W.E.L.P.

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the collapse of the postwar order. The future is not going to be great. The United States might have made a mistake in building a military-backed economic empire before contending with its original sins. The president-elect is likely going to pardon the collected leadership of multiple Nazi organizations, thereby putting them back on the streets with a presidential seal of approval. You’ve got a couple of months to get ready for that. America’s most famous African immigrant is about to set his technofascist sights on the economy and give it the same thoughtful attention he gave Twitter. Probably nobody will notice since it looks like the end of the petrodollar, so, you know. Have fun.

China already got a head start in replacing US outreach with whatever China’s offering, so the world is going to be China in twenty years, for better or worse. Europe is about to be facing Russia’s latest protection racket alone, and the Middle East is Middle Easting harder than usual. The supply line keeping Ukraine alive is going to shift about a thousand miles south to make Palestine dead.

All the Western democracies are dealing with a rise in nationalism as multiple immigration crises unfold. It’s their own fault, because they tend to be safe and stable places to live, so they’re where people want to go when the places they live in start to destabilize and become unsafe. The beauty of the arrangement is that the safety and stability of the former are funded by the destabilizing effects of extracting wealth and resources from the later. From this perspective, climate change is a mere corollary effect: an ironic accelerant for immigration, as places become unable to distribute necessary resources on their way to becoming unsurvivably hot. It also happens to be a fitting literal consequence of burning half the world to keep the other half warm, but try not to think about the literal consequences of climate change right now.

Seriously, stop. You’ve got other things to think about, again.

If you don’t live here, yes, there were a bunch of structural flaws in the political edifice of the world, and yes, the US is about to drop a bomb on it because that’s what the US does best. Sorry. You knew what we were. Maybe don’t get back together with us next time we call.

If you’re in the United States right now, hide yo kids, hide yo wife, grab a Tennessee whiskey and settle in, because things are about to get extremely real, and we’re going to need to do some weird stuff to get to the other side.

Whisper Networks

It cannot be overstated how bad social media is going to be. It’s not like it was all Skittles and beer before, but it’s getting worse. Above and beyond the mix of bad actors and AI nonsense, it’s a targeting system. Russia already used it to tear our country in two, and now that targeting system may soon be leveraged by a relationship between the US government and the above-mentioned Nazi organizations.

Frustratingly, it’s also useful. There’s a reason our favorite prison countries ban Facebook, and there’s a reason a lot of us still chase the dragon for hints of friends that would otherwise be long forgotten. There’s a reason to mourn Twitter’s passing.

It’s going to grow progressively less useful for information, and more dangerous for organizing. At this point, it can be used, but it can never be trusted.

But without it, how do we even? Sadly for those of us who prefer cats, real human connection is the only way to build trustworthy networks. We need to build community, and we will need to establish private means of signaling safety. Widely known signals can be useful for solidarity, and that’s what those of us already living in relative safety are used to signaling. They’re useless for creating actual safety under oppression, and that’s what we’re going to need moving forward.

Talk to people you trust, in person, and quietly. Establish subtle signals they can pass on to people they trust. Learn the ones that are already out there, if you can. This isn’t a groundbreaking strategy; at a rough guess, it’s probably older than spoken language. It’s harder to do now because information spreads so quickly and our rewards for social interaction have been warped by online meta-attention, ever training us to trumpet our solutions into the wires. This is an effort of patience and attention.

Engage, Endure, Escape

Asking a lot from the letter E, but these cover the options. I think they’re always our options for dealing with life, based on a half-formed philosophy I now may never get to bore you with. You’re welcome.

They’re not exclusive choices, and they’re all going to be on the table. Enduring this is going to eat up a lot of psychic energy, because this has already been exhausting for almost a decade and it’s going to get worse.

A world solely endured is a world of despair. So engage. Protest, work, party, garden, read, it doesn’t matter: Extract from the world some momentum for continuing to be.

Escapism is still a form of engagement, but that’s not what escape means here. Have a go bag. Look into foreign citizenship. Suddenly needing to run is going to be a looming possibility for an ever-growing portion of the population. Fascism requires continual threat to justify continual oppression, which is why it eats itself even faster than the other bad ideas people use to run nation-states. In the past two years, the legal legacy of 2016-2020 is actively killing people and the loudest voices of a populist movement are proudly shouting that they do not care. And killing white women, of all people. The safety of white women is the excuse this country historically uses to kill everyone else. If they’re tossing Mackenzie under the bus, they don’t think they need an excuse anymore.

So stick around for a while if you want to help fend off the early stages of a fascist theocracy, but no shame if you think it’s time to say, “Peace out, America. Good luck with your dead kids.”

Lie

Among the more tiresome aspects of the political circus the US has been living with is the unending barrage of lies. It long ago coalesced into a firestorm of unreality, a self-sustaining weather system in which every ember was a random atom of conspiracy swirling into whatever kind of hell the fascists need to sell and their sympathizers need to believe. It is impenetrable, unquenchable, and growing.

I say feed it.

Say MTA stands for Masonic Templar Assassins. The darker the cloud, the more spy satellites are hiding in it. Red sky at night causes red tide in morning. Go Dadaist on them. Jesus wasn’t white, Jesus was a banana. Daylight saving time is caused by jet engines in the arctic that make the Earth rotate an extra thousand miles once a year. The word “it” is a woke psyop. Teutons invented croutons. Cram so much nonsense into the digital world that people are surprised to discover the sky is still blue. Misinformation has been dragging us toward a cliff for years; cut the cord and push it over the edge.

They’ll go for the journalists first, then they’ll start looking for anyone purporting to know facts not sanctioned by the regime. They want targets, so fill the targeting systems with illusion. They panic over Satanic cults; there are thousands of other demons they could be panicking over. Technology has crossed the threshold of sufficient advancement to be indistinguishable from magic, and we need chaos warlocks. Get the AI imps out of art theft and into epistemological arson.

Persist

There’s a sad meme occasionally posted by sad people that follows some variation of this quote:

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

I initially assumed this was a quote from a war hawk in the 1800s, but it’s from a novel written by G. Michael Hopf, who is still alive and appears to be exactly what you would expect, namely a person who should not be as proud as they undoubtedly would be to be mistaken for a war hawk from the 1800s.

The sadness of this quote is its illustration of the desperation of suffering. “Strength comes from hardship!” echoes down the thousand-year corridor of pointless trauma. And that corridor was built by these strong men, because the intent of the sentiment gets it backwards: those hard times are always caused by strong men. They are the psychopaths and the spiteful, the greedy and the inept, those unwilling or unable to help others in any meaningful sense, so they demand war. They demand hard times because they have nothing to contribute during good times. It’s a lack of imagination. It’s a lack of spirit. It is always these people who create hard times, and it’s up to everyone else to clean up their mess, again, and again, and again.

We’re going to have to clean it up, again. We’re going to have to listen to a bunch of people say, “Gee I didn’t think it would be that bad,” while we drag away the corpses of all kinds of men and women. It’s the privilege of living in the good times to say this too shall pass without thinking of the implications. Won’t lie: this might be it. The nukes are rattling and the air is getting hot. The strong men might finally finish up history the way they always wanted to, and I get it. If it has to end, I want to watch.

In the meantime, carry on. Live. Hell, laugh and love, if you can’t help it. The world of us survives by the hands that haven’t let go once the strong men have finished their homoerotic bickering. We have improved our methods of stopping them, but it is a race against the technology of murder. I give us even odds, weighted slightly toward optimism due to the worthlessness of the bet in the face of extinction.