I’m working on a new pair of essays, slowed temporarily by having had very painful surgery on my hands, which do tend to be helpful when it comes to typing letters into machines in satisfactory order. But also slowed by the flurry of activity that goes along with publishing a new novel.
Yes! It’s true! I do not actually make my living yelling creative profanities at American politics and/or the internet at large! I’M NOT LIVING THAT $400K A MONTH PUTINBESTIE PLATINUM TIER MLM LIFE.
Nah, I’m a science fiction, fantasy, and horror novelist and short story writer. In fact, “Garbagetown” in “Welcome to Garbagetown” isn’t just a reference to how rubbish this world truly has become, but also a reference to my climate dystopian book The Past Is Red. I’ve been doing this thing for twenty years, and book #49 is coming out next Tuesday.
There she is, looking all shiny and new! Space Oddityis the sequel to Space Opera, the most elaborate result of an idle Twitter dare ever, and one which rather a lot of people turned out to be very fond of. Both together are possibly the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done—Eurovision in space, but also political commentary, and then also gonzo comedy on top of that. Look, it’s easier to show you. Here is how Space Oddity starts:
Once upon a time, in a very large, very elegant, shockingly belligerent galaxy, there lived a rather troublesome planet about whose precise character no one could quite agree except to begrudgingly admit, at the conclusion of a number of publicly broadcast hearings, that it was most certainly blue.
Ish.
On this (allegedly) blue world, there happened to evolve all three of the following, though not at the same time: a Dutch sea captain by the name of Willem de Vlamingh, a Lebanese hedge fund manager called Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and a very large, very elegant, shockingly belligerent bird called a swan…
Wait! Don’t run away! Yes, if you follow me elsewhere (Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) you’ve probably already seen posts like this and BELIEVE YOU ME, I get that they’re annoying in just precisely the same way as PBS pledge-drive breaks, but it’s my job and I have to, so let’s get through this together and we’ll all move on to the bar.
Posting this gif-you-can-hear in a state of extreme authorial self-cringe since 2004
So, ya know, anyway, ahem, you should definitely pre-order (or regular order if you’re reading this after 9/24) the ebook or hardback or amazing audiobook performance, because of how much I and my 1st grader and my animals enjoy eating and being inside when it rains. And honestly, if you like the way I write here, this book will definitely be your jam, baby.
If you’re reasonably local to Portland, Maine or NYC, I’ll be having a bookstore launch party this thursday, 9/27, at 7pm at my extraordinary local indie bookshop, Print: A Bookstore here in PWM (and anything of mine you order from them you can get signed for free before shipping), a Eurovision karaoke book party Friday night (9/28) at 8pm here where I live on Peaks Island at the American Legion (hush, it’s rad) though I don’t expect many islanders are Garbagetown readers, then reading at Brooklyn Books & Booze in…uh…Brooklyn, on 10/15. Come if you can!
And finally, as I mentioned before, I’ve set a casual sort of stretch goal here, in which I offered to commit to a regular posting schedule if we could get 500 paid subscribers (to which number I’ve included new Patreon patrons who told me they got there from here as well) and I’m thrilled to say we’re up to 401 all-inclusive as a result of that, so only 99 to go! Double digits! If you were waffling, now would be a great time to sign up. Paid subscribers here get access to a companion piece to every public essay, in which all my too-spicy-for-me-to-want-to-deal-with-sea-lions opinions wait to yell even louder.
That about wraps it up for admin business for the moment! New pair of essays next week! Swans everywhere! Let’s get back to cathartic swearing! If nothing else, we have all of us had a better week than at least one guy in North Carolina!
In conclusion, this is Fiona. She is a very beautiful and intelligent border collie. She has fetched herself a copy and would like treats. She thinks you should also have copies. Just saying.
Fiona is just saying, obviously. I would never. I am very quiet and unobtrusive. But border collies? FULL OF BEES AND INSISTENCE.
I swear I didn’t even tell her to put her paw on the book, she just got tired of it falling over and was like HERE IS THIS WHAT YOU’RE TRYING TO DO? JFC, HUMAN, IT’S NOT HARD. I SHOULD GO INTO PR.
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On one side, there is so much work it's unbelievable people keep doing it
Right now, the most profitable company of the world is nVidia, because it makes the most wanted special chips that power AI applications.
One major reason for the success of nVidia, according to Bloomberg, is grueling 24/7 work by employees who, in increasing numbers, could already cash out millions in stock options. This may be creating "a culture problem brewing at nVidia" that I could only summarize as "why on Earth should I still live like this? To make "AI" that's just clones of people who already have so much wealth to become dementia?"
In other words, the whole house of cards of AI, which can't happen without nVidia, could crash, possibly triggering a global meltdown worst than 2008, the day after one tiny group of people realizes they could retire rich NOW, to finally enjoy life.
Popularization like this is how I try to make the world a better place, AND also to make a living. Thanks for considering a paid subscription.
On the other side, there is too little work, or no work at all
In the same world where those few guys could realize any moment they're working themselves dead for no real good reason, workers with comparable or higher skills have the opposite problem. Take Kevin Cash, a US Navy veteran with five degrees who, since he was laid off two years ago, has sent almost 2,200 jobs without success, and now survives off Uber rides and Taskrabbit gigs, almost sure that continuing to try, even for someone with with five degrees and years of experience, "is futile".
One reason he's giving up is what many people, me included have been reporting for years now: "a lot of posted jobs are fake... I spent a solid 12 ½ days applying to jobs that never existed." Another is that software, including the AI proudly powered by those nVidia engineers, make way too easy to demand unneeded or impossible purple squirrels, as in "[one recruiter] wanted 10 years of experience with a certain software program that had only been around for six years".
Long story short, the strategies to "try new (online) ways to “develop and retain talent”" suggested just a few years ago have failed miserably, and even actual job interviews fail to predict if a candidate will succeed. For the record, the very day I decided to write this post, I got this piece of spam email:
"Are you interested in having the ability to search for candidates - for all types of desk roles?... Our service enables you to search for handpicked candidates from a database of over 4 million highly skilled remote staff from the Philippines."
The story of Kevin Cash, however, means much more than it seems at first sight. To begin with, his story is important because he's unemployed with the same skills that nVidia should need to remain so profitable, namely "business intelligence and semiconductor manufacturing".
Then, it's even more important because almost all the 2.200 jobs he's quite qualified to get but didn't are (besides being often fake!) exactly the kind of jobs that, thanks to some mythical "upskilling" are supposed to compensate everybody, not just guys with five degrees, of the jobs they lost or will lose because of automation, AI and what not.
Sure, innovation eventually creates more jobs than it destroys. I could still believe that. But in the last decade or two "innovation" has been destroying exactly the kind of jobs people should have "upskilled themselves for, and it keeps doing so faster and faster: in the US only, the whole high-tech industry faced in 2023 a brutal wave of layoffs that shows "no signs of slowing down", with figures "lower than all estimates in a Bloomberg survey.
That's the whole problem, here, speed: "in the long run we're all dead", longtermism be damned. I really don't get how anyone in this reality can still believe that the super fast "innovation" we are going through will create enough jobs that enough of the real people it will put on the streets could ever get qualified for, before starving under some bridge. That's just a fable, and it's always been a fable, because:
Executive summary of this whole section: forget a full employment society, and forget upskilling to wages that can afford a family more than a tiny percentage of all the workers that should be thankful to live in these wonderful times.
Worldwide job market, ca. 2030
Dating is just like looking for a job: so complicated it's futile
A new research on dating, which was expecting to find "a substantial improvement in the ability to find and meet potential partners, reflecting reduced search costs brought about by [online dating] technology" found something else instead:
"data suggest that search costs have not changed over time despite the wide use of online dating sites and apps."
If this looks like the guy still jobless after 2,200 applications, is because it is. The researchers explicitly note that recent literature documents "a similar lack of improvement in matching efficiency in labor and product markets".
Jobs and dating go hand in hand even in inequality: another recent research found that online dating caused "a rise in U.S. income inequality", making Americans (and everybody else, why not?) to increasingly "marry someone more like themselves" (for the record, that's just what I meant when I wrote that online dating amounts to self-inflicted eugenics).
Back to the first research, one reason it mentions for lack of improvements may be that, exactly because they can ask so much with dating apps, lonely hearts become as hard to please as those HR recruiters dreaming of purple squirrels. The researchers, however, point to a simpler explanation: dating apps just don't increase one's inborn capability to process information, which is what would ultimately determine one's "proficiency in mate selection within the marriage market" (which is just the dating version of the already mentioned "genius is SCARCE"" thing).
For what it's worth, I suspect it's even simpler: the mere fact of looking at things like dating and marriage as "markets" is twisted. Well-adjusted human beings are those who use "markets", or help others to do so, to buy carrots or screwdrivers, not life partners.
What makes dating apps pointless is the same thing that makes stupidly hard to hire or get hired, thus contributing, among other things, to parents and children getting in debt for schooling that's prestigious, but little else: technology for the sake of technology. That's not the only cause, of course, nor the main one: almost always technology, especially digital technology, just enables or accelerates stuff (good or bad, doesn't matter) that humans were already doing or were begging to do anyway.
Still, all the stories and studies I've reported so far are perfect examples that going too fast, too digital, is bad for everybody's mental health, because dating, marriage and jobs aren't hobbies. They greatly overlap with one's own meaning and stability in life, and if they are all messed up simultaneously, in the same way and for the same reasons, it's not sustainable for much longer.
Solutions are as simple as they are hard to implement. It's painfully evident that both head hunters and lonely hearts should spend much more time with the real people who may help them.
That would only be a stopgap, however. As I said, there are too many signs that we're going towards a future where, even if there was no global warming whose only real solution were to "just sit still and smell the roses" ...
I argue that we can get there by getting UBI and AI in the right order, after disrupting the first if not the only thing that REALLY needs disruption. That may look hard, or downright crazy. But the more we keep going like this, the more it seems to me the less unrealistic, less unfeasible solution among those that would work. Just ask good old uncle Albert, below.
PSA:I am actively seeking work as blogger, (ghost-) writer, speaker, researcher, popularizer... on all the topics in this and my other posts. Or, you can support me directly by subscribing, or with donations.
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft:
As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games:
Trusted computing promised to supercharge DRM and make it orders of magnitude harder to break – a promise it delivered on. That made gamers a weird partner for the pro-trusted computing coalition.
But coalitions are weird, and coalitions that bring together diverging (and opposing) constituencies are *very* powerful (if fractious), because one member can speak to lawmakers, companies, nonprofits and groups that would normally have nothing to do with another member.
Gamers may hate DRM, but they hate *cheating* even more. As a class, gamers have an all-consuming hatred of cheats that overrides all other considerations (which is weird, because the cheats are *used* by gamers!). One thing trusted computing is pretty good at is detecting cheating. Gamers – or, more often, game *servers* – can use remote attestation to force each player’s computer to cough up a true account of its configuration, including whether there are any cheats running on the computer that would give the player an edge. By design, owners of computers can’t override trusted computing modules, which means that even if you *want* to cheat, your computer will still rat you out.
Dr. Farnetani, a famous italian pediatrician, just said "No to age limits for smartphones and social media" (italian) when interviewed about a petition by other Italian experts, who asked the government to ban smartphones before 14 years old, and social media before 16. These are his main points and suggestions:
such tools are harmful if taken in excessive doses, for long periods
what is necessary is to teach children a responsible, conscious usage of said tools
because those tools are now part of everybody's lifestyle, with undeniable advantages
being with peers is always positive as long as virtual meetings aren't THE exclusive way to be together
rather than imposing generic bans, it is important that parents create alternative opportunities for socialization
rather than hiding the problem it's better to have a daily, continuous conversation also about these things
sleep must be protected, because using electronic devices right before sleeping, or worst: in bed, makes falling asleep harder
teach smartphones and social media, because learning how to use such crucial tools can't be left to self-improvement. Such teaching must start and happen in the family, but also in schools and by NGOs, via properly trained teachers
Sure. If...
Dr. Farnetani surely is a very competent pediatrician. Still, I argue that, in the real world, his intrinsically good recommendations are hardly applicable, and partly misleading, at least as reported in that interview. The world would be wonderful if everybody could follow Dr. Farnetani's advice. Seriously. Besides, should age limits be enforced, the only ones who could do that without serious collateral damage and huge waste of money would be parents, NEVER governments, like that petition says. Still, there are many things that fall short in that interview.
Magical spells, i.e. the ONLY age limit on social media that could work in REAL life without BIG collateral damage.
First, there is no explicit declaration of how soon is certainly too soon, which is sorely needed, and never repeated enough. Tell the average family of 2024 that "children do not need smartphones bans", and way too many parents will just hear "it's OK to keep giving personal smartphones to kids as young as seven/eight years old", which I would bet is not what Dr. Farnetani meant.
Second, it is wrong to equate smartphones with social media or messaging systems like WhatsApp or Telegram. Really wrong. From a certain point of view, it doesn't even matter whether "social media" is good or bad.
The real problem, however, is that most suggestions of the list above are basically impossible to follow for the overwhelming majority of today's real families wealthy enough to have kids that could be harmed by smartphones and social media. It's as simple as that.
That is, how many real parents of today have, on top of all their other responsibilities, BOTH the knowledge AND the time to have "daily, continuous conversations" for teaching "responsible, conscious use" of something that, unlike cooking, bicycling or even dating, that they themselves don't really understand (more on this below)? How many parents have concrete possibilities to "create alternative opportunities for socialization" for their own children... before those children grow up? Ditto for real schools, in case you were thinking it should be their responsibility.
Seriously, why didn’t the journalist ask Dr. Farnetani how many parents of 2024 have the time, and skills, and opportunities to be like Henry Oliver? One in a thousand? One in five hundred? Surely too few to make a difference. Or, put in another way, Dr. Farnetani's advice, while being indeed very good, does not scale at all. Not enough to make a difference in society, for the next 15/20 years at least.
We must certainly strive for a world in which all parents have those possibilities, but that is another discussion. In the real world of today, and as long as certain things stay the same, the only smartphone and social media strategy that will work without negative effects on the overwhelming majority of real kids with real parents is exactly the only one that almost every real parent could afford and will be able to follow: "no smartphone before ~14 years old, period". And if you didn't notice right away that I did NOT say "no internet", do read that piece twice, and then this.
If you need proof that way too few adults of today don't understand enough the actual nature and deep impacts of digital networks and services, just check the "Ruby Goldberg" part of this post, look at NFTs, or remember the credit still given to dumb ideas like online voting.
I am not saying this to accuse, insult or shame anybody! I am simply pointing out the fact that smartphones, social media and other digital tech that even much science fiction of the 20th century didn't imagine pretty much crashed on us just 20 years ago, changing every quarter since then.
I am just saying that all this stuff is so new, so big and so fast, for a species that needed 150 thousand years to "invent" agriculture and 6/7 thousand years more to invent writing, that almost nobody has had the time to really understand it, no matter how smart they may be. There is no shame at all in taking it slow, or just refusing (not being forced!) to use certain services until they make sense. Quite the contrary, actually, especially when children are concerned. It's just basic common sense.
The sooner we accept we’re ALL as ready as these guys to handle certain things, the happier our children will be. (source: screenshot of image search for “cavemen with smartphones”
Furthermore, speaking of social media, the interview doesn't mention at all that datafication, censorship, surveillance and misguided or missing regulations make current social media so bad that even adults should use them as little as possible, and children even less, regardless of any mental health concerns.
Then again, omissions of the complete picture are very common in many, similarly well intentioned proposals to limit certain abuses. For example, last May the European Parliament voted on a law proposal nicknamed "Chat Control", whose intended purpose is to fight child sexual abuse, collateral damage be damned. Under Chat Control (source), "users of apps and services with chat functions [would] be asked whether they accept the indiscriminate and error-prone scanning and possibly reporting of their privately shared images, photos and videos" and those who refused such scanning "would be blocked from sending or receiving images, photos, videos and links". It goes without saying that refusing would automatically make of whoever chose to do a potential target of many other forms of surveillance or discrimination.
Surprisingly, many NGOs and politicians, including this member of the European Parliament, asked to reject the proposal period, which is what eventually happened. But I dream that it would be much better, should that or any similar proposal return, if everybody first approved it, and then every citizen refused to submit to the automatic scanning.
I dream this first of all because if everybody (starting with parents) did so it would be an excellent proof, and a powerful political signal, that it is a stupid, very dangerous law.
But I dream this even more because losing the ability to share as we do today pictures and notifications of every meal, party, relative, holiday, home improvement... and to receive the same "news" from every "friend" would be a feature, not a bug. Heck, it would be a return to circa 2005, not the Bronze Age, because Chat Control would not touch forums, blogging, email, IRC or those ugly, so personal phone calls (1). Can you imagine a better remedy for the endless stream of "me, me, ME!" flood everyone is pushed to both practice and endure these days?
Of course, this would NOT solve all our problems, including the root, pre-digital issues that (starting from this one) make life suck so much to make people escape inside Instagram or TikTok. The point of this post is just that as long as journalists or members of Parliaments only ask wrong or incomplete questions, the answers don't really matter, no matter how well intentioned and competent the other party is.
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Yes, of course the same parties who long for Chat Control would target those other media, sooner of later, and of course we should fight those proposals too. One problem at a time.
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “Marshmallow Longtermism” a reflection on how conservatives self-mythologize as the standards-bearers for deferred gratification and making hard trade-offs, but are utterly lacking in these traits when it comes to climate change and inequality.
I’m no fan of Charles Koch, but I agree that his performance at the helm of Koch Industries demonstrated impressive discipline and self-control, and that his enormous economic and political power stems in large part from his ability to resist temptation and reinvest patient money in patient technologies.
But Koch’s foresight is extremely selective. Much of Koch’s fossil-fuel fortune has been spent on funding climate denial and inaction. Koch claims that he sincerely believes that the climate emergency isn’t real or urgent, which is awfully convenient, given the centrality of fossil fuels to Koch’s power and wealth.
The rigor Koch applies to evaluating the technical propositions of new, efficient coal extraction and refining processes disappears when it comes to climate science. If Koch held coal-tech to the same evidentiary standard that he applies to the climate, he never would have bought a single piece of gear.
and we already have all it takes to do it. Except our own minds.
Short PSA first:I am actively seeking work as blogger, (ghost-) writer, speaker, researcher, popularizer... on all the topics in this and my other posts. Or, you can support me directly by subscribing, or with donations.
In this uncertain world, there may be just three things that I am more sure of, every year more. One is that we already have all the tech and science we need to solve our most urgent REAL problems (including sensible use of machine learning, of course).
The second thing is that we do not have enough raw stuff to keep doing Life As Usual, even assuming it would be worth it. Not at affordable costs, in acceptable time scales, that is. We just don't.
The last, and most important, is that we're not going to live in a society that really works for as many people as possible, until we avoid all the distractions caused by the two things above, which are just symptoms of another thingy on which we should focus first, which thanks to digital technologies is also much, much easier than it would have been 2 or 3 decades ago. Before looking at that thing, it's necessary to recap the real problems we have, because they are what make that thing THE most urgent thing.
The real problems we have
Clueless coders and number crunchers roam unchecked
Geeks must participate in world making, but letting them pilot or "disrupt" any mission-critical service, from nuclear power to healthcare or death is almost always a wretched idea. Especially when it causes the next problem:
High-Tech dumb dreams suck all the oxygen (and money) in the room
Letting immature techies unchecked has brought to power characters who dump oceans of money and precious physical resources down drains like:
Another evolutionary dead-end that wastes precious resources is any form of prepping, from setting up remote homesteads to defend in arms to building micro-nations populated with all and only nice people their founders would like. Both visions are quite .. short-sighted, if not reactionary, hopeless navel gazing . Above all, they are already too late.
You may happily retire in the mountains, and one guy (already) left free to launch sulphur balloons on the other side of the planet could still be all it takes to tweak the climate wherever you "escaped" enough to make you starve. Similarly, no digital fairy kingdom on the internet will run, if the few aging guys fixing submarine cables aren't replaced soon.
As things stand now, the truth is that (source) "the contemporary regulatory and administrative state... emerged for a very good reason", namely the "only way to take the danger out of social life" in a system so fragile and globalized as the current world.
Retreating on mountaintops or on digital pillars would be enough for a past that won't return. The world has become too interconnected to be shielded from it, even if network states weren't so inherently.... unbalanced to go quickly downhill by themselves. Today, however one imagines it, withdrawing into any custom-made utopia is an absurd notion.
There are many people for whom at least the "no heaven nor hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for" part of John Lennon's Imagine already is the world they live in, and yet they are often sad, and more than others too. And then, as thisand other elections in the last years clearly show, there are more and more people every year who are more or less furious, because they sincerely consider those same things to be deeply wrong. Personally, during Italy's lockdowns I was depressed because I HAD a job which PREVENTED me from doing useful work.
Who's right or wrong there is totally off topic here. Me, I have a feeling that each side dismissing the other as one monolithic bunch of losers "on the wrong side of history" won't make anybody happier, but never mind me. Here, I'm only pointing out that, regardless of their material quality of life, there is a huge, and growing number of people who aren't exactly happy these days. We must be all doing something wrong.
First of all, accept that none of the problems I just outlined can be fixed by new technology. As to what to do instead...
The Italian science-fiction comic Nathan Never, started in 1991, happens in a world that was totally devastated in the year... 2024 by a dumb geoengineering attempt to exploit the energetic potential of Earth's magma. Devastation is so bad that all the governments of the planet accept the proposal (italian) of the Pope elected in the same days of the catastrophe: a worldwide reset of the calendar back from January 1st, 2024 to January 1st, 1946, as tangible, continuous incitement to participate in rebuilding the world, both psychologically and technologically, just as everybody did after the end of World War II.
We need something like that: a practically sudden, very visible, very concrete, worldwide restart of the right thing, that is the very nature of money, through global, almost simultaneous:
abandonment of GDP, because it's at least 56 years we know it's terribly stupid. Make Bob Kennedy happy, already
fiscal/financial/whatever monetary reforms that make Universal Basic Income viable (why? See here and here)
abolition of corporate personhood, and of shareholder value as the ONE main goal of corporations, both stupid ideas for lots of reasons that are much more capitalist than "communist", like this, this, this or this
That was 1968. Now, we have 56 more years of evidence he was right.
Don't dismiss this as madness right away. Keep reading
Instead of "no heaven nor hell, no countries, etc.."
Imagine all nations on Earth doing, on January 1st 202.., a reset of all debt, both public and private, freeing huge energies throughout the developing world that would sensibly reduce migrations.
Imagine the evening news of New Year’s Eve, showing New Year parties in New Zealand and China, then Australia, then India, the Middle east, Europe, and finally Wall Street and the Silicon Valley... where people party not because a new number appeared on their smartphones, but because they have economic peace of mind, at last.
Why would the 1% want or allow this?
First, because at this point in time they can't ignore it would be pretty bad for their businesses and investments... but much, much better than the chaos that will soon happen otherwise. Second, because they would still be the 1%, status being relative to what everybody else has.
Popularizing these topics is how I pay my bill. Thanks for considering a (possibly paid) subscription).
The real obstacles
The real, biggest obstacle to realizing the four points above is not the 1%. It's everybody else. It's us, who are self-conditioned to instinctively fear or hate such measures.
The real obstacle is every common person who wants to live badly, because they don't get they are already slaves today. It's the ordinary people who, for example:
insist that we should not fight for social innovation because... ... it could be taken away at a later point (yes, I've actually heard this!)
actually callany "dependence on government money" an "immoral, worse-than-death slavery, while calling freedom the freedom to endure depression, debt, urban violence and lack of access to decent food and healthcare... while never being actually free from the same governments".
It would be a world in every real entrepreneur would still have the possibility innovate and disrupt all she wants (except UBI, of course), and be free to fire underperforming employees without accusations of ruining their lives.
It would be a world in which everybody else would have both no fear of homelessness and the time to monitor and held accountable whoever runs the show and may curb their actual freedom. Open Data, anyone?
It would be a world in which the fast-growing sandwich generation would have time to look after their kids and their aging parents and their own health, that is to spare lots of money and hugely reduce the public costs of healthcare, in ways that make sense (like, you know, having the time to prepare healthier meals and exercise, instead of getting in debt (or pregnant) over Ozempic). It would also be a world in which the young wouldn't be forced to get in debts for degrees that may never repay themselves.
Sure, in the first years of such a world there would be lots of therapy to pay for the too many people who still identify their dignity with their jobs. Then again, they would hardly be more than the people who would need therapy, right now, from the US to Europe and Asia, in no negligible part exactly because of economic precariousness.
First, don't accept that it can't be done without serious, thoroughly vetted proof that it can't. The actual, simultaneous reset and reconfiguration of all accounts and ledgers worldwide, should be by far the easiest, since all current major currencies are either fiat money all the way down, or heavily controlled, and all highly digitized. The real obstacles are the already mentioned resistance of the masses, and figuring out how to implement certain measures without causing worse-than-Weimar inflation or other catastrophes related to the availability of money, or lack thereof.
About this surely very complex problem, I only know one thing: today…
that is, the money system we currently endure is so much complex, unstable, dangerous... that I sincerely fail to believe that certain proposals would be harder or riskier (1). What about you?
You may say, I'm a dreamer...
There already are other proposals worth considering, if nothing else as starting points (add yours in the comments!)
There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness ...Read More
I didn't remember the link or the publication date of that post. So, being almost certain that there are no other posts there with the word "Oath" in their title, I automatically typed "Oath site:stop.zona-m.net" in Google search bar, to retrieve that link (in case you don't know, adding "site:DOMAIN_NAME" to any search string tells the search engine to only search for that string inside that one website).
With such a specific, site-limited query, the first result of any search engine worth its name and stocks should have been title and link of that post, right? Instead, Google failed:
How could that happen? That post DOES exist, is only five years old (more on "only" in a moment), and I know for sure that that Google had indexed my whole website at least once since then. Fact is, Google failed to do the right thing, unlike DuckDuckGo which, answering the exact same query showed my post where it belongs, at the top of its list. As you can see comparing the screenshot above with the corresponding page of my blog archive:
all Google managed to do was to list, in this order:
the index page of my website for the posts in the "DigiWorld" category
the posts right before and after the one I was looking for
This proves that Google HAD all it needed to see, index and show that post. Still, it showed , everything "around" my post, except the post itself, behaving like a Table of Contents that said "Chapter Three is before Chapter Four and after Chapter Two" instead of "Chapter Three starts at page 42". How dumb and confusing is that? Luckily, DuckDuckGo did the Right Thing.
Of course, nothing of this is new. This is just another proof that, as I and others were already reporting in 2018, Google deliberately but without any recognizable criterion, forgets lots of "old" pages. When it doesn't fills screens with AI-driven crap, that is, which is bad in more ways than we can count.
How old are your web pages? For REAL, I mean
Google's obsession for "newness" is bad also because it pushes websites to falsify themselves.
Back in 2011, I wrote a roundup of six Linux file managers for the LinuxFormat magazine, which is still readable online with my byline at TechRadar, a sister publication of the same group. Thirteen years are an eternity in software, and yet that piece is still relevant now, for one specific reason: its date, which as of August 26th, 2024 reads "last updated August 3, 2021". Now, I would not mind at all if somebody had updated that piece without my knowledge. Problem is, it was not updated, as you can quickly verify by yourself, by just checking the versions numbers of the programs reviewed. As of August 26th, 2024, that article "last updated August 3, 2021" is still about version 0.8.0 of 4Pane (now it's 8.0) and version 2.32 of Nautilus (which was renamed years ago and is now at version 46).
Can an article REALLY “last updated in 2021” review software release ten years earlier?
On the same note, I remember seeing online articles dated e.g. "November 2023", without any "last updated" notice, but with lots of reader comments at least five years older. With both them and my roundup, by far the most likely explanation of those misleading date is that they were falsified years after publication, just to make Google keep them in its index. Not good.
Whatever. Just stop using Google. Nothing to find there anymore. Let's talk of Snow White, instead.
The REAL problem behind Woke Snow White
In the unlikely case that you got distracted by petty issues like the climate crisis, Gaza or Ukraine, there is a serious crisis unraveling about... the wokeness of Disney's next Snow White movie, due next year. After a summary of that crucial topic, the article moves to the more important issue of whether "this revamp is really needed", or not.
Micro rant, skip to next paragraph if you want: as far as I am concerned, that revamp is not needed at all period, regardless of wokeness or lack thereof. I won't see that movie for the same reason I never bothered with the sequels of Highlander, Back to the Future, or anything Star Wars after the first two trilogies. To me, certain stories are OK as they were told the first time with a defined end, and obsessively repackaging just them specifically to make money isn't interesting. If Hollywood believes that real creativity, diversity and inclusivity are important, which of course they are, I'd rather have them produce really new or previously unknown stories about, or by, people and places that were always ignored or misrepresented before.
But never mind the previous paragraph. The really important reason to be bothered about the new Snow White movie by Disney is the same thing that should bother everybody about Harry Potter novels and J.K. Rowling, regardless, again, of whatever one thinks of "wokeness".
The problem with the allegedly woke Snow White that I care about even if I'm not going to watch that movie is the fact that "Snow White or Frozen, it's all the same", because it's all from Disney and only Disney all the time (including allegedly woke mermaid castings). The problem is the fact that everybody else trying to create anything that directly takes from that movie will be sued to bankruptcy, even if their version, woke or not who cares, will be better than anything Disney could do.
Appreciation that this happens in a "free market" is left as exercise for the reader. My first concern is the monopoly on "imposing a canon as a way to grab and hold (cultural) power", more and for longer than any impact a single movie may have. Because what copyright lobbies really fight, consciously or not, is not piracy of already published works: it's the very possibility to make future movies or books, that is to make money, but also new ideas and cultural models, that they couldn't control.
Ditto for lots of stories about Harry Potter and everything else Disney, as well as stories about Middle Earth, Tin Tin, Poirot, Asterix, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond etc... that, for the same reasons, must remain well below the radar, confined in fan fiction communities. This sucks just as Google canceling websites, for the same reason. Which brings us to streaming.
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The Dark Streaming ages
Another things that really sucks and is really gone too far is this concept that one should subscribe (1) for months, if not one year to some streaming platform, even if all they want to watch on that platform is one movie. Me, I'd love to watch with my kids The In-Laws, in all its impeccable “serpentine” madness. But I'll wait till some TV channel reruns it, because The In-Laws is only available on streaming platforms I am not already subscribed to. I am not making more subscriptions, even if they have free trial periods, just to watch ONE, forty-five years old movie, that should already be in the public domain.
This is terribly stupid, and would remain so even if the main problem I explain in the last paragraph didn't exist. It's very wasteful, and way too complicated to be sustainable for long anyway. It must end now, in two ways. First, there must be one, really quick, simple and privacy-friendly way to pay to see just one movie, on any device, regardless of who streams it. Like, you know, those obsolete places where people could go without ever knowing who owned them, and watch just the movie they wanted, all without being tracked by digital payments (all right, movie teathers would be better if they didn't run 20+ minutes of spots before the movie and confiscated all smartphones at the gate, but you know what I mean).
Second, any form of "out of print" must disappear. You make a movie, you get exclusive rights (for 10, 15 years top, surely no 70!) to make money off it in any way. That's fair. But if you stop distributing that movie, even to people willing to pay for it, at no higher prices than your newer movies, you lose those rights, and that movie automatically goes in the public domain. Even if it happens one month after release. Ditto for e-books, music or any other "content", of course. This is what people should see right before any movie, song, book… is taken offline:
Gimme CATMS, a Copyright Act That Makes Sense
Please share this, in and outside Substack. The more people are informed, the sooner things can change.
What do Google's selective amnesias, monopoly on hypothetical future movies and past movies locked by streaming have in common? The fact that they are all ways in which great works are or become hidden way too soon for the common good, that's what. There are surely thousands of great cultural works of any kind that never benefit all the people they could, for this reason only.
Instead, by tolerating laws that make copyright last forever or extend it beyond decency like the DMCA, and an ignorance that brings "Digital Dark Ages", we keep alive a world where only the big guys can reinvent old stories, all in the name of a "creativity" that is more and more mere self-looting their own basements:
Ever wondered who cannot make the kind of movies that always break the same records? (source)
There are plenty of NGOs and cultural institutions that fight this madness worldwide, and it's high time that they become a real mass movement. So, as material for a follow-up post, please write your favorite one(s) in the comments, or tell me about them by email.
The more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.
As I always say, YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software and digital data are used AROUND you. This begs the questions, which are today's topic, "Are those data really so terribly fragile and ephemeral as they seem, and if they are, what should we do about it?"
This is NOT a post about huge electromagnetic storms or EMP pulses by nuclear explosions that may destroy every digital devices and data. Never mind them. Should such events happen, either they wouldn't be so bad, or your data would be the last of your problems (1). This is about the digital dark age made of technical fragility, secrecy and decadence we already live in, every day, because we keep failing to see its real nature and causes.
EMP weapons? Worry about what they would MEAN, not their effects on your data (Image source)
The problem, as perceived
Yes, our lives depend on equipment, services and data that may too easily break or disappear any moment precisely because they are "digital". But what makes the core problem really bad is just the fact that, while it is relatively well delimited and easy to define, it takes so many different forms that most people struggle to see it... if and when they realize certain forms (still) exist.
Floppy drives, for example, are fifty-years old digital technology that for most people is as dead and distant as phone booths. But did you know that the German Navy has started to replace the floppy drives inside its anti-submarine frigates ONLY THIS YEAR? Or that Japan managed to free itself of more than one thousand regulations that mandated the usage of floppy disks ONLY THIS YEAR?
older industrial machines and equipment, CT scanners, ultrasound machines and other medical devices
the San Francisco Muni Metro light railway, whose mission-critical Automatic Train Control System will boot up with a floppy, every morning until... 2033/34
Why is that so? I'll get back to that in a bit (of course), because a bigger digital fragility problem, which still goes largely unnoticed, is the low durability of consumer grade optical media. Many music CDs from the 1980's or 1990's, including yours, "aren't just aging, they're dying". Ditto for movies or video games on CD and DVDs, including FACTORY SEALED ones. What about YOUR CDs and DVDs? Do they show anything like "bronzing of discs, small pin-hole specs located on the discs, or “edge-rot"? Check them, and let me know in the comments!
The Web and Cloud storage were supposed to solve both the evident physical limits of distributing physical documents, and the invisible fragility and ephemerality of digital ones. Instead, as we let them grow unattended, Web and Cloud brought us the worst of both worlds, by marking the end of the end of files as individual objects that could a) live as long as they really could and b) controllable, or at least surely readable by their owners or viewers.
Link rot is a growing digital pandemic: in 2021, over 60% of older links in the New York Times articles still accessible online were already broken. Web-wise, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in 2023, and 23% of news webpages contained at least one broken link.
Google makes things even worse. After years of deliberately forgetting perfectly working websites just because the weren't "new", one month ago Google stopped indexing altogether (as in "practically erase from the Web") millions of still working web pages with unique content, just because they were published before mobile phones, but their authors will never have the time or money to "optimize" them for such devices.
The situation is so bad to make E. Mollick argue that "only LLMs will remember the web, since our own knowledge is rotting", and then wonder"how many people would be willing to license unlimited LLM training on their content in order to ensure that their work is “remembered,” in some way, somewhere".
Hell, no, I say. Even without LLM hallucinations, if "the cloud is just somebody else's computer" LLMs would be just somebody else's memory. Somebody who could stop talking to you any moment.
Private files stored online are rotting as much as public web pages, albeit in a slower and very different way. This is because (source)“files are discrete objects that exist in a physical place [but] the internet is pretty much the opposite of that".
Services like Google Docs do not let us sort or organize files in any way that (see above...) doesn't just“prioritize [only] the new over the important”, and by "us" I don't mean septuagenarians mourning the good old days of handwritten letters posted with just a 6c stamp: we already are in the second or third round of university STEM students for whom it is possible to struggle with homework because they cannot find their own files in their own computers, and of younger students in no better conditions, as we all saw during the 2020 lockdowns. Unsurprisingly, these are the same generations that, in order to "own" again the stuff they paid for, are allegedly going... back to "more permanent" vinyl and DVDs. Oh, my...
The more people know this stuff, the sooner we’ll exit the Digital Dark Age. Please share this post, in and outside Substack!
Civilizations and individual humans cannot really exist without permanent memories of their own lives. How did we came to this? Mainly, because there still is a dangerous level of ignorance, at all levels from lawmaking to parenting, around all things digital.
Let Big Tech Toddlers with way more money than their maturity can handle chase immortality. As I wrote years ago, if digital files really disappear as discrete, permanent objects, it will be only OUR fault. What we should all make immortal is OUR DATA, not our bodies.
This IS possible. Let's take books and e-books as an example. People who go back to paper books because "iPads are distracting and paper is unmatched" or "don't own what they (NEVER, actually) "bought", instead of demanding open formats and copyright reform really miss the point. The solution to the current stupid constraints on (NOT "of"!) e-books is to demand e-books that will never expire, and nothing less (for even more examples, see here).
The truth is that paper books, printed photographs, and pretty much everything "non-digital" document storage technology, including clay tablets, is much more fragile and durable than bits.
"Father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, who is rightly worried that future generation will have little or no record of the 21st Century also pointed out that “modern photographs may not last more than 150–200 years before they fade or disintegrate. Modern books, unless archival paper is used, may not last more than 100 years.” All it takes to destroy one unique, "eternal" papyrus or clay tablet is one fire, one spilled cup of coffee by overworked, underpaid archivists or similar minor accidents.
Bits are the ONLY way to PRESERVE in just one, extremely small and overall really cheap "bit container", literally tons of content of all the possible kinds that we would NEVER, EVER have the space or money to preserve in any pre-digital format.
Even better, bits and bit containers are the ONLY way, both space- and money-wise, to make and keep MULTIPLE COPIES of the same content in different places, that is to NEVER, EVER LOSE any document after it was digitized.
Hardware, electricity, software... those are not REAL problems
Yes, if civilization fell back to any state that makes electricity or computer technology unavailable, it would become impossible to read, write and produce the "bit containers". But that's a dumb concern to have.
The reality is that fully interchangeable "bit containers" are the only physically possible way to preserve everything that should be preserved and keep doing a million more good things we can't live without anymore, and that a regress to pre-electricity or pre-computer ages would be a catastrophe anyway. So, the right thing to do is to avoid that catastrophe and manage bits in the right ways, not to give them up.
This said, the "right way to manage bits" does include worrying about hardware in the right ways, places and moments. After all, the real reason why why we worry about the accessibility of bits that, unlike with pen and paper, we need two high-tech things to handle them (it's actually three, but I'll leave the most important for last), and one of them is objects, from monitors to microprocessors, that can be manufactured only with very advanced, very expensive machines.
That's not a big problem, however, except in very special cases. Some experimental and rare films and video works, for example, are "very difficult if not impossible to digitize without losses". But those are exceptions.
If the average life of a hard disk is, say, five years, having two different disks for backups, and replacing them every 3.5 or 4 years will keep all your document and memories safe as long as ANY kind of computer exists. Surely much longer than any vinyl, paper or tape could, IF you had space for them.
Important: I say "hard disk" to mean "whatever storage media is more common in any given period". I have files from the 1990s that I copied from floppy to CD, then to DVD, then to USB drive... and will continue to copy on whatever kind of "bit container" comes next. Bits don't care what they live on.
Even when the only way to access some valuable content is one very specific piece of hardware, if the designs and specs of that hardware are available, it is technically possible to make another copy of that hardware that behaves exactly in the same way. The extremely expensive machines that still work perfectly but need floppies, for example, will not be replaced until they break, which is good considering how scarce of raw metals we continuously forget we are. However, making those machines believe that any cheap USB key of 2024 is a real floppy disk from the 1970s is easy, with stuff like this, because the design of floppy drives is completely known. That's what matters, as far as hardware is concerned:
You can make every machine believe it still has a floppy drive
The other obstacle to managing bits without worries is software. This is often the biggest problem, partly because software is still black magic for 99.9% of human beings and will likely remain such for the foreseeable future, no matter how many coding classes are laid on children, or adults that should be "upskilled" to do "work" that shouldn't be done.
Many real problems with software, however, only happen when that software is secret or uselessly complex. Unless they were made with Flash, the archives of websites made 25 years ago are bunches of files that still “just work”, those of websites made 25 months ago are useless without getting mad with software dependencies. Static blogs like this or this are a wonderful way to self-publish online, not to mention a mandatory backup for every Substack author.
The root problem: ignorance, at all levels
We joke that executives politicians are clueless about everything digital, but even the creator of Star Trek was clueless about digital preservation, and even an intellectual giant like Umberto Eco got e-books wrong. This is the real problem: too many people, at all levels, still sincerely believe bits will surely last much less than paper, vinyl or film, and that it could't be any other way.
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The (mandatory) road ahead
A complete strategy to avoid "Digital Dark Ages" would be much longer than one post (2), but it should surely include two or three basic guidelines.
One would be to acknowledge that not everything needs preserving, or even created in the first place. Check out all the pictures you took: how many of them will still make sense in one or five years?
The second thing to do would be to learn for good that, since the dawn of culture, all human beings have always managed information by combining three very different things:
Physical Supports, that is some the material objects "hosting" the information
Data Formats, that is the rules by which the information is encoded on the support, and
User Interfaces, that is the tools used to write and read the data according to the format
This is what everybody should learn, and politicians should enshrine in laws:
Starting yesterday, digital interface, supports and formats must return and remain as separate as they were in the Bronze Age, possibly more. To see what I mean, have a look at these screenshots of my evergreen seminar on file formats (2):
This is how we started: clearly SEPARATE supports, formats and interfaces!
Digital can be as durable as hyeroglyphs, if it separates support, format and interface in the same way
and then check the full thing, especially slides 8 to 13 and the "bit containers" part.
It doesn't matter if the "data format" is handwritten language, or a set of rules to decode a sequence of bits. What matters is only that the formats are completely open, to allow new software programs to keep handling them. Even the Vatican says so for their archives. This is hardly surprising for me, considering Free Software’s surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine, but never mind me: when it comes to permanence and durability, who should you trust more than an institution that's lasted millennia and has every intention to last even more?
Two-sentence executive summary: The real problem of "Digital Dark Ages" is the same that Japan got partially rid of just this year: not technology, but laws and regulations that tolerate, when they don't impose, closed file formats, dumb practices like DRM, or ignorance about these issues. Get rid of those, and your bits will last forever.
Finally… the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.
NOTES: 1. to put solar storms and EMPs in perspective, read here, here, here and here 2. Wanna hire me for tutoring, popularization or research on those topics? Just email
This week on my podcast, I read a recent post from my Pluralistic.net blog/newsletter: “AI’s productivity theater,” about the severe mismatch between the bosses who buy AI to increase their workers’ efficiency, and the utter bafflement of the workers who are expected to use the AI…somehow.
A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:
Last week, Michael Bauwens asked on X if someone could please have some AI summarize the transcripts of three videos (linked below) in which Simon Michaux, a professor of geometallurgy, first describes how "Green Transitions" or "Circular Economies" just ignore physical realities and then his own alternative, which he also aims to demonstrate in an idealized city of 10,000 people in the desert of Peru.
Since many of the crucial, age-defining themes in those videos are very close to what I cover here, I said "let me try, without any AI, of course!". This post, with my apologies in advance for any error or misunderstanding of Michaux's arguments, is the result, followed by some suggestions by me, and an explanation of why I've been offline for more than one month.
Same for AI-written summaries, of course.
Historical/geopolitical background: BRICS, the Ukraine war, peak oil and money
Michaux argues that the BRICS economies and the Ukraine war are a change from a [petrodollar] Empire to a Commodities backed Empire. In that context, he says, the Russians are not interested in finishing the war anytime soon, because what it's really about is not Ukraine: it's Russia's attempt to do what the United States did in 1973, trying to force Europe into a position where it allows survival of the ruble, which already is a partially commodity-backed asset.
Of course, he says, the West cannot let that transition happen, since the affirmation of a commodity-backed currency would "set off a financial nuclear explosion" of fiat currencies like the dollar and the Euro, and all the associated debt.
For the world at large, a bigger (underlying) problem than BRICS and wars is the fact that, while there still are enormous amounts of fossil fuels, all the cheap and easy ones to get are gone, especially oil: fracking, biofuels, gasoline made with alternative processes all bring massive inefficiencies to an industry that spent decades to become super efficient.
This inefficiency would be the reason why a barrel of oil cost 80 USD, but a gallon of gas still costs 3.5 USD at the pump: to get that gallon of usable oil, we much more money, infrastructure, upstream investments and refining. It's like, says Michaux, trying to drink beer with a spoon: the first half of the mug is no problem, but the bottom becomes harder and harder to drink as you go.
The global financial crisis of 2008, he says, was caused by a chain reaction with its genesis in these growing problems of the oil industry. The problem was solved, or better: postponed, by printing money, as with all previous crises of the same kind since 1970, all tied to increasingly serious geopolitics issues. For example, says Michaux, countries like Qatar, Norway and the US, could provide all the gas Europe and China need only if they canceled all their existing contracts. Only Russia produces so much more gas than it consumes to also fill those needs.
In the background, after decades of the same play, global debt is spiraling out of control (in 2008 American debt was around 7 trillion USD, now it's 34) to levels that printing money won't fix anymore, and will require a reset.
The root cause of all this is that when we're talking about money we're actually talking about physical systems: no matter how many financial or fiscal policy tricks you invent, money is linked in an unbreakable trinity with energy and raw materials. Technology (powered by money) consumes energy to turn those raw materials into some outcome that's useful to whoever provided the money. But money and economics, defined as "a decision-making system of who owns what and who does what", are just the top layer which can never ignore its physical constraints.
Green transition and circular economy cannot work as advertised
Unfortunately, instead of taking those physical constraints into account, we tend to hope for future technology breakthroughs that will somehow deliver more commodity resources. But dogmas like "The free market will fix it" or "human Innovation is amazingly powerful" are just denials of reality, and the entire Green Transition can only be a stepping stone to something else.
Net Zero by 2050 means having, just 26 years from now, all energy from renewable sources, all transport of goods and people powered by assorted combinations of electricity, hydrogen fuel cells, synthetic fuels, biofuels or ammonia, and heating by electrically powered heat pumps. Is that physically feasible?
Michaux's answer, backed in the videos with plenty of research, data and charts, is NO, no way, because we simply don't have enough time and money, and even if we did, we'd meet huge bottlenecks:
to make the current economy work with renewable but intermittent sources like wind or solar, there must be enough energy storage to power the whole system for at least four weeks, or months in many places. That (see next paragraphs) turns out to be the largest task
we don't have the technology to save so much power for such a long time
as large as they are, Chinese refineries and industries are not large enough to deliver all the physical stuff that is needed
we don't even have to care that expanding mining would destroy ecosystems and have its own extra effect on climate change, because mineral supplies (from both land and sea floors) are "nowhere near enough, not even close"
recycling (and by extension the circular economy) is not the answer, and not even because the quality of the material flows that are coming out of recycling is just not good enough. To make the Green Transition by 2050, we'd need 30 times all the copper that has been consumed in the last 30 years. Same for most other metals: the quantities mined until today are a tiny fraction of what would be needed to transition the whole world economy as it is today
Circular economy is just as flawed and imbalanced as the Green Transition, says Michaux: more specifically, he argues that European conceived the circular economy because they were concerned only with the dependence of European industries upon raw materials that came from China, not with the intrinsic scarcity of the same materials. In other words, the EU conceived the circular economy just as a market-based answer to a market phenomenon, not to hard, physical limits.
Causes of the bottlenecks and limits of renewables
Wind and solar are highly variable sources, and even very short glitches may destroy the electronic devices we are totally dependent upon. Our world needs stationary, very stable power, but today there are still no large renewable network that can provide it by running completely in a self-sufficient matter. For example, in Europe, wind turbines in Denmark are balanced by power from Germany and Sweden gas turbines, because if you have unsufficient wind in Denmark, you will almost always have the same situation even in neighboring countries. Ditto for solar power.
In order to balance these large scale, long term variations you would need months of storage, but hydrogen and battery banks simply can't do that at scale, and pumped hydro isn't viable either. Michaux quotes studies that found 530K sites worldwide that could become pumped hydro reservoirs, but obviously concluded that first ,it would be politically impossible to rezone enough of them, and second that should that happen, it would "lock" half of the fresh water that's absolutely needed by humans and agriculture.
Michaux goes on to demonstrate that all this doesn't even matter, because providing uninterrupted power year round would require "four times more raw materials than there are thought to be on Earth period", and even if they existed, mining a meaningful quantity of them by 2050 would be impossible anyway. He also observes that the more we moved to nuclear power, the smaller this problem would be, because that move would substantially reduce the total amount of metals needed. For that to happen, however, we should find much faster ways to build nuclear plants, and use lots of fossil fuels to do it.
The biggest problem is inside us
On the positive side, Michaux points out that markets, growth and many related concepts are not laws of nature, but just a rule set that this current batch of society has put together: we can burn them to the ground and make something else, so the future doesn't have to be one of war, doom and gloom.
Michaux says it's crucial to accept that renewable energy sources just aren't strong enough to replace fossil fuels in their current form, because they aren't as effective, and we'd need many more of them that we can physically make anyway. Even more important, we have to realize and accept that so far, every time a new source of energy came along, we just stacked it on top of the other ones, but now, this is the first time through the ascent of man is that we'll be removing lesser dense forms of energies for different forms of energy, whether we like it or not.
Usually (and often with good reasons) we think in terms of patches instead of completely new solutions, as in "just replace internal combustion engine vehicles with electric ones and Life Will Go On as before". But the only way to cope with that fact is to radically reorganize all current industries, and Michaux fears that until we start rationing this necessity is not going to fully hit home on the general population, at least in "First World" countries" where everybody is still living in the 1950s in their head: air conditioning running 24/7, cheap food in supermarket, gadgets from Amazon, a sea of energy taken for granted.
Writing about important issues WITHOUT abusing any stochastic parrot is how I earn a living. If you appreciate my work, please consider a paid subscription, or read below.
Purple transition
Michaux advocates a "purple transition" to a resource balanced economy that has reliable and consistently stable electricity generation with every weather, in all geographical locations, preferably in concentrated form, and low materials footprint.
Concretely, at the heart of his proposal there is a reimagined commodity sector, and (besides geothermal, which if someone does get it to work will provide enormous amounts of energy) four technologies:
Small, modular, molten salt thorium reactors that have a very different logistical footprint, produce much less waste and are much easier to place and manage, because doesn't need water to cool it
Iron powder, whose combustion is hot enough for cement production and iron smelting and yelds... plain old rust, which can be converted back to pure iron powder, sometimes even using dried human sewage
Ammonium, which is much easier to store and transport than hydrogen, as fuel for internal combustion engines.
Different batteries for energy storage, made out of much more abundant minerals than lithium, like chloride sodium magnesium
The real transition or revolution, however, would be the restructuring of the whole economy and society on regional scopes instead of global ones, around concepts like:
replacing industrial agriculture with something else
different transport technologies of raw heavy goods and materials
population distribution: large cities or not? how large?
replacing today's huge power grids with series of micro grids, each attached to one specific "customer" (village or neighborhood, smelter, hospital...), but all connected so they can transfer power between them
a new relationship with raw materials and energy, that is industrial policies that put feasible rates and steps of mining in all its forms at their very heart, and allow for production to periodically shut down to reduce energy storage needs which, as said above, are a huge part of the problem
information management systems that allow us to make intelligent choices fast, taking advantage of digital twins and mineral intelligence
new social contract and new monetary system
Michaux's final remark is that BRICS countries are ahead on this, because the West is not paying as much attention to this resource scarcity.
The pure non-existence of enough raw stuff to keep doing Business As Usual is maybe the most ignored fact of our time. If you still ignore it and have a few hours to spare, do watch Michaux videos below, otherwise read this post of mine.
Luckily, as I always repeat here and on my original blog, technology or lack thereof is the last of our problems. Real innovation is needed in our minds, laws and political participation, not inside labs or high-tech startup and factories, because much of current innovation is just fake, and "Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities", said Mark Twain.
There is a LOT we can simplify and reduce without any harm to our rights, or any substantial reduction of our quality of life. Here are a few proposals I already made here, to replace:
city traffic, with public transit and reserved lanes for bikes and, of course, scooters done right
Last but not least: why did I disappear for a whole month?
Easy: the first two weeks, I did what every "First World", internet-connected human should do once a year, that is going 100% offline to recharge myself. The other two, catching up with paid assignments to pay the bills got priority over writing here.
It's that simple: the more direct support I get, the more I can investigate and share content like this with everybody who could and should know it. If you can’t or don’t want to do it with a paid subscription, you may fund me directly via via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net), LiberaPay, or in any of the other ways listed here.
The more people know about our physical limits, the easier it will be to find a FEASIBLEsolution. Please share this post as much as you see fit.
We’ve been doing this for about a year and a half now, and as I mentioned before, it remains commented upon to me privately that I do not post enough of the essays you all come here for.
As I said in that post, this is about my fourth job (I write books!One is coming out in September!) and it doesn’t make me a huge amount of money, unlike many folk you’re certainly aware of who make a whole living here.
But as my post frequency or lack thereof keeps coming up, and I do deeply enjoy and value the community and commentariat we’ve grown here, and this is a really intense time politically, but…I’m a single parent with a small child and many animals to feed as well as, occasionally, myself, I thought I’d make a suggestion/offer:
If we can get up to 500 paid subscribers, of any type, I’ll commit to doing a pair (one public, one for too-spicy-for-prime-time hollering under the paywall) of WtG-brand long-form essays every month instead of…whenever I can while not going broke.
That’s a fair jump, but not impossible, and I know the economy is hard…but the economy is hard and I have to balance this against my paying work somehow. And you’ll get the fresh new essay from today plus all the other treehouse club posts from the last 19 months.
I have no idea if it’s possible to make that jump, but I guess we’ll see. I feel embarrassed even suggesting it, so that’s super fun for all of us!
I will also count any subscriptions of the same monthly/yearly amount to my Patreon if you message me to tell me that’s why you’re subscribing. I know many people have issues with Substack, and I’ve made it a policy to cross-post any paywalled essays here over there 24 hours later as long as someone actively asks to see it. (My Patreon is a much cozier place, dedicated to art as this place is to politics and cultural screaming. I like that separation, but one or the other is and should be fine.)
So there’s my offer for making WtG a fixture. Hopefully this place has value to you—if not, that’s fine too and we’ll keep on as we can and current events inspire.
Please register to vote and vote Harris in November!
Welcome to Garbagetown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Note: the way this Substack works is each public post has a follow-up under a paywall in which I discuss the things I wanted to say but didn’t want to deal with drive-by sealioning in the comments. Paid subscriptions support and further this newsletter; if you want to see more essays here, subscribing is the best way to make it happen, as I have many folk to feed.
This one follows on from If You Think You Know How This Ends, You Haven’t Been Paying Attention, and a bit from the gender issues in What We Talk About When We Talk About the Village. And, well. I plan to say a few words that tend to agitate the pinnipeds to deafening choruses of incessant barking. One need not spend MUCH time on the hellplain known as the internet to be aware that the mention of Hillary Clinton, TERFs, misogyny, and patriarchy do tend to bring the marine mammals floomping, and frankly, I will literally never be in the mood.
I’m incredibly happy to see people here, there, and everywhere embracing Kamala Harris and rallying to elect a woman of color to the Presidency. Not only that, but by and large resisting the tired old wadded-up wet pants middle-school knee-jerk ha ha what a stupid slut, am I right, fellow excellent gentlemen who definitely aren’t still mad their English teacher was a woman and/or a girl rejected them and taking that out on all of society because I can’t handle my big feelings attacks that this country just instinctively projectile vomits in the direction of any woman who commands even a bit of authority. Especially one using that authority to say something beyond tee hee I make granola shirts from scratch while worshipping my conspicuously absent husband and that’s more than enough identity for me so I DEMAND IT BE ENOUGH FOR YOU now give me money to hear more of me speaking about how women shouldn’t speak!
I’m also….pretty damn surprised. And extremely concerned it isn’t going to last. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the general vibe has gotten really fucking weird when it comes to gender over the last decade. Famous people and regular people and every sentient podcaster mic in between have spent years now happily spilling bilge that would make even the rankest 1950s misogynist blush, right out loud with their own government name attached, and without the courtesy of even so much as a flaccid Al Bundy punchline.
Has the general vibe when it comes to gender always been extremely weird and like unto an ourobouros cooking its own tail to serve to her husband in silent adoration? Of fucking course it has. In some ways we’re only just now speaking about how truly demented the treatment of half this species by the other half has been, for how long, and at what cost. But for a minute there, it wasn’t just completely socially acceptable to talk about women like cattle the way a whole bunch of ALLEGEDLY NORMAL people have gotten super comfy doing. And honestly, it’s been a couple of centuries since it was cool to just get out there and YELL ABOUT WOMBS ALL THE TIME WHAT IN THE MEDIEVAL HALLUCINOGENIC BOSCHIAN BUTTSCAPE OF HELL, YOU GUYS.
Oh no birth rates are down on the Plane of Endless Torment! I wonder why?
I’ve talked about how much I value my little cusp micro-generation before, the cultural transitions being born in 1979 has let me witness first-hand—and this is one of them. Because I remember when it changed. There was a part of my childhood when I distinctly remember the main question adults asked me was how many kids do you want when you grow up? And I remember when it changed to what do you want to BE when you grow up?
A terrifyingly large portion of the population wants to change it back. Maybe they always wanted to change it back. But for awhile, they were at least quiet about it. Now, punishing women for not having children is the stated position of a major party’s Vice Presidential candidate, and he’s not even close to alone, or even the worst peddler of egregiously garbage opinions on how tight to cinch the leash on women being treated as human at all.
And a world where some of the most popular podcasts, politicians, and media content regularly lays out how fundamentally worthless women are and intently discuss methodologies for abusing and exploiting them for the pleasure and profit of men without any real consequences, even social consequences…I have a hard time believing 100 days isn’t plenty of time for America to find a way to justify choosing full fascism over a woman in charge again.
The 2016 election is a huge part of how we got here. And while the relationship might not be obvious, the rise of TERFs and their absolutely unhinged hatred of transwomen is a very real by-product of the steep rise in acceptability a scorchingly radioactive brand misogyny has enjoyed since Hillary Clinton got up there, dared to breathe in the presence of power, and spooked the shit out of everyone who hadn’t already lost their ever-loving minds because a black man got elected twice.
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, Unpersoned>; about the enormous power that we’ve given to tech giants to determine who can participate in modern life, and why the answer to the giants’ failure to wield that power wisely is to take it away, rather than attempting to perfect their use of it.
AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting “inappropriate” content in her private files. Renee never got back into her account and never found out what triggered the lockout. She wasn’t alone: as Madeline Ashby recounts in her excellent Wired story on the affair, many romance writers were permanently barred from their own files without explanation or appeal. At the time of the lockout, Renee was in the midst of ten works in progress, totaling over 200,000 words (Renee used Docs to share her work with her early readers for critical feedback).
This is an absolute nightmare scenario for any writer, but it could have been so much worse. In 2021, “Mark,” a stay-at-home dad, sought telemedicine advice for his young son’s urinary tract infection (this was during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, all but the most urgent medical issues were being handled remotely). His son’s pediatrician instructed Mark to take a picture of his son’s penis and upload it using the secure telemedicine app.
Mark did so, but his iPhone was running Google Photos, with auto-synch turned on, so the image was also uploaded to his private Google Photos directory. When it arrived there, Google’s AI scanned the photo and flagged it for child sexual abuse material. Google turned the issue over to the San Francisco Police Department, and furnished the detective assigned to the case with all of Mark’s data — his location history, his email, his photos, his browsing history, and more.
At the same time, Google terminated Mark’s account and deleted all of their own copies of his data. His phone stopped working (he had been using Google Fi for mobile service). His email stopped working (he was a Gmail user). All of his personal records disappeared from his Google Drive. His Google Authenticator, used for two-factor authentication, stopped working. Every photo was deleted from his Google Photos account, including every photo he’d taken of his son since birth.
Two weeks after that slowly-broiling bag of walrus-drool and noted shadow over Innsmouth slightly turned his head, then posed for his little Monroeville Mall Glamour Shot, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, NOT EVEN REPUBLICANS, GIVES EVEN THE SADDEST AND MOST PEBBLY OF SHITS ABOUT A FULL-ON ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT.
It’s genuinely impressive how holistically Trump and his semi-leashed trained RNC have rake-faced their entire response to a shooting that should have sealed the election for anyone even remotely normal. It is gone from the headlines, and frankly, already was before Biden’s grand gesture and the bonkers twists and turns of the last four days.
You know, the way this Substack usually works is that I post a public essay, and then a follow-up piece under the paywall, featuring a great deal of yelling I wanted to include in the original but about which didn’t want to deal with a bunch of bad-faith screaming in the comments.
I have two separate 2500 word chunks of almost finished follow-ups to Keep Calm and F***ing Stop This S*** that I have to delete because SO MUCH KEEPS HAPPENING that 72 hours later the first one was wildly out of date, and 24 hours after that, the second one was totally irrelevant as well.
Totally unconnected random thought…Welcome to Garbagetown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, too-spicy-for-free-access posts, and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
It’s fun to be right. It’s definitely way more fun to be about things not being quite so dark as they seemed…right up until Sunday afternoon, when I was not right at all.
The first follow-up that will now die in drafts concerned what an acidically horrendous idea I thought it was for Biden to drop out, how dangerous, boneheaded, as bot-infested as a Wesley Crusher science project and as astroturfed as a fucking stadium the whole movement looked, and how frightened I was that it might actually happen.
And when literally everyone I’ve ever met started texting me to tell me the breaking news with which a gatling-gun of shrieking ALLCAPS ENDTIMES alerts had already choked my phone into quivering submission, I was genuinely horrified. I deleted all the social media apps, turned on airplane mode, and locked my phone in a fucking drawer because I knew I simply could not take it right that second. The utter fear for the future. The panic for my very young child. My own cynical pessimism so tenderly nurtured and grown by the constant shamefaced Eeyoring defeatism and infighting of my own party, even in the face of the oncoming fucking sandworm of this smirking, shoddy-ass Goon: Messiah,the ICE must flow, shambling Mad Libs: Oops! All Racial Slurs highly-absorbent diaper-elemental American gom jabbar of a community-theater fascism reboot.
I headed straight for the bar and parked my open mouth under the tap because the last eight years have training-montaged me into assuming crash position any time the Democrats make an active strategic move. The problem was, it had to be Harris. We could not stand up and look the country in the eye with a straight face and tell the truth, that the Republicans are a life-threatening disease in our democracy, while elevating any other candidate. Harris is the only possibility anyone cast a vote for in the primary. She is who we voted for to replace Biden if he could not serve. Anyone else would be a smoky backroom deal to circumvent the primary process, as unofficial and technically unnecessary as that process may be.
And I just couldn’t. It’s been too long since 2016, and too much. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t believe that the entirety of the Democratic Party, a big tent bursting at the seams with a clown car of loosely-aligned individuals with their own aspirations and goals, plus a shit-ton of craven grifters, firebrands and cowards, Beltway boyars, and an even shittier ton of non-Party members who have worked far harder to nailbat that organization than they ever have to speak the softest tsk-tsking of conservatives, would rally around a woman of color. A woman of color the left has hated like hellfire and incremental policy changes for the crime of daring to Run Without Being Bernie, and whose name the center has barely bothered to pronounce correctly more than twice in a row. America has gotten so much more radioactively, venomously misogynistic in these last eight years, so much more openly white supremacist, so much less ashamed of its worst instincts and suspicions, I truly believed this nation would enthusiastically choose fascism over a woman. Again.
And then. And then it started. The endorsements, the donations, the support. The bloody coconut memes. The energy. The impotent Looney Tunes rage of the GOP as their convention, their button-eyed Other Brother of a VP candidate, their arrogance, fell apart to the point of barely managing to choke out a flaccid her laugh is stupid and she’s stupid splutter days later. People finally being able to admit that Biden was a good President and give him at least some shriveled dried-up version of his flowers. The youth interest and positivity. The joy the online world, which had basically forgotten how to say anything nice to or about anyone, fucking Care Bear Stared into the void for Kamala.
Oh, god. Everything felt so much worse.
Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
What the fuck am I supposed to do with hope? Hope? Fucking gross. I can’t afford that shit. It’s the hope that kills you! Like, ALWAYS. Graphically. Explosively. I barely remember what hope feels like. I think the last time I felt it was when we were dancing in the streets because Biden had won. Even on my little Maine island, dancing in the streets, kids, grandparents, so many of us. I don’t want to hope. For the length and breadth of my entire political life, every time I think I’m as cynical and jaded as I possibly can be, America finds a tiny little ember of stupid sunny Disney princess bluebird-alighting optimism deep down inside me and then strangles the fucking life out of her. I’m used to grim white-knuckled bracing for whatever comes. Hope feels like a dress that’s too big for me now. It hangs funny. It’s not fashionable anymore. It gapes and billows in weird places that show too much for public wear.
But what the hell. I got a lot of belts and a sewing kit.
(By the way, if you want to make fun of me for feeling so strongly about all of this, you can very kindly, gently, and lovingly, go insert a plastic glove between the cushions of your favoritecouch and fuck it all the way to whatever reeking golfball-gargling techfrathell JD Vance’s sugar-free Edgar-suit crawled out of. If people you know and respect are afraid for their lives and their futures there is a reason. We were supposed to have gotten over ew it’s so lame to care about literally anything when it became so crystal clear that pretending to be too cool to care about things meant it was easy to take those things away.)
Here’s the thing, though. It all feels possible right now because it’s early days. Momentum hasn’t been with the Dems in some time, and it’s heady stuff.
But we still don’t know how this is going to turn out.
No more than Trump’s shooting made victory inevitable, Kamala’s rise does not cinch this. A week ago, all that Let’s Go Brandon merchandise had, you know, any kind of meaning at all. Next week, neither I nor anyone else with a crumb of honesty left can tell you what the situation on the ground will be.
It’s STILL impossible to predict what’s going to happen next.
The media and the GOP and most of the internet were screaming for Biden to bow out, but it’s pretty clear that either they didn’t actually expect him to do it, or that he wouldn’t do it until it was too late, instead of the cinematically perfect timing that obliterated the RNC, assassination attempt, VP pick, and everything else from the public Give-a-Shit-O-Meter. Or they assumed, as I did, a nasty battle royale of cutthroat saints and ghouls slugging it out at the open convention every pundit goes to sleep praying for, an orgy of backstabbing and bloodslinging that would leave any eventual victor both too damaged for voters to embrace and drowning in too much residual resentment from their peers and their peers’ fanbases (ugh, I will never not loathe that “fanbase” has become a word commonly and worse, correctly, applied to politicians’ supporters) to rally a real coalition in November.
It’s never Joever
That salivating carrion-bird, mostly right-wing billionaire-controlled media hasn’t gone anywhere. That Hungry Hungry Nazis free-for-all GOP even the New York Times is bafflingly running cover for hasn’t either. They’re in disarray right now because they weren’t prepared to go against a popular Harris, but I promise you, the talking points will come, and when they do, they will be the nastiest centipede-brained notes from that Event Horizon gore dimension you have ever heard. they don’t have time to give her the full Hillary, so what they dish out in the next hundred days is going to be some seriously pustulant, concentrated shit.
The GOP will be supported in every drop of wild-eyed spacebat bile they spew by an army of bots fueled by the Thousand Dark and Writhing Young of the Black Goat of the Internet, Chat GPT, conjoined at the heart with a complicit media and online commentariat that desperately wants its Trump years back.
It will not just be the right. The Copmala memes will resurface, the accusations of sleeping her way to the top will even be trumpeted by women who should know better, and while neither those nor any of the old 2020 mudslinging was actually true within proper context, and none of it, especially calling her a cop, is going to freak the normies the way the online left thinks it will, the campaign will have to have better answers to them than they had the last time round.
And it will not just be things that actually happened with a different context than is useful to a political culture in which the first to make the accusation reaps the rewards. There will be pure lies that make the rounds faster than the truth can tepidly whisper a retraction on page 9. There will be conspiracies and fucking Black Lady Space Lasers and clones and blood-drinking demons and a mountain of bullshit shoveled faster and more furiously than it ever has been, because they have that little time to make it all stick. And every grain of sand will erode some of the amazing support and goodwill giving us all a light to look up to right now.
Then there will be the debate, which will happen at least once. And while I see everyone chortling with glee over seeing a prosecutor disasemble a felon on live television, I’m not so sure it will go that way. She was good but not great in the primary debates, though those are different creatures. But Hillary won her debates while the Biff Tannen you get from Wish.com babooned around behind her and admitted to crimes live on stage and it never mattered whatsoever.
As usual, as always, all Trump has to do is not shit out of his mouth directly onto the moderator (over the shoulder is fine) to be hailed as a winner by the media. While Harris, as usual, as always, will have to be perfection personified. She has to present coherent policy that satisfies every corner of a Democratic coalition that must now include literally everyone who isn’t ready to be a cartoon Nazi, but she can’t be boring or stiff or use any nuance or big words or she’s a charisma-free schoolmarm. She has to attack Trump with both clever memeable zingers and devastating statements of the facts of his malfeasance—but she can’t be too angry or she’s a sooper skary angry black woman whose “only platform is not being Trump.” She can’t be shrill, but it really doesn’t matter what she says, every woman who says something a man doesn’t like is shrill to that guy. She has to defend both Biden’s administration and separate herself from it, have the perfect answer to every question, never let Trump yell over her but never yell over him, and look both beautiful doing it and also not too beautiful because WE LIVE IN A GARBAGE PLACE FULL OF GARBAGE AND THAT GARBAGE IS ON FIRE.
Her VP pick will also have to be perfect. Everything will have to be perfect—or this big blue Care Bear Stare will have to hold the line when its inevitably not and Democrats are fucking terrible at doing that. Especially when asked to unify around a woman, let alone a woman of color from California. Part of the reason for the sound and fury on the right is that Dems almost never stop taking a sledgehammer to their own knees long enough to unify like this. No one knows how to deal with it. Everyone expects it to fall apart because it usually does. And it may yet.
Then there are the events that are too frequent now to call Black Swan Events. The things we can’t predict, like a conservative incel trying to take down his own guy. I can’t tell you what any of those will be, but I can tell you at least one is coming. It will be bad. Overseas or at home. Putin, Iran, Netanyahu; Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, the list of foreign despots and homegrown oligarchs who want their sweet baby Trump back so he can sleep through their dances of death and money goes on and on and they won’t be idle for long. Whatever the October surprise is will likely not be as clearly stupid as Hunter Biden’s laptop. (And don’t worry, they may call her childless now, but they will go after her stepkids and anyone else they think is vulnerable.)
Drums. Drums in the deep.
And there’s the plain old revolting, ancient misogyny and racism that will be an issue when all those Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you they don’t see color or gender actually get into the booth. Lift up any rock )or any comments section) and it’s always there. The laugh thing seems pathetic now, but there may well be just enough time to get just enough people to sing their old song: I don’t know, she’s just not likeable.
We have to put in the work, and we have to be prepared to maintain this unity in the face of a political ecosystem that’s extremely favorable to conservatives on every level. And then, if that unity does hold up to unreal stress-testing? They are planning to and will try to cheat and steal this country out from under those of us who just want to go about our goddamned lives any way they can—which is not me being paranoid, it’s what they have said out loud every day since January 6th and put in preliminary work to accomplish with statehouses and courthouses.
I hope we’re ready.
I am still so worried. I am still so afraid. She’s a good fucking candidate. But that’s rarely the real problem.
But hey. I don’t know. I’ve honestly never seen anything quite like the joyful embracing of Kamala Harris’s nomination these last few days. Not even in 08. Maybe we won’t throw her to the wolves the way so many before her have been summarily tossed. Maybe a loud, bright, unembarrassed laugh can drown out a scream of hate.
I was so wrong about Biden dropping out. I was wrong about people’s willingness to rally around Harris. Maybe I’m wrong about the worst of my fears. Maybe there’s a reason to…well.
Fucking hell I want to be wrong. Please make me wrong, America.
I’ll conclude this week’s sermon with a parable.
I don’t think many people know that a “biden” is a type of flower. A rather pretty one, but not terribly showy or fancy. It won’t be the main star of any grand arrangements. You won’t win a prize at a fair for even the best of them. They’re just quite nice little things.
I had a few in my garden this year. And to be honest, they’re not doing very well. It’s been too hot; they got pretty fried in July. And to be honest, I didn’t do a great job watering them. I was so busy with so many things. I didn’t pay enough attention. I didn’t notice them drooping. They didn’t scream out for attention the way thirsty roses or snapdragons did.
But they’re not gone yet. They’re still pretty green. A few blossoms left. There’s one particularly huge, sunny one I’m working hard to save.
This is a biden. Don’t forget their lesson: Nothing grows without care.
And you know, right next to them, there’s this crazy coconut tree that suddenly sprang up out of nowhere a few days ago, and it’s growing every single day.
Make America Laugh Again.
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Well, that was quite the little weekend, wasn’t it?
I was steaming fucking mad before the weekend. I’m just radioactively disgusted now.
With America? With gun violence? With “the tone of political rhetoric”? With the media? With Republicans? With Democrats? With 2024 holistically?
I mean, yes, but no more than usual. Because literally nothing has actually fucking changed since Saturday night.
No, I’m disgusted with us. My own alleged side. Everyone from ostensibly lefty commentators to that famously “liberal” media to regular everyday Jo and Joanna Six-Facts who aren’t particularly involved beyond being normal enough to remain not-fascists.
Goddammit, Us, what are we doing? What are we doing to ourselves? Why are we like this?
All I saw and heard Saturday night was total abject certainty that the election was over now and Trump had already won. No point in even trying anymore, right, fellow lefties? Just accept it, babe. It’s hopeless. It’s basically already happened so might as well buy a red fucking hat. Look how handsome and powerful he looks totally genuinely jumping up in ecstasy and screaming at his followers to fight for him. Daddy is SUCH a Big Daddy! Just give up, it’s only your rights, no big whoop.
And all that weeping and moaning and rending of garments was from US. The right was absolutely delighted. All the ghouls came out to smile their crocodile grins at us and gloat. They couldn’t even keep up the pretense of a vaguely normal solemn-shock-and-dignified-perserverance reaction between Tweets. The millisecond it happened the right was giggling with joy, high-fiving each other, laying out their best Gilead Commander cosplay, and counting every unhatched domesticated bird they could conjure up in their beetle-infested imaginations. Hardly any of their “thought leaders” seemed half as concerned for Trump or horrified at the shooting as positively turgid about taking this out on Democrats for the rest of time and using it every way they could to stomp half this country’s face into the mud. The night their candidate was shot, the Republican Party was just out there saying “we are going to use this to hurt everyone” AND WE JUST INSTANTLY GAVE UP AND SAID YES YOU’RE RIGHT IT IS INEVITABLE.
It fucking is
And this after weeks of the most appalling display from the media, who fully ignored or actively buried every horrifying Trump story, pretended Project 2025 didn’t exist, and said precisely nothing whatsoever about Trump’s own trashslime debate performance in their rush to drool and pant heavily (while trying to look like they weren’t disturbingly excited) over the absolutely fishfuck insane idea of ditching an incumbent candidate four months before an election because the President had half a bad debate. Every single person with even the most vaguely magical connection to politics just out there submitting their old West Wing spec scripts to social media like one of them was gonna get picked up by the big bosses at Reality Studios with, apparently, a fucking sea nymph’s idea of how the system actually works.
At the slightest excuse, we just vigorously chuck ourselves off a Victorian cliff clutching our pearls in despair and sighing to the wind that nothing could be done instead of, I don’t fucking know, not behaving like a caricature of wishy-washy weak liberals who can’t even back their own guy for five seconds in the face of an oncoming freight train of globally catastrophic dystopia.
Sometimes I hate us so much. We are so willing to believe the worst and beat each other down and so unwilling to put any of that energy into…well…anything else.
And yeah, okay, I had my moment of oh fuck who cursed us, too. But past the first twenty minutes, at no point did I think this was nearly as sure a thing as the media, who fucking bolted to release their barely-concealed ceiling-net of red balloons and confetti and rev up the celebration party bus, insisted.
First of all, if the last eight years have taught us anything, it should have taught us that Trump is Asimov’s fucking Mule and it is impossible to predict what happens next in any given circumstance involving his gaseous horrormouthed presence. The idea that what has held true historically is somehow fixing to start holding true for Trump is a pretty weird conclusion to belly-flop into. Four months is forever in terms of news cycles. Every story from four months ago is gone from the headlines now, even Gaza. If this happened in October, maybe. But we’re busy packing our bags for an all-expenses paid trip to failure in July?
Second, assassination attempts make people sympathetic when the target was sympathetic before, or behaves in a way that inspires sympathy afterward. Screeching GO FUCK YOURSELVES WE’VE ALREADY WON AND WE CANNOT WAIT TO CRUSH YOU ALL approximately thirty seconds after the shutter snapped on that thrice-damned photo I’m already sick to death of seeing plastered everywhere doesn’t exactly red rover new and/or remotely normal voters to the side.
It’s a real humdinger of a conundrum to bank on sympathy and shock from the voting population when you’ve taken such care to frame sympathy/empathy as weak bullshit, and snapped angrily at the nation to get over it and stop giving even the most hesitant of shits about victims after every single shooting for decades on end. Not to mention joyfully engaged in so much unprecedented, comic-book evil chaotic clown-car-of-goblins-with-the-rickets nonsense that the concept of being shocked by current events just seems like a fun nostalgia I Heart the 90s trip.
They keep telling us to stop caring about other people. You can’t do that so hard for so long and then kick back and expect the caring to flow in the way it would for a normal candidate who never let a pandemic rip through states on purpose because not enough people there voted for him, actively killing many of our family members for their own benefit—and profit. Who shrugged and told everyone to suck shit if they actually cared when children were mown down by assault rifle fire—and insisted that that reaction was the Correct American Way to Do and Think Things.
Y’all said we were stupid asshole-babies for caring about shootings approximately 900,000 times this year. Just because you love him so much you think he’s the special exception to every single rule doesn’t mean anyone outside your play group does, and those are the voters everyone needs, so don’t be surprised if they…you know…
Truly amazing that this is the clearest shot I could find
Plus, four months is plenty of time for some follower of the new President Pennywise in his blood-red tie to make an attempt on Biden, and for the right to show no sympathy whatsoever while laughing their asses off as they have anytime any lukewarm Democrat—or you know, children in a schoolroom—has suffered in any way.
The most callous comments I saw in the immediate aftermath were variations on “too bad the shooter missed.” And sure, that’s unkind. Not as unkind as literally anything that’s escaped a Republican’s midden-mouth concerning anyone not a Republican in the last… *checks notes* ever, but unkind.
It’s also very wrong. The first thing I said to my nieces was thank god he’s not dead. Thank god it’s only his ear. Because that’s the nightmare scenario. That’s the martyring. Then, if the violence isn’t completely unhinged, Nikki Haley (probably but who knows, it seems unlikely they’d go with something they disdain as much normal protocol to elevate a woman of color) ascends and very likely does win against Biden as Trump becomes deified and people do that ugly little trick where they pretend someone was good just because they died. And really and truly, we are lucky beyond belief that bullet only grazed his ear. If he’s still wearing that bandage in four months he’ll look like a ridiculous crybaby—the one thing the right 100% is but can’t stand to be seen as. If he’d been hit in a place with a longer recovery time that kept him in the hospital not being a jackass 24/7 so people could worry about him, or put his arm in a sling or his leg in a brace, if it had been an injury you could see, then yeah, that sympathy might kick in, because he’d seem in need of protection.
But, thirdly, he’s not a martyr. Because he’s still here. And he’s fine. Overclocked dickassery fully charged up and raring to be a total fucking psychopath at the RNC. So nothing has changed whatsoever. Looking “strong” might feel good to him and to them in the moment, but takes away a big part of the motive force of sympathy—to protect someone vulnerable. Trump isn’t vulnerable. He couldn’t even pretend to look hurt. He was THRILLED. He jumped right up with an active shooter on site to get his photo op, a very normal response from a normal human person. And he’s tossed the tried-and-true response to this sort of thing into a volcano because he doesn’t have any idea what human people with human feelings are like, so it never occurs to him to appeal to that. Come on, none of us had to read that Trump didn’t call the widow of his own supporter who actually died, or the injured (but Biden did). Did anyone, even the most devout and worshipful cultist, ever think he would? Why would he start now?
I had to go looking on purpose to even find out the name of the professional first responder who died. (It’s Corey Comperatore, by the way.) That is such a massive PR blunder I can hardly believe the party that couldn’t stop braying SAY HER NAME when Laken Riley was killed could possibly make it. That guy’s name and face should be everywhere. His wife should be speaking at the RNC right now. That guy is the martyr. That’s the one who lost something for their wretched “cause,” the person we can all sympathize with at least a little because he’s fucking dead. They should be howling SAY HIS NAME and Trump should be praying with the family and bringing them to his house, paying off their debt or mortgage or setting up a fund for his kids or something. But our Tangerine Trujillo, and his folk, are physiologically incapable of doing that, even if it benefits them. Because that would take a tiny part of the terrible light of collective attention away from the guy who thinks he’s Captain America now, and make someone else the face of it all.
They’re so hard for their revenge they can’t even play the PR right. No press conference, golfing immediately, no talk with the widow, no pretending to abhor violence. They can’t play the victim because they can’t stand to be seen as vulnerable even if it would help them. They simply have to smirk behind their hands so their base knows they’re super amazing and strong and cool and awesome and alpha.
Then there’s the fact that I have a hard time believing anyone who wasn’t voting for Trump is thinking oh no the guy who keeps saying he's gonna start blasting as soon as he's in office got minimally grazed by a bullet and is totally okay and golfing right now. Better change my vote and embrace fascism! Now, I bet it’s all rather more shocking when media is so laser-focused on the dream they had one time about reporting on a contested convention and absolutely burning Joe Biden at the stake that they just barely bother telling anyone the bloviating bully said he's considering murdering a new group of people today. But nobody, no matter how uninvolved in politics, just has no idea that Trump likes hurting people. That’s sort of his whole brand.
And all this was before it came out that the shooter was one of Trump’s own beautiful beloved darlings, a disaffected white 20-something gun-stroking manchild whose reasons have no reason because reason is not part of the Republican platform at any level. And my god, are they disappointed. They were so excited for it to be one of us. Oh, fingers crossed it’s a trans person! Maybe even a black trans person! A party can dream, right? But no, the guy who got people to just ignore reality wholesale, embrace profound madness and eschatological violence, who encouraged their hate and their growing distance from anything resembling normal behavior, who openly and in public hopes for a Civil War on his own behalf every day…got a minor injury from a lone wolf functionally indistinguishable Kyle Rittenhouse, who they call a hero.
I don’t think that’s a narrative that’s going to move a lot of swing votes, if such magical things actually exist.
Look, Doom Patrol. The election is four months away. Four months before COVID we were all Christmas shopping crammed in together merrily breathing each others’ snot and literally never washing our hands like that was just totally fine. Because it was.
Four months is far more than enough time for the right to completely pile-driver themselves into the mat, eat their own teeth on this topic, and alienate everyone who hasn’t lovingly worn the “Q” off the Q buttons on their keyboards yet.
They’re already doing it. They literally can’t help themselves. They were immediately crowing victory, they’re crowing now, sneering and smirking and laughing at everyone who isn’t in their club of Demographics Who Are Semi-Safe Until We Run Out of Others to Brutalize. Trump announced J.D. Vance, a white authoritarian fuckbeard with the world’s most kickable face, who does nothing to bring in undecided voters, but really must believe you gotta stick it out in violent marriages because he’s prancing down the aisle toward the same one the GOP can’t quit. The RNC is in full scream-sweating fangs-out fall-in-line-maggots swing and no one seems to be upset or shaken, they’re all celebrating like it’s Mardi Gras on Cocaine Planet—so why should anyone feel bad for them? They look super-stoked! No one likes Now I’m REALLY Gonna Get Ya as a campaign slogan. It’s incredibly off-putting, and they couldn’t WAIT to rub everyone’s noses in the reeking shit they’ll make of our future.
But the thing is, we, who are busy not shooting people over here on the center-to-left, seemingly can’t even hold it together for 48 hours to give these mule-headed Pleasure Island cast-offs a chance to fuck it up for themselves, as they have every single easy lay-up political opportunity that’s ever landed in their laps, because their pure need to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic regular plain old shitty-uncle assholes right now always, well, trumps their plans to be toxic hate-barfing sadistic uncontested rulers of all mankind. They get ahead of themselves. They blow their wad too early. They post their plans online and storm the capitol before they have the numbers and assume they’ve got it in the bag when the bag hasn’t even been opened yet.
What is wrong with us? Are we just nihilistic and semi-suicidal as a culture now? Is that even possible? Fuck it, McDonalds’s is too expensive so why not let it all burn this is a sensible thought that I should have and share enthusiastically. Wishing for everyone and everything I know and love to suffer endlessly because reform and compromise take too long for not enough of what I specially know is perfectly correct isn’t something I should seek therapy about at all.
We don’t even seem to be able to try solidarity or optimism or even…criticism of anyone but each other. The bile the left holds for conservatives is a cup of sweet tea next to what we have for other members of our own coalition.
We’re in this masochistic abusive relationship with the right where they’ve groomed us and ground us down and told us we were worthless so thoroughly we flinch whenever they take a breath and just fall utterly apart when they get mad. The media, who hasn’t been on our side since mostly always, says our guy is too old? Yes, masters, he is too old, all is lost. Social media says our guy is somehow personally and solely responsible for the oldest continuous conflict in human history despite doing more than any President ever has to reign it in? Yes, masters, revolting nickname accepted, all is lost. Republicans stand by their man no matter how many times he rambles on about sharks or airports during the American Revolution, but Biden stutters like he always has, and we join right in with the media telling him to fuck off in to the sun despite there being no one whatsoever anyone can agree on to take his place and everyone knowing full and goddamned well that this clown-tantrum country will not vote for a woman of color, not even over a fascist who promises to eat our faces on Inauguration Day, even if they won’t admit it out loud.
Is some of this bots and astroturfing? Oh, far more of it than we’ll know until it’s too late, I’d bet. But a lot of it is just traumatized fucking people using social media as therapy to purge their anxiety and terror without realizing all that outpouring of individual despair creates a collective zeitgeist of surrender and hopeless misery—which motivates no one to vote or organize or believe in anything but an inevitably dark future.
We have to stop this. We have to stop giving up in advance. We have to stop accepting the blame for conservative’s sins and responsibility for their extremism. The problem is not that we call the right fascists the problem is the right is full of fascists.
The problem isn’t that Joe Biden is old, it’s that the media doesn’t want Biden and is providing cover for a monster to sink regular boring old democracy that isn’t fun to heroically report on. And pretending, like everyone else, that things will just go on as normal if Trump wins and they’re just kidding about all the horrors they’re looking into the camera with a smile and announcing “We are very much not kidding and are tickled pink about doing this as soon as possible.”
I don’t really care if you hate Joe Biden or think he’s old and Trump (who is 78) looked cool in a photo he clearly had an actor’s instinct to pose for. It’s not a joke, and it’s not impossible for it to happen here. If America falls to fascism fleeing the country will not help. Fascism must have prey to survive and grow. This nation has the greatest military in the history of the world and is embedded in every aspect of the global economy. Do the math. Everyone will lose everything. White rural resentful men, too. If you think your precious 401K survives Project 2025, you need to read it again.
All hope is NOT lost.
What we choose to do and say now will determine the future in November. I am begging you all to pull it together and stop backbiting and self-sabotaging, stop using social media as a hallucinogen, stop demanding the impossible and dismissing the possible from our own side while celebrating the tiniest decency the other side occasionally fakes. I don’t care if Biden isn’t left enough or perfect enough or young enough or magical superhero unicorn enough. Another Trump term is the end of progressive policy in this country. Another Biden term isn’t. So suck it the fuck up, don’t give them the narrative they’re insisting we MUST follow (because we must always follow) and vote for Biden’s team and Biden’s SCOTUS if you can’t get behind what Biden himself has accomplished because the media hates him like fire so we don’t all lose our rights before they get around to killing us. And if the rhetoric of Republican party can get one of their goodest boys to come within a head-turn of murdering their own adored leader, that is not hyperbole.
If they beat us and the darkest timeline comes to pass, it better not fucking be because we refused to fight back.
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CORY EFRAM DOCTOROW was born July 17, 1971 in Toronto, Canada. He attended alternative schools and worked at SF specialty store Bakka Books, but dropped out of high school at 17 and briefly moved to Mexico to write. He dropped out of four universities in two years and worked as a CD-ROM programmer, website designer, volunteer in Central America, CIO for a film company and an ad agency, founder of ...Read More
Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he’s just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won’t be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they’ll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.
Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn’t even a teardown, it’s just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn’t start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It’s not a toxic asset, because it’s not an asset. It’s just toxic.
Equifax isn’t just a company: it’s infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black
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