absolute mind-shearing hell. It is, and now, that Sea of Screams is humanity’s home. Just trying to exist while constantly being mentally hammered with the cries and wails and bitchy petty complaints and narcissistic judgments and pleadings for love (in one form or another) of all mankind will literally make you fucking crazy and it will do it incredibly fast. At no point has anyone suggested having a shit-ton of voices in your head is a good and healthy thing for a happy, fulfilling life on Planet Earth, but these days we all have a shit-ton of voices in our heads 24/7 and they never, ever stop screaming.

We made a hive mind. We did it too soon and too fast, and it’s eating us alive. Back in the old digital days, people used to talk a lot about the Singularity—a future event or technology that would change the world so fundamentally and radically that it’s simply impossible to imagine life afterward from the vantage point of life today. This was often applied to true, sentient AI or other science-fictional concepts, but the truth is, while we early-adopting children of the computer age were having those conversations, it was already happening all around us, so truly transformational we couldn’t see the water for the ocean.

The mass adoption of the Internet was the Singularity. People still talk as though the Singularity hasn’t happened yet. That without flying cars and affordable interplanetary travel opportunities, we can’t possibly have arrived at The Big Future already. But we’re long past it, into the Previously Unthinkable Mess Beyond. Of course, as William Gibson said, it’s not evenly distributed, some of us are less online by choice or circumstance, but COVID took the last band-aid off by confining everyone in their homes, and the powers that be keep chipping away at the option to live mostly offline.

Think about what we’ve done with the 21st century. We took almost every job, every form of entertainment, every logistical task, every virtue and vice, every path to forming a personal identity, every simplest transaction between living beings or previously unavoidable reason you had to interact with another living being, every way of actually meeting and creating a connection with another living being as well as every method we ever came up with to maintain connection with other living beings, and either moved them entirely online or made the internet such a massive, mainstream sidecar to such units of social structure that trying to accomplish it all offline requires extra, dedicated, conscious effort or privation. And possibly a detailed mission statement just to underpin a personal philosophy of maybe putting your phone down sometimes.

You know, back in the time known as the Age of Folgers Instant Coffee Crystals, people used to be, generally, fairly concerned with how much TV everyone was watching when I was younger. Rots your brain, don’t you know. Makes you lazy and passive and stupid. Kill Your TV was a major movement. Bumperstickers, posters, the whole nine.

No one ever says Kill Your Computer, Kill Your Phone, Kill Your Internet Connection. Because we can’t. Our entire culture is tentpoled around internet access. It’s been inserted into even the smallest interactions, not just between humans, but between humans and everything.

At the risk of crumbling to dust before your very eyes, I do not know how to explain to any young person the sheer number of other human beings we used to have to interact with, on the phone or in person, in a baseline socially competent manner, just to get from one end of the day to another.

To deposit your paycheck. To pay a bill. To purchase anything. To get a refund on a product. To speak with any incarnation of customer service. To get a bit of advice on childrearing or fixing a leaky faucet. To address any sort of issue whatsoever with anything. To plan a vacation. To put gas in your car. To insure that car. To choose classes for the next semester. To get a nice family photo taken. To apply for a job. To excel in that job or ever hope for a promotion. To organize for a cause. To get food delivered, if you even could. To share your thoughts on recent elections or a new film with someone outside your immediate family.

You stood in a line and you waited and then you talked to someone, and if they didn’t like they way you handled any of that, if your social skills weren’t ready for prime time, well, you might just…not get what you needed. At all. And if you didn’t like the way someone else was behaving toward you, you didn’t really have to give them what they needed, either. You had to make it work using human psychology, rhetoric,

It all used to require human beings, face-to-face, or at least mouth-to-ear, and so most people encountered and had to learn to deal with, many, many different kinds of other humans in their environment. That was how, by and large, people met romantic partners, friends, that famous “guy who knows a guy.” Mutual connections, co-ed classes, and just…interacting with random strangers all day every day.

It was exhausting! We were thrilled to be able to do a whole heap of that annoying everyday crap automatically. IT WAS FUCKING GREAT. It saved so much time, so much energy that we could use for activities! I’m not a Luddite here, I’ve been terminally online since before we had a word for that. No one did anything wrong by cannonballing into the digital age before actually learning how to swim. That’s how tragedy works. Nor do I honestly think there was ever any real possibility that we wouldn’t embrace that gargantuan level of convenience. It IS easier to do things online, other people are fussy and difficult and there’s a lot of rules and even if neurotypicals don’t call use the word, they still mask, and it’s annoying to have to do it all the time.

We took to the internet like fish to bleach. But damn, it sure did look like water for a long time.

And then, having steadily, determinedly, removed or made voluntary so many of the tiny ways in which you were forced to behave yourself toward others, even so much as talking to your taxi driver to tell them where you wanted to go or checking out at the grocery store or ordering food at a restaurant, we stood back, very proud of ourselves, we liberal digital folk, and told everyone to care A WHOLE LOT about the person next to them. More than they care about themselves, in some cases. To protect those others, to value their issues, problems, and needs equally to our own, and to vote that way.

The problem was, as a great many people looked to one side and then another, there was no one actually, physically next to them anymore.

The internet has become the lens through which Other People can be seen, heard, understood, and interacted with, and on a good day, 78% of the internet is a goddamned Jacobean nightmare parade of lies, scams, rage, and a howling labyrinth of the opinions of maladjusted dopamine addicts who may or may not be 13 years old, or fuming after a fight with their spouses, or in the depths of despair, or a content-scraper, or addicted to conflict because they’re desperately lonely, or employed specifically to piss other people off as efficiently as possible, or a really nice person trying to have an intellectual conversation, or fucking AI, and there is no way for the human brain to tell the difference between any of these at a glance.

People are not good at caring deeply about abstractions. They are extremely bad at valuing others’ needs over their own wants, but catastrophically bad at doing that when they don’t actually have to physically see those scary, weird, oh-so-different others with their own gooshy corneas. This is a huge part of why cities are usually blue and rural communities usually not; because in cities you still have to acknowledge the existence of, and navigate through, millions of real, thinking, breathing, sweating, yelling people who are nothing like you.

Not only did we make a hive mind way too soon, but we also jumped several guns on uploading our minds to servers and abandoning the meatspace. Because we can’t abandon the meatspace yet, but we all went ahead and put our brains in digital jars anyway.

The internet turned most of human existence into a series of abstractions viewed through a 6x3 inch black rectangle with a heart of lithium and sadism. And the guys who have been able to live longest in a cozy bubble of convenience, instantaneity, and constant stimulation without the annoyance of having to deal other human beings or see them as anything but flashy lights on a fashy screen, are the malevolent, solipsistic Silicon Valley Smaugs who built the abyss in which we’re all drowning, brick by fucking brick, and are even now ransacking our government for virtually no one’s benefit, not even, ultimately, their own.

No one can care too much about things they don’t have to deal with pretty regularly, not even the best of us, which that tech most certainly are not. Unfortunately, by making it so easy to not deal with other people at all, we kicked the legs out from under the barest concept of society itself being a pretty good thing we should probably not set on fire for the clout.

Over the next several weeks, this series is going to look long and hard at what we’ve done to ourselves and why, exactly what the internet has and hasn’t replaced, the effects of it all, expected and unexpected, the little UI tweaks and algorithmic adjustments that might have fucking ended liberal democracy, and what the hell we can do about it now.

I don’t know about that last one. Maybe. I’m hoping. If we’re lucky. And I have enough Folgers’ Crystals on hand.

Because maybe the smartphone was humanity’s gom jabbar, and we failed by passing. Put your most vulnerable self in this shiny black box, connect to the person on the other side of it, and experience unfathomable pain, but also unfathomable reward. You’re only a real person if you keep your hand in the box. If you pull away, you might as well’ve never existed.

I doubt even Frank Herbert could have imagined Paul rocking up to the space nun the next morning and asking to have another go at Happy Fun Box. Let alone rolling over in bed and grabbing it first thing. But we got so used to the pain only the reward remained: the confirmation that we’re human, we’re real, we’re seen, we’re valued, at least by someone, somewhere, for something, even if it’s dark and awful. Once you have that, it does feel like dying to disengage.

And a little while after that, the weird fascists who made the box don’t even need the needle at our necks anymore.

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