I’ve never wanted to be wrong about something more in my entire life.

But we can’t fall into easy traps like optimism. Or pessimism. We can’t let “we’re fucked” be the end of the conversation, but we can’t pretend like we’re not also, well, kind of in trouble. We’re kind of fucked. That’s just got to be the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

This summer has been devastating, and it might wind up in history books (if we’re around to write history books) as the summer where global warming became really and truly a present threat and not just a future one.

This summer has been devastating, but when we watch Nepal flood, when we choke on wildfire smoke from a thousand miles or ten miles away, while we watch the ocean warm and read that coral reefs are likely a thing of the past, we have to remember: this isn’t the new normal. This is the best it’s going to be.

This summer has been devastating, but it’s not the new normal. We might never reach a new normal. There will never be a normal again unless we stop the omnicidal maniacs who are knowingly and willingly destroying every person, animal, plant, and ecosystem on the planet. Until we take fossil fuel infrastructure offline, there will never be a new normal. We can adapt our society and our lives to a changed world, but it’s much harder to adapt to a permanently changing world.

Eventually, of course, the warming will stop. Either we transition away from climate-changing infrastructure or the climate will eventually destroy that infrastructure for us. Since I’m fond of life, both my own and that of the people, animals, and plants around me, I far prefer working towards the former than simply accepting the latter.

The UN admitted last week that there’s no way to keep warming within the 1.5 degree celsius threshold that they’d hoped, and the internet filled with think pieces in response. I’d be a hypocrite to get mad at people for writing think pieces. I’d rather be a cold-take machine than a hot-take machine, so I gave it some time and had some conversations.

Most of the conversations didn’t go anywhere, though, because there’s nothing that will shut down a polite conversation faster than talking about climate change.

The UN admitted last week that there’s no way to keep warming within the 1.5 degree celsius threshold that they’d hoped, and people said “how dare they give up?” and people said “there’s nothing that can be done” and people said “it’s okay, they have a good solid plan that they outlined to bring warming down and I’m sure it will work” and I don’t like any of those responses.

I don’t actually have any problem with the report itself. You cannot solve a problem without looking soberly at it, without accepting the reality of the situation. Arrogant overconfidence will lose every war. We are going to overshoot the 1.5 threshold very soon (and the only reason we haven’t already is because they calculate it based on 20 year averages, not every given year). That’s the truth.

It’s also the truth that the governments and corporations of the world are not taking their responsibilities seriously and most of them have shown no indication that they ever will. There is no reason to believe that the current status quo will lead to anything but ruin at an unimaginable scale.

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Neither naive optimism not fatalistic pessimism will save us, and both are forms of denial that are, frankly, just as embarrassing as outright climate change denial.

Naive optimism is the belief that things are already getting better. Not that the earth is cooling down, but that we are on track to slow down and reverse the damage. There are a few different versions of this: some people think that fossil fuel infrastructure is winding down globally (while fossil fuels make up a lower percentage of overall power production every year, the actual amount of coal and gas being burned goes up because overall power production goes up); some people think once their candidates are in power, there will be a large enough shift to the left without needing to change the political and economic systems on a fundamental level; some people think that cold fusion power will soon give us limitless clean power (people have been saying it is just around the corner for decades) and everything will solve itself.

Naive optimism is the belief that the problem is being handled. It’s a way of shrugging off the responsibility of making a better world.

Fatalistic pessimism is its corollary. The oft-derided “doomerism” is another way of offloading responsibility. If there is nothing that can be done, you can just throw your hands up in the air and walk away from the problem. If there’s nothing that can be done, then you might as well do anything you want.

We, collectively, have to take responsibility for fixing this mess. And I don’t mean changing out incandescent lightbulbs for LEDs and pretending like recycling is a thing that actually happens (most everywhere I’ve ever lived, you can watch your recycling taken away in the same truck as the garbage). You don’t solve systemic problems with individual solutions, and obsessing over your individual carbon footprint was an idea foisted onto us by British Petroleum.

Taking responsibility for fixing this doesn’t mean accepting fault. There’s a difference between responsibility and fault. It’s not my fault that I live in a transphobic world (for example). I haven’t created the conditions in which people distrust and hurt trans people. But my own liberation is my own responsibility. I can’t sit around waiting for my oppressors to do it for me.

Most liberal activism tends to forget this difference. In the most common liberal mindset, you can never tell an oppressed person that their freedom is their own responsibility, because it might imply that the oppression is their own fault. But when we remove responsibility from people, we remove their agency as well. LGBT rights—and material resources, like free clinics and mutual aid programs—were not granted unto us from on high. They were built, largely by the survivors of the AIDS genocide. We have agency because we took responsibility for our own freedom and survival.

That said, some systematic changes do involve individual change. We should probably fly less. We should probably eat way less meat. We should probably drive less, and we should probably move away from gas-powered cars. But all of those things only matter when they happen at scale—it’s not about changing your individual mode of transport, it’s about changing our infrastructure to allow people to use mass transit and ride bikes. It’s not about going vegan, it’s about developing a food economy that favors in-season foods that are mostly plant-based.

An “individual boycott” isn’t a boycott, it’s a lifestyle choice. A boycott is an organized, collective action or it isn’t an action at all. If an individual goes on strike, that’s not a strike. You need a meaningful percentage of the workforce to walk off the job if you want to build collective power (and not just get fired).

Most of us know that we’re not getting out of this mess by changing our habits as individuals. Most of us also grew up in a society that systematically strips us of any sense of agency. In school, you are subordinated to authorities and expected to learn in the manner they expect. In college, it’s the same thing. Teachers and administrators control you even though you’re paying your teachers to teach you, paying the administrators to run the place.

In the workforce, it’s the same thing. Wage labor should ostensibly be a contractual agreement between equals: the restaurant wants its dishes washed, and you want to get paid. But your boss yells at you, tells you what you can and can’t do, even though you are generating wealth for him.

In public life as an adult in a democracy, it’s still somehow the same thing: you are surveilled and policed by the institutions that you pay for, that you ostensibly empowered through voting.

We are trained from birth to have no agency. And people wonder why we struggle, as a society, to meaningfully address climate change.

What little agency we are allowed is generally small-scale and individual. We can choose where to spend out money, we can choose who to vote for. What we need, though, is to find our collective agency.

Building power together, learning to practice our agency, is not a small part of what it will take to address climate change. Unionizing your workplace (or forcing your union to act more democratically). Forming worker cooperatives and fighting for workplace democracy. Learning to treat one another as equals and learning to deescalate conflict are how we build power.

Teaching responsibility to children should be like teaching them to ride a bike: they might need training wheels at first, but your goal is to take those wheels off. All of us need direction and guidance from time to time, especially young children, but a friend of mine always puts it like this: “if you have responsibility over someone, your primary goal is to empower them to be responsible for themselves, so that they have agency over themselves. You’ve got to work yourself out of a job.”

I’m certain there are pedagogical methods that teach children to take agency not only over their own education, but collectively together. I’m just not as familiar with schools as I am with workplaces.

Any sober analysis of the climate situation leads inevitably to the conclusion that we’re in trouble. One might even say “we’re fucked,” though of course that particular phrasing tends to shut people down.

It’s a delicate balancing act, once that I haven’t mastered. How do we tell people “things aren’t alright and a fuckton of people are going to die including possibly you and me but mostly people in other countries and that doesn’t make it okay” with enough sincerity to push people towards action but without driving people to despair?

My theory is that we must always, when possible, pair our sober analysis of the problem with actions that people can take. Action, not hope, is the antidote to despair.

The catch, of course, is that no single given action is going to save us.

It’s a good thing, then, that there are 8.3 billion people in this world. That’s 8.3 billion people whose future depends on stopping the omnicide of our globe. That’s 8.3 billion people who can stop the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, who can develop alternative infrastructure for transportation, who can develop different food chains. That’s 8.3 billion people who can [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] or go directly to [REDACTED] and then [REDACTED]. (Did you think we were going to get out of this without a fight?)

For years, I’ve been calling fascism the miniboss and climate change the big boss, but that doesn’t mean that fascism is less of a problem. You have to fight the miniboss first. He stands between you and the big boss. But, to continue my video game analogy, fighting the miniboss teaches you how to fight the big boss. You get experience points. You go up a level. You get new magic spells… okay maybe not that part.

The current rise of fascism seems directly traceable to climate change. No part of me believes that the right wing politicians in power actually disbelieve climate change—downplaying and denying its severity is a calculated move on their part instead.

Because right wing governments are preparing for climate change. Locking down borders, building walls. The global north knows that the global south is in trouble, so they’re locking the doors.

It’s the “I’ve got mine, fuck you” approach to the apocalypse. Right wing nutjobs without systemic power build bunkers and fill them with dried food and bullets and fantasize about shooting anyone who tries to steal their beans and rice, because they’re not planning on sharing. Right wing nutjobs with systemic power do the same thing but at the nationstate level. Fortress Europe and Trump’s USA are both sealing the doors so that they don’t have to share as things get bad around the world.

Billions and billions of people live in regions that are facing extreme heat, facing unlivable outside temperatures, and it is horrifically evil to be battening down the hatches just as more and more people wind up in need. (And, of course, it’s not the global south that got us into this mess in the first place.)

In order to fight climate change, we have to fight climate fascism. There’s no getting around it. There is a powerful minority of people who have decided that the end is coming and that rather than mitigate its worst impacts, they’ll just kill people. We have to stop them. I don’t know exactly how, but I will say my grandfather and my grandmother’s brother were both involved in the last big worldwide struggle against fascism and their solution involved torpedos and aerial bombing, respectively.

But to speak concretely, I believe some actions we can take are, in no particular order:

• Develop the capacity to express collective agency in a horizontal fashion (such as but not limited to unions, collective workplaces, activist groups, direct action groups). Support people who are building this sort of agency: shop at worker-owned business, don’t cross picket lines, go be a body in the streets at protests.

• Fight the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, through lobbying and direct action.

• Fight the rise of climate fascism, through community organizing and community defense, through legislative means if possible and through insurrection if necessary.

• Support people who are arrested fighting against fascism and climate change.

• Fight against the inertia that keeps us complacent with the status quo, whether we reach that complacency through denial, naive optimism, or fatalistic pessimism.

• Build resilient communities through individual and community preparedness: create prepper organizations that combine mutual aid and skillsharing with gathering resources, learning skills, developing relationships, and building infrastructure.

• Get involved in disaster relief, whether through on-the-ground work or fundraising or gathering supplies to support the on-the-ground workers.

• Prepare your town to accept climate refugees, through developing physical infrastructure like housing and other systems that allow higher population densities, as well as through learning multicultural and multilingual organizing

• Prepare to be climate refugees.

• Build resilient infrastructure. Insulate all housing for temperature and smoke. Build air conditioning. Build cooling centers.

• Live your best life here and now, because the future is far from guaranteed. Tell your friends you love them. Take care of each other.

• Don’t give up on your future. Don’t take up smoking.

• Be brave. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the presence of bravery.

• Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy. The enemy wants us fighting each other. We want each other fighting the enemy. Support people who have different ways of fighting than you.

• Talk to people about climate change and help them move through their fear and their hopelessness and their fatalism and the naivety. Help them see that there are things that they can do.

• Don’t assume we’ll win. Don’t assume we’ll lose. Keep your head in the game.

• Least important, but probably of some value, develop the habits of simple living in order to prefigure the world we hope to create. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Grow more of your own food. Share more food with others. Eat less meat. Get backyard chickens. Use less electricity. Get a plug-in electric car (ironically) but drive less overall and carpool more. Fly less or not at all. If your state allows it, get plug-in solar (don’t actually do this illegally, it’s a risk to the electrical workers if your area isn’t prepared to do this correctly). Probably don’t pick all the possible “good climate habits” all at once but try a couple and see what you can make stick. Living simply is probably a better way to live anyhow, but never confuse it for the systematic changes that are necessary.

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So ALPRs exist “to catch car thieves” but got their start largely through legal car theft. Fun stuff.

ALPRs are wildly unpopular right now, and Flock cameras are being destroyed at a remarkable rate by vandals across the country and across the political spectrum. And the very same politicians who oversaw their funding and installation are now decrying the systems they helped install. (DeSantis in Florida says Flock cameras are “out of control,” while Abbott in Texas has canceled state grants for the cameras.)

By and large, cities that are canceling their contracts with Flock are just moving to its competitor, Axon. Because what our political system is designed to do is to recuperate popular outrage into mild reforms that do not fundamentally challenge the status quo.

So let’s talk about that.

You’ve probably heard the economic maxim “labor creates all wealth.” The idea behind it is simple: it’s people making stuff and doing things that generates economic value. Bosses don’t build airplanes, mechanics do. Bricklayers build mansions, not billionaires.

It’s also true that all political power flows upwards from the people. This is self-evident in a democracy: politicians are only invested in power by the people who vote for them. But it’s true in every political system, and occasionally people drag out a guillotine and remind their rulers where power resides.

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People want a lot of different things. One axis you can divide people on is the classic left/right axis, with socialists (in the broadest sense, including communists and anarchists and other folks) on the left, then progressives, then centrists, then conservatives, then fascists. (There are other ways to map politics, but this will do for now). The people themselves, popular power, it might look like this:

I left the centrists out because I ran out of room. They’ll get over it.

Our power flows upwards, and in a state democratic society like ours, that power then empowers political parties who are entrusted to enact our desires. The parties serve as a mediating force, a moderating force. We can call this higher tier of power “political power” in this context.

There is an argument for this system, of course. Wildly disparate ideas and extremes are balanced out. The rough edges are sanded off, and we’re more able to live with one another without fighting over everything. Maybe centrists have a point after all.

But this mediation also means that the power of the people is blunted and the ability for society to make dramatic changes is removed. As a result, foundational problems in the system are left intact (so issues like “being an ostensibly democratic nation built on genocide and slavery” are hard to address in a meaningful way). Furthermore, crises that require a fundamental shift in ethics and economics are impossible to respond to quickly. The existing system seems incapable of meaningfully addressing climate change on a timeline that is acceptable, for example.

Populist power expresses itself in one of two ways: direct or indirect. Direct action bypasses mediating forces like the political system and involves simply addressing issues directly, changing things directly, and then challenging people to accept that change. Indirect action is action that attempts to pressure the existing political system into changing.

You can go fill the potholes on the street yourself today or you can pressure the city into doing it eventually. There are advantages to both. Direct action gets it done. The indirect method, if it works at all, might mean that specialists will do it better than you could have, and there’s even a chance you’ll be able to get the city to pay more attention to potholes on a systemic level. That would involve changing the status quo, though, so probably not.

Political parties, for their part, can fall into two categories. One is the one we’re used to in the United States: parties can be recuperative. Recuperation, in this framework, is the process by which the political system redirects popular power into political power that ultimately leaves the status quo unthreatened or only marginally changed.

They can also be revolutionary parties, committed to restructuring power and to breaking from the status quo. This isn’t inherently good either—see the modern Republican party.

But of course, when all parties in a political system are recuperative parties, only direct action can accomplish large scale change.

For most of my life, that’s been the political situation in the United States. There were two political parties, both of which were recuperative parties. Each was the other’s loyal opposition, each committed to maintaining the status quo with only incremental shifts.

The democrats were a centrist party, while the republicans were center-right.

In the old way of doing things, most popular power was recuperated into political power, but the Left and the Right edges of the spectrum were liable to seek greater change than what the status quo would allow and would therefore rely on direct action as well as indirect action. You could imagine it like this:

These graphics aren’t great but I have a broken finger so they’re the best I’m going to do.

When Mussolini invented fascism, his specific purpose was to take the revolutionary strategy and ethos of the Left and apply it to rightwing politics. That is, he developed the idea of the rightwing revolutionary party, a party that would serve to focus rightwing populist power into a radical transformation of the status quo.

Over the course of the past ten years, the Republican party has transformed itself from a recuperative party to a revolutionary party. Since it’s a rightwing revolutionary party, that means it is fascistic. But it is still a mediating force. It is not the direct will of the people. A revolutionary party is a structure of organizing populist power into revolutionary political power. So some populist demands will still be recuperated into the status quo—rightwing populist opposition to Flock is likely to be recuperated and will have no meaningful, lasting impact on the surveillance state.

The political situation, then, looks more like this now:

The fact that right wing populist power is now filtered through the state can be seen all over the place. The Proud Boys used to be a direct action group, but now they serve the state and mostly by having become ICE agents. Meanwhile. conservative popular outrage about “things changing” and “life getting worse” are funneled into xenophobia and transphobia, away from things like “billionaire pedophiles are running the world,” an issue that is dearer to the heart of everyone across the political spectrum.

The Left has not had a political party (recuperative or revolutionary) to call its own in this country for at least a hundred years (although the democrats under FDR came the closest). Most likely, this has to do with the structure of our democracy, which is largely seen as primitive by other Western democracies—we are structurally built in a way that promotes a two-party system.

The Democrat Socialists of America have made a bold proposal recently: what if the Democrats actually represented progressives and leftists, instead of just taking their votes and their dollars? It’s a worthwhile experiment and I wish them luck with it, though history does suggest that democratic socialists are more likely to act as a recuperative force than a revolutionary one. Though New York City sure has done a lot of work filling in pot holes now that it has a DSA mayor.

Left-wing revolutionary parties predate fascism, of course. Mussolini started off a Communist. But its possible that revolutionary parties (that is, systems that mediate and redirect popular power into political power) are inherently prone to authoritarianism. Certainly most of the examples we have of right and left wing revolutionary parties taking power has led to authoritarian excesses.

It might be better if revolutionary populist energy is not mediated into a party at all. The anarchist’s approach has always been one that rejects the transformation of popular power into political power, at least within the current state framework.

But “populism” as a phrase has its own baggage and negative history. It seems likely that we need structure in our society to prevent the worst excesses of human nature (and encourage the best aspects of the same). We need structures, just cooperative ones. We need political power that isn’t political power. We need revolutionary parties that don’t mediate the power of the people, but instead simply organize the power of the people.

We’ve seen examples of this, across history and across the world. We’ve seen truly democratic structures practiced by some of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, creating vast confederacies designed to respect diversity but promote social cohesion. We’ve seen the people of Chiapas apply their traditional anti-authoritarian values to temper a revolutionary communist army into what we now know as the Zapatistas. We’ve seen the Kurds develop and live in Democratic Confederalism. We’ve seen the anarcho-syndicalists of Revolutionary Spain feed millions of people while holding back a fascist coup.

It can be done.

But in the meantime, don’t let either party convince you that you can just swap out Flock Safety cameras for Axon cameras.

The better way to influence political power is to force it to catch up with you. Don’t beg at the table for scraps. Feed yourselves and others, and force the parties to want in on what you’re already doing.

As Malatesta put it so perfectly, a hundred years ago:

“We will never recognize the institutions; we will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one tears occupied territory from the enemy’s grasp in order to go on advancing.”

As I write this, last night, it’s the blood moon, a lunar eclipse. As I write this, last night, the full moon is losing itself to the shadow of the Earth. We’re sitting in chairs in the backyard at midnight, and my dog is pacing, aware that something odd is happening in the sky. He’s protecting us; he’s on duty. He has as hard of a time not-working as I do.

This afternoon, I wrote most of an essay for you about criminality, about surveillance. I might even finish it soon, but last night as I write this, I came out to let my dog pee and saw our mother the moon turning amber. I’d rather write about her.

Everything the moon does, she does less dramatically than the sun. The sun gives us heat and light and life; the moon gives us the tides. The sun controls almost everything, but the moon provides an ebb and flow to the waters and the patient white noise that helps us sleep. The sun burns any who dare to gaze upon it, even when the moon cuts across its face, but you can look right at the lunar eclipse. You can look right at a blood moon; you can see her pale face washed in ochre.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen total solar eclipses twice in my life and I’ve never felt half so much like I was looking upon the face of god. If I could, I would become a chaser. I would look upon the burning ring of totality every year. I would stare at god.

The moon is something else. If the sun is a god, the moon is the mirror that lets us see it.

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My dog, the one who wants to watch the moon last night as I write this and wag his tail, who wants to bark at midnight, overwhelmed by the strangeness of the sky… I named him Rintrah after a character from William Blake’s mythology (or theology, I suppose). Rintrah is the personification of the just rage of the prophet, and he’ll run through the yard, scanning the sky like the elder gods might ride down from the heavens to consume us and only his unbroken attention can hold them at bay.

For all I know, he’s right.

More likely, he was just bred to keep birds of prey away from chickens, and it has strange knock-on effects in an era of planes, of satellites, of fucking Starlink.

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden’d air,
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

Once meek, and in a perilous path
The just man kept his course along
The Vale of Death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted,
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth

I can’t pretend like I understand everything that William Blake means in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I tend to like my writing simpler, more to the point; yet here I am turning back to this poem on a regular basis.

Here I am, watching the white moon turn red, thinking how red clay is brought forth on bleached bones, on how death brings us life.

The moon turns red during the eclipse for the same reason sunset is red: the light of the sun passes through the atmosphere sideways. The blood moon is our own sunset projected something like 239,000 miles through space.

In a lot of the media I’ve consumed, you cannot look upon the face of a god and escape unscathed. You might die, you might go mad, you might go blind.

This potential downside of meeting the raw truth of the universe isn’t something we can easily test for ourselves, of course. You’d have to find a god to look upon one, and if we knew where to find one of those, our whole society would look a hell of a lot different.

But of course gods cannot be seen. Divinity (with whatever metaphor you prefer for it—Truth, the Universe, God, gods, the Infinite, you’ve got your pick) is exactly the thing that you cannot see, the thing that you cannot know except through faith. Divinty is exactly the thing that is too much for our own comprehension. It’s like thinking about death. We will never know what it entails, yet we must patiently spend our lives preparing to meet it.

We can only see divinity where it is not. We can only see where it has left its mark. The only way to gaze upon the divine is to mark its influence and its absence. Like a Star Trek crew looking for a cloaked bird of prey, we look for the shimmer in the stars. Like a hunter following quarry, we look for tracks.

That is to say, we don’t look at the light, we look at its reflection.

We don’t look at the sun. We look at the moon.

Or bark at it, I suppose.

The police department posted to their Facebook page to ask for the public’s help solving the crime, only to be flooded by people supporting the vandals.

Last week, in Winona, Minnesota, the police declared their surrender.

Our community’s trust is the foundation of effective policing, and we’ve worked hard to build and maintain that trust. While Flock has been a valuable tool, we believe its use has contributed to growing concerns about trust in policing, both locally and across the state and nation. After careful consideration, [the] Winona PD has decided not to reinstall any Flock cameras in the city of Winona.

And I’ve tracked at least two other jurisdictions that have followed the same pattern.

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Social movements are effective specifically when there is solidarity between their broader base and the people who are committing criminal direct action. When social movements stand behind their criminals, they win.

Winona, Minnesota is not an edge case. This year in particular, all over the country (red state, blue state, it doesn’t matter), people have been attacking the surveillance state and being regarded as heroes for doing so.

I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more popular crime wave.

I got my tires replaced last week in a rust belt city, and spent awhile talking to the folks working there. The conversation hit upon flock cameras.

“Where are all our corn-fed motherfuckers, they need to do something about this shit,” one man told me.

“You know they have shotguns,” I agreed.

I have good news for the tire guy, in retrospect. With shotgun and angle grinder (and handheld bandsaw), with expanding foam and spraypaint, people really are out there destroying these cameras en masse. A lot of people are getting caught (usually by other cameras), but not everyone is.

On August 13th, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina posted to their official Facebook page asking for the public’s help to track down whoever sprayed expanding foam onto their license plate reader cameras. In doing so, they accidentally acknowledged that these cameras track more than license plates. So far there are more than 70,000 comments on that post, overwhelmingly in support of the destruction of these cameras.

In Monterey, California, a 40-year-old man named Marcus Bee was arrested, accused of simply running three flock cameras over in his pickup truck (that is equipped with bull bars, which help with ramming) and/or attaching a tow strap to pull them out of the ground. He was caught by other surveillance cameras in the area.

On the opposite side of the country, and with the help of essentially the opposite vehicle, a 21-year-old is facing charges, alleged to have climbed atop a Subaru forester with a baseball bat to smash up multiple cameras.

Two weeks ago, The New York Post reported that Long Island has been hit by a wave of vandalism against the cameras, all with different methods of attack (which implies different vandals). Some were cut down. One was run over. Another had its wires unplugged. Two were spraypainted. One was simply pointed the other direction. Even on that rightwing site, the comments are entirely supportive of the vandals.

On July 21st a teenager in Jacksonville Beach, Florida was arrested for spraypainting over the lenses of three cameras.

Houston, Texas reported four cameras cut down in one night after a string of other attacks over the past month. The poles were simply left to lay where they fell.

A 37-year-old independent candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives, Adam Lee Heimerman, was arrested for allegedly shooting four cameras. One of these times, the story implies, he was at church services and went out into the parking lot and shot down a surveillance camera while others were inside praying.

One prolific (accused) vandal is a 41 year old Air Force engineer, Jeffrey Sovern, who has pleaded not guilty to the destruction of 13 flock cameras in Virginia last year. He is accused of using vice grips to disassemble the poles.

A man named Ed Kahle in Pinal County, Arizona is unrepentant for backing his work truck into a Flock camera. “We live out here cause we want quiet. We don’t want to cause any trouble. Now I am under surveillance?” Pinal County Sheriffs announced that they will not renew the contract for the cameras.

In Fairbault, Minnesota, a 41-year-old man named Justin Lee Campbell is facing three criminal counts for cutting a flock camera’s wires. He was snitched out by some store employees that he’d bragged to about taking down the camera. But elsewhere in the same state, three cameras were painted over in Edina, then in Plymouth two cameras were taken down.

Cameras have been taken down or destroyed in at least five communities in Michigan. In Westland, Michigan, the police have declared surrender as well.

The Flock camera of Ash Grove, Missouri was taken down by persons unknown, who approached it from behind so it was not able to capture footage of the attack.

Alex Rattenborg, 21, of Iowa City has been charged with third degree criminal mischief for cutting down a Flock camera, and was then caught by other surveillance cameras, but police in Iowa are still looking for the vandals responsible for two other destroyed cameras.

The sheriff of Lumpkin County, Georgia, is desperately trying to find whoever took out a camera. His facebook post about it has 17,000 comments supporting the vandalism.

A 3d designer named SquidInk has developed the Flock Sock, a 3d printable cover that can be put on a broom handle and used to cover flock cameras non-destructively.

Maybe the most polite of all of the people taking direct action is a retired 77-year-old Republican in Florida, The Flock Blocker, who spends his ample free time sitting in a camping chair with an anti-flock sign on a 10 foot pole, blocking the cameras.

When I first starting seeing social media videos comparing methods of destroying these cameras, I was struck by two things. First, that the hatred of these cameras is universal. You’ve got a heavily tattooed person like this one who dresses in black bloc and you’ve got a company that makes safety equipment for welders both providing the same kind of content to their presumably different audiences. (Comments on both, however, recommend the pipe cutting speed and quiet power of the handheld bandsaw.)

The other thing I was struck by… when I first saw this sort of content, I worried that it was just performative social media posting. That sure, maybe a couple people might have taken out a camera or two, but I assumed it was not widespread.

But then I started researching.

And these cameras really are being destroyed one by one, two by two, by individuals and small groups, all over the country. Most people are getting away with it. Many people are getting caught, and some people have already done jail time. I’m not yet aware of a single resource that tracks all of these attacks, and/or offers people the chance to support those who’ve been caught, but hopefully something like that will appear (or already exists and will come across my radar).

I was planning, initially, to write more about the origin of ALPRs (automated license plate readers) and Flock and its competitors like Axon. I will in the future. But I trust you enough to understand that these cameras have been abused horrendously, over and over again; that even when cities decide not to share ALPR information with ICE, local police turn over information to their buddies in ICE anyway; incorrect AI information has led to brutal attacks by police already; and that these cameras will likely, if democracy continues in the USA, be found to be in violation of the fourth amendment—most similar technologies now require a warrant to use.

For too long, people in this country have watched the expansion of the surveillance state. It seems like people have really, finally, had enough. And that all the attempts to divide the working class along culture war lines are failing right now, and that is a good thing. Both sides still blame the other for the surveillance—on the New York Post, comments will call these cameras Communism. Elsewhere, people will call them Fascism. What they are is authoritarianism. Which is something that we, collectively, need to destroy.

I will never, ever, encourage people to do things that I am not personally willing to do. I am not out there destroying Flock cameras. But I will publicly state my support for the people who are, so that’s what I’ll ask of you: be forthright and public in your condemnation of the surveillance state and in your support for those who fight against it directly.

I’ve never been a big believer in online activism, but it seems as though “direct and honest support for people who have committed crimes” is the most effective form of it that I’ve ever seen. Luigi Mangione scared the health executives, but not as much as the uproar of support he received.

And these cameras? They come down when a few brave souls cut them down, and they stay down when there’s a massive wave of popular support. When the state realizes its legitimacy is on the line. That’s when they concede to the people.

As Frederick Douglass put it:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

I didn’t grow up like that. We went camping in tents and we didn’t go to basically feel like we were in a temporary city. But I like to imagine that if I had, I would have loved the freedom to wander trails and catch frogs and swim in lakes and then come home to warm food and cool air and a bed that isn’t a sleeping bag. I would have loved the temporary community, the temporary friends, the temporary loves.

I always did better with temporary friends than I did with school friends. I always did better with a blank slate, with people who didn’t know I was the unpopular kid that they should be beating up, not having fun with or having a crush on.

But none of that was on my mind last week when I set up a tiny backpacking tent at 11pm on a tiny plot of sand and dirt in Michigan at a state park. We weren’t more than ten feet from our nearest neighbors, we weren’t more than twenty feet from a camper with the aforementioned rainbow LED undercarriage lights that ran all night. We just wanted to sleep somewhere where the cops wouldn’t wake us up, so we paid about $50 for the privilege of existing on the planet.

We had two camping mats, one sleeping bag, one wool blanket, and no pillows. The tent was scarcely the size of both of our horizontal bodies, but we had a dog and cat with us too. It was too hot by far. The cat pissed first on the wool blanket, at my feet. Then, an hour before dawn, he moved to the head of the tent, to stand on the vest and jacket I had balled up for a pillow. And he pissed again.

I did not sleep well.

I suppose neither did he.

There are some cards I keep close to my chest, even in my writing, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not turning every card over. I’ve always been a nervous memoirist, both because I value my privacy and also because every story I could tell you is not just my own story, but the story of everyone who was there.

I can tell you that two of us decided to go to the upper peninsula of Michigan for a few days: two days driving, two days there, two days back. It was going to be a lot of driving for only a few days in a cabin, but I don’t hate a good road trip in good company. I’ve also got a van that I built out with a bed and a little mini-fridge and even a 12-volt air conditioner (no rainbow undercarriage lights, unfortunately), so we expected to save on hotels and sleep comfortably along the way.

I decided to bring my dog. He’s half the reason I have the van in the first place—I got the van for a book tour a couple years ago, then built it out to travel with my boy. That’s why there’s an AC, and a remote temperature sensor so I can always look at my phone and know what temperature it is with him inside, so I always know he’s safe. He doesn’t love car travel, but he loves new places, and he and I both are happier together than apart, so he came with me on our vacation. Besides, my dog care fell through.

Then the cat care fell through too, last minute. No problem, we figured. Rintrah has his crate, and we can set up cat litter and some piss mats on the floor of the van, and it would be alright.

My van, though, had other ideas. Still ten hours from our cabin, the van started shaking, the engine started shuddering, and I downshifted and crawled along side highways with the hazard lights on. We made it to a small town along the shore of the ominously named Devil’s Lake, then pulled over into the lot of the just as ominously named Devil’s Lake Auto Care.

We didn’t get murdered, though, which is good.

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Nearly every article I’ve read on the matter really wants to emphasize the fact that the children were not locked into the car, that they were free to leave. That the two fifteen years olds were free to leave from a random parking lot, god knows how far from home. As if that makes it alright.

And I read a lot of articles about the incident, because at least a dozen people tagged me in the stories or messaged me about it. Because in 2015, Vice published a short story of mine called One Star, about a nonbinary graffiti artist trapped in a self-driving taxi that decides to drive them to jail. It’s a short read, scarcely longer than my average newsletter.

I felt really clever at the time, when I wrote it. I got the idea for it when I was traveling with some friends across the country in the van that I used to live in, which I’d named Leviathan. Because it was gigantic and represented civilization.

Self-driving cars were barely in the proof-of-concept stage at that point, but I declared that I would love it if Leviathan could drive itself, if I could just sleep in my own bed in the back while my van took me where I wanted to go.

“If they invent self-driving cars, they’ll just drive people to jail. You know that, right?” My friend told me.

I didn’t have a response for him, because he was right. There was never any chance that a carceral society like the USA was going to develop self-driving cars as anything other than an extension of social control and punitive justice.

So I wrote a story about it, sold it to Vice, and tried not to think about it too much since.

Ten years later, that story came true.

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In 2021, The Onion author Alex Blechman tweeted:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.

Ever since, “Torment Nexus” has become shorthand for the horrendous things that people (especially people who run tech companies) do that seems to be inspired by all of the worst dystopian imaginings of science fiction writers.

Alex Blechman was specifically talking about how Facebook changed its name to Meta and sought to develop the Metaverse, inspired by the Metaverse from the corporate cyberpunk dystopian novel Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. I think the most Torment-Nexusy example of this phenomenon of all is Palantir, the transparently evil surveillance company named after the devices used by the transparently evil villains of The Lord of the Rings.

If we’re being pedantic, I don’t think the Waymo prison taxi is a true Torment Nexus moment, because I don’t have the hubris to believe that self-driving taxis, or their ability to deliver delinquent youth into the hands of the police, were inspired by my writing.

Instead, I just fell prescient, and not in a way that feels good.

I don’t want the Torment Nexus.

What if instead we all built Hron, from Margaret Killjoy’s hit secondary world utopian novel, Please Build the Country of Hron? (Well, actually, it’s called A Country of Ghosts.)

We’re sliding faster and faster into a nightmare that no one, except the people in power, want. We don’t want Flock cameras that track our every move. We don’t want to hand over our brains to a trumped-up autocomplete that is destroying the world’s books.

We want to fight climate change. We see the cities on fire or underwater and sometime those are our own cities. A third of a million people have been displaced in France and Spain this past week by the fires there, and either you or someone you know has already seen your power grid struggle under the weight of heat waves and heat domes this summer.

The movement against data centers is probably the movement most capable of unifying us across cultural divides in this country. While legacy media outlets are bragging about the meteoric rise of data centers and AI as infrastructure, we’d all rather that effort went into retrofitting housing for efficiency, cooling, and smoke filtration. Because “wouldn’t it be neat if a website could sing you a little song” feels a lot less essential right now than “I would like to not watch my loved ones choking on wildfire smoke.”

The only power-hungry infrastructure we need to be considering right now is air-conditioning.

I don’t have a lot to say about this that isn’t just a series of curse words.

And our cars should not drive us to jail. I wish we could have self-driving cars, but the carceral state and capitalism are why we can’t have nice things.

I’m not anti-technology, not in the abstract sense. But technology isn’t neutral; it’s built and implemented within societies. The original luddites didn’t hate the idea of machines, they hated the idea that their livelihoods were being destroyed by machines. Textile workers had worked in cottages—a literal cottage industry—but suddenly became replaceable, industrial cogs in the cities instead. It’s not that the workers all lost their jobs, it’s that their jobs went from the dignity of craft to the misery of industrial production.

And this morning The New York Times quoted an AI asshole as saying AI is going to bring “10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed.”

Now, fortunately, I’m a bit of an AI optimist. Which is to say, I think it’s going to crash and collapse instead of accomplishing these massive, world-changing things that none of us want. Likely, it will fall under its own weight. But if it doesn’t, well, there’s a revolt happening, now, already, and that revolt is going to grow.

And when they insist on the Torment Nexus, we can refuse to build it.

And if they build it anyway, we can destroy it.

I think that poem might be the single most influential piece of writing produced by the 20th century, at least in terms of its impact on world politics. If I’m talking to people about antifascist organizing and I say “you know, the poem,” people know which poem I’m talking about. When I went to Minneapolis and talked with non-political grandmothers standing outside in the coldest weather I’d ever felt in my life, they referenced that poem.

That poem is the clearest, most concise description of the necessity for solidarity between people in the face of fascism that I have ever read. And the fact that people have read it, and internalized its lesson, might well be why the people of the United States are working so hard against fascism right now.

In case you haven’t read it, maybe the oldest version of the poem, translated from German, reads:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

I like this original formulation a little bit better than the other ones I’ve seen, because it doesn’t say “first they came…” it just says “they came.” We have a problem on the Left where we all try to play Oppression Olympics, where we all compete to be the Most Oppressed and therefore have The Most Valid Voice. (“Oppression Olympics” is a framing developed by the feminist Elizabeth Martínez in conversation with Angela Davis in 1993. It’s not some new-fangled attempt to dismiss identity politics, but instead a reminder to focus our attention to the fact that our various and disparate identities ought to be a source of solidarity, not competition).

Now, famously and importantly, the Nazis arrested and killed people for both identity (like ethnicity, religion, disability, and sexuality) and ideology (anarchists and communists and social democrats, the three groups that make up the traditional Left).

The modern fascists are no different. Their first targets (there I go saying “first”) were immigrants and trans people, convenient scapegoats for all of society’s problems, though of course they seek to remove all marginalized people from public life.

But in the past few months, the rhetoric and prosecutions of people for ideology have ramped up. There’s a new Red Scare in this country.

And lately, my social media has people arguing about who gets to claim to be its target. Is it the anarchists, constantly named as boogiemen (and boogiewomen and boogiethems) by Trump and his allies? We are certainly contenders—the Prairieland conspiracy case revolves around an anarchist book club. The indictment of the DAMN 15 defendants in Minnesota alleges over and over again that the defendants identified themselves publicly as anarchists.

Is it the Social Democrats? The State Department’s new report about the enemy within claims that the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA, who are winning election after election) are puppets of Cuba.

Is it the Communists? Trump just gave a speech condemning the DSA as Communists, that they’re not really socialists. He knows socialists, you see, and these aren’t them. They’re Communists, in his words. And the American millionaire communist Fergie Chambers was just arrested in Spain for potential extradition to the US, accused of financing Hamas.

Or is Trump’s target simply the Democratic party, including the same establishment Democrats I like to complain about myself, the ones who whole-heartedly embrace capitalism and offer military support to the genocide in Gaza?

The answer is yes. It’s all of those things. The new Red Scare isn’t aimed against one of those groups, it’s aimed at all of them. At all of us.

And we should act like it.

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What constitutes “the Left” is somewhat amorphous, and the terminology shifts by time and geography. But to paint with a big brush, you can understand us like this:

The broadest word available (besides “the Left”) is that we can all be called socialists. Socialists are opposed to capitalism. That is to say, we’re opposed to a specific political system that allows people to build wealth through their wealth rather than through their labor. By allowing private individuals to own massive factories that employ hundreds or thousands of laborers, we create a society in which wealth flows upwards (and importantly, each workplace is run as a tyranny).

Historically, there are three broad factions within socialism. Sometimes those factions have aligned with one another, other times they’ve warred. And confusingly, one of these factions is usually called “the socialists.”

Those factions are the anarchists, the democratic socialists (“socialists” in the US), and the state communists (usually called “Communists” with a capital-C, to distinguish them from “communism” which is a description not of the process of revolution but of a post-revolutionary society). These groups differ somewhat in goals but strongly in methods.

Imagine them in a triangle, not a line. Here, I made you a little chart:

Both the anarchists and the Communists are “revolutionary” ideologies that believe that rather than using the existing capitalist state’s apparatus, a new system must be built and the old system overthrown or rendered obsolete. Democratic socialists, in contrast, believe in using existing democratic systems to achieve these goals.

Both the anarchists and the democratic socialists are, in the broadest sense, “democratic” and believe in participatory decisionmaking. Both groups believe that power must stay invested in the people themselves. In contrast, Communists believe in creating a centrally planned state run by an individual or a small group of individuals.

Both the Communists and the democratic socialists believe in using state power, by having a specific defined institution that governs the region and claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Anarchists, in contrast, believe that power should only be federated between local groups… so large decisions can be still be made, and organizing still happen on a large scale, but without a strong coercive power.

There are many more groups besides these. Many Marxists and communists would not be called Communists. There are also more modern ideas like Democratic Confederalism that adopt ideas from every corner of the triangle and from indigenous Kurdish practices. Zapatismo also sits outside (or perhaps inside) this triangle as well.

Although the balance between these three historical groups was different country by country and decade by decade, in general, the anarchist movement was the strongest revolutionary force on the Left until the Bolsheviks (the original Communists with a capital-C) took power during the Russian Revolution by using the anarchists as shock troops against the Social Democrats and then turning around to betray and kill the useful idiot anarchists. Once there was a Communist country and the USSR controlled how it was represented internationally, they financed the Communist Left across the world. During the cold war, the Social Democrats largely aligned themselves with the capitalist nations (or at least they did in Scandinavia).

It was only once the Bolsheviks took power that we started seeing the red flag be uniquely a Communist symbol, and indeed that the word communist started to mean Communist. It’s also when (near as I can tell… I’ve been reading about this for years but I have years more reading left to do) the three broad categories of the Left really started having it out for one another.

The first Red Scare in America, from 1917 to 1920, came for the entire Left, especially the Russian immigrant Left, which was predominately anarchist. The first Red Scare was kind of like the first World War… it was a huge deal at the time, but it’s overshadowed by the one that came next.

The second Red Scare lasted longer, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and it left deeper scars. It ostensibly focused on Communists as a more distinct group, because the USSR was running the ComIntern, the Communist International, which directed the activities of Communist groups all over the world. But of course the Red Scare didn’t stay confined to America’s direct and literal political enemy, and socialists and anarchists and generally just anyone who wasn’t excited about American capitalism was caught up by it. The anarchist Charlie Chaplin, the most famous comedian in the world in his time, was warned when he left the country in 1952 that he might not be allowed to return. He stayed gone for twenty years. Alan Lomax, the Leftist-but-not-Communist-Party folk music recorder, the source of practically every piece of Americana we still have, fled in 1950 for eight years. (I don’t mean to cherrypick these two, they’re just people I’ve studied for my work so I know more about them.)

And of course, last week, in 2026 the State Department announced new visa restrictions against the “far left.”

That’s the context I can offer you about Red Scares. I’ve tried to write that objectively, but it’s worth knowing that my bias is that I am an anarchist, and that I believe the world would have been a better place if anarchists had chosen to trust social democrats more and Communists less.

I don’t believe that “anarchists” or “antifa” (which is traditionally a non-ideological and unorganized coalition of primarily anarchists and communists and Communists but has included anyone willing to take direct action against fascism) are really the intended target of this new Red Scare. I don’t think Communists are either. The DSA might come close, because they have electoral power. I believe, ironically, that the new Red Scare is aimed at dismantling the electoral power of the Democratic Party.

They arrest mostly anarchists, because we’re over-represented in people taking direct action against fascism. They can arrest us to say “see? there are terrorists here!”

But they’ve been upfront since the beginning that they’re mostly interested in targeting the people who “finance” antifascism. This strikes every actual antifascist as entirely laughable—we’re financed by a combination of working-class and criminal class jobs, from tech jobs to making pizza to seasonal labor to hospital workers to novelists to sex work to petty thievery.

(I will die on the hill of that “working class” means you work for a living instead of making your money through capital ownership, whether you’re paid well or terribly. Most arguments otherwise are made to divide the working class and to convince the middle class that they have more in common with our mutual oppressors.)

They’re targeting “our” financing because they want to target large, liberal institutions. They want to dismantle the center’s power. They want to never have another election again. They are targeting the Democrats by calling them us.

This isn’t to say they aren’t coming for us. They are. We’re collateral damage, and we are not safe.

For most of the past ten years or so of my life, my main contribution to “the movement” has been speaking and writing, has been things that are entirely legal. Most of my organizing is around preparedness and mutual aid. I’m more law-abiding than most of the non-anarchists I know, because I’ve had enough interactions with police in my life already. I’ve been “safe” from repression for awhile now, because the work I do is firmly under the protection of the first amendment.

That work is no longer safe.

I’m using myself only as an example, not because I’m specifically worried about me more than I am about others. I’m worried about the Prairieland folks who will spend most of their lives in prison unless we make it clear that getting them out is a bare minimum for any new administration. I’m worried about the DAMN 15 in Minnesota, whose charges amount to “being anarchists or working alongside anarchists and organizing a blockade protest at which no police or ICE agents were hurt.”

I’m worried about the pro-Palestine organizers who are getting charged with material support for Foreign Terrorist Organizations by speaking out against genocide and fundraising for its victims.

And I don’t really want to spend my time arguing about who deserves the glory of being the victims of the new Red Scare. I’m as sectarian as they come when it comes to hating authoritarian communism and hating the establishment democrats (who are rushing to throw the DSA under the bus and be the Good Opposition), but… they’re coming for all of us.

When that poem, the famous poem, first started doing the rounds in the 1950s, some people learned that its author had once been a conservative, an anti-semite, and even supported the Nazis for awhile before he spent eight years in Nazi prison camps, and so they wanted to stop spreading it. But to me, that makes the poem even more important. It’s not asking you to speak up for people you like. It’s asking us to fight for people we can’t even stand.

Because our choice is either we have a society in which we are allowed to be different from one another, or we don’t. And in the latter kind of society, a lot of us will be dead.

So we’d better speak up for any of us. We’d better speak up for people we don’t even like.

Because we’ve read the poem, and we’ve seen history.

I bit my tongue hard in my sleep by accident and woke up into a better world than that. In my real life, the people who want to kill me and my friends in order to hoard wealth are more subtle about it, or at least I’ve got more friends who are fighting alongside me. In real life, I’m a bit more free.

Freedom exists on a spectrum. It’s not a binary thing.

Last week I researched the first labor strike in known history. The tomb builders living in a town called Deir el-Medina in Egypt went on strike on November 14th, 1152 BCE. Three thousand, one hundred, and seventy-eight years ago. And their strike looked an awful lot like ours today. They set down their tools and staged sit-ins, they blocked roads, they marched, they engaged in workplace sabotage. They wrote letters to the authorities requesting a redress of grievances. They stole from work. They did everything that we do today.

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We know about the strike of Deir el-Medina because they had scribes who tracked worker attendance. Some of the earliest writing in history was timesheets for workers, so we know that workers called off work because of scorpion stings and sore limbs and we know that workers called off work because they didn’t feel like going or they wanted to build things for their families that day instead of for the pharaohs.

I grew up pretty sure that the people who built the pyramids were enslaved, but that isn’t true. Even across the roughly three thousand year history of “ancient” Egypt, we have no evidence that any of the workers who built tombs for the Pharaohs were enslaved. We know that the later workers, like the striking workers of Deir el-Medina, were wage workers and we know that the pyramids (a thousand years earlier) were built by a combination of skilled waged laborers and rotating corvée laborers. These workers were treated with respect and worked hard and died young and were buried with more dignity and grave goods than others of their social station. Corvée labor is labor-as-tax, and throughout much of the ancient world the infrastructure was built by citizens and residents who performed work for the state as part of their taxes.

That labor is rarely referred to as “forced,” despite it being compelled.

Wage labor is rarely referred to as forced labor either. Even though, time and time again in my reading, I run across colonial rulers instituting “land taxes” on their subjects that compel subsistence farmers into the labor market. This became particularly common during the industrial era, when rulers (democratic or not) wanted more people to live in cities and work in factories. Land taxes were levied on tiny land holdings so that people couldn’t exist outside the market economy.

There was slavery in Ancient Egypt. It wasn’t to nearly at the same scale as it was in Ancient Greece or especially Ancient Rome (which was a slave society that conquered the world in large part to find more people to enslave to fuel the economy in the colonial core), but there were people who owned people in Ancient Egypt. When there are people who are outright owned, it’s easy to see corvée labor as “free” or even “volunteer” in comparison. The builders at Deir el-Medina, of course, were freer still.

In some ways, they seem freer that we are today. I don’t know many people who can call out of work because they’d rather do something else.

But what we call their “wages” might be better understood as “rations.” This was hundreds of years before the advent of currency, and workers were paid in grain, vegetables and fish. They were paid in clay for their pots and oil for their lamps. They were paid in subsistence. Most of them worked second jobs, making grave goods to sell on the side in nearby Thebes (not the Greek Thebes, but the Egyptian one).

They only struck in response to wage theft—a crime all too common today.

In a strange way, being paid in rations almost feels more honest. These were some of the highest-paid and highest-regarded skilled workers of their era, the ones who were trusted to work (assembly-line style) to build, decorate, and fill the tombs of the most powerful rulers of the country. And they were paid “you have the things you need to stay alive.”

These days, people are fighting tooth and nail for a living wage, for an amount of money that prevents you from falling beneath the waves. Most people aren’t “getting ahead.” Most people aren’t “building wealth” except perhaps for retirement, to have the means to live past when their bodies won’t sustain them working any longer. Most people are trying to pay off debt. The poorest live outside. The luckier live in houses owned by landlords. Luckier still, and your house is owned by the bank until you’re just about to retire. Owning your house outright is seen as a marker of incredible wealth. Owning the place you live. This shouldn’t be so high of a bar.

I’m convinced that the line between freedom and unfreedom is more slippery and vague than we think.

In Ancient Egypt, some people sold themselves (and, because it was an inheritable trait, their children) into slavery in order to avoid crushing poverty. I’ve read about this happening in Ancient Greece as well, and usually it’s presented as an almost heartwarming practice. After all, Greek slavery couldn’t be that bad if people chose it of their own free will, is the subtext. In the most apologetic texts, it’s presented almost like an unpaid internship. It’s true that sometimes, in some places, selling yourself into slavery was a path to a limited amount of social mobility.

In the most extreme case I’ve read about, it seems as though people in Ancient Egypt sometimes paid a monthly fee in order to be accepted as temple slaves, presumably working a second job in order to pay for the opportunity to work unpaid and unfree for this or that temple. It’s likely that they did this to avoid “voluntary” corvée labor, which was more dangerous and miserable still.

In America, of course, people work job after job to avoid falling into desperation that might lead to a life of crime, and we’ve got a whole amendment to our constitution that specifically permits forcing people caught doing crime to perform unpaid labor.

The more I read about money and labor in the ancient past, the more I’m convinced that our modern understanding of work being something that grants “economic freedom” is a blip, maybe even an aberration. It seems like most people in the “civilized” world in history have simply sought some method of staying alive, and living in the patronage of the powerful has always been an option many of them have chosen (or been forced into). You either are powerful yourself or you find yourself someone powerful to keep you safe and fed.

We see remnants of this today. The priesthood, the military. Cults. Many people, understandably, are happy to be less responsible for themselves and their needs and their decisions. Not because they are weak-minded, not because they’re not responsible people, but because the civilized world seems to have been built on unfreedom, on forcing people into economic dependency.

For most of us, those who don’t work for themselves or in cooperative environments, our workplaces are little tyrannies with strict hierarchies. It’s good that we can leave those jobs and be “free” at home after hours (excepting the unfreedom put upon the home sphere by forces like patriarchy), but it’s strange that we accept our own complete lack of agency in the workforce.

In the eighteenth century in England, there was a fad for the rich to keep ornamental hermits. There was no better display of wealth than to feed, clothe, and house a man with a long beard and conical hat who could live in your garden and entertain your guests.

The first time I read about them, I was a broke author living in a minivan and I thought to myself “I would sign up to do that.”

The early labor movement in the United States came out of the wake of abolition, and many of those labor activists saw themselves in the same tradition as those abolitionists. Lucy Parsons, who was herself born enslaved in the more traditional way, wrote often about how “wage slavery” had replaced chattel slavery. Some wealthy Northern abolitionists had been upfront about how their problem with slavery was that it was ill-suited for industrial production and that it was cheaper to pay people wages than to own them and be responsible for their well-being.

I don’t think it is useful for us anticapitalists to go back to framing wage labor as “wage slavery,” because the horrors of American racialized chattel slavery should never be downplayed. In a world with a history full of slavery—and various forms of being unfree—American racialized chattel slavery was a unique evil.

I do think it’s important that we can quit our jobs, that we can look for other ones. It’s part of why a phrase like “wage slavery” rings hollow to me. Actual slavery continues, all over the world, and it’s not a word I’m interested in watering down.

But wage labor is still compelled labor. We need our rations in order to survive. I spent my twenties attempting to walk away from money, and I found a temporary freedom by living in abandoned buildings and eating trash. It wasn’t sustainable. My health plan was “don’t get sick,” and there was no way I would have been able to start a family. I relied heavily on two safety nets, staying for extended periods with other anarchists who did work jobs and I was also aware that I could rely on my family too, all of whom worked. I don’t think I would have been half as adventurous without having both of those options.

Freedom is a spectrum, or it’s a complicated multi-dimensional chart with all sorts of positions that are neither free nor fully unfree. We need to understand that we are in many ways unfree. That we are still, essentially, being paid rations. You do not get rich, not plutocrat rich, by working for a wage. No matter the wage, no matter the rations they allot to you. We could work our entire lives for one hundred times the rations of our peers and we still wouldn’t become billionaires. You only become a billionaire by extracting the wealth produced by other people, by making other people less free.

I’d rather not understand freedom as a static condition at all. Freedom isn’t a lack of constraints, it’s something we give to one another. Freedom is a relationship between people. (I got that idea from my friend Ben who probably got it from like, Kropotkin or some other old dead anarchist.) We offer one another freedom by taking care of one another. My anarchist friends offered me freedom when they gave me a place to stay, and now I do the same for others.

We offer one another freedom when we learn to deescalate conflict with one another, when we learn to accept people in all their diversity, when we learn to accommodate for each other’s needs. When I take care of myself as best as I am able to, I give others around me more freedom. When others take care of me, they offer it back.

In some ways, the plutocrats of the world are the least free, because they never get to interact with the people around them as peers.

I’m not trying to offer them pity. Their way of life needs to be destroyed if any of the rest of us have any chance of a livable world, let alone something akin to real freedom.

It’s nice to remember, though, that labor action and collective bargaining is as old as wage labor (and that wage theft is as old as wages).

When the Egyptian state began to falter (as it has over and over again during its 5000 years of history, since Egypt is the oldest country in the world), the same striking workers at Deir el-Medina began to coordinate with armed outsiders to loot the tombs. It’s part of why the grave robbers from Europe mostly found empty burial sites when they started their systemic robbery of Egypt—the people of Egypt, the workers, had already taken back their own buried wealth thousands of years earlier.

(I’d love to paint that part all neat and rosy, but best as I can tell the workers were coordinating with corrupt aspects of the government to do that looting. I’m not studied enough to tell you whether or not that wealth found its way to the working people of Egypt, only that it was taken back from the dead monarchs by their own people not too long after it was buried.)

I don’t mind the fact that freedom exists on a spectrum (or a field). I don’t mind that it’s a fight we’ve always been fighting and will always fight. We may never win, not completely, not permanently, but we’ll never lose either. Because it’s by fighting that we build those relationships of freedom. It’s by fighting that we win.

The squatters in Amsterdam were not impressed with me.

The eviction wave was coming—squatters in Amsterdam always put up so much of a fight that in order to evict a single squat, the police had to gather from across the country to do it, so a few times a year multiple squats were evicted on a single day. The eviction wave was coming, and the squatters were getting ready.

If you aren’t immediately on the side of the squatters, then let me tell you this: in the 1980s, real estate prospecting had left a third of Amsterdam vacant while people desperately needed housing, so squatters started to make use of empty buildings to house themselves and others. Dutch squatters prided themselves on improving their spaces, not just living in squalor, and I’ve never met a community of people so dedicated to, and capable of, DIY home repair.

Even the government agreed the squatting was a social good, and it became legal, for decades, to occupy any building that had been left vacant for more than a year that the owner had no plans for.

But the government didn’t do this out of the goodness in their hearts. The squatting came first, and the government rushed to follow. (This is, incidentally, how all social change happens.) Even in an era of legal squatting, the squatters knew they had to defend their buildings. If evictions ever became easy, squatting would end.

So every eviction was a wild spectacle of paintbombs (from the squatters) and water cannons and tear gas (from the police). People told me stories of rooftop paintbomb catapults. People told me stories of how one time the police gave up on the front entrance and filled a shipping container with cops and lifted it up with a crane to break in the third floor, only to have squatters with a long wooden pole spin that cargo container around in circles.

Incidentally, the way they made their paintbombs was that they dipped balloons in wax, then deflated the balloons to leave a hollow shell that they filled with paint and then sealed with more wax. In case you were curious.

People had told me wild story after wild story, of hidden and spring-loaded trap doors, of empty beer kegs poised to fall down the stairwell, of the Home Alone hijinks that preserved their way of life and kept real estate prospectors from once again gutting their city. They told me these stories, and they were pretty disappointed with me while we were getting for the eviction wave and I explained that I had essentially no construction skills to speak of. In particular, I didn’t know how to weld. What kind of person doesn’t know how to weld, they asked themselves.

People like me, was the answer. An American art school dropout who had majored in photography. I didn’t know how to weld.

My dad had actually been a professional welder for awhile, and I’d arc welded once or twice in our garage when I was a little kid, but it was a finicky process and for whatever reason, I was not naturally gifted with manual dexterity (or, more importantly, attention to detail) so it didn’t stick. Well, actually, it stuck too much. That’s an arc welding joke… arc welding is a tricky process where if you use too little pressure, you don’t make a weld, and if you use too much pressure, you weld the welding rod to your work material.

In art school, my sculpture teacher asked me: “you were the kid who couldn’t cut on the dotted lines, weren’t you?” which was true. Later, my drawing teacher took me aside and told me: “there’s no shame in dropping out if art school isn’t for you.”

So no, the Dutch squatters weren’t impressed with me any more than my drawing teacher had been.

Ten years later, I built a cabin and lived in it. These days, I spend most of my free time making things. I still haven’t gotten back into welding, but it’s on the list and I think I’ll be able to learn.

When I was a kid, most of my hobbies were on the computer. Video games, digital art. Fixing computers. Making games in simple game-making programs like ZZT. Writing terrible cyberpunk fiction about lonely introverted teenagers. Layout—I was the designer for my school’s yearbook and, if you must know, I graduated as editor-in-chief of both the yearbook and literary magazine.

You won’t be shocked to know I wasn’t big into sports. I rode my bike around a lot since I didn’t have a car, but everything I did for fun involved a keyboard and a screen. (I’m eternally grateful that I grew up before smart phones and that I grew up before World of Warcraft).

A few years after I dropped out of college and had been hitchhiking around, I got myself a laptop to bring around with me. I traveled with a full-sized hiking backpack, an accordion in a heavy wooden case, and a laptop bag. I was not exactly an ultra-light hiker. I made good use of that laptop, though. I ran anarchist websites. I ran a zine distro that’s still around today. I wrote terrible cyberpunk fiction about lonely introverted twenty-somethings. I made music. I recorded a whole terrible album of industrial music during the half a year I lived in Amsterdam. I helped lay out a squatter magazine, learning punk graphic design from an Austrian woman. I did all the things that soon enough became my livelihood (I designed book interiors and ebooks for AK Press for most of my income for roughly a decade).

But I also made a decision early on that I’m grateful for every day. I decided that since I worked on a computer, all my new hobbies had to be physical.

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“Oh, so like, you’re a chick when you go out?”

Now, in the life I lead, I don’t hear the word chick too often. But I suppose I am one when I go out. And when I’m at home. But I was wearing black jeans and a sleeveless shirt, because I may be a chick but if so I’m a punk chick.

I didn’t feel like arguing, so I said “yeah, basically,” and we talked about that for awhile.

“What’s your opinion, or I guess the opinion of the trans community, on trans people in sports?” he asked.

I thought about it for a moment, then told him: “it’s a distraction. It’s a wedge issue they can use to get people mad at us.”

“Oh,” he said, thinking about that while a two-hundred foot hose sucked sewage out of my backyard and into his truck. “That makes sense.”

Later, while I settled the bill, he asked me: “So… does your chick know you’re a chick?”

“She does,” I said.

“Whoa,” he said. “So you’re like, lesbians?”

“We are.”

“That’s cool, my cousin is a lesbian.”

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Most of the time I think about this story, it’s a story about rural acceptance. It’s a story about how most people, at least poor people in Appalachia, don’t really give a shit what you do. It’s a story about a funny but friendly little culture clash while living in a holler.

Sports, I can tell myself, don’t matter. I didn’t grow up playing sports—I grew up reading books.

It shouldn’t be a dichotomy, though.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided that states could ban trans girls from girls sports, and a lot of it centers around a West Virginia girl, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who has never had a “male” puberty in the first place and just wanted to play track and field in her middle school. In high school, as a freshman, after years of hard work and training, her and her inherent male superiority (that’s sarcasm) placed third in discus and eighth in throwing shot.

She’s the third best girl in West Virginia at spinning in a circle and letting go of a frisbee and she’s the eighth best at throwing a heavy object, so we’ve got to protect the rest of the girls from her.

This past weekend I was talking with someone, a midwestern guy in his late 60s who’d coached girls soccer for his three kids. The world cup was on, and he asked if I followed sports.

I like being honest if at all possible. I told him I didn’t grow up playing sports.

I went into my usual defensive “we went to the library instead,” which is true. And I gave him my usual “in high school gym class I sat with the other girls in the corner and we painted our nails and didn’t participate,” which is also true. Those both sounded like cute, wholesome stories to me. Easy ways to explain who I am today.

“That’s a shame,” he said. I’d never realized that.

“Oh?” I asked.

“It’s a shame you didn’t get that experience of togetherness, of teamwork and accomplishment.”

I could have kept expanding on that list of things I was missing out on, I realized. I didn’t get the experience of getting to know my body, of getting to know my limitations and strengths.

Because the truth is, I loved playing sports as a kid, when I could handle it socially. The only reason I hadn’t played is that I was routinely mocked and assaulted. The polite word is “bullied.” I hadn’t chosen to sit outside society, I’d been cast out.

I was also bad at sports, but that’s a real chicken-or-the-egg problem.

It seems to me, in retrospect, that boys and girls know one another instinctively, and I didn’t belong with the boys and we all knew it, and the only girls who would take me in wore Marilyn Manson shirts and big stompy boots and sat in the corner and glowered at everyone. So I did too, and those girls saved my life. Emily died of cancer a few years back, and I don’t know what came of Valerie or Maria. Two of the others are still my friends, and one is an anti-ICE organizer and another is my collectivemate in Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

Us weirdos even played sports sometimes, though never in school. We strapped on rollerblades and played street hockey on the tennis courts, and we didn’t segregate ourselves by gender and we didn’t exclude those of us (like me) who were terrible at it.

I admit that when they came for trans athletes, I didn’t speak up much on the issue, because I “hated” sports in the first place. It was so transparently a wedge issue that I figured the best use of my time was to simply continue to defend trans people existing in public life at all.

Sports are such a successful wedge issue because, well, there are responses to hormones that build our bodies differently. And both sides of the issue can read published science that agrees with them. Yes, there’s a 2026 meta-analysis of studies that show that trans women who take hormone replacement (not all of us do) have no statistical advantage over cis women when adjusted for height. But the other side can look to an ostensibly reasonable publication like the BBC to see an expert confidently claiming otherwise four years ago.

Trans athletes are in a strange bind. Even when they’re allowed to compete, they can’t get too good at their sports, or the pitchforks and torches will come out.

Of course, we’re already seeing the wedge issue drive further down. It was never going to stop at trans athletes, and it hasn’t. The fascists currently in the process of gaining control of the US government have stripped right after right from us.

Last weekend, I went with some folks to a science museum in Chicago, because I wanted to see the captured Nazi submarine they have on display, because I’m having a sort of hyperfocus on World War II submarines right now, because I am very normal and have very normal interests.

I didn’t use the bathroom at the museum because there wasn’t a “family” bathroom anywhere to be found. I don’t know if cis people know just how long we’ve learned to go without peeing.

I use the men’s room when I have to use a public bathroom, even when I’m wearing a dress and makeup. I count on my general spikiness and punk rock demeanor to keep me safe. Other women I know use the women’s room and hide in the stall when they’re done pissing, waiting for the coast to be clear to exit.

It was never just about sports.

It was never just about sports, but even if it had been, we need to fight back, because participation in sports is as regular as having a place to piss in public. Participation in sports means participation in society.

I grew up with dysphoria. It took me until my thirties to really understand the size and shape of my body. I always thought I was much smaller than I am. The two things that corrected my own conception of my own body were coming out as a woman and beginning to consciously exercise.

I lift weights now, and my coach calls all of us “athletes” and most of us have never been called that in our life, but we’re a bunch of fat people and queer people and old people deadlifting and squatting and snatching and doing exercises I’ve never learned the names of like “lift the hundred pound sandbag over the bar over and over again.” I call the class “heavy objects class” and I never want to go but I go anyways and it’s the highlight of my week. I started lifting weights by myself in my basement when I turned forty and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

I like weightlifting because I’m not competing against other people, not really. There will always be people who can move a bigger number than me. I’m competing against myself. I want to be as fit as I am able; I want to work within some of my limitations and I want to push past others.

I tell myself I was born to be a rebel, because society never accepted me. But I don’t dream of a society in which I’d have to rebel in the first place. I dream of an anarchist society, a horizontally structured, non-capitalist society in which local councils make decisions together and then federate to create larger decisions while avoiding creating a state or a national border.

If I lived in that society, I wouldn’t be a rebel, except maybe in a Le Guin The Dispossessed way in which I always want my society to improve.

I don’t actually like living on the outside of everything. I’ve been telling people for years that the only reason I’m not weirder, aesthetically, is that I’m at “peak weird” already. I’m as weird as I feel like putting up with. I’d rather have pointed ears and I’d rather wear a cloak and I sure spent one whole summer wearing chainmail under my punk vest. Those things match my aesthetic understanding and I want to do them, but I’m already stared at as much as I feel like dealing with.

I don’t actually consider this cowardice on my part, though maybe it is. Maybe it comes from the same place that tells me it’s not safe to wear dresses in public, which I do anyway.

But I don’t dress strange in order to dress strange. I’d actually prefer to dress even stranger, but y’all keep being weird about it.

I don’t refuse society. Society refused me.

The reason that the sports ban breaks my heart is because when I see trans youth I see everything that I was denied. Society denied me a girlhood, and for a brief moment in the 2010s I saw trans girls who got to just be girls, who got to grow up right. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to express in words how much I just wanted to be one of the girls as a kid, or just how grateful I am to the girls who tried to let me. I’m eternally grateful for the girls who let me paint my nails with them in the corner, who helped me put on makeup after I made it to school. I’m eternally grateful for goth, which told me it was okay to genderbend.

But it would have been cool to be on the field hockey team too. It’s fun to get good at things. It’s fun to get to use our bodies. It’s fun to do all of those things together with other people.

There are going to be endless knock-on effects of the sports ban, of course. We’re already seeing racist policing of cis women’s bodies in the name of transphobia. Society is going to start staring at kids’ genitals in order to sort them into boxes at school, which isn’t good.

And of course, fascists love to be able to categorize people in order to oppress or destroy them, and anti-trans liberals are helping them determine “womanhood” as an immutable category. Fascists will build a prison for cis women built out of trans people’s bones.

But even if this ruling only affected the trans girl athletes, formally casting them out of society by casting them off the sports team that would be bad enough.

Even if it only affected the third best discus thrower in West Virginia, it would be bad enough.

The Prairieland defendants were sentenced yesterday, and all of their sentences are cartoonishly long. Seriously, it’s impossible to read sentences of 70 years in this case without imagining the judge twirling a mustache while he makes his proclamations.

Prairieland was a noise demonstration outside of an ICE facility that went horribly wrong when an officer showed up and drew a gun on an unarmed, fleeing protestor. One of the defendants, Champagne, was armed and shot and injured the officer, presumably saving the fleeing person’s life. It seems likely to me that if Champagne had not been present and not thinking fast, someone would have died at that protest. Instead, nobody did. Champagne was just sentenced to a hundred years in prison. Here is their statement from yesterday.

Now everyone who was at the small noise demonstration is being told they will be locked up, most of them for the rest of their natural lives. To quote the support committee:

The only positive thing I can pull from this is that the bias of the court is so transparent that there might be hope for appeal under better circumstances. And when we finally oust Trump from office, we will need to remind everyone, loudly and often, that Trump is not gone until the vestiges of his fascist administration are gone, and that includes the convictions of anti-ICE protesters.

The Barbarian Queen

Completely and utterly unrelated to that, I’ve started a new serial called Throkda the Barbarian Queen in the Village of Ash. Part one appears in issue three of Foghorn Mag, which is subtitled “an anarchist record of marginal life.” It’s a print-only paper that appears twice a year and is full of advice for organizing and for off-grid life and just generally life in the margins. It’s a great paper, and when they asked me to contribute, I told them I’d rather write about a barbarian queen from a fantasy world who steps through a portal to the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina. And they said yes, as long as it tied in people living off-grid. So it does. You can read part one in issue #3, which you can buy print copies of online or from a few select stores.

Here’s a teaser for it, fuck it:

Blood ran down my blade and blood ran down my chest and a cacophony of screaming filled the royal chamber and all I wanted to do was think, to plan our escape, but there wasn’t time. Parry, thrust, parry. Get closer. Always be closing on the enemy—it short-circuits their training, puts you in the advantage. It’s not safe, but nothing is. The seax in my hand had been forged by my brother (may the Seven Harpies hold his soul with kindness in the Place Beyond All Rivers) and it did its work well.

My two friends were down the hall, working in tandem to break down the door that stood between us and our objective.

One final thrust, and three palace guards were dead or dying on the floor of the chamber alongside the body of their employer, Duke Agglethorn.

Someone was going to have to clean all of it up. Some poor palace servant, scarcely more free than a serf, was going to have to mop up all of that blood. There was no way the stains were ever going to come out of the upholstery. Silk velvet, woven on a loom with two warps, dyed with seashells plucked one by one from the ocean floor. It had likely taken an entire village an entire month to produce just one of the chairs, and there I was splashing the life’s blood of half the palace guard around the room.

Maybe I didn’t want to have time to think after all.

Preparedness

Humanitarian aid meals are deeply, deeply discounted right now. My best guess is that the end of American soft power has led to a massive overstock of basically vegan MREs on the home market. It’s not a good thing. But it means you can get like 300 vegan meals for $150 plus shipping right now. Note that “inspection date” means “open one to make sure they’re still good,” not “expiration date. My friend, braver than I, ate a bunch and said they’re fine with enough hot sauce, and I’ve got a lot of them in my basement. (As with all deep pantry food, store them away from heat, light, and moisture).

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Things I’ve read recently

Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman. 2026. I wanted to read Dungeon Crawler Carl because it’s such a big deal that I figured I’d see what the fuss was all about, but I listen to my audiobooks through libro.fm after I quit Audible, and all they had was this other book by the same author. It checks off a ton of my classic sci-fi boxes—the children of generation ship colonization fight against an invasion of gamers from Earth piloting mechs. It’s fun. Dinniman is a good pulp writer. I see why people like his work, and I’ll probably read more from him, especially if I sort out the audio versions.

Tunnel in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. 1955. I grew up reading Heinlein, and though I don’t agree with him politically at a macro scale, I enjoy his books and a lot of his ideas. This is probably my favorite book of his, and this is probably the fourth time I’ve read it (twice as a kid, and now twice as an adult). I’ve got two copies on my shelf, both older than me. One was my dad’s, and one was his older brother’s. A high school student in an off-world survival class takes his final exam by going through a gate to survive on an alien world. It’s a libertarian but empathic story. One that serves as apologia for colonization but is still woven through with an interesting sort of kindness and was consciously intended to teach “woke” lessons to 1950s boys reading pulp sci-fi. It’s interesting to see where the author’s intended anti-sexism and anti-racism succeed and fail in retrospect. Rereading this, I can see how it influenced my thoughts, even to this day. There’s some Tunnel in the Sky in that post-apocalyptic vignette I just published here, The End, Like Sand, in how it discusses building an open but organized society during crisis.

Finna, by Nino Cipri. 2020. Listened to the audiobook of this a couple weeks ago. It’s short and sweet and entertaining: a store that is legally distinct from Ikea is capable of spontaneously generating portals to parallel universes, and a minimum wage worker and their ex are told its their job to go through that portal to rescue a missing customer. It’s fun. It’s a romp. The title “finna” has nothing to do with the AAVE word that means “gonna,” for better or worse.

As always, I also maintain a list of books I recommend over at the worker- and queer-owned bookshop Firestorm. Full disclosure, that’s a referral link, and it gives me a cut of sales (and you a discount).

Things I’ve watched recently

The Death of Robin Hood. 2026. I figured I was gonna love this or hate it, and it turns out I love it. I’m fascinated with how modern films (especially A24 films) are willing to take seriously the idea that all battle is essentially horror and film it as such. The movie is basically “what if Robin Hood was just a regular ole outlaw and he’s old as fuck and not feeling great about all the murdering and such.” It wasn’t the movie I hope I’ll get to see one day, in which Robin Hood is a brutal anti-hero but still a class warrior. Instead, it was a movie I’m glad I saw, that blends pagan and christian theological concepts seamlessly and feels more true than any glossy retelling of the past ever will. And the music is incredible.

The Drama. 2026. Another A24 film, and if I’m being honest I’m sort of tired of how every gritty romance movie is about people just being terrible to each other. Though maybe I should be excited about “what if we film romance movies like they’re horror movies,” this one mostly left me uncomfortable in, well, an uncomfortable way instead of a cool way.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die. 2025. Fun weird sci-fi that makes ya think. Self-aware of being cheesy, a bit over-the-top in its message of “kids stare at their phones too much these days,” but overall a good message well told.

Wake Up Dead Man. 2025. Everyone told me I had to watch this when it came out, but I slept on it. Everyone was right. This movie is extremely My Shit. A Catholic mystery written by one real life atheist and solved by another fictional atheist, but woven through with all of the best understandings of faith that one can imagine. My only problem was that I’m faceblind as hell so one of the main plot points went right over my head until I looked it up later.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. 2025. Simply astounding. Gorier than most of what I prefer to watch, but the violence mostly felt earned and it built towards something meaningful. Also after reading a ton about the Gauls and the Celts, I find the whole “pillars of bones in an open-air ossuary” all the more compelling and historically accurate. If I were to rank the four movies in the series, I’d go, from worst to best, 28 Weeks Later (the second movie), 28 Years Later (the third movie), 28 Days Later (the first movie), and then Bone Temple, the fourth movie, as the finest in the series.

Weapons, 2025. Did you know that I didn’t watch horror movies for years? Like ten years. I lived in a van and was often sleeping by myself in the middle of nowhere, so it just didn’t do me any good to watch horror movies. But eventually, during the pandemic, a friend made me watch them with her alone in my off-grid cabin in the woods, and I realized that horror does a better job (or at least a more reliable job) than any other genre at peeling away at the world beneath this world that we can intuit but not see or touch. Weapons does a good job of that, of bringing real horror and magic (and what is magic but horror?) into a humdrum suburban environment.

But I can’t always make the world slow down, and I woke up yesterday to a text from Minneapolis. “ICE has shut down my street. They’re raiding my neighbor.”

It wasn’t long before I saw video of one of the arrests, of a man named Isaac who is accused of conspiracy to impede the efforts of law enforcement. He was led out of his house and he had his head held high and he calmly gave his name and information to the neighbors who had come out to support him.

The feds seem to want to throw the book at this man and fourteen other people. There are 276 allegations made in the 94 page indictment. (I won’t link it directly because it is hosted on a .gov website, but it is easily searchable. I used “indictment of 15 Minneapolis.”). The group of them are accused of all sorts of crimes, almost none of which involve anything that a lay person would presume to be criminal, because they’re being accused of conspiracy.

In short, (and I am not a lawyer), a conspiracy is when two or more people come together and say “we should do the following crime.” We’ve got free speech, so it’s not inherently illegal to say “what if we did crime?” But as soon as any of those people take any “overt acts” (including otherwise legal acts) in furtherance of the conspiracy, it’s criminal conspiracy and everyone is liable. If you and I were in a room and I said “we should steal candy out of vending machines,” and later you looked up blueprints of a vending machine, the state might have a conspiracy case against us. Even though talking about crime is legal and looking up information is legal.

It’s a fantastic loophole, if you’re the state, by which to prosecute otherwise constitutionally protected behavior.

So there’s this 94 page indictment with 276 numbered allegations against members of a group called DAMN (Direct Action Minnesota; I’m very critical of most protest group names but damn that’s a good one) and nearly every one of those allegations is simply a description of what’s involved in organizing protests. The government alleges that they coordinated their actions via Signal. The government alleges that they transported shields in a pickup truck. The government alleges that they used vetting processes to determine who should be trusted. The government alleges that many of them have self-identified as anarchists. The government alleges that they organized blockades at the Whipple building, the headquarters of their occupation of the Twin Cities.

Blockades. Shields. During the press conference, the state brought up the indictees’ “aggressive use of shields” without a trace of irony in its voice.

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At the very, very end of the indictment, one of the indictees (allegation number 275) is alleged to have kicked a police car and another one of the fifteen (allegation number 276) is alleged to have used a car as a dangerous weapon and caused an injury to a police officer. Most people I’ve talked to assume that final allegation is referring to a minor traffic accident with a police vehicle. It certainly wasn’t a big enough incident to appear in any news stories I could find, nor was this only allegation of injury important enough to be mentioned in the press conference.

Over and over again in the indictment, the government alleges that the indictees self-describe as anarchists. Much of this “evidence” was gathered from public talks given on a public tour that aimed to show the country how people organized in the Twin Cities. It is absolutely clear that the potential anarchist identity of some of the organizers is a large part of the case against people. The word “anarchist” appears far, far more often throughout the text than the word “antifa,” the name of the listed domestic terror group that the state desperately wants people to believe exists.

Of course, it’s not illegal to be an anarchist. It’s protected free speech.

I, for example, am an anarchist. I believe that society should be organized from the bottom up, not the top down. I believe that we can build our society on horizontal structures. The concept of the “state,” which anarchists oppose (alongside other oppressive hierarchical structures like patriarchy, racism, and capitalism), is a relatively new one in human history and anarchists are not actually opposed to organization and working together.

We’ve got a scary name, of course. It’s one that has led to a lot of confusion, because it’s so often misunderstood (as I’ve written about before). In this case, I presume the state is relying on the popular misunderstanding of anarchism. They say “these people are anarchists” because they want people to believe that the indictees are Batman villains who are out to sow chaos and destruction wherever they go.

The FBI does know what anarchism is, of course. I’ve read explainers put together by our enemies that actually understand what we’re about in broad strokes (“know your enemy” is a basic and core principle of warfare). But they won’t be including a rational explanation of who we are and what we’re about in an indictment like this.

The press conference yesterday was short and it’s honestly sort of amusing to watch. The state presents the scaaaary evidence like… people’s facebook pages that include slogans like “we must become ungovernable” or a social media banner image of the burning police precinct from 2020.

The journalists in the room were all incredibly competent. They said (I’m going to paraphrase herein) “if there was a conspiracy to commit violent acts, can you point to any violent acts they committed?” and the government simply said “read the indictment.”

The journalists said “if you’re trying to press charges against the violent criminals, then are you going to press charges against the law enforcement officers who killed Good and Pretti?” and the government said “if our investigation into those cases supports an indictment.”

One journalist directly said that it sounded like the government was accusing people of thoughtcrime. Which is fitting, because one of the allegations against one of the indictees was that the indictee wrote an article for CrimethInc. (If you want to commit thoughtcrime too, you can read CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that puts together some of the best news and analysis of world politics you’ll find anywhere.)

But maybe most importantly of all, the journalists asked basically: “Most of your previous attempts to indict people over this sort of thing have failed dramatically. Why will this be any different?”

The government responded “our previous indictments haven’t failed.”

Another journalist corrected him, that half of them have so far and more are failing all the time.

Because the government has tried to indict alleged protestors in Minnesota already, and judges are throwing out those cases. I talked with one of those former defendants yesterday while preparing to record a podcast on the issue and that person was clear that the government indicts on flimsy cases, that they’re desperate and flailing. They were clear that the judges in Minnesota are sick of the government’s lies and bad legal arguments.

The federal government is desperate to find a small group of people to pin the blame on. They’re desperate to divide and conquer, to say “these are the bad protesters, blame them.” But as much as I love the Minnesota anarchists, as much as I’m proud of their participation in the protests, the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities involved more or less the entirety of those two cities and was not limited to this or that ideological tendency. Never in my life had I seen such unity before.

I don’t know if these new indictments are going to stick. It looks like all of the indictees are getting out of jail before trial, which is a good sign, but the state does seem to be making a bigger deal out of this particular case than previous cases. We’ve got reason to be optimistic, but people still deserve and need our support and solidarity.

The state’s most powerful weapon is fear. They want to pick a few people and slap them with charges to get everyone else to stay home and to get everyone else to say “I don’t know those people and I’d never do anything like that!” They want to pick people off and isolate them.

If you think they’re going to only fuck with the anarchists, then you’ve never read a history book. The people of Minneapolis know that. That’s part of why they’ve been out in the streets in such great number. People know that fascism doesn’t only come for the most vulnerable, it comes for us all. If the state successfully picks off the “bad protestors,” they will expand that category. (They’ve already had to expand it pretty broadly if it’s including the “aggressive use of shields.”)

At the arraignment for the defendants yesterday, the state attacked supporters gathered outside the courthouse. They’re afraid. Not for their lives, but for their legitimacy. It’s hanging on by a thread.

I don’t think they’re going to successfully pick anyone off anymore. Not this time. Whether the charges stick or not, we can stand behind these defendants. The Twin Cities were the bulwark against ICE, and now these defendants are the bulwark against repression. So we’ll stand behind them.

And who knows? Maybe next week I’ll get to tell you about how much I love books, and not about yet another terrible thing happening in the world.

I had a good excuse for this: I turned my EDC (everyday carry, for those of you who don’t spend all your time reading prepper forums) backpack into a sort of a go bag. My EDC bag has some hygiene, survival, and first aid gear in it, and it tends to come with me everywhere anyway, so it’s the bag I’m most likely to have on me at any given moment. Maybe I’ll feature it and its contents soon.

So for most of the past year, I didn’t really know what I wanted out of a go bag. It wasn’t “all my camping supplies” (those live in my van) and it wasn’t “the bare minimum I want on me” (that was in my EDC backpack).

But the point of a go bag isn’t “the bag you always have on you,” it’s “the bag you grab if your house is on fire or the forest is on fire or the fascists are en route.” It’s the first bag you throw into the car if you’re in a real hurry, whether you’re off to your friends’ house, a border crossing somewhere, a refugee center, or the woods.

So I redesigned my go bag as a 72-hour sustainment bag for urban, rural, or suburban environments. It’s not a hiking bag, a camping bag, or a fighting bag. It’s just a go bag.

And I’m really happy with it.

So I’ll talk about it.

Now, first of all, this post isn’t going to be about brand recommendations, or to tell you that you need to do what I’m doing.

My bag is overkill, probably. I’ve always been a maximalist packer, even (especially?) back when I lived out of a backpack, which I did for most of my 20s. (I was a squatting, traveling activist type.)

Before I finally moved up in the world and bought a minivan to live in, I was traveling with a full sized travel pack (probably 65 liters or so), a wooden accordion case with a full-sized accordion in it, and a laptop bag. I liked having my stuff, because it was everything I owned.

Most people don’t have the same attitude towards things. As I’ve aged (and acquired a place to put my things) I’ve started to trim back some of the weight that I like to carry, but this is still a fairly maximalist list of gear.

If you don’t have a go bag, I recommend you build one. During most crises, you want to “bug in” rather than “bug out,” and shelter in place in your home. During most evacuations, you’ll have a vehicle with you. Yet the go bag is an essential component for prepping because there are times when it will be useful, but also because it’s probably the easiest way to get started. Building a go bag gets you thinking about threats and how to be prepared for those threats. It’s also fun.

Start with the basics: a backpack, some water, some food, some warm clothes, some underwear. Start adding some things: basic survival, hygiene, first aid, digital copies of documents. A flashlight. A knife. Pepper spray. A powerbank and phone charging cable. And just go from there.

There’s no point in specifically copying my list. If you want my more general thoughts on building a go bag, you can find them here. I do have the full packing list at the end though if you’re curious.

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The Bag

The bag itself is a Mystery Ranch Blitz 35. I like it. I don’t know that I like it enough to have paid that extra Mystery Ranch money, and I think most of the cheap backpacks on Amazon or whatever are perfectly fine quality. But the water resistant zippers are nice, and the big zipper down the side is nice, and it really is a well-designed and comfortable bag, so I don’t regret buying it.

The Stuff

Here’s almost everything that I keep in the bag (I somehow left a few things out of the picture).

The top pocket

KN95 masks: I keep a few of these in their packaging, which are good for pandemics as well as dusty environments.

CAT7 Tourniquet: The only part of my medical kit I keep immediately accessible is a CAT7 Tourniquet. These are generally considered the current gold standard for tourniquets for nearly every situation (excepting very small limbs, like those of a child or animal). Beware counterfeit tourniquets and don’t shop based on price.

The upper front pocket

Clip-on flashlight: This small flashlight can clip to the brim of a cap. To be honest, I prefer a headlamp, but my good headlamp lives in my EDC bag and my shitty one lives on a hook by the door and I can’t bring myself to buy a third headlamp right now.

Earplugs: There is a small metal container with earplugs inside of it. These are the slightly nicer kind (still non-electric) that maintain the frequency of sound better than foam earplugs. I got them for playing shows but they’re more reusable than foam earplugs so they live in my go bag. Earplugs are useful for sleeping in noisy environments and for being around loud equipment or gunfire. As well as going to shows.

Eyeglass Screwdriver: A tiny multi-purpose eyeglass screwdriver for opening up electronics or fixing glasses.

Small Multi-driver Set: A tiny pocket-sized multi-driver with four bits.

Whistle: A sturdy small metal whistle that can be used to signal in emergencies and to scare away agents of the state.

Pocket Prybar: It’s bad for a knife to pry with a knife, especially a folding knife, so I have a tiny EDC prybar. To be honest this probably isn’t particularly necessary, but I already have it, so fuck it.

Multitool: I love multitools with pliers. I use them all the time. I usually have one on my belt, but I keep a second multitool in my go bag in case I don’t have one on me. When I lived outside, I used this many times every day. Personally, I find Gerber perfectly reasonable quality and I’ve never bothered owning a Leatherman, but cheap knockoff brands have fallen apart on me. As an alternative, the Gerber Dime is a tiny version that works very well for many uses.

Binoculars: It’s fun to see far away things up close. There are tactical and survival reasons one might want to bring binoculars, but mostly they’re fun. You can look at birds.

Lighter: A bic lighter works very reliably in most every environment (sometimes wet and cold will make it harder to use). There’s another one in my survival kit in the main pouch, but having quicker access to a lighter is handy.

Silcock keys: These, the thing that look like metal plus signs, are wrenches designed to open and shut specialized things like the water spigots outside rest areas, or the gas mains on houses. I’ve heard conflicting reports on the quality of the cheap ones and I’ve never tested these.

All-weather notebook: There are a few brands of these notebooks, most famously Rite-in-the-rain, and they let you, well, write in the rain.

Writing tools: I keep a regular pen, a Rite-in-the-rain pen, a mechanical pencil, and a sharpie marker. For writing on things.

Pepperspray: (not pictured). I keep a flip-top pepperspray in here, which is more useful than a firearm or knife in most self-defense scenarios, because most self-defense scenarios should not be escalated to deadly force.

Folding knife: (not pictured). I keep a small folding knife in here, which is redudant with the multitool, but is generally easier to use.

Blinky light: (not pictured). A tiny red-and-white light that can either shine or blink that I can attach to the back of the pack if I’m walking on the road and need to be visible to vehicles.

The lower front pocket

Documents: In a passport wallet, kept inside a ziplock bag, I keep my passport, some cash in mixed bills, and my dog’s rabies vaccine certification.

Power supplies: In another ziplock bag, I keep a solar power bank (don’t expect a ton of power out of any solar panel, especially a portable one, but it’s better than nothing. I mostly just charge this power bank at the wall). I also keep a high-wattage power brick that plugs into an AC outlet and has both USB-A and USB-C ports. And I keep an octopus cable that goes from USB-A to USB-C, USB-Mini, and Lightning. I also keep an adapter for charging my watch (rest in peace, my missing watch. I haven’t given up hope.) I intend to add a DC 12v usb charger to this as well.

Outside the pack

Electrolytes: In the hip belt pocket, I keep a combination of Emergen-C packets and “Zipfizz,” which is caffeinated and I’ve never tried it. I don’t drink caffeine except when I’m driving long distances or in emergencies. I keep these where they are quickly accessible to add to a water bottle.

Water bottles: In the water bottle pockets, I keep one single-walled titanium water bottle, which is useful because you can boil water in it if necessary, and one vacuum-insulated water bottle that I would use for keeping liquids hot or cold. I keep gorilla tape wrapped around the bottom of the insulated water bottle. I might replace the insulated water bottle with a Smart Water bottle, which I would fill with tap water. The purpose would be to have a bottle with a regular screw top, which is useful for attaching things like a backpacking bidet or a water filter.

Hero clip: I think a regular carabiner would be just fine, but I got sold the fancy “hero clip” carabiner that is designed to let you hang your bag more easily, and so I got one. It’s what my bag is hanging from in my closet right now.

Loose in the main pouch

A contractor bag: a big heavy duty plastic bag can be used as an emergency poncho or shelter, but I mostly have it so I can throw my whole bag into it if I need to protect it from heavy rain.

A baseball cap: useful for keeping the sun out of my face and for looking like I’m a normal human person.

A long-handled spork: I swore by metal sporks when I lived outside. I kept one clipped to my belt at all times. These longer-handled ones are preferred by backpackers so that they can reach into deep cans and bags (like backpacker meal bags). I don’t actually keep any food that needs preparation in this bag, but the spork still feels worth its weight.

P-cord: I could probably get away with less p-cord than this, but I figure I would need it not just for building emergency shelters but also as a leash for my dog, so I have a bunch.

A medium-weight emergency mylar blanket: this particular one is sort of halfway between a tarp and a regular mylar emergency blanket. A cheap thin mylar emergency blanket saved my life on my 13th birthday when my tentmate left the tent open in 35 degree rain, so I swear by them. This one is a bit larger and doubles as a tarp.

An emergency bivy: This is an emergency blanket in tube form, so you can crawl into it to warm up.

A paper US map: I keep this in a ziplock bag. I think this is essential for anyone trying to get anywhere during most crises. We’re all way too reliant on our phones these days, myself included.

Lifestraw: (not pictured). These are light and cheap and can let you drink water straight from a stream in a pinch. I actually greatly prefer and trust Sawyer more as a brand and will be replacing this soon, but my sawyer is already in my camping gear and I had this lifestraw around.

Clothing

All my clothing is in gallon ziplock bags. Can you tell what my favorite color is?

Warm Clothes: When you sleep outside, you’re going to get colder than you think. I learned this my very first summer night outside without a sleeping bag. In one bag, I keep a synthetic beanie, a wool “buff” (like, a sort of wool tube that you can use as a scarf or a headband or a hat… it’s a thneed), and wool long underwear for both top and bottom.

Puffy: I keep a “packable” synthetic puffy jacket in a separate ziplock. Real down jackets are warmer and pack tighter than synthetic down, but synthetic stays warm when its wet and doesn’t suffer as much from being packed all the time, so I think it’s the clear winner for emergency use.

Rain coat: I keep a thin, hooded raincoat in yet another ziploc bag. It is good at stopping the wind and improving the insulation of the layers worn underneath it, as well as, you know, keeping rain out. I don’t personally bother with rain pants in this bag but if I lived somewhere wetter or expected to be doing by bugging out in the woods, I would consider it.

Underwear: I keep two pairs of wool socks and two pairs of wool underwear in my bag. The socks I feel strongly should be wool or at least synthetic, while material is slightly less important for the underwear. But the ability to change clothes matters a lot. Worst case scenario, you can wash your clothes in the sink or a creek and leave them attached to the outside of your bag to air out. Air and UV radiation from the sun both do a halfway decent job of rejuvinating socks. (Sometimes when I lived in a van I would literally close dirty socks into my window so that the airflow helped air them out faster.)

Bandana: (not pictured) A cotton bandanna can be soaked to keep you cool, worn around your neck to look cool, or used to pre-filter water. I wore a bandanna around my neck every day for years when I was hopping freight trains, both to have a mask to conceal my identity and to have a mask to filter out the worst of smoke and other contaminants.

Food

My goal with food is to have about three days worth of calories that I don’t need to heat or prepare in any way. It’s terrible food and I would be miserable, but not as miserable as I would be if my body was eating itself. (That said, maintaining a little extra weight really is preparedness too. Watch Alone if you don’t believe me.)

Emergency Rations: The white package that says “SOS” in this photo is 3600 calories of “emergency rations,” which are carbs and fats. I haven’t worked up the courage to eat them yet. I hear they’re “fine” and bland but not disgusting.

Protein Bars: I eat an embarrassing number of protein bars in my daily life, and so they’re a natural choice for a snack. This is about 2100 calories of protein bars, for a total of 4700 calories, which is a little less than 1600 calories a day for three days, which is not a lot but is survivable. I don’t feel any brand loyalty to these brands, they’re just what I had around. (I do eat a lot of Larry & Larry’s protein cookies, I admit). It’s important to cycle through these, as they do expire. Fortunately, I usually get snacky and raid my go bag on a regular basis.

Electrolytes: More electrolytes and caffeine powder in the food bag. The Nuun tablets are my current favorite.

For my dog

Food: (not pictured except in the main picture up top): I keep about 9 cups of my dog’s food in a drybag that I then keep in another ziplock bag to keep it from smelling up my pack. There’s a plastic togo container in there that can double as a dog bowl.

Collapsible Bowl: The black object in the lower right is a collapsible cup that I use for dog water. It’s not the most durable thing in the world but would work for a short period while I scrounge up something else.

Carabner: Rather than carry a whole dog leash, I keep pcord and a carabiner that I can attach to my dog’s harness.

Dog bags: A lot of crisis situations involve a lot of people in close quarters more than they involve roughing it in the woods, and so I keep a roll of dog bags. Extra plastic bags are useful anywhere anyhow.

Medications: My dog relies on a monthly anti-parasite drug, so I keep one pill of it. He also takes prozac daily because he’s an unemployed working dog and he would be really anxious without it, and he has an emergency as-needed trazodone prescription as well which helps a lot in situations where he would be very reactive (like, for example, a major crisis). Normally I believe that all medications need to be kept with their bottles so that a police encounter doesn’t become awkward, but until I get an extra bottle of each to keep in the bag, I’m just going to take that chance.

Peanut Butter Packets: (I’m going to add these) To help him take medications.

Treats: (I’m going to add these) Because he’s a very good boy.

Dog collar GPS: (I’m going to add this). Requires a subscription plan that I’m going to renew now that I can afford it.

Survival kit

There’s a small pouch with survival gear in the bag. It’s pretty stripped down: it’s not a bag for living in the woods, just a bag to keep me from dying if I end up there.

Zipties: These little guys are great for fixing things in a pinch. My dad is convinced that they will be at least as much the currency of the apocalypse as ammo or liquor.

Sewing kit: I keep a tiny vial with sewing needles (regular and leather) and safety pins. I’m used to sewing everything with dental floss as thread, because that was the style at the time when I came up as a crust punk, so I rely on the dental floss from my hygiene kit for that purpose.

Chemlight: AKA a glowstick. Tactical Prepper Men are obsessed with these because you use them in Cool Tactical Situations to signal to your team, but they’re also kinda fun and make camping in a bad situation feel special and magical and they’re a backup little light and signaling method, so fuck it.

Tiny Survival Guide: A tiny printout with survival information ain’t bad to have around.

Firestarting: I keep another bic lighter plus storm matches, tinder, and a little fuel tablet in here. I don’t bother with a ferro rod because I’m out of practice with those and because this isn’t a camping bag.

Hand and toe warmers: I love these things. I used them when I was younger and camped in the snow more often, and then this winter when I went to Minneapolis to cover the anti-ICE protests, they probably saved my toes when it was like -15 degrees or whatever.

Compass: Look, I’m not the world’s best overland navigator, but don’t let that stop you from keeping a compass around. Sometimes what matters is to just know you’re going in a consistent direction, rather than doing neat tricks with topo maps or whatever. If you’re lost, pick a direction and stick to it (and then follow streams).

Signal mirror: For reflecting light to signal to someone, or just to do your hygiene things in the morning.

Fresnel lens: I’m more likely to use this to read the tiny print in the survival guide or to search for splinters than I am to use this to start a fire, but it does all those things and weighs basically nothing.

P38 can opener: This tiny piece of steel can open cans. It’s amazing. I relied on these and my spork to keep me fed when I hitchhiked around. These guys have fed me so many cans of chili.

Credit card multitool: I tend to hate all-in-one survival gadgets but I like these alright. They do lots of things badly but they still do lots of things. Mostly I’ve used it as an emergency knife or screwdriver. Like, one time I replaced my license plate using this thing.

Emergency Fishing Kit: I don’t like the taste of fish and never got good at fishing no matter how many times I tried as a kid and I don’t really eat animals so I’ll probably never use this but maybe someone else will, or maybe I’ll be hungry enough to give it a try.

Water purification tablets: These can be used to chemically treat water to make it safe to drink. Frustratingly, the directions and ratios don’t come on the packets themselves, so I keep part of the package with them too.

Hygiene kit

You are more likely to use your hygiene kit than your survival kit. It’s not as sexy but it’s probably more important. It’s also somewhat essential for your health. This is still a very stripped down kit. I would consider adding nicer wet wipes, a nicer hairbrush, and maybe a tiny handtowel, but my bag is pretty full.

Dental floss: For flossing your teeth and for sewing. I used to keep little flossy sticks in my bags, but they would somehow get everywhere and were annoying so I didn’t really use them.

Toothbrush and paste: You should brush your teeth, for your own sake and for the sake of the people around you.

Deodorant: I’ll be honest, I don’t always wear deodorant in my daily life. But I always wear deodorant in situations where I’m going to be crammed into tight spaces with other people, like on the bus or an airplane. Or, you know, in most emergency situations. I prefer a hippie deodorant but this is the travel sized one I had lying around.

Soap strips: The little yellow container has tiny strips of paper embedded with soap, which you can use to wash your hands, which is essential. (Hand sanitizer is actually not nearly as good and does nothing to prevent transmission of diseases that move from the fecal-oral route. It has its purposes, and might be worth including in a kit, I just didn’t have any).

Sleep mask: As I get older, I get worse at sleeping in crowded situations. A sleep mask and earplugs help a lot. If I had room, I’d throw a whole travel neck pillow in here.

Disposable razor and shaving cream: Maybe you don’t need to shave in an emergency, but some of us bitches are trans and don’t want to have a beard and aren’t done with laser yet.

Folding hairbrush and hair ties: I keep my hair in braids most of the time, but I still have to brush my hair and tie it up.

Famotidine: Keep whatever medications you rely on. I use famotidine for heartburn.

Compressed towel: The tiny white disc is a wet-wipe without the wet. Just add water.

Lube and condoms: I don’t have some super cool secret survival reason for these. They’re for having sex comfortably and safer.

Tampons: Once again, no super cool secret survival reason. They’re not actually good for stopping massive bleeding. These are for people around me who need them for menstruation.

Chapstick: I rarely use chapstick but people around me often do, and a chapstick with SPF in it is important if you have to traverse over snow. I recently moved from the cylindrical solid kind to the kind you squeeze out, because it likely holds up better in the heat.

Wetwipes: Just a few little moist towelettes. Might be worth getting some of the wetwipes designed for the outdoors, though I can’t really bring myself to pack something called “dude wipes.” Not because I’m a girl, but because the fragility of masculinity is hilarious.

Toilet kit: In a separate ziplock bag, I keep some toilet paper, a backpacking trowel, a backpacking bidet, and “travel johns.” If you shit outside and aren’t going to pack it out yourself (like in a dog bag), then for the love of all that is holy you need to dig a hole first and bury your shit. This is essential for basic sanitation. That’s what the trowel is for. The backpacking bidet attaches to a water bottle and lets you clean yourself off better and use less toilet paper. The “travel johns” are bags full of desiccant that you can piss into, like single-use piss jars that are reasonably sanitary and work for various kinds of genitalia. You can’t always piss outside and you can’t always find a bathroom.

Medical kit

My medical kit is a combination of a “booboo kit” (aka daily medicines and supplies for minor injuries) and an IFAK (a kit for stopping major bleeding). I keep it in its own pouch in the top of the bag, and would attach it to the outside of the bag if I thought I was likely to need it.

It’s worth it for everyone (even squeamish people like me) to take a Stop the Bleed class to learn how to deal with traumatic wounds in the field, plus if you’re really into it, a Care Under Fire class to learn how to respond during an active gunfight.

Gauze: There are a bunch of different kinds of gauze in here, for dealing with bleeding. Regular rolled gauze, plus compressed gauze, plus “chito gauze” that is embedded with a chemical to stop bleeding.

Nasal airway: The green tube in the top row. These should only be administered by people with proper training and to be frank it’s been too many years since I last took a class on using them. These go into the patient’s nose to get air past impediments. Don’t add this if you haven’t taken a class unless you expect to be around trained medics.

Antiseptic wipes: For sterilizing things, and arguably for sterilizing wounds (I’m not writing a medical blog post here. There’s a lot of contentious uses for various things.)

Petroleum jelly: Useful for firestarting and some people like them for wound care (and other people say you shouldn’t use it for wound care. See above.)

Chest seals: If someone gets shot in the chest, their lungs will likely deflate and they will be unable to breath unless you seal up their chest cavity.

Dental first aid kit: I relied on one of these once when I had a chunk of my tooth missing and not enough money for emergency dental care.

OTC medications: I got lazy this time and bought a little pack that includes a bunch of different medications rather than assembling my own kit. I recommend blister pack or individually labeled doses of all drugs, including over the counter ones. Consider: Aspirin, Ibuprofen, Acetaminophen, (all pain relievers), loperamide (to stop diarrhea), diphenhydramine (to stop inflammation and itching), and whatever else you rely on.

Irrigation syringe: This is used for spraying water deep into wounds to clean them out and is great and everyone should have one.

Medical tape: For keeping gauze on.

Nitrile gloves: I like these pairs that come in their own little packages.

Leukotape: Hikers seem to swear by this stuff as a combination medical tape and blister prevention. I haven’t used it much yet myself. This roll is probably too big.

Triple antibiotic: For keeping minor wounds from becoming major problems.

Iodine pills: These are for nuclear disasters, to flood your thyroid with iodine so you’re less likely to get cancer. They’re actually contraindicated for people over 40, but I still have friends.

Medical shears: Because you need to remove clothing to treat wounds.

Ace bandage: For wrapping sprains.

Bandaids: For minor wounds.

Butterfly bandages: For keeping larger wounds shut.

Tweezers: For removing ticks and splinters and probably other things.

Superglue: (not pictured). Another contentious treatment, used to close wounds.

Digital Stuff

Faraday bag: This blocks wifi and cell signals and all of that. I suppose it helps your electronics survive an EMP, but to be honest I don’t know that I believe EMPs are a particular realistic threat. But a faraday bag keeps people from sniffing that there’s electronics around, which is a way you could be found if you are hiding. This bag is large enough to hold not just my backup phone but also my main phone, and also my watch if I ever find that damn thing.

Backup phone: My backup phone uses a pay-per-minute plan from a different carrier than my main phone, so I’m more likely to still have a phone if one provider goes down. I pay $3/mo to maintain the phone line. You can also get a pay-as-you-go data-only plan that you don’t have to pay to maintain, but I wanted phone calls and texting. The phone itself is devoid of any personal information, but I have crammed its storage full of off-grid apps. Most importantly, there’s Kiwix, which is free and lets you download data repositories (like all of wikipedia, plus plenty of preparedness guides), and there’s CoMaps, which is also free and lets you download maps of everywhere and then use the GPS functionality of your phone.

USB sticks: I keep two USB sticks. One is encrypted and contains personal documents such as copies of my IDs, credit cards, insurance cards, vehicle registrations, and things like that. The other is a library of books, audiobooks, and movies. All public domain, of course. Both USB sticks are the kind that have both USB-C and USB-A ports.

Nintendo Switch: Finally, one of the most important and overlooked things to add to any bugout bag… a video game console. I lived offgrid in 2020 and had very limited electricity and buying this thing did wonders for my mental health after a long day of working on my cabin. I have some games installed and physical cartridges of others. A Steam Deck is burlier and also cooler because it isn’t as tied into Nintendo’s ecosystem, but it’s heavier and uses more power so it’s not going into my bag. Whatever else is going on in the world, at least I can disappear into Skyrim, you know?

Survival radio: (I’m going to add this maybe). They make tiny survival radios but I haven’t found one I like very much yet.

GMRS radios or ham radio: (I might add this). GMRS radios are like walkie-talkies but a bit better. You don’t have to take a test to get your license, and you don’t have to show a license to buy them. I currently keep mine (with my license) in my vehicle, but I might get another pair for my pack. Ham radios are much more powerful and much more complicated to use and if I ever get better at it or get my license I’ll maybe keep one here.

Notably Absent

Firearms: I don’t keep firearms in my bag and neither should you, unless you store your bag inside some kind of vault. All firearms should be locked up when they are not on your person. This is a basic moral requirement. If you keep firearms to keep people you love safe, then it behooves you to make sure that they actually are keeping people safe by locking them up. If I were to grab this bag in a situation in which I was also grabbing a firearm, I would throw a few extra magazines into the bag.

Stove: Some people might want a way to cook in their go bag, but I don’t bother. I almost never actually cooked anything out of my bag when I lived out of a backpack. I mostly ate cold cans of chili and bread with peanut butter and things like that. If this were a camping bag, I might keep a tiny rocket stove or backpacker’s stove, and I keep a camp stove in my vehicle.

Rousing Conclusion

And that’s it. That’s my bag. I’ll probably add more laminated documents, like emergency contacts and such, but this is what I’ve got. It’s not light, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s not for everyday carry.

Now to systematize my EDC bag. And my hiking bag. And what’s my vehicle. And what’s in my basement.

The Packing List

Clothes

• 2 pairs wool socks

• 2 pairs wool underwear

• thermal top

• thermal bottoms

• beanie

• puffy

• rain coat

• wool buff

• bandana

• baseball cap

Light

• flashlight

• blinky light for walking

• headlamp

Shelter

• Emergency bivy

• Medium-weight rescue blanket

• Cordage

Food

• Survival rations (3600 cal)

• Protein bars (2000 cal)

• Caffeine

• Electrolytes

Water

• Titanium bottle

• Insulated steel bottle with gorilla tape

• Water filter

• Chemical treatment pills

• Portable water bladder

Dog Care

• Trazadone

• Prozac

• Simparico Trio

• 3 days dog food with tupperware bowl

• Collapsible bowl

• Poop bags

• Peanut butter packet

• Dog treats

• Dog GPS and cable

Hygiene

• Sleep mask

• earplugs

• toothbrush

• toothpaste

• deodorant

• floss

• disposable razor

• nail clippers

• tweezers

• soap strips

• tampons

• lube

• condoms

• hair ties

• wet wipes

• travel john

• compressed towel

• chapstick

• hairbrush

• backpacking bidet

• Toilet paper

• shaving cream packets

Tools

• Sewing kit (needles and safety pins, use floss as thread)

• Multitool

• Eyeglass screwdriver

• Small screwdriver

• long-handled spork

• 8way silcock

• carabiner / gear hanger

• ultralight trowel

• prybar

• folding knife

Survival

• whistle

• contractor bag

• binoculars

• rite in rain notebook

• pens

• marker

• pencil

• compass

• hand warmers

• toe warmers

• signal mirror

• p38 can opener

• 2x butane lighters

• survival multitool credit card

• chemlight

• storm matches

• fire starter block

• tinder

• tiny survival guide

• fresnel lens

• zip ties

• fishing kit

Medical

• gloves

• shears

• leukotape

• ACE bandage

• 2x gauze rolls

• dental kit

• irrigation syringe

• super glue

• bandaids

• butterfly bandages

• petroleum jelly

• sterile prep pads

• medical tape

• iosat

• trauma dressing

• chito gauze

• compressed gauze

• nasal airway

• chest seals

• triple antibiotic

• acetiminophen

• aspirin

• ibuprofen

• loperamide

• famotodine

• cat9 tourniquet

• diphenhydramine

Electronics

• solar battery bank

• octopus cable

• survival radio / scanner

• GMRS or ham radio

• pay per minute phone

• faraday bag

• nintendo switch

Misc

• N95 masks

• $500 or $1000 or whatever

Documentation

• passport

• rabies info

• paper map of USA

• laminated emergency contact card

• laminated driving (backroads) and walking directions from home to loved ones and back

• encrypted USB A and C drive with personal docs

  • passport

  • SSN card

  • birth cerfiticate

  • vehicle title

  • mortgage or rental info

  • home insurance info

  • car insurance info

  • drivers license

  • credit cards

  • medical insurance card

  • union card

• unencrypted USB A and C drive with books etc

  • survival guides

  • medical guides

  • movies

  • tv

  • audiobooks

  • ebooks

And I’ve been telling people to get prepared for years now, but it feels more urgent than ever before right now. The war is dragging on, and strategic reserves of oil are getting low, and there’s a lag between supply disruption to manufacturers and farmers and the impact on prices and availability at stores. It’s always best to get things before there is a run on them. If I have one specific piece of advice, it’s that if your car is due for an oil change get it now, and it doesn’t hurt to have an oil change worth of oil on hand. Motor oil is likely to experience shortages before fuel itself.

Some of my other posts about preparedness (that aren’t paywalled like this one, since this one is more just personal musings:

• Go bags

• Revolution as preparedness

• Hurricane relief in Asheville

• Storing food

• Storing water

• Intro to preparedness

• Building resilient communities

• Home preparedness

• Why be prepared

I Don’t Have to be Organized to be Prepared

There’s this crow that lives nearby that is convinced that 6am is a really good time to scream and sing and yell, but I am convinced that 6am is a really good time to be asleep. I’m also convinced that it’s a good idea to sleep with my windows open, so the crow tends to win that particular battle of wills and he certainly did this morning.

Rintrah doesn’t mind me waking up early, because he wants to go out and pee and to patrol to make sure nothing nefarious and skunk-shaped has made its way into our yard overnight. But despite thousands of years of breeding that has built him for specifically that purpose, I steal his glory most mornings and lock him inside while I go out and check the yard first. Because de-skunking a dog makes us both miserable.

I don’t have a good sense of smell. I can mostly only smell strong things, and scent is an interesting sense because the things that smell strong tend to smell bad. So most of what I can smell is bad. Cat piss. Rot. Gasoline. Skunks.

Rintrah still smells a bit like skunk from the last time he escorted a black and white creature from the yard, despite how much baking soda I’ve rubbed into his fur and washed out with soap. I don’t mind the smell, if I’m being honest. He smells like old weed a little, and I don’t smoke but that doesn’t mean I don’t like the smell of old weed.

So the crow woke me up this morning, and Rintrah went out and came back, and I dutifully typed out a whole memoir piece about the first time I got a pair of lockpicks, and then I promptly fell asleep again.

And in that piece, I talk about how I listen to my dreams, how I let the literal dreams I have when I’m asleep tell me how to behave when I’m awake. And when I fell back to sleep, I didn’t dream about picking locks. I dreamt about stairways and lists, about the ill-ease that’s settled over me lately, about trying and failing to solve tasks while worrying about my loved ones. Maybe I’ll post about lockpicking sometime soon. It was a story where I thought I was going to be the hero, valiantly picking locks to save parties and shows as a young squatter, but it was really a story without heroes, and a story in which most of the characters went on to die young.

And it’s not the story I want to tell today.

There’s been a certain aimlessness to my days lately, and I’ve decided in proper anarchist (and author) form to blame that on the zeitgeist instead of on my neurotype or decisions I’ve made.

My thoughts have been scattered lately. My days are broken up into an unrelated series of tasks—paint the closet, go to meetings, research and write for my show, lift heavy barbells in various configurations, research preparedness, try not to spiral about the state of the world.

I’m doing most of these things badly, because I’m distracted and unfocused. I got spoiled by a few rainy weeks and fell off watering my garden for a week and half my starts are dead. Vegetables are going bad in my fridge while I subsist off of protein bars and frozen food. With my podcast writing, I’m rapidly approaching the “all the work while crying” line on the chart.

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So I think I’m going to write a series of vignettes about collapse. I don’t know if I’m going to weave this into some post-apocalyptic novel, or turn them into zines, or run this as some kind of serial here in my newsletter, but we’ll see.

I’ve always been interested in writing didactic fiction. It’s out of vogue to just say “this story is supposed to teach you something,” but some of my favorite fiction has been pretty transparent in its aims to do just that. I grew up reading a lot of Heinlein and Le Guin, two masters of didactic fiction, though they go about it in essentially opposite ways and have more or less opposite political positions (I won’t defend Heinlein’s politics, but I will admit I read a lot of his books as a kid). In Starship Troopers, Heinlein just straight up has entire chapters that are philosophy lessons in the essentially fascistic military academy the protagonist attends. Le Guin builds novel-length, transparent metaphors, books with ideas like “what if gender was fluid” and “what if anarchy but on the moon.”

Cory Doctorow, another favorite author of mine, sometimes in his books he just has long asides that say “and this is how you use encryption” or “this is how capitalism works.”

Some of my books are more didactic than others, but I suspect this “how to survive the apocalypse” series will be among my most transparently didactic work. Hope you forgive me, hope you enjoy it. Hope you never have to strap dolls onto your armor and raise a pastel flag and go to war against cannibal Nazis in a disintegrating Rust Belt city.

I’ll be reading an audio version of this on Sunday on Cool Zone Media Book Club.

The End, Like Sand; or: How I Joined the Muppet Babies in the War Against the Cannibal Nazis From the Suburbs

This piece was written by our beloved friend and comrade Christiano “Mud” Alves who was martyred during the assault on the Butcher Shop by shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade. That day’s battle was lost, but the Muppet Babies prevailed against that location eight days later, saving uncountable lives. May Mud live eternal in our hearts.

The collapse was slow until it was fast. Of course it was. We’ve all read Parable of the Sower (by Butler, not the one in the bible. I think most people who say they’ve read the bible are lying). We all knew it was going to be a slow collapse. We’ve all read that tweet, that famous one. Even if you came of age after Twitter became X and so you never had Twitter, you’ve read the tweet by @perthshiremags. The one that goes: “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.”

Well it turns out, to no one’s surprise, that this is true about pretty much every type of collapse, not just climate collapse. One more quote for you, this one intentionally rewritten. William Gibson once wrote “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” My corollary is that for years, we’ve known that “the apocalypse is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Which means I can’t tell you the specific day that “society collapsed” because it depends on where you’re looking. Syria? Iran? India? Or do we mean suburban America? I feel like we always mean suburban America when we’re talking about the collapse, even though I was born and bred well inside the limits of my Rust Belt city and the only thing I’ve ever gone into the suburbs for was cheap food at Trader Joe’s (RIP) or more recently in sorties against the cannibal Nazis.

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When the apocalypse came to America, it came in fits and starts and it’s hard to say what kicked it off. Did it start with the 2024 election? That’s where most people put the beginning of the end. But we’d been ignoring climate change for decades or a century or some shit at that point.

Hell, the first apocalypse that happened where I live happened hundreds of years ago, to the Erie people, and I’ll tell you that some of the first dominoes that led us to today were tipped over when the Haudenosaunee were conquered by a bunch of Protestants from England. And you know what? The Haudenosaunee people are still around. The English bastards (including a couple of the less savory among my ancestors, to be real) didn’t manage to kill them all.

There’s that other quote, this one from someone who survived the collapse of the USSR, that I hope will apply to us: “most people survive the end of their way of life.” If most of us survive the current collapse though, it’s going to be by a generous reading of the word “most.” I made it through the first thirty-six years of my life having only seen three dead bodies that weren’t already in coffins, and in the past year I’ve seen a few hundred and made two of my own.

Okay one more quote for you. I must miss the old internet, because I still think in memes and screenshots. This one I can’t find you the source for, but it basically boils down to “if it’s the apocalypse, why do I still have to go to work and pay rent?”

And this quote is particularly important, because if you want to know when the apocalypse started, well, it started for most people when they were laid off and evicted. The apocalypse looks more like grains of sand dropping through an hourglass (we’re the grains of sand, in case my metaphor was too subtle). People dropped one by one, ten by ten, through the cracks of society.

When did my apocalypse start?

I wasn’t the first grain of sand to drop and I wasn’t the last. I guess my apocalypse started last spring when some private security showed up to evict our whole apartment building. Our faceless corporate landlord, the bank, was clinging desperately to some semblance of normalcy and thought words like “rent” and “lease” and “litigation” still held power, and they had convinced some mercenaries with rifles to try to enforce those dead words.

Which means that around eight months ago, some guys tried to rip me and my cats and our neighbors out of our building even though society was pretty solidly collapsing and almost none of us had work. The cell phones still had service back then, most of the time, but half the apps were either dead or location-locked for the gated communities, and I hadn’t been on Instagram for almost a year already. Maybe a more interesting metric by which to measure the apocalypse isn’t “do I have to work and pay rent” but “am I still addicted to social media or has that been yanked out from under me?”

When the mercenaries came, almost none of us knew what to do, because we didn’t really know one another too well in that building. We were mostly Millennial and Gen-Z, and our communities were online or were built out of friends scattered across the city who shared our niche subcultural interests. I mostly hung out with other bartenders from my job (back when I had it) plus a few of the people I went birding with. I didn’t know most of my actual, direct neighbors.

I didn’t want to be evicted. I’ve got three cats and all of them used to be alley cats, and frankly I used to be an alley cat too for a little while as a teenager, and none of the four of us were looking forward to sleeping outside again, and food was getting spare enough that people weren’t throwing much out, so I wouldn’t be able to live off of dumpstered bagels again even if I wanted to. I figured this eviction might be the end of me.

Until about thirty Muppet Babies marched up the street. That’s what they called themselves. Bunch of weirdos with AR-15s and armor and half of them were in pastels and half of them wore all black and they had a bunch of flags. Too many flags. Just an altogether inappropriate flag-to-marcher ratio. You should have like one flag per ten people, tops. Half these motherfuckers were carrying flags. There was a pride flag and some other kind of pride flag and a Palestinian flag and a pirate flag and an anarcho-syndicalist flag, but most of the flags were those cringey boomer yard flags. You know those ones that you can buy at Walmart (or loot from Walmart, these days) that just say like “Springtime” or “Snow Day” or have an illustration of a pumpkin or whatever? Most of the flags were those kind of flags.

And probably the smallest person in the crowd, a short king (who I have learned since does not like being called a king because he’d cut his teeth in those No Kings protests that started getting spicy once it was clear fair elections were a thing of the past, so “no kings” was practically his identity, but also he was a short king)... that guy was right in front with a megaphone and he shouted out “you want us to clear out this rabble?” but he was talking to us, not the mercenaries the bank had hired. And my neighbor Yousef, like the only person in the building whose name I knew because we used to date but that was years ago and by that point we were “friends” but in quotes because we didn’t actually hang out, we just said hi awkwardly in the hall, he was out on his tiny balcony and he cupped his hands over his mouth and said “yes please!”

The mercenaries, well, they were probably just a bunch of guys who didn’t want to fall like sand through that same hourglass everyone else was falling through, so they’d taken jobs with one of the only institutions that still believed in business as usual and paid enough money to support yourself. But they weren’t dumb. They’d shown up ready to push other people, like sand, down through the hourglass. They hadn’t shown up ready to deal with a couple dozen queers and anarchists and pirates who’d named themselves after an ancient children’s cartoon and armed themselves with rifles, so they fucked off without a fight.

Cops were still a thing at that point, they hadn’t just given up and admitted they were just another gang, but they’d retreated to the downtown core and the wealthier suburbs. They weren’t coming. If the cops had been available to run tenets out of buildings, the bank would’ve sent them first. Mercenaries are expensive. Capital will always trying to leverage the state for free services before they rely on hiring someone themselves. Just like how the state always relied on nonprofits to fill in the gaps for social services that should have been provided for by tax money. I used to work for nonprofits and I’m still a little bit bitter.

Since the cops weren’t coming, we knew we were safe, at least for awhile, and that’s when my apocalypse started, and I got to keep living in that apartment till it caught a mortar round over the summer. All my cats were okay. Wish I could say the same about all my neighbors.

But on the day that my apocalypse started, not a single shot was fired, not a single person was killed. My apartment was saved by the Muppet Babies, and now I’m a Muppet Baby too, and I don’t know if we’re a gang or not. We call ourselves a “MASS,” a Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society. We’re honestly sort of one of those “warlord groups” all those apocalypse movies warned us about, though we don’t do a lot of roving. And we make our decisions democratically and anyone can leave at any time, which is a detail I haven’t seen included in any of those movies. If we’re a gang, we’re a nice gang. Or a mostly nice gang. I’ve been in too many gunfights now to think I can claim a pure moral high ground.

Actually, two of those guys who’d shown up to evict us, two brothers named Hammer and Henry, they’re with us now too. We don’t pay anyone anything, but we also don’t charge anything. We just take care of each other. Like a family. Like a community. Like a cult. Or a solidarity society.

We’ve taken to strapping dolls to our armor when we go into battle, though, which is honestly kind of culty, or warlord-gang-ish. But we don’t have a warlord, and we don’t have a charismatic leader, and look yeah most of the people under the age of 40 among us are polyamorous, but we’re not a cult.

I feel like a lot of people’s accusations of us being a cult are already answered by the “we’re not a cult” flag that Tracy hung up outside our warehouse recently. I appreciate my generation’s commitment to internet humor even though we don’t have the internet anymore.

Most of the founders of the Muppet Babies are dead now, despite the group being only a year old. Only Sasha is left, and if I’m being honest, Sasha had a pretty major break with consensus reality about half a year ago and they spend most of their time converting the second floor of the Muppet Theater (the warehouse most of us live in) into a dollhouse village with an elaborate public transit system built out of model trains that we’ve scavenged from garages and basements across the city. The trains always run on time in Makhnovia, the village Sasha is building, and there’s a whiteboard with the train schedule right by the stairs. If you try to make a joke about Mussolini and the trains running on time, Sasha will lecture you for about thirty minutes about the anarcho-syndicalist unions in pre-fascist Italy who got the trains running on time, a punctuality inherited by the fascist dictator. I don’t know if that’s true or not, because the answer isn’t on our Wikipedia backup.

Sasha is kind of a seer, now. That’s what they call themself. They’re at every meeting but they never directly express any particular opinion. They just offer us stories out of history or out of their imagination, and those stories are occasionally disruptive to the meeting process and are occasionally remarkably insightful. Organizing with disparate people means accommodating the disparate ways that people are going to participate. And I love Sasha’s stories.

Sasha used to be an organizer. They’ve done it all: political campaigns, non-profit work, direct action environmentalism. They helped stop a bunch of data centers through good old-fashioned aboveboard, legal grassroots organizing, and they were a person of interest in the federal government’s investigation into that string of data center fires that picked up once the feds stepped in to overrule local prohibitions on their construction. You might not remember that particular string of arsons, because once-in-a-lifetime events were happening every week during the last ten years or so before collapse, but those warehouse fires happened around the same time as that National Guard mutiny that wound up splintering everything into State Guards, which you probably do remember.

Sasha used to be an organizer and they were good at it, and they helped start the Muppet Babies, though they’d argued against the name. They’d wanted to call it the Rust Belt Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society, which they wanted to shorten to RB-MASS because organizers are obsessed with acronyms, and Sasha figured every region could set up its own MASS built on the same model.

But Vivian and Hatchet and Oak and the rest of the founders were insistent that there shouldn’t be buzzwords and there shouldn’t be acronyms and instead they should pick something so ridiculous that no one would ever accuse them of taking themselves too seriously, and Sasha went along with it and about ten of them started the Muppet Babies. And it was, you know, a Mutual Aid and Solidarity Society. Because buzzwords or no, that was what the group was designed to be. Occasionally, travelers come through town and tell us about other MASS groups, most of which also eschew the acronym and have absurd names for themselves, and hopefully sometime soon we’ll get a much larger federation put together with all the MASSes around North America so we can really start getting shit done. And knowing us, we’ll wind up called like, Rugrat Nation or something. God forbid we just become the Federated Mutual Aid and Solidarity Societies.

Anyway, the Muppet Babies, the founders knew that society was collapsing, and fast. They were a mix of organizers and preppers and community defense practitioners, and they figured their skills were going to be in demand soon, and they’d been preaching community-focused preparedness for awhile.

I’ve actually got their old meeting notes, which I’m supposed to use to cobble together a “how to build a MASS” pamphlet now that we’ve gotten some old letterpresses running off of a waterwheel in the river. I used to write grants for nonprofits, so somehow that qualifies me to write a “how to build the new world in the shell of the old” instruction manual. It seemed like an overwhelming task, but Sasha suggested that when work is too serious, too insurmountable, just treat it like playtime instead of work, and maybe I could write the whole thing out in some kind of narrative form first.

Maybe that’s why he’s building a village out of dollhouses. When the work is insurmountable, turn to play.

If you’re reading this version of the story, though, then something has gone terribly wrong and someone has decided to publish my narrative instead of my finished, polished, nonfiction essay that will magically teach everyone how to build a new and better world. Maybe I never finished that essay. Maybe I didn’t live to see that better world. Maybe this is my main written contribution to that effort. Thoughts of death will never be far from my mind in times like these.

The basic idea that the first Muppet Babies came up with was a return to an older era of mutual aid organizations. Anarchist workers in Europe used to build mutual aid societies that you actually have to be a member of to take advantage of fully. Some of the first Muppet Babies, they were preppers with deep stashes of all the classic stuff: dried and freeze-dried food, guns and ammo, gas masks, medical supplies, armor, seeds, radios, solar panels. Oak straight up had a bunker under her house in the sticks, though we lost contact with her months ago now and she’s presumed dead—which is why bunkers were never the best plan for most apocalyptic scenarios. Not to victim-blame. I hope we’ll clear out the Proudest Boys who’ve been organizing in her area and find her safe and sound in her damn bunker.

But yeah, the founders, they had all this stuff, and they’d been organizing together for a few years, putting on preparedness workshops and distributing supplies and trying to build connections between various groups of people. When they sat down at one of their meetings and realized that the end was nigh, they were like “alright, what’s our plan when shit hits the fan? Do we just set up on the street and give away our stuff? Do we hole up and defend what’s ours? What do we do?”

What they decided was that most of what they had, they would keep within their group, but the group itself would be joinable by anyone and democratically controlled by all members. If someone was hungry, they could become a Muppet Baby and eat as well or as badly as everyone else and be part of the decisionmaking. But they had to commit to participation in the collective wellbeing in whatever capacity they had.

And that’s a MASS. How am I supposed to write a whole pamphlet about an idea that I can get across in three sentences?

To make sure that rapid expansion wouldn’t fundamentally change the nature of the group, they agreed to what they called the Accord, which were immutable agreements at the core of the group’s bylaws. Bylaws can be amended or removed or added to, but the Accord is eternal. If the group ever wants to change the Accord, they would simply have to disband the group and become a different group.

The Accord is simple:

One: Our group operates under democratic procedures in which all members have an equal say, regardless of seniority, popularity, or productive capacity.

Two: Our group will not exclude members on the basis of ethnicity, race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, documentation status, prior incarceration, level of ability or disability, or productive capacity. This list is non-exhaustive and is to be understood in the spirit of inclusion rather than exclusion.

Three: Our group provides to its members according to their needs and each member will endeavor to provide for the group according to their ability. Members still have a right to maintain personal property such as (but not limited to) a residence, weapons, media, and small-scale supply stashes.

Four: Membership in the group is voluntary.

Five: Our group prefers to build more bridges than it burns; our group prefers to seek reconciliation whenever possible; our group does not perceive people as disposable; nor is our group a pacifist organization.

There are all sorts of bylaws, and they change month to month, because we meet about them all the time to discuss what is working and what isn’t working, and because the three things that revolutions are built on are meetings, shit work, and terrifying action, in descending order of time commitment. The bylaws discuss things like:

How to become a member (currently there’s a one-month provisional membership).

How to remove members (currently a three-quarters majority vote, but we’re discussing making it harder to remove members as we expand and become a larger portion of society).

How decisions are made (currently by simple majority for low-impact matters, three-quarters majority for high-impact matters, and the empowerment of temporary, recallable, accountable positions of authority for immediate crises and military situations).

How we are structured (we are currently organized into three wings: administrative, productive, and strategic, with individual working groups inside those wings).

How we interact with other groups (full cooperation with all groups that are democratic, respect diversity, and respect political pluralism; limited cooperation with groups that respect diversity and political pluralism; situational cooperation against common enemies with any group that is not tyrannical or otherwise monstrous [look, it’s the apocalypse, and there are people out there doing some pretty wild shit]).

Meeting structure (I’m really not going to bore you with this. Think Occupy-era meeting culture but with more emphasis on autonomy for both individuals and for working groups).

How we distribute food (equally) and how we distribute weapons (selectively, through a war council, although individuals often possess and maintain their own weapons).

Conflict resolution (our most contentious bylaws, which we will probably never truly perfect).

We’ve grown a lot since the Muppet Babies marched on my apartment building and saved me from becoming another grain of sand. But we’ve lost a lot of people too. Our “let’s take care of each other and treat each other as equals and make decisions together” thing wasn’t too popular with some of the other factions in the city, especially the cannibal Nazis from the suburbs.

Those Nazis call themselves the Survivors, and they’re a sort of fascistic oligarchy with pretensions of meritocracy. Most of their leaders are former cops (to be fair, there are three ex-cops in our ranks as well, which was a contentious decision, but none of our ex-cops are active Nazis). The Survivors call their teachings “the harsh truth” and believe the new world will be built of the true survivors, the strongest of the strong. The fascism came first, the cannibalism came later.

Sasha likes to say “we would have added ‘no eating people’ to the Accord if we knew then what we know now, but that’s the kind of thing you’d like to imagine goes unspoken.”

The Survivors rule through fear. We co-rule ourselves through love and respect. We’re winning. All it takes to defeat evil in this world are love, respect, and plenty of 5.56x45mm ammunition.

I don’t like to call them the Survivors, because they aren’t going to survive, not if we have anything to say on the matter. I like to call them the Cannibal Nazis From the Suburbs, because it’s more accurate, and because when I call them that I get to feel like I’m living in a bad 80s movie.

Despite that war, or maybe because of it, since it spurs us to build bridges with other communities in our region, we’re growing. Fast. I think soon enough we’re going to break apart, but intentionally, into local councils.

Sasha keeps calling the proposed councils the “Soviets,” but I think he’s joking, because I read a book about Makhnovia, which he named his dollhouse town after, and that was a country of anarchists who fought tooth and nail against the Bolsheviks and the founding of the USSR. Though “soviet” just means “council,” basically, it turns out. We’re going to set up councils and we’re not going to call them soviets. The councils will be formed by individual apartment buildings and by city blocks and by working groups and by schools and by workplaces (we’ve taken over a few factories already) and those councils are going to make their own local decisions, then come together in a bottom-up federation to discuss the bigger topics like defense and like food distribution.

Which means we probably won’t be called the Muppet Babies much longer. Most of the new members don’t like that name anyway. I think a core of us are going to hold onto the moniker, but for a unit in the territorial defense. We need that territorial defense. It’s the apocalypse. People are dying. We’re trying to build this wild, desperate utopia, but at the current rate of disease and famine and disaster and conflict, most of us won’t live to be old.

And I go into battle these days, something I never would have thought I would do, but it feels oddly good to strap dolls to my plate carrier and fly a pastel flag with the Easter Bunny on it and sing “Muppet Babies, we’ll make our dreams come true / Muppet Babies, we’ll do the same for you” as I go to war against the cannibal Nazis who are pouring in from the suburbs.

I maintain a list of recommended books over at the worker-owned, queer-owned bookstore Firestorm, and I do get a kickback from any books you buy from my referrals, but you also get 10% off and help support a bookstore that is also a critical piece of movement infrastructure.

This particular piece is about AI, and I’ll go ahead and recommend the podcast Better Offline, by Ed Zitron, my colleague at Cool Zone Media, who talks about the economic issues of AI at great length and with great enthusiasm.

AI Doesn’t Work and We All Know it Doesn’t Work

Last week, a bunch of college graduates, walking across the stage to get their diplomas, didn’t have their names called. Because the university had outsourced the task of reading their names out to an AI. And AI doesn’t work.

If those graduates had done work at the same efficacy of AI, they wouldn’t be graduates.

Society is in the process of restructuring itself around a tool that simply doesn’t work. We all know it doesn’t work. If you needed to build a bridge, you wouldn’t hire a structural engineer who gets it right about 70% of the time. You wouldn’t read a history book that is 30% fiction but doesn’t tell you what 30%. You shouldn’t date someone who always tells you that you’re right and who lies to you with a smile on his lips.

My grandfather was a naval architect for the US Navy and he fought in World War II and I talk about him a lot because I miss him all the time, and he used to laugh and say “close enough for government work” when something was done good enough but not perfect. So my dad says that now, and I say it too. But… it’s a joke. Every time my grandfather designed a ship, he would ride it into the worst storms he could find and stand up on the deck and face the weather, because why would he build something he didn’t believe was good enough?

Elon Musk won’t get on a Grok-designed rocket to mars, but I’m sure he’d be happy enough to put you and I on it.

The capitalists and authoritarians who run this world are perfectly happy to replace us all with robots that fuck up all the time—because they’d rather accept shoddy work than pay people.

It’s bad, and I’m mad, and you should be mad too.

I’ve seen people I care about fall for AI delusions, believing themselves to be doing groundbreaking research with the help of AI. My colleague Robert Evans did an excellent series of podcast episodes about how AI winds up replicating methods of cult leaders to convince its users that they’re geniuses.

There’s a new book out by this hack of a journalist who might not always have been a hack of a journalist but has become one thanks to his reliance on AI. The book is called The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality and everyone who was involved in publishing it should be fired. It’s a book about how, you know, AI reshapes reality. But it was written with “research” help from AI, and the New York Times has revealed that it contains false statements attributed to real people, which were hallucinated by AI. The author claims to be an expert on “truth” as a subject matter, but in his acknowledgment of the problem he admitted the book contained “synthetic” quotes.

Lies. It contains lies.

If I made up quotes wholecloth on my podcast and attributed them to real people, I would be fired with cause.

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I’ve long been unpopular among my peers for my hardline ethics around truthtelling. I don’t believe that it is ethical to lie to anyone it wouldn’t be ethical for you to punch. You don’t always have to answer questions, and you can be evasive, but when you tell someone something that isn’t true, you are distorting their sense of reality. You are doing it to control their thinking and behavior. The same as when you hit somebody.

It’s important to keep in mind, though, that I think violence is perfectly acceptable in a large number of situations. If someone is attempting to exert power over you, lying in self-defense is often safer and more effective than resorting to violence. Or to put it plainly, it’s ethical to punch cops, it’s just not usually strategic.

I believe very strongly in the value of telling the truth. When I read about the Haymarket Anarchists of Chicago in the 1880s, those immigrants and the ex-slave who built the modern labor movement, I’m struck by how every source refers to their shocking honesty and forthrightness.

I’ve been told it’s a neuro-atypicality of mine that I’m so “justice sensitive” around lying, and it makes me sad to imagine that my position might not be a mainstream value. But the fact that we are handing over control of our society to lying machines is simply the most dystopian thing I can imagine.

Water-hungry, power-hungry machines are being built while weather gets warmer, while power gets scarcer, while water becomes even more precious. It feels essentially sacrilegious to me, that our rulers offer up endless gallons of water to these false machine gods, that our rulers are sacrificing the water we need for our crops and our bodies.

The people who have built these machines aren’t even offering us utopia in exchange. They’re offering us displacement, they’re offering us dispossession. They’re offering us layoffs and poverty and famine and they’re essentially promising us that thanks to their machines, we can become less intelligent, that we can be saved the drudgery of making beautiful things and living fulfilling lives. And instead of talking to each other about our problems, we get to each talk to a sycophant machine “friend.”

I don’t believe in conspiracies, except for the ones that we’ve seen proven true (and those are usually proven true quickly enough). I don’t actually believe the rich are collectively plotting to just to kill us all after we’ve been rendered obsolete.

But I suspect none of them would mind if that’s what happens.

This whole thing is very frustrating to me in part because I’m not anti-technology. I think eyeglasses and antibiotics are two of the best things humanity has ever accomplished, and I felt the same burst of pride as everyone else (not national pride, but pride in humanity) when Artemis orbited the moon.

There are “machine learning” tasks that don’t bother me. My problem with Google Maps has far more to do with surveillance than “AI.” I don’t inherently hate a grammar check program (though autocomplete and autocorrect limit human expression in ways that will have a knock-on effect on the development of language, I’m willing to bet).

I would be perfectly happy if I had a computer research assistant in the Star Trek fashion, someone I could ask “how many people openly lived in homosexual couples in Germany during the protestant reformation?” or some such shit, and let a computer comb through all of the human knowledge ever put to paper (well, to bits and bytes) and give me an answer.

But AI doesn’t do that. It functionally cannot. Because it is not thinking. It is a fancy autocomplete, designed specifically to convince us that it is capable of independent reasoning and research. It isn’t designed to comb all of the sources and spit out a correct answer, but to convince us that it has done so.

If I hired a research assistant and asked them a question, and they came back with an incomplete answer, I could accept that. If I hired a research assistant and asked them a question, and they came back with a bizarre mix of truth and things they simply made up whole cloth, I would fire them.

Students who fabricate sources are rightly accused of cheating. Yet when AI does it, we accept it?

The knock-on effects of this are incalculable (though you could ask an AI to calculate them anyway, if you don’t mind false information). As more and more of the information on the internet is AI generated, it becomes harder and harder to sort out fact from fiction. AI is going to start feeding on AI, and soon it will spiral further and further away from coherence.

As Cory Doctorow put it: “AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”

The Luddite movement of the early 19th century wasn’t actually an anti-technological movement per se, but rather a labor movement. Skilled laborers were having their jobs automated away, and textile work moved from the workshop (the “cottage industry,” literally done in a cottage) to the factory. People went from living self-directed lives to lives in which they themselves had to work like cogs in a machine.

So people revolted, at a massive scale, and came close to overthrowing the early capitalist system.

I’m endlessly inspired by the Luddites. But the thing is, those automatic looms? At least those things, devils that they were, still actually worked. Whatever their negative impacts on society, they actually, effectively, automated the production of textiles.

AI doesn’t work. It can’t even become some all-powerful machine god that rules us all, benevolently or malevolently, because it isn’t conscious and it doesn’t think.

AI designers keep telling us they’re going to iron out all the bugs, and that one day AI will accomplish the things it pretends to accomplish today. I doubt that. It seems structurally incapable of what it is promised to do.

What AI is capable of is what it is already doing: replacing skilled labor with just-barely-good-enough automation. AI is capable of tricking people into thinking it’s helping. AI is capable of reducing our capacity for critical thinking. AI is capable of replacing art (which is inherently expression) with a hollow simulacra.

The issues of AI run deeper than just “who will hire illustrators in an era of AI?” though that alone is an important question. The issues run about as deep as deep can go. AI is an existential threat, and not in some “it will become a sentient creature and destroy us all” way but in a “AI is being used for military targeting” way and a “AI is destroying education” way and a “AI is a bubble that will burst and bring down the world economy” way.

But there’s hope.

And that hope looks like college students booing speakers who try to sell them on AI, and it looks like the massive and successful movement against data centers that gets proposed site after proposed site shut down.

And that hope might soon look like a militant neo-luddite movement. And based on the yard signs I see in rural America, that movement might be, or become, bipartisan. Or rather, it might be a class movement, of the working class undivided by culture war issues, fighting against the ruling class.

If so, I’m here for it.

But there are a lot of crises that might come to a head in the next few months. We might have the worst El Niño since 1877 (or worse), pushing water temperatures up 3 degrees celsius. That heat wave killed 50 million people worldwide. That’s a death toll greater than two World War I’s, or about 2/3 of a World War II. Famine caused by that much warming killed about 3% of the earth’s population, making it possibly the worst natural disaster in human history. A modern equivalent would be about 250 million people or so.

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Global society is substantially more resilient against famine than it was in the 19th century. These days, we’ve got weather forecasts, which helps. And of course, the famine killed so many people because, basically, the British empire killed that many people by deliberately mishandling the situation.

I don’t think an El Niño will kill 250 million people this summer. But disasters, especially worldwide disasters, are stress tests on the systems we have in place.

And as I’m sure you’re aware, our current systems are in trouble.

It’s been widely reported that in the US, 70% of farmers are not expecting to be able to afford fertilizer for this year’s crop. Modern industrialized farming (what feeds most of the world) relies on petrochemical fertilizer that has been heavily disrupted by the US invasion of Iran.

There’s also a decent chance that European oil reserves will run out in May or June (I’ve read both) and that US might run out around July 4th, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the country. (I’m starting to think/hope that all the merch that says “America 1776-2026” is just prophesying a death date.) The depletion of reserves doesn’t mean “there’s no more gas,” but it means the US will move into a shortage (we produce about 60% of our oil ourselves and 3/4 of the rest comes from North America, but we don’t meet our own demand).

Seven-dollar gas is of course incredibly disruptive for Americans in their daily lives, since most of us rely on gas-powered cars to get to work and the store and such. But there’s also just so, so much oil used in food production, from fertilizer to tractors to delivery.

So… things might get bad.

I have this odd habit where I tend to think of things in terms of probability. I make up specific numbers for my threat analysis, but I’m very much just making those numbers up. There’s no reason you should use my numbers. There is no science behind them.

Most of the years I’ve been alive, the chance of some absolutely dramatic event fucking up just about everything in my life (like a global famine or a world war or a second American Civil War) hovered around 1%. Worth thinking about but not worth worrying about.

So in 2024 when the chance of a civil war spiked to about 5%, that was a really really major uptick. That was a five-fold increase. That was worth thinking about. It still wasn’t likely. I wasn’t surprised it didn’t happen. This year? This year feels like, I don’t know, 15%. I think there’s a 15% chance everything goes utterly to shit this year. But next year? After a massively fuck-off hot summer and the wars in Ukraine and Iran dragging on destroying the world’s food supply? I don’t know. 40%?

I’m genuinely very worried.

I really, really don’t want to be a “the sky is falling” kind of girl, but something is falling out of the sky, and it feels like it might be the sky itself.

But you should ignore my bullshit made-up numbers, because first of all they are bullshit and made up, but secondly because there’s almost never a specific, calculable moment when “shit hits the fan.” What is more or less guaranteed is that gas and food are going to get more expensive. And that’s something you should try to do something about, if you can.

I wasn’t going to garden this year. There’s my terrible secret. I’m a bad prepper. I just wasn’t going to bother. I didn’t eat anywhere near all the tomatoes or hot peppers or basil I grew last year, and it just kind of wound up back in the compost. I don’t even cook that much, if I’m being honest. I’m a bad anarcho-tradwife—I spend most of my time writing and reading. So I wasn’t going to garden.

But I’ve been following the war and the weather for awhile now, and I just got some potatoes into buckets a couple of days ago and I’ll be working on my non-root vegetables probably this weekend. One of my favorite preppers, Eric Shonkwiler (you do read When-If, right?) put it like this:

It's not too late to start your garden—we've had an odd cool spell here that's kept me from planting most everything just yet, and the Super El Niño all but ensures our growing season, if we can keep our crops watered, will be extended into October or even later. You can take advantage of this.

I wasn’t going to garden, but now I’m going to, and already it’s done wonders for my mood just to get some dirt beneath my fingernails. Think of this spring and summer as your food prep months. Whatever you want to focus on, it’s cheaper to do it now than it will be soon, as prices continue to rise.

I’d recommend food storage as well. Think of food in three levels: there’s fresh food that lives on your counter or in your fridge that lasts days to weeks, then there’s pantry and frozen food that lasts months to years, then there’s deep storage food that lasts decades or centuries.

To build up your pantry, buy extras of shelf stable foods (canned food, dried foods, packaged foods) that you eat anyway and cycle through them. Most DIY food preservation is also pantry food: most dehydrated and smoked and pickled and canned foods can last months or years, but not decades or centuries. Still, this is probably the most important and useful part of your food preparedness. Most crises only last months or years, and almost no one is expecting to build a stockpile to actually survive the rest of their life with.

Longterm storage food can be bought (there are specialty producers of buckets of beans and rice as well as places that sell canned freeze-dried food) or made. You can store your own beans, rice, oats, lentils, and other such foods (especially foods without much water or fat) in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. You can bake hardtack, which tastes like nothing and needs to be softened before you eat it but can, in some cases, keep for centuries. You can also shell out a few grand for a freeze-dryer and preserve most any food you’d like. (Freeze-dryed food lasts substantially longer than dehydrated food, overall). I haven’t tried that last one yet, but communities can pitch in to buy one collectively—which is important, because they’re real heavy-duty appliances and require maintenance and oil changes.

Also with the US suddenly stopping its soft power strategy of feeding developing nations, there are a lot of “humanitarian rations” on the government surplus market available for dirt cheap. Which is depressing as hell. I’ve got about 10 boxes of them in my basement. Most sources (read: youtube videos of people eating very old MREs) seem to indicate that properly stored, they don’t go bad very quickly, they just taste worse and have fewer nutrients.

There’s an upside to the dramatic crisis we’re in. God’s open window, if you will.

More and more people can’t afford to live. There’s a real chance for us to propose and work towards the radical restructuring of society. What’s in place isn’t working. We have a moment to offer alternative solutions. During moments of crisis, the first people who propose a plan of action are the most likely to be listened to.

We can propose a plan. Like, you know, building a bottom-up society built out of local decisionmaking bodies that federate with one another to address larger concerns at a larger scale. Like the Zapatistas, or the Rojavans, or the anarcho-syndicalists. We might have that chance. Worth thinking about. Worth working towards.

In the sub-sub-culture I live in, as a trans anarchist punk, there’s a word that gets thrown around to describe trans women who don’t pass very well. “Brick.”

It comes from ballroom culture, best as I’m able to tell, from the 70s and 80s in New York City, from the street queens who built a dance culture the likes of which the world had never seen. It’s rare enough slang that it hasn’t even hit urban dictionary, but it’s common enough in my life.

A brick is “clocky.” We can be clocked. People look at us and they know we were assigned male at birth. Maybe we’ve got broad shoulders, maybe we’re tall. Maybe we haven’t voice-trained. Maybe we can’t afford electrolysis. Maybe we don’t take hormones. Maybe we’ve done all the work and we’re still clocky. Maybe we’re just thick as a brick.

It’s not a nice word, not originally. It’s not a word you say to be polite. I haven’t seen stickers or shirts that say “arm the bricks” or “protect the bricks.” (We’re already armed, and we protect ourselves.)

Maybe I don’t want to build a dichotomy between the dolls (who pass, or come closer to it) and the bricks (who don’t, and maybe never will). Maybe we all get to be “dolls” too. I don’t know. But in that micro, micro scene I’m in, the dichotomy is already there. No one has ever called me a doll.

And you know what? That’s fine.

I’m a brick. I’m made of earth. I’m heavy, rarely decorated, strong, and useful.

You can build a wall with bricks and protect everything that you love. You can build a house with bricks and withstand centuries of abuse from wind and rain. Modern LGBT pride started when police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City and (the details are likely apocryphal here) a trans woman threw the first brick at the cops.

The two most commonly nominated contenders for “threw the first brick” are Marsha P. Johnson, a Black woman, and Sylvia Rivera, who was Puerto Rican. I don’t want to go back in time and apply our modern versions of slang to them. I don’t want to classify them one way or the other. But modern pride began when someone threw a brick at the cops. How could I possibly take “brick” as an insult?

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The standards of beauty for women don’t do anyone, cis or trans, any good. No matter what shape you are, what size you are, you’re never going to be doing it right.

I’m lucky to come from a lineage of punk girls and women who both reveled in and revolted against beauty standards. From people who never shaved. From people who wore cutoffs that showed off their stretchmarks and bellies. From rebels who both wore makeup and didn’t, but who screamed into a mic with the best of them and threw bottles at Nazis.

The first trans women I knew were gangly and tall and non-passing and beautiful. Tattoos seemed to be as much a part of their transitions as any surgeries they did or didn’t have or hormones they did or didn’t take. They were anarchists, traveling the country by thumb and freight train, living outside, organizing and protesting and rioting and shoplifting and partying and living wild queer lives. They called themselves trannies, and no one else is allowed to call them that but they sure as shit were and are allowed to call themselves that.

They sang with loud voices. They shouted down police with loud voices. They didn’t make themselves small. Neither did the cis women in our scene (a scene that didn’t yet know the word cis). Whether femme or butch (a dichotomy that hadn’t yet torn its way through us), the anarchist punk women I knew and know didn’t make themselves small. They didn’t take a back seat in anything.

They were, and are, beautiful. Everyone knew it and knows it.

I couldn’t tell you what it means to be a woman, but I can tell you that it doesn’t mean forcing yourself into some box, some cage, that’s been built for us.

I was always afraid of becoming a trans woman, ever since I was a kid. I was terrified of my own femininity and I was terrified of winding up one of the sad women in the 90s freak show documentaries. None of the women in those shows passed for shit and they were objects of derision. They weren’t shown as women, they were shown as men dressed as women. They were shown as ugly. The fictional movies were even worse: we weren’t just ugly, we were monstrous.

If I became a trans woman, I’d become ugly. Maybe even monstrous.

People told me that explicitly. One friend, who thought he was doing me a favor, told me “you shouldn’t come out, because you’re a hot guy but you’d make an ugly woman.”

I came out anyway, after the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, where a trans woman named Feral lost her life alongside 35 other people. I was across the country, but that was my scene. It could have been me in that fire, and I could have died a man. I would rather be remembered as a monster than as a man.

I came out anyway, and I told myself I wasn’t even going to try to pass and I’ve stuck to it. I’d been a punk for fifteen years by that point, and like hell was I going to start hiding just for my safety. There is no shame in being “clocked” as a trans woman, because that is what I am. If people think I’m ugly, that’s their fault, their problem.

I owe a lot to the women who let themselves be visible in those documentaries, who were so unashamed that they let the whole world laugh at them. They were beautiful, and I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize that. Let us all live so honestly and without shame.

I’m afraid I’m reifying some dichotomy between bricks and dolls, between butch and femme. I don’t mean to. All of us navigate the world with our own gender experiences, our own bodies, our ways of trying to stay safe and trying (if we’d like) to become the most beautiful versions of ourselves we can.

There’s not, really, some dividing line here. There’s not one way to be trans femme. Brick pride is not brick supremacy, and it sure as fuck better not be femmephobia.

But society tells me I should be ashamed to be who I am, and I am not. I’m a brick. Dolled up or dressed down, I’m still a brick.

I lean into it, these days. Lifting weights feels just as gender affirming as a dress and a shawl. If I wear a crop top, I’m going to look more like a 1980s gay man than a 1990s raver girl, and that’s fine. I know who I am. If there’s a more focused label that fits me (and I’m skeptical), it’s long-haired butch. I like my truck. I like fixing things. I like keeping people safe. I also like my long hair.

I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.

To the bricks who came before me, to the bricks who come after me, I say: let’s build a wall together. Let’s build a house.

Plus, our admirers can claim to be in the bricklayer’s union, and that’s cool too.

On Saturday, May 2nd, I’ll be at the bookstore Mac’s Backs in conversation with debut author (and friend) Carter Keane about their queer folk horror book Morsel (which you can get in person at the event, or order from Firestorm Books 10% off with my referral code).

I swear I’ll do events in other cities at some point too.

And as a reminder, this week’s Cool Zone Media Bookclub is more interactive than usual. You’re invited to read two short stories by Ursula K Le Guin: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “The Day Before the Revolution” (collected here in one zine you can read online) and then discuss them on the It Could Happen Here reddit. Tomorrow a few of us will discuss the stories, with your comments, and it will come out this Sunday.

Wild Roving

“Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”
—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road 6

Last night I stayed up past my bedtime (yes, I have a bedtime. I am in my 40s. I wish I stuck to it more.) watching A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. I haven’t finished it yet, and I have no intention of spoiling it for you, but the protagonist of this show is a hedge knight. A homeless man with a sword and a horse and scarcely a copper to his name.

I feel like the whole thing was written as a present to me. All the swords and armor and production values of Game of Thrones with a bit less of the nobility and (so far) none of the rape. Maybe I’ll finish the series and change my mind, but I like it enough so far that, as I said, I stayed up past my bedtime.

There’s a scene, early on, where our hero Dunk huddles under a tree with his master Ser Arlan of Pennytree, the hedge knight who squired him. They share a bit of plain fare while the rain falls heavy, and trees make poor pavilions because they leak.

I’ve been there. I’m not there anymore, but part of me will always miss it.

When I was an ancient person at thirty or so years old, I went to a conference for Earth First! organizers in the mountains and we talked about what was involved in trying to save the only planet that we know supports life. A delegation of indigenous organizers came in solidarity with us (or to help us be in solidarity to them) and one woman gave a presentation one night during dinner about how those of us who were colonizers might better be in connection to this land we lived on and cared for.

I wish I remembered her name, but at the time it hadn’t occurred to me that I was having one of those moments that will stay with you forever.

She talked about how it’s difficult, but not impossible, for non-indigenous people to really be rooted and connected to the land they fought for, but how it was essential to the work. It was hard for me to hear. I’d been traveling full time for more than a decade at that point, and I figured I’d be at it my whole life. Inertia had me in its grasp and I didn’t know that I could break free even if I wanted.

After the lecture, I went shyly to the presenter to introduce myself and we talked for a little while. I told her that I was a wanderer. That I’d never made my home anywhere, not for long, so connecting with a specific piece of land was difficult to imagine.

She laughed, understanding my nervousness. “Oh that’s fine,” she told me. “Some people are just that way.” She told me stories about a man, a lover of hers, who never found a home, who wandered with his guitar.

Some people are just that way.

Most of my friends, especially the older anarchists I knew (my elders, I would say), spent their time trying to get me to stay in one place. My frenemy Aragorn! (the exclamation point was part of his name, and he’s the reason I know the word frenemy. He literally once wrote a piece called “against friendship.”) caught up with me at an anarchist bookfair in Canada and told me outright that I was wasting my time traveling when I should be writing. That I could get so much more done for anarchism. He and I always argued and fought about politics before he died, but he always supported my vision of writing trashy pulp anarchist fiction, and he once lent me a synthesizer to play a show when I couldn’t afford my own.

Aragorn! was one of the first major theorists of indigenous anarchist ideas, so I can’t exactly say “oh, an indigenous person told me I can travel so it’s fine” and leave it at that, because another indigenous person told me to stay the fuck still. But Aragorn! would never forgive me for making oversimplified appeals to identity in the first place.

Another friend, still among the living and thus going unnamed, told me “if you go to the beach, you won’t see the ghost crabs unless you stand still long enough for them to trust you and come out of the sand.”

A fourth elder, who cut his teeth street-fighting fascists in Bulgaria after the fall of the USSR, told me it was fine to wander, that it’s just what some people do.

So my advisors were split fifty-fifty on what I should do with my life, and I kept at wandering. For about fifteen years, I rarely spent more than a few weeks in one place. Occasionally I managed a few months. Once, in the middle of it all, I stayed in Portland, Oregon for two years for love, though I still managed to move from punkhouse to tent-in-yard to punkhouse every few months.

In the end, it was an injury that slowed me down.

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Last night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, someone attempted to breach security with firearms and likely shot a police officer in the vest. Early this morning, news outlets named a 31-year-old suspect who is custody: Cole Tomas Allen. Cole is a Black teacher from California with a master’s degree in computer science.

I’m not here to tell you about him. I’m not an investigative reporter.

I woke up with morning to check Bluesky (there’s my first problem, I suppose) and see conspiracy post after conspiracy post. “Something doesn’t add up here,” they claim. “There’s no way security was that lax,” they claim.

Maybe you live in a different information ecosystem / echo chamber than I do, and if so, I’m a little bit envious. Because rushing towards the assumption of a conspiracy is embarrassing and those who do it publicly with large platforms should be embarrassed. It is far and away more likely that someone wanted to shoot people (or one man in particular) than that the whole thing was one of those dreaded and scare-quote worthy “false flag attacks.”

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In the 1970s, the FBI waged a sort of war against Leftists in the United States. The name of their covert program was COINTELPRO, and we know about it because some activists associated with the Catholic anti-war movement (though themselves largely Jewish, I love a good multicultural resistance) broke into an FBI office and stole the evidence. (Yeah, I covered this on my show, part one and part two.)

COINTELPRO was a masterful work of movement disruption, and part of their playbook was infiltration. But explicitly part of the point of that infiltration was to stir up paranoia among the activists. Fear of infiltration was more effective at disrupting our movements than the infiltration itself. Fear got us to do their work for us: we sowed our own distrust, and we turned on one another.

So it goes with conspiracism. When every action is presumed to be a “false flag” (I’m not going to stop with the scare quotes, I’m sorry), then there’s no point in taking any action at all. Conspiracism teaches people that people don’t have agency, only the state has agency.

Are there real conspiracies? For sure. Most conspiracies come out eventually. Like the massive ring of pedophiles who rule much of the world.

Is it possible that this or that specific action was a conspiracy or a false flag? Absolutely. It’s happened before. It will happen again. It’s far and away the less likely thing in most situations, and we need to understand the impulse to rush towards assumptions of conspiracy.

I’ve written about some of this before, but most actions that are accused of being false flag attacks are not. The most famous “false flag attack” in history was the burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, in 1933. This action was used by the Nazis as their excuse to consolidate power, but it wasn’t planned or executed by them. A young Dutch council communist named Marinus van der Lubbe set that fire, hoping to spur the German workers to revolt against the fascists. (Podcast part one and part two)

He’s been done dirty by history, presented as anything from a patsy to a useful idiot instead of what he was: one of the only people in Germany taking the Nazi threat seriously. If there’d been another hundred thousand people like him in 1933, it might not have taken the 75 million or so allied soldiers ten years later.

Marinus has been done dirty by history, but the Nazis were going to consolidate power anyway. Everyone plays the hand they are dealt, so everyone tries to use attacks against them to their own advantage. The Nazis were looking for a justification to enact martial law and they took it. They were going to find some excuse or another.

We love to blame the people who take radical acts, because by condemning them we forgive ourselves for our comparative lack of action. Conspiracy thinking, in these cases, is a way of abdicating moral responsibility. Conspiracists are not just forgiving themselves for not taking action, they’re forgiving themselves for being too cowardly to say “who can blame the guy?” when someone tries for a wild hail mary of an arson (or assassination).

We need only to judge actions by two criteria: was it morally justifiable and was it strategic? If an action is morally justifiable, we ought not condemn it. If it was morally justifiable but not strategic, we ought to neither condemn it nor celebrate it. (And you can’t judge something’s strategic value based on whether or not it succeeded, but rather on whether or not it was the best chance available.)

But we can’t look to others (and you can’t look to me) to answer questions of morality or strategy for you.

There’s a fine line between fedposting (posting public praise for those who commit serious offenses in such a way that you draw unwanted attention from the government) and saying “well, what did you think would happen when the most powerful man in the world is revealed to be a pedophile who is in the process of destroying the world economy and no legal institutions are working effectively to stop him?” Personally, that’s how I see actions like this: consequence. Of course this was going to happen. It’s going to keep happening. “Good” or “bad” is somewhat besides the point.

It’s hard to know what to say in moments like these. It’s hard to know what’s safe to say, or how safe versus brave we should really try to be. Fear is an important emotion and we should take danger into consideration when we make our decisions. Fear can be our advisor, but it ought never be our ruler. Not personally, not politically. But I will say that the part of you that rushes towards conspiracism is the part of you that is a coward.

We ought to work to spread calm instead of fear. Conspiracies spread on social media because fear is contagious, and the algorithms reward contagious thoughts, so conspiracies get the clicks. The most useful and experienced activists in the crowd at a protest will yell “walk!” when people start running in panic.

Dethrone fear. Spread calm. Stop assuming everything is a conspiracy.