Folks like to blame the internet for everything, and I’m the first to say Technofeudalists, tech companies, and especially tech billionaires are a real and present danger, but we didn’t get to this stage of society breakdown overnight or even in the last eight years. Neoliberalism and cowboy conservatism have corrupted the culture for decades before the internet. “Greed is Good” is from the 80s. Cowboy rugged individualism reaches back to the 50s (HCRs newsletter today is very good/terrifying). The nuclear family and suburbanism destroyed community values long before the internet… but the internet also has been weaponized to accelerate the fracturing and isolation.
My kids were raised in the internet era and while a lot of those kids suffer, I’ve never seen a more empathetic generation (on average) or one more determined to stick to their small friend groups. Because they see the horrors all too clearly. (And apparently some are getting seduced into the Andrew Tate misogyny tarpits).
I’ve long said it’s the OLDER people who fucked up the internet. It’s your grandpa sharing fascist memes for the LOLz. It’s the incels weaponizing it. The J6 traitors were fucking dentists and car dealership owners in their 30s and 40s.
But even for them, it’s largely all been a game. They’ve LARP’d their way into putting the fascists back in power and now they’re gonna find out how badly they fucked up. This is not me wishful thinking. This is simply what’s happening as the evil MFers that let them live their hyper masculinity power fantasies are let loose to destroy all the things they take for granted.
As Rebecca Solnit says (Hope in the Dark), “capitalism is an ongoing disaster anticapitalism alleviates, like a mother cleaning up after her child’s messes”. The world doesn’t fall apart, in general, because we’ve built systems of safety nets in the government (paid with taxes, run by bureaucrats, strengthened by laws and democracy) and outside the government (usually women doing all the reproductive and care work, inside and outside family). But right now, the government is being dismantled (everything from science, to health, to the weather predictions to social security) and women and people of color are being shoved out of the workplace/public, an attempt to make them a subservient underclass again (good luck with that shit).
But we are the very people that keep things from falling apart. You take those people out of power and empower the destructive broken men, and you will break things. Apparently at tremendous speed, which will just make it more sharply obvious what’s actually happening. There’s a reckoning coming where people who have benefited from and taken for granted all that invisible labor and protections and infrastructure find out what happens when it’s all ripped away.
Maybe this is when they finally figure out how the world really works.
Or maybe they’ll make excuses for why none of this is their fault, why there’s some scapegoat to blame, and they’ll double down on suffering. Some will certainly do that.
I don’t think most people want to live this way.
The real reckoning will be when/if they figure out it there’s a better way to live. And demand it.
Because in the end, that’s all it really takes.
America, you will only keep the democracy you fight for. You have to decide you actually value the Rule of Law, that your power fantasies aren’t as important as having planes that land safely, water that isn’t polluted, weather predictions that keep you safe from the hurricane, and a thousand other things those educated, dedicated public servants have been quietly working on until you set loose an unelected billionaire with a chainsaw to dismember the country.
You can choose better. Today. Right this minute. Grow up, take responsibility for getting it wrong, and work to unfuck the country.
As for me, I’ve been here fighting the rising fascism in our country all along. I will continue to do so. This weekend in particular I’m doing the longer-term work of editing stories that tell of a better world, one where we’re working together to survive the climate crisis that’s barreling toward us, now faster because fascism and the climate crisis amplify each other. This week, I will continue work on my novel holding up ways that we can renegotiate our relationships with nature and with each other. I’ll keep podcasting about things like Library Economies and Third Spaces, holding up alternatives that already exist in our midst, those anti-capitalist models that already show a better way, already here today, we just have to support them.
We just have to choose better. It’s really that simple.
And now I’m heading off to a local bakery to pick up bread because I like to support local businesses. Then I’ll stop at the grocery co-op in town because supporting cooperative businesses as well as producers of organic, local foods is how we get to a more sustainable world. Later I’ll video chat with my kids in our weekly family chat, then re-read The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ode to a gifting economy, both in practicality and in mindset. For other anchors in this chaotic time, I read Rebecca Solnit’s soul-restoring new newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency, and listen to Future Mending’s podcast about how to build a better world.
That better world isn’t a fantasy, but it won’t happen with zero effort on our part, especially with Trump decapitating the military and illegally seizing power and declaring himself king.
Choose better, America. And do it today, right now, before it gets worse.
Because it will get so much worse.