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.

Last week I talked about the book Avalon, Rise by Madeline Ffitch, and it’s now being carried for pre-order by my favorite online bookstore Firestorm Books, a cooperative in North Carolina. It’s a book about small town antifascists and it’s been on my mind ever since I finished it. So I added it to my recommended list (which is a referral program. You get 10% off and I get 10%, to be upfront about that).

The Coming Privacy Apocalypse

There’s a privacy apocalypse coming, and the Democrats are just as responsible as the Republicans.

There’s this series of books that you’ve probably never heard me talk about, written by a Catholic anarcho-monarchist who hated Nazis but never really unpacked his own instinctive racism. The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien. I don’t know if you knew this, but I’m pretty into The Lord of the Rings. (This is a joke, for anyone who doesn’t know me. I reference Tolkien uncomfortably often.)

Tolkien wasn’t a subtle writer. He writes valiant soldiers of light and he writes mindless (and racially coded, to his discredit) villains of darkness. And his villain-of-villains, the archetypical Big Bad from which all 20th century Big Bads are derived, was Sauron.

And Sauron had a cell phone. A crystal ball he could use to call up his best minion, Saruman. There was a whole network of these phones, and Sauron could spy on anyone who had one.

Those crystal balls? Tolkien called them the Palantir.

Maybe the single most influential company that works to expand the surveillance state in the United States, Palantir, named itself after those stones. They named themselves after a tool used by evil by the embodiment of evil and power. You probably know that.

Last year, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, co-authored a book called The Technological Republic. Theorists have referred to it soberly as technofascism, and it’s transparently an effort to pave the way for AI killing machines. Since no one can be fucked to read whole books anymore (and to be fair, I don’t want to read this particular tome), Palantir posted a 22 point summary

It’s something out of Starship Troopers. They propose that Silicon Valley has a duty to the nation and a duty to not just protect Western values, but project them across the world. Individuals have an obligation to serve the state and perform military service. Some cultures are degenerate and less worthy than others. Plurality was a mistake. Leaders should not be held accountable to the public. It goes on and on.

The Republican Party has spent the last ten years restructuring itself from the conservative neoliberal party to the fascist party. Economically, unbridled capitalism has been replaced with nationalism. Geopolitically, soft power has been replaced with hard power (well, really, it’s been replaced with incompetence).

Palantir aims to force Silicon Valley into the same transition, from capitalism and innovation for their own sake (which was already bad) towards “civic duty” and hard power and cultural supremacy (which is worse). The Republicans went fascist, Palantir says, so why can’t the billionaires?

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I’ve long been critical of both sides of the political aisle in US politics. For the whole of my life, the two-party system has operated like a ratchet system: the Republicans did evil stuff, then Democrats came to power and didn’t bother rolling those changes back. The easiest example I can point to is Guantanamo Bay. When Bush Jr. opened the torture site and imprisoned men who hadn’t been charged with a crime, it was a blatantly illegal act. Obama campaigned on shutting the place down, but instead he legalized it—as if the problem with the place was that the fact that it was illegal and not the fact that it was a torture prison for men who hadn’t been charged with a crime.

Meanwhile, Democrats seemed to simply refuse to encode abortion rights into federal law, presumably because those rights being under threat was such a powerful fundraising tool.

Democrats and Republicans alike are working to expand the surveillance system and to destroy privacy in the US, and they likely have different motives for doing so. Palantir is open about their desire for technofascism, but the Democrats largely claim to empower the surveillance state for our own protection. Whenever they expand the powers of the state, they never discuss what will happen to those powers the next time the state is run by Republicans. The Democrats often build the weapons that are wielded by the Republicans.

One of Sauron’s distinguishing characteristics was his network of spies and scrying that allowed him to keep tabs on everything happening in Middle Earth, through the all powerful “Eye of Sauron.” This power was so important that his troops used the red “lidless eye” as their symbol.

Most of what I’ve read about the rise of surveillance understandably focuses on programs like the Flock cameras that track people and cars, or how the FBI admits that it buys location data from app manufacturers and thereby circumvents fourth amendment protections. (Ostensibly, a warrant is required for the government to access the location data produced by communication between your phone and nearby cell towers.) ICE is transparently interested in surveilling its opposition, and it’s developing its own smart glasses to turn its agents into cameras.

But there’s more than that. There’s so much more than that.

Democrats are sweeping elections in the US at the moment, because fascism turns out to be blessedly unpopular with the electorate. Red states are edging purple and purple states are edging blue, and the newly empowered Democratic politicians are, seemingly, putting all their attention into ignoring the rise of fascism and instead “protecting the children” by expanding the nanny state and removing the right to privacy.

Politicians love to use wedge issues. It’s like splitting wood. They pick some topic as the tip of the wedge (trans women participating in sports alongside cis women) and hit it with a mallet over and over again so that the rest of the issue is crammed into the wood (if we’re sticking to our metaphor). Soon it’s not just trans women in sports, it’s HRT for children, then gender confirmation for children, then HRT for adults, then gender confirmation for adults. And it won’t stop with trans women. They are interested in clearly legally defining “womanhood” so as to roll back all women’s rights, not just ours.

The state has all sorts of these wedge issues, and the thing is, you might even agree with the tip of some of them. Blue state politicians seem to be in a frenzied rush to spend their newfound political capital on sweeping gun bans. You might be against guns. But the laws they’re considering (and/or passing) offer the police all kinds of new powers. Who do you think enforces gun laws, and who do you think they’re enforced against?

In Minneapolis, politicians are considering (but to be clear, have not passed, or even fully introduced) a gun ban that would require every firearm to be registered and would give the police the right to enter houses for warrantless searches to ascertain that the gun is being stored safely.

I believe in the safe storage of guns. It’s an issue that is personal to me. If you own a gun, you need to control access to that gun and be certain it is never available to those who should not access it.

But this bill proposes warrantless searches. I don’t expect it to pass, and I don’t want to fall into the ragebait habit of fearmongering with unpassed bills, but it’s the kind of thing we should pay attention to.

More broadly, and more immediately affecting people who aren’t gun owners, state after state is working to pass legislation that demands what is not even currently technologically feasible: a requirement that all 3d printers be prevented from printing gun parts or any other contraband.

3d printers don’t know what they’re printing. They are given something called “g-code” (not the Geto Boys song, unfortunately) that is just numbers. G-code tells the printer to move the print head to the following position at the following time. It’s separate software called a “splicer” that takes 3d models and turns them into code. So in order to comply with these laws, 3d printers would need to have some sort of g-code reversal software that, presumably through AI, detects what is being printed and determines if it is allowed or not. It’s like requiring your hammer to figure out what you’re building and refuse to build a barricade.

There’s no wedge issue more… wedgey? than “protecting the children.” And there’s no incoming bipartisan series of legislation that is more terrifying than the age verification systems that are being built. To put it bluntly, the open, anonymous internet will disappear if politicians get their way. It started with porn. People always come for the sex workers first. State after state has passed laws requiring porn websites to age verify their viewers, as if anyone would want to add their ID to a database of people who watch porn.

Right now it’s in our social media. To protect children, the internet apparently needs to know who we are. But it’s not stopping with websites. Lawmakers want age verification to happen at the operating system level, which will make it illegal to produce operating systems that don’t have a method of verifying people’s IDs. The knock-on effects of this are incalculable. Soon enough, the entire internet might refuse to allow noncompliant computers to access it, and the global south (which heavily relies on older equipment) will be even further isolated. Open source coding will become, in many cases, illegal. Political organizing and outreach might become impossible online. The power that a de-anonymized internet hands to billionaires and their pet politicians is simply beyond understanding. Not to mention the fact that operating systems are embedded into all sorts of objects used by all sorts of people… does the cash register need to know who its operator is? Does a library terminal?

None of this privacy invasion will magically keep children safe. Most abuse isn’t caused by strangers in the first place. If you want to protect children, destroy ICE, institute socialized health care, abolish borders, and dismantle the fossil fuel infrastructure that is destroying their future.

At least you can go offline, you might think. But our offline space is increasingly online. Any device you have will be required to know who you are and how old you are. You might literally need to show your ID to own afridge or a watch.

Cars have sensors, cameras, and modems in them that report on your driving habits (and even your sex life, I’m not kidding) to manufacturers, who then sell that data. Increasingly, insurers are pushing “telematic” insurance with your premiums based on the recording of your driving habits. Slam on your brakes too hard when a bicyclist darts into the road and suddenly your premiums go up.

But you aren’t allowed to drive without insurance, and insurance companies are madly in love with telematics and getting far more granular with their data. Home insurance suddenly requires an inspection from an increasing number of insurers. How long until house telematics determine your rates?

And sure, you can buy an older car that doesn’t track your data, but older cars are more expensive to maintain, and gas cars themselves will likely wind up obsolete. (I would absolutely love a “dumb” electric car. I think someone could make billions by making a modern vehicle that doesn’t have a camera pointed at your face that yells at you if you look away from the road.)

Not to mention the fact that your giant TV was so cheap because it collects data about what you watch and sells it.

Lawmakers in New Jersey just passed a law requiring all e-bike riders to carry registration and a license, and for most to carry insurance. These aren’t motorcycles or even mopeds we’re talking about. They’re bicycles. Most of them are capped at 20 miles an hour, and the fastest of them are capped at 28 miles per hour. “Protect the children” by banning them from riding modern bikes, and give those bikes the sort of registration that allows them to be tracked by Flock. I suspect this law has much more to do with social control (and racist policing of Black youth) than it does public safety.

There’s more than this. There’s so much more. Stores are increasingly not bothering to catch shoplifters on the way out the door, but at their houses later—meaning private enterprises are able to weaponize the police, often at people who are targeted by faulty AI systems.

To be honest, I never used to care enough about digital surveillance by this or that megacorporation. Sure, my Instagram ads were creepily well-targeted, but I didn’t mind. But the state has been captured by fascists, and Palantir isn’t alone in trying to move Silicon Valley into lockstep with the new regime. Democrats built the system of surveillance and the Republicans can use it.

For now, there are ways to opt out. To be clear, I haven’t bothered to do so fully. I still use my customer rewards card at the grocery store, even though I know they’re building a profile about me and are aware that I like my tofu extra-firm and am still hooked on almond milk instead of the environmentally correct oat milk.

I’d rather pay a bit more for car insurance than be “rewarded” for my good driving habits, but I don’t refuse to drive cars with modems in them.

You can still buy 3d printers now, and they might be grandfathered in by new laws. They might not be. If age verification at the operating system level hits, there will probably be criminal Linux distributions that refuse to comply. When the internet starts blocking all non-compliant computers, you can join whatever mirror to the internet that is sure to crop up. Maybe we’ll all be using VPNs to access the internet in some safe haven country.

But “opting out” is getting harder and harder. Some digital minimalists have returned to dumb phones only to find out they can’t register for classes without an app for two-factor authentification.

We’re in a unique moment in history, at least in the US. The Democrats are fully aware that they are only popular because of how unpopular Trump is. If we can speak loudly enough about privacy, and stop letting wedge issues (like gun rights, or sex work) divide us from other people who care about privacy, we might be able to tip the scales more than usual. We need to make it clear that privacy is a non-negotiable right.

There’s some movement in that direction. There are some people saying “hey maybe the Feds shouldn’t be able to just buy consumer data to circumvent the process of getting warrants” and that car manufacturers occasionally get told to stop tracking who we fuck in the backseat. We need more of that, and we need to be louder.

It fell out of vogue on the Left to defend free speech, because of right wing trolls who claimed the issue as their own, but we need to defend free speech and not let the right wing claim it as their issue. We need to stop empowering the state to build new methods by which they can control us.

There are people who’ve been working in this field for decades. The best group I know that works on privacy issues is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Class is a strange creature. I’ve spent a lot of time in Philly dressed not much differently and treated way worse, but now I was the guest of the University. Now I’m a writer.

I’m in town just for a day, just to present and read for some writing students at the university, and one of the strangest things about being a performer is that means I’ll spend four days in transit to read for fifteen minutes and talk for maybe another sixty.

Last night I finished reading the ARC (the Advance Reader’s Copy) of Avalon, Rise by Madeline Ffitch, a novel about smalltown Appalachian antifascists trying to organize against a rising white supremacist threat in their county. It’s fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough. I don’t know that Madeline has ever written a character who isn’t deeply flawed and therefore deeply human, and this book is an ensemble cast of fuckups that gets across the point that antifascism is full of terrible people (just like everyone else) but it’s still clearly the correct side.

(Can you tell I’m working on writing her a blurb?)

The book is mostly a story about people, about multiple generations of people, about the struggle that has gone on for centuries. But it’s also an insider’s critique of everything that makes us insufferable, like the white people who get so obsessed with academic understandings of antiracism that they fuck up their friendships with Black people. Where the antifascists fail, it’s where they flatten nuance out of the conversation (or try so hard for nuance that they just allow fascists to organize).

And there’s a sentiment in it that one character keeps coming back to: nostalgia is fascist.

If you want a book in which characters only do what’s right and true and morally superior, this isn’t going to be the book for you. The book itself isn’t saying that nostalgia is fascist, a character in it is saying that. It’s the kind of thing that young antifascists believe—that anything that any fascist likes is permanently tainted.

But I just finished reading it in my fancy hotel room, paid for by the university. And I finished reading it in a city I don’t come to much anymore, the city where I first tried to hop a freight train. Nostalgia, that authoritarian bastard, is staring at me from across the room.

And like the dictator it is, it’s not letting me be nostalgic for Philly, the city where a long-lost love licked my eyeball and we swore a pact to never lick anyone else’s eyeballs but each other’s, that no matter what would happen in our lives we’d always have that between us (I haven’t seen her in decades, but I’ve kept my side of the pact). Philly is the city where I spent my first days sleeping outside, where I walked endless miles of train tracks and had conversations I’ll never forget.

But nostalgia wants me thinking about Toulouse instead, about France, about the summer with the Yellow Vests protests and the tear gas and the language I don’t speak.

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They’ve been running into some financial problems of late and worry they’ll have to cut their own wages. But they fulfill online orders. So I’ve been working to try to send traffic their way, and I’ve got a referral deal with them now. The books that I pick out and recommend, you get 10% off (and I get a cut too, to be transparent). So I’m positing books that I use as sources for Cool People, books that I read from on Book Club, and of course my own books.

Some recent titles:

Here Where We Live is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple: I just interviewed Molly on Cool People about the Labor Bund and how it presents a clear alternative to Zionism for Jewish folks who care about their heritage. The book just came out yesterday, and it already went into a second printing before it was even released.

A Towering Flame, by Philip Ruff: The source for my episodes about Peter the Painter. Maybe the most adventurous tale of revolution I’ve ever read, written by an author who spent decades uncovering the story.

Black Arms to Hold You Up, by Ben Passmore: You can hear me talking to Ben about his graphic novel of Black history on Cool People. Maybe the best take on a complex history that I’ve ever read.

Or you can see the whole list.

The Death of Agency

This week the president of the United States promised genocide, and everyone (including me) is waiting around for other people to deal with it. “Where are the revolutionaries?” people are posting. “Why aren’t the streets flooded with anti-war protestors?” people are posting. “Why hasn’t the 25th amendment been invoked to remove Trump from power?” people are posting.

Here I am, posting.

A couple decades ago, I took the ferry from Finland to Sweden thanks to the kindness of some strangers who’d decided to give me money at a gay bar in Helsinki. Well, really, I’d been passed out in the gutter outside, but we don’t have to tell that story. The important part was that I was on an overnight ferry and those of us without money for private rooms all slept in seats or on the carpeted floor on the main level.

Shortly before we reached Stockholm, a man started yelling at his wife in Swedish, and all thirty or so of us stared in horror, and for long moments, none of us did anything. I thought to myself “everyone else around me knows what’s being said, so it’s up to them to act.” I don’t know what excuse everyone else around me came up with, but excuse themselves they did. Maybe they figured it was a job for the police.

Finally, the man raised his fist. Myself and a young man stood up and stepped towards the aggressor. I think I yelled “what the fuck!” but I’m not certain. The man put down his fist, intimidated into silence.

I doubt I did much to solve the problem, longterm, but I’m equal parts proud of myself for standing up and embarrassed it took so long.

I’ve thought about the bystander effect ever since. How when there’s a crowd, it’s easy to believe that solving a problem is someone else’s responsibility.

Here we are, in 2026. The US is ruled by a mad king, and none of us knows what to do.

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We’re in a strange bind right now, in which no one feels like they have much agency.

The democratic politicians in congress (those who are actually attempting to make the world better) feel powerless because they don’t have the numbers and are waiting for the elections. It might be true that they are powerless, but it comes across as careerism when they post toothless statements about voting to impeach.

Meanwhile, blue states come across powerless because they don’t want to be the ones who pick a fight with the federal government and trigger a civil war. This is a legitimate concern: there is no specific reason to believe that the antifascist side would win an open war of blue vs red. Yet every mayor and governor who does not task their police with arresting ICE is admitting that the law (and morality) are less important to them than the structuring of power. They are admitting that laws only exist to control the actions of the powerless.

Fear of civil war doesn’t explain why blue states are spending their political capital on disarming their own populations through anti second amendment legislation. If there has ever been a moment where we want liberals and progressives to have access to firearms, it’s right now on the brink of large-scale conflict. It also doesn’t explain why blue states are rushing to pass privacy-invading laws like the age verification systems that promise to destroy anonymity on the internet, or anti-3d printing laws that remove people’s right to explore and create.

(I’m not impressed by the ostensible alternative to fascism that the democratic party is offering.)

As for the activists, the anti-war movement today looks nothing like it did twenty years ago because twenty years ago the government pretended to care about popular opinion. Bush Jr. and his friends spent a whole year building support for us to invade Iraq, but Trump just does whatever he feels like on any given day. We don’t feel like we have any agency.

Today’s activists can also look back and see that in 2003 the world’s largest demonstrations in history took place, with millions of people marching around the world, and it accomplished nothing. I’d say “it made us feel better about ourselves,” but at least for me, that part isn’t true.

There are the No Kings rallies, and I never want to talk trash on people who are doing what they think they can, but an awful lot of people wonder what the point is, what the theory of change is, behind mass protests that do not engage in civil disobedience or disruption.

As for revolution, well, that’s never been an easy task. Once again, we are cursed with the knowledge of history, and an awful lot of revolutions have been lateral moves at best. What’s more, a revolution is a mass action or it isn’t a revolution, and in the surveillance society we live in (that the democrats are eager to expand), it’s hard to organize and build trust.

This isn’t to say none of this is worth doing. It’s just my best effort to answer the question “why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

For better or worse, most people are waiting for conditions to change. Few of us feel like we have agency, and most of us feel like other people have more agency. We’re all waiting for someone else to do something. For there to be an organization you can join, a march you can go to, a politician you can vote for.

It turns out, we have to build the organizations. We have to call for the marches (and set the terms, and stop hiding behind non-confrontational politics as if they are more ethical). Those who are interested in working within the electoral system need to be supporting actual grassroots campaigns and politicians.

We also, and maybe this is the most important part of my whole point… we have to support people who are doing rowdy shit. When we sit around and bemoan that no one is doing anything, the fact is that people are doing things. (shoutout to Bumlung on Bluesky for reminding us of this). There are people facing trial for bodyslamming ICE agents. There are prisoners in jail for setting fires at ICE facilities. There are the Prairieland defendants, recently convicted of material support for terrorism for attending a noise demonstration outside an ICE detention center in Texas.

But most people doing spicy things aren’t getting caught. They’re not even bragging about it on the internet, so we might not ever know it happens.

If we want to rebuild our sense of agency, the way to do it is to accomplish things. Accomplish mutual aid. Accomplish building organizations that grow local power and decisionmaking (worker’s councils, rapid response networks, underground railroads, neighborhood assemblies). Accomplish preparedness—look realistically and soberly at what might be coming, and get ready for that with people. And accomplish, well, rowdy shit. We need a movement with teeth and we need to practice building our agency.

And while we’re doing that (and we are, in fact, doing that. All over the country, people are doing these things), the president is threatening to wipe out entire civilizations, targeting the very civilians that a few weeks ago he pretended to be liberating.

If a political office wields so much power than an unpopular man can threaten genocide without consulting the public nor their elected representatives, that political office should not exist. This seems like the mildest way I could possibly phrase that. Presumably, no political office should wield the power to commit genocide even if it is popular, but we’ve got to start somewhere I suppose.

I think our descendants will view positions like “president” with the same disdain we hold for kings.

Whoever is elected, going forward (presuming our current system lasts until 2028), we will all have to remember that they are capable of authoritarianism, of tyranny. The exploits in the code that is the constitution have been laid bare, and that code needs to be patched, rewritten, or scrapped.

If you were to ask me, I’d give you the same answer I’ve believed in for decades: we need a system that is not a “state,” governed from the top down with rigid borders, but instead a series of local councils that federate together to collectively administer the larger territory. Our democracy needs to be bottom-up, or it is not democracy. I think the truth of that has been laid bare the past few years.

But I don’t think I need to convince you of that in order to convince you that the current system is fundamentally broken if it is capable of producing this result.

You there, hypothetical cis reader, tired of hearing about trans shit in the news all the time?

So am I, so are we.

It’s Trans Day of Visibility but it’s also Trans Day of Have To Go To Work Anyway, or Trans Day of Who The Fuck is Hiring, or Trans Day of How Are We Going to Support All These Queers Who Are Internally Displaced Refugees Here in the States.

I used to wear a pin that I made that said “I probably don’t want to talk to you about gender” because gender is so desperately low on my list of priorities in my own head. I refer to myself with the pronouns “I/me/my” and the only gendered word I feel strongly about, personally, is that I am Rintrah’s mom. And he doesn’t care about gender, and he pisses with all four of his paws on the ground.

I rarely write about trans issues, and it’s not because I’m self-hating, it’s because gender sort of bores me. The only reason I care about it is because society cares just so deeply about it. I promise you, my thoughts about decolonization and the eradication of the state and capitalism present a lot more of a challenge to the status quo than the fact that I wear dresses sometimes even though I don’t “pass.”

At least, that’s how it works in my head. But somehow, my very existence, and the existence of like half the people I know, is some fundamental, existential threat to society. Our fashion sense is bad but surely it’s not that bad.

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The thing is, on an individual level, no one else gives a shit that I’m trans either.

One time, in rural West Virginia, I told the septic cleaner I was a trans woman while we were chatting while he was cleaning decades of accumulated shit from the chamber under my house.

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

“Sure,” I said, because I’ve never particularly felt like quibbling on details.

He thought about it for awhile. He was curious, more than anything. Statistically, based on the county we lived in, he either voted for Trump or didn’t vote.

“What about women’s sports?” he asked. “What do people in the trans community think about that issue?” Again, he was curious.

“It’s sort of a wedge issue, something minor that they can use to get everyone mad at us.”

“That makes sense,” he said.

Later, after I settled the bill and was walking away from his truck, he called me back over. He had one final set of questions for me.

“Wait, so your chick [I had told him I was seeing somebody], she knows that you’re a chick?”

“Yup.”

“So you’re like, lesbians?”

“Yup.”

“Cool, my cousin is a lesbian.”

And he drove off.

Some people might care, but most people don’t. It’s structures that care, that want to make everyone else care.

Gender (the social construct, not just biological sex) seems to be as old as human society, but every society seems to have treated it at least somewhat differently. And importantly, most societies, historically, have offered room for variance within whatever gender structure they used. “Men” who lived as women, “women” who lived as men, or people living in understood third, fourth, or fifth gender roles.

Crucially, most societies in history didn’t have the social construct we call the state, and as far as I can tell, most societies depended more on what we might call “guidelines” than “laws.”

I think this gets at the fundamental threat we pose to fascism, and to authoritarian structures more broadly. Authoritarianism relies on classification and stratification, on strict social order. Yet here I am, not only telling everyone in the world that I’m a girl, but having everyone either believe me or politely accept that I see the world differently than they do.

Because at the end of it all, most people understand that we all see the world differently. Most people fundamentally understand multiculturalism, that our ways of doing things are not the only ways of doing things.

My great aunt, the Catholic nun, kept a Muslim prayer rug in her cell in the convent. I asked her about it, and she told me it was to remind her that everyone looks for God in their own ways. She committed her life to a specific institution and its theology and its way of doing things, but she understood flexibility. We all do.

That’s the understanding that fascists are here to destroy. The authoritarian urge sees only a single way of doing things.

It seems silly, in my own head, to make a big deal out of transness. To reiterate, my transness isn’t not even a big deal to me, and I’ve been out for coming on a decade. It seems absurd to imagine that we’re a threat to power.

But we are.

Our silly queer lives and our silly queer drama and our endless arguing about terminology, it’s fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism because it’s fundamentally a declaration that we either defy classification entirely (my preference) or we at least get to dictate that classification amongst ourselves. The state wants to be the one who decides which of us are valid. It doesn’t want to let us hash that out ourselves in mean-spirited Instagram reels.

It’s trans day of visibility, and I think I’m not visibly trans but most of my friends laugh when I say that. I can drive a big truck and wear Carhartt all I want, but I guess the classification for me is “long-haired butch” and it’s visible to anyone with quarter-functional gaydar.

(I suppose the backpatch of Willem Arondeus with the quote “let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards” doesn’t help).

Maybe I should start caring about transness, maybe that’s the lesson here for me. The fascist state keeps telling me that my gender presents it with an existential threat, and maybe I should listen.

I could have sworn it was my desire to reorganize society from the bottom up instead of the top down, but maybe all that talk about “who really has the power when there are bottoms and tops” is queer as hell anyway.

Either way, happy Trans Day of Visibility. Take care of each other and stop arguing about bullshit. The state wants us dead, and I want us alive. Nothing is sweeter than aging. So let’s all do that, together. Let’s become elders before we become ancestors.

General News

In movement news, the anti-ICE activist Trenten Barker received an 18 month sentence for “arson” (he tossed a flare at some debris piled up in front of a metal fence outside an ICE facility during a protest). He’s raising money for legal fees and to help his family while he’s inside.

Idris Robinson, a Texas philosophy professor, was fired because of a talk he gave at the North Carolina Anarchist Book Fair about Palestine. I’m going to order his book.

Anarchist trans prisoner Marius Mason is going to be released to a halfway house on May 4th after something like 17 years behind bars for his role in the Earth Liberation Front. I promise you if there are humans two hundred years from now, the Earth Liberation Front will be written about as some of the only people from the early 2000s who actually tried to do something.

I’ve never actually been a despairing person. For most of my life, awareness of injustice and cruelty have spurred me to action and activism. I’m having a harder time of that right now. The crisis is worse than it’s ever been, and sometimes at night I lie there trying to engineer some solution to all the world’s problems, and it’s an impossible task, and it overwhelms me and I shut down and finally get to sleep. It’s like counting sheep, if you want nightmares instead of dreams.

Maybe it’s precisely because I struggle with hope and despair recently that I’m qualified to write about it. I hope so.

There’s a sort of folk saying that’s been on my mind a lot recently. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

I can’t solve this problem, the problem of fascism, by myself. I can’t even reason what the solution would be by myself.

That’s a hard realization for me, because despite being some sort of anarchist-communist or socialist or whatever, I’ve always been a solitary person. I tend to prefer working alone. I like projects you can do by yourself. Except… well, there aren’t any projects you can do by yourself.

Oh, sure, I write books, that famously solitary pursuit. My friends help me brainstorm, and my agent helps me find a publisher, and my editors help me revise, and a designer makes them beautiful, and librarians and booksellers help them reach readers. The act of writing is fundamentally solitary (for me and most authors) but everything that makes it possible and worthwhile is a collective effort.

Oh, sure, I built a cabin “by myself” one time. On my friend’s land. With advice from contractor friends and strangers at the rural hardware store and from half-a-hundred YouTube videos. And help setting the foundation posts. And help with the flooring and the wall panels. And help raising the rafters. Most of the hours that went into that house were me alone in the woods, up on a ladder, repeating the litany against fear, but I didn’t build that cabin alone, despite building it alone.

I can’t reason my way through fascism by myself, and I hate that.

Worse still, I don’t know that even all together we’re going to be able to do everything that we need to do. Maybe the task in front of us is actually insurmountable, and I do not like considering that possibility. But fascism has always been the miniboss. Climate change waits behind it, looming.

A “Blue Ocean Event” is the name for a summer without arctic ice—or rather, a summer when the arctic ice falls below a thousand square kilometers, leaving the water blue instead of white. Ten years ago or so, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was talking about how this might be possible by the end of the century, and possibly sooner.

Some climate change models (more pessimistic models, but not the most pessimistic models) suggest we might have a blue ocean event this summer. We probably won’t, but it’s a serious possibility in a way that would have been unheard of earlier in our lifetimes.

We’re mostly waiting in this terrible limbo between inaction and action. The problems we face are severe enough to warrant rather dramatic action, but we’re told to hold our breath until the elections. Even more than that, we know most dramatic actions won’t actually make the situation better, because individual dramatic actions don’t tend to change the world for the better, because if you want to go far, you have to go all together.

If there’s anything that gives me hope, it’s what I saw in Minneapolis a few months ago. The problem wasn’t “solved,” not outright, but tens of thousands of people acted (and are acting) directly against the invasion of federal troops in their city. Going far because they’re going together.

This morning I didn’t know how I was going to get up.

There are all these things that I tell myself, things I believe, like: focus on what you have agency over. Focus on local issues, local problems. Focus on building resiliency, for both yourself and your community.

This week, I ordered garden supplies for a friend, I went to Harbor Freight (suggestions at the end) to get those sweet discount preps, and I showed up to an in-person meeting of local lefty preparedness folks to compare what we know and how we can help one another. We talked about freeze dryers and teach-ins, about tinctures and emergency medicine. This week I organized my basement and I taught a new friend about backup power.

It’s all stuff worth doing.

I still didn’t know how I was going to get up this morning.

What got me up was a text from the rapid response network in my neighborhood, a text that said that federal agents were raiding a house a few blocks away. That got me up and dressed and out of the house, jogging, wishing I was in better shape. It wasn’t immigration enforcement, in the end, just a drug raid (people weren’t being kidnapped for where they were born, they were being put into cages for having the wrong plants in their house. Somehow we’re supposed to believe there is a big difference between those two things).

It wasn’t ICE, but it was worth remembering that people care, that people gathered at a moment’s notice. And that I was one of those people who could care, who could be useful.

And it got me out of bed this morning.

And it helps me to remember that I can be part of trying to do something to make the world ever so slightly better.

And it has me realizing I need a little tiny go-bag just for ICE watch, with a whistle, covid mask, notebook, pen, marker, and know-your-rights cards. Because ICE is acting everywhere, across the country, but so are ICE watchers. ICE watch is not the main thing that I do. It’s not what I focus on, or what I have the most experience in. But if they’re in my neighborhood, then, well, that old saying is worth remembering: “if not us, then who?”

And who doesn’t love the excuse to build little kits?

The way to accomplish things is to break large projects down into concrete steps and then do those steps. But sometimes you don’t have a real picture of how to accomplish the entire project. Sometimes it’s too big of a project to hold in your head, especially alone, and your job is to just think of the steps that might help and then take those steps and see. It’s worth picking a specific, smaller project (like setting up a rapid response network, or a preparedness circle, or a radical assembly) and finding the other people who want to do that. Because we can go far, together.

(And it turns out if you want to go fast, you probably need to practice jogging.)

Things a prepper might want from Harbor Freight, an incomplete list

• tarps (emergency shelter, pavilions for large gatherings, disaster cleanup)

• plastic sheeting and duct tape (sealing rooms and windows to keep them warm during power outtages)

• hose clamps and zip ties (emergency vehicle maintenance)

• prybars and axes and sledgehammers (emergency demolition like for rescue)

• tow strap (for vehicle rescue)

• gas cans (store gas for 2-3 months, or 1-2 years with additives)

• weatherproof foam-filled hard plastic cases (store electronics for disaster zones)

• batteries (for everything)

• PPE (goggles, masks, earplugs, nitrile gloves, those big white disposable suits you can wear doing disaster cleanup)

Mostly, I avoid buying electronics and complicated tools from Harbor Freight because their quality is hit-or-miss, but I have had good luck with like, shovels and tarps and such.

Maybe I’ll start trying to add these little mini prepper tips at the end of posts. We’ll see if I keep it up.

To be blunt, us Irish Americans sure fucked up. In Ireland, we were revolutionaries. In America, we were cops and colonizers and race-rioters. We took the devil’s bargain as soon as we could, trading heritage and language for whiteness and for watered-down remnants of culture that look like green beer and shamrocks.

I say “we” like I wasn’t born several generations into this, like my grandmother didn’t scarcely speak her parents’ mother tongue. She was born in Boston (naturally) to immigrants from Galway who desperately wanted their kids to assimilate. Her father escaped Ireland just before the Rising, but each of his brothers fought in it and were arrested for their trouble.

Perhaps the proudest moment of my life is shaking the hand of one of those brothers on his hundredth birthday. That man lived in three different centuries, and near as I can tell he fought in a failed uprising, a mostly successful revolution, and a civil war against the revolutionaries who sold out the country—all before he turned twenty-five. When I met him, he’d been blind for decades but he was grinning ear to ear to meet his brother’s descendants. He lived a longer life than the famously long-lived queen who later ruled the empire he took up arms against, and he did it living in a stone hut.

Meeting him is something I take pride in. That’s a legacy that matters to me.

My grandmother’s family name, I can trace it back to the Battle of Clontarf, in the year 1014, when the Irish drove the vikings from their shores.

St. Patrick’s Day? I couldn’t give a fuck about St. Patrick’s Day. I drank a St. Patrick’s Day green milkshake at a cafe this morning and it tasted like toothpaste.

I drank it anyway, because it was made of sugar and I’m fundamentally a goblin. I hope me drinking it anyway doesn’t somehow become part of the metaphor I’m building here.

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Neither Ireland-Irish and Non-Irish-Americans can stand us when we get on about our heritage, whether we’re wearing green plastic garbage and screaming about whiskey or we’re singing IRA songs and claiming a legacy of rebellion that we sure don’t seem to live up to. No one can stand us and I don’t blame them. It’s reasonable to distrust (or dislike) any white person who claims oppression points by going on about how she didn’t used to be white (the things we have in common with our Italian-American brethren are complaining about not always being white, being Catholic, and abandoning our history of radical leftism).

It’s true that the Irish weren’t quite white for most of American history, but we never had it half as bad as Black or indigenous people here, and we’ve been white for a hundred years now because we met the devil at the crossroads and sold him our soul. To be frank, and to open a can of worms no one feels like eating, Irish Americans have faced at least as much oppression in Protestant America for being Catholic as for being Irish (look at the history of the second incarnation of the KKK for more about that). But once again, Catholicism is not currently an axis of oppression in this country and while history matters, the present conditions matter more.

There is a legacy of Irish Americans worth caring about, but they’re buried under cops, white supremacists (but I repeat myself), and leprechaun hats.

As for a legacy worth caring about, I can point in a few directions. First, and what I know best, are the Molly Maguires of the coal fields of Pennsylvania. When Britain did its second genocide of Ireland in the 1840s by starving the island, people fled to to North America and brought some time-honored workingclass traditions with them. (The first genocide of Irish people came at the hands of Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century in the wake of the English Civil War. Ask me why I don’t give a shit about the early anti-monarchy movement in England.)

It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I can point to two competing theories of labor struggle that vied for relevance in the 19th century. One, imported primarily from England, was labor unionism. Strikes, walkouts, collective bargaining. Socialism as something you have to strive for and build. The other, from Ireland, was basically “form a secret society with your friends, get drunk, put on women’s clothes, and kill the rich while they sleep in their beds.” It’s a pretty cool tradition. It comes from the people that Engels (of Marx and Engels) considered too barbarically socialist to ever become good and proper Marxist socialists.

(Seriously, it’s fascinating how obsessed with Ireland Engels was, in all the wrong ways.)

But the Molly Maguires. So there have been these looseknit secret societies all throughout Irish history (or at least since there have been English landlords to strangle), but the most famous today is the one that made it to the coal mines of America, the Molly Maguires. Their crossdressing wasn’t quite a gender thing, and it wasn’t quite a disguise. It was more of a magical act of transformation. They became something else when they got dressed up to go do sabotage and violence. That’s a tradition of drag I can get behind.

Most of the Irish miners were happy enough to join the British-style unions, and frankly unionism is probably a better way, overall, to build the power of the working class. But whenever the bosses started to crack down on the unions and began to criminalize organizing, the Fenian bastards were always waiting. Insurrection and revolution are not opposites; they are complimentary strategies. Accept the unions or you’ll deal with the Mollies.

Though the state is a powerful thing, and the Molly Maguires largely disappeared after a ton of them were hanged. So it goes.

Ireland won most of its independence in 1922, though Michael Collins and some of the other revolutionary leaders accepted a compromise and soon went to war against their own country, leading to the partition the country has today. (My Irish family doesn’t like to talk about politics, but told my aunt that my revolutionary uncle would spit every time he heard the name Michael Collins, to the end of his days.)

But revolutionaries, all over the world, rely on having somewhere to go when things get too hot at home. For the Russians, it was Switzerland. For the Irish, it was America. This is a history I’ve peeked at here and there, in the scripts for various episodes, but it’s one I haven’t looked fully at yet. A history of the Irish American revolutionaries who fundraised, bought arms, returned to Ireland ready to do war, and even invaded Canada. (Seriously. They figured if they could capture Canada they could ransom it to the British for Ireland’s freedom. It’s not the most anticolonial move, but it’s weird and it happened and I’ll cover it someday.)

This went on for decades. The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in 1858, an American counterpart to the Irish Republican Brotherhood that became the Irish Republican Army. But you’ve also got folks like the Irish (not -American) syndicalist Jim Larkin who helped found the Dil Pickle Club in Chicago in 1917 alongside an American IWW bombmaker named Jack Jones (I don’t think he was in a bombmaker’s union, he was just a union guy who made bombs to blow up bosses. It was the style at the time). This club was a nightlife spot and one of the only racially integrated places in Chicago. And it was where Jim Larkin hung out while in exile, before he returned to a mostly-free Ireland.

There wasn’t a lot of anarchist history in Ireland before the revolution (though by the early 20th century syndicalists and anarchists played a larger role in revolutionary struggle), but I have a theory about why there wasn’t a capital-A Anarchist movement there. I even have notes somewhere about this theory, but they’re not in front of me, because this isn’t a well-considered essay, this is a rant I wrote because I was grouchy that my St. Patrick’s Day milkshake tasted like toothpaste and that I still drank it. Shit, I think that milkshake is part of the metaphor after all.

All throughout anarchist history, I find European anarchists less concerned with exporting anarchism to the colonies so much as working in support of anticolonial struggles and importing indigenous methods of rebellion, which then got digested in Europe and exported again. You’ve got the Greek anarchist doctor Plotino Rhodakanaty, who went to Mexico to learn about traditional land use from people and wound up inspiring a generation of indigenous Mexican anarchists. You’ve got the veteran of the Paris Commune, Louis Michel, who threw down with the indigenous people of New Caledonia while she was in exile and developed her anarchist thought while there. You’ve got the naturalist Peter Kropotkin, who developed most of his theories of anarchist communism by studying nature and anthropology, including in Siberian communities. And you’ve got… British anarchists who were consistently the only people (that I’ve found) in Britain who supported Irish independence and the violence of the oppressed. The editors of British anarchist newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s weren’t trying to export anarchism to Ireland, they were trying to raise funds for Irish revolutionaries and they were taking notes about Irish methods of socialism and resistance. Like the Irish secret societies. Possibly (I haven’t traced this on my red string board just yet) the precursor to affinity groups.

Direct action, insurrection, and communal land use were already core principles in Irish culture.

Somewhere in me I’ve got a good and proper essay about the abolition of whiteness, about how in order to destroy white supremacy we need to destroy whiteness as a social construct. I’ll write it some day (other people have written it already, but who doesn’t like learning to play a good cover song? It’s like folk music; the abolition of whiteness is for everybody).

In the meantime, remember: if we wanted to celebrate Ireland properly, we’d fly Palestinian flags today, not wear green.

Some episodes I’ve done that have covered this sort of stuff:

• The Molly Maguires (part one / part two)

• The Dil Pickle Club (part one / part two)

• The Diggers (covers Cromwell’s genocide a bit) (part one / part two)

It’s time to get prepared. Or, if you’re a regular reader of my content, it’s time to check on, and shore up, your preps.

To be clear, I’m not particularly worried about nuclear war. No more than I was yesterday. I’m a big believer in preparing for everything, but you’ve got to have priorities, and nuclear war should always be pretty low on your list, because it’s unlikely, hard to prepare for, and hard to survive even if you’re prepared. In an awful lot of scenarios with nuclear war, you and everyone you love will die more or less without notice.

Sure, you can get iodine tablets to flood your thyroid to reduce your risk of one specific cancer (though those tablets are contra-indicated for anyone over 40). You can actually, surprisingly, build a DIY fallout shelter fairly easily, and maybe one day I’ll bother. But nuclear war is either coming or it isn’t, and it’s quite possible it will simply end life on earth, so honestly it isn’t worth worrying much about.

No, it’s the oil crisis that has me worried, and it’s going to have knock-on effects. A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz strait in the Persian Gulf, just south of Iran. I woke up this morning to news that oil tankers were burning. This is the largest disruption to the oil supply chain in history.

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I feel weird focusing on the economic impacts on Americans when describing a war that is fought by a madman war monger like Pete Hegseth who lifts fake weights to try to look buff and views morality as weakness. It’s a wildly immoral war being waged by two wildly immoral regimes (against a third country ruled by a wildly immoral regime, but as always it’s the people themselves who are suffering). But I can only write about so many things at once.

There were a series of oil crises in the 1970s caused by tension in West Asia. In 1973, most Arab countries refused to sell oil to the countries (like the US) that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War (six years earlier, in the six-day war, Israel had stolen the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from neighboring countries, and in 1973 various countries tried and failed to halt that land theft).

The embargo quadrupled oil prices in the west, leading to energy rationing and a stock market crash that reshaped US economics and therefore world history. The revolution in Iran in 1979 led to the doubling of oil prices and a second oil crisis. During these crises, there were miles-long lines outside of gas stations, with people fistfighting over pumps and stealing from one another’s cars.

Already gas prices have gone up around fifty cents and could reach $4 by next week. The economy was already in trouble, with the US losing 92,000 jobs last month. So it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Which is to say, the current war on Iran might (or might not) lead to much bigger issues than “gas is 50 cents more expensive.”

The price of gas impacts the price of everything. The stuff we buy at the store was driven there in trucks that burn gas. Fertilizer is made from petrochemicals (whether or not it should be) and food will get more expensive to produce.

We’re already in an economic crisis, of course. And that crisis is going to deepen. If the current energy crisis is short, retailers and distributors will eat the cost. But if it goes on a month or more (according to what I’ve read) then the costs will reach the customers, who were already struggling to pay for what they need. I personally can’t imagine the US is capable of wrapping up a war in a month.

So then, preparedness. How do you prepare for an oil crisis? Well, more or less the way you prepare for anything: shore up your ability to survive short and medium term supply chain shocks by maintaining a few days or a few weeks worth of supplies at home. Food, water, medicine. Backup power. Keep extra shelf-stable food around by buying slightly more than you use every time you go to the store. Deepen your pantry.

You can store gasoline, but it’s complicated to do. Personally, I only did this for a little while because it’s a pain to maintain. Since gasoline is not shelf stable, you have to rotate through your stocks every 3 months or so (slightly longer if you get ethanol-free gas, and slightly longer than that if you bother to add additives). If you want to store gasoline, get good quality gas cans, fill them up, and write the date on them. Store them tfor two months and then put that gas in your vehicle and fill them up again.

Personally, I only bother doing this when there’s a reason to suspect there might be shortages. Like, you know, now. I guess I’m going to go get some gas today.

But in general, just fill up your vehicle more often. Make it a rule that you don’t park at home with less than half a tank of gas. It’s the same price in the end to keep your gas tank topped up.

If you were thinking about getting an electric car, it might not be a bad moment to do so. It’s hard to say how an energy crisis will affect the cost of electricity, but it probably won’t hit as quickly or dramatically as the price of gas.

But the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself for an energy crisis is the same step that is always the most important step in preparedness: build community.

This is something more and more people are doing anyway due to the ICE crisis, in which armed gangs roam our streets kidnapping people. There are rapid response networks being set up all over the country, and frankly I can’t imagine a better network to be plugged into for any crisis than neighbors who are concerned for, and willing to fight for, other neighbors.

The way I’ve seen people build hyperlocal community is a two-pronged approach. One prong is to start getting together with the people in your neighborhood with whom you have the most ideological or subcultural affinity. Punks meetups, anarchist meetups, or I guess transgender furry meetups (whatever you zoomers are into). Try to get together regularly for dinners or potlucks or lube wrestling or whatever y’all are into. Create a signal loop for it. This group of people is easier to organize because you’re starting from a similar place. But it’s not enough.

The other prong is to organize with all of your neighbors who are willing to share a basic bottomline idea like “we shouldn’t let armed gangs kidnap our neighbors.” This is a reasonably popular sentiment, and you’re likely to find people who agree with it. You can call for building a rapid response network, but you can also call for a barbecue or a block party. I have this suspicion that the block party is going to be the single most important social structure of the revolution. Your goal with your neighbors might not be to actually organize right away, but just to help each other be known in each other’s lives.

I’ve written a decent bit about preparedness before, if you’re curious:

• An introduction to concepts

• How to live like the world is ending

• Why we’re prepared

• Building resilient communities

• Go bags

• Storing food

• Storing water

• Home preparedness

I am going to tell you that all genuine revolutions are built by local decisionmaking bodies (councils, let’s call them) that then network or federate together to build a larger, revolutionary society.

And I’ll start with the saddest example I can think of.

All power to the soviets.

In March 1917, the Russian people had their February revolution (they were working with a different calendar back then, so February was in March) and threw out the Tsar and then tried to figure out, as all people in that situation must, what the fuck to do next. They spent most of the year ruled by what gets called “dual power.” Two different systems of governance co-existed, awkwardly. On one side was the Duma, the top-down “democratic” structure that looked more or less like any western republic. On the other side were the soviets, the democratic-without-scarequotes workers councils that then networked themselves up into a larger congress.

By and large, the Duma was the government of the moderates and the soviets was the government of the radicals. The radical faction (bolsheviks and anarchists and left-socialists) demanded that power reside in the soviets, rather than the Duma. Their slogan was “all power to the soviets,” a slogan that meant, more or less, “all power to the people.”

As far as I can tell, the slogan was coined by Vladimir Lenin.

Unfortunately for pretty much everyone involved and for the history of socialism in the 20th century, Lenin didn’t mean what he said. He spoke of workers’ power, but he meant to take personal power.

When the Russian people had their October revolution (which was, frankly, more of a coup—the anarchists controlled large chunks of the military and ousted the Duma from power by force), political pluralism lasted only a few months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks centralized the power at the top of the Soviet structure, disenfranchising the very soviets they’d claimed to want to invest with power and arresting, outlawing, and killing the other folks who helped them in both revolutions (such as the anarchists and the left-socialists).

These days, Bolsheviks and their apologists will tell you that the centralization of power and the seizing of state power were necessary in order to have a socialist revolution, but the thing is, they’d already had a socialist revolution. They’d built a vast, coordinated network of workers councils all across their gigantic country and ousted both the Tsar and the representative democracy, only to have a few of their leaders pull a bait-and-switch on the workers to create an authoritarian state.

It was decentralization and pluralism that defeated the Tsars, it was decentralization and pluralism that defeated the Duma (albeit in more questionable ways). It was centralization that swept in, turning the slogan “all power to the soviets” into a sick mockery of itself.

People didn’t take any of this lying down, and there was a whole civil war with an awful lot of sides (there was a white army, a black army, a red army, a green army, and various nationalists who just wanted to be free from Russia entirely). But in the end, the Bolsheviks triumphed. After one last stand for socialist pluralism in the Battle of Krondstadt, the people who wanted (by my definition) a genuine revolution were defeated.

Then Stalin came to power and started the purges that saw most of the surviving Bolshevik revolutionaries murdered—the two ideologies that have killed the most communists (including Bolsheviks) are fascism and… Bolshevism.

It’s worth knowing that Stalin coined the term “Marxist-Leninism” to describe his own belief system, not Lenin’s. It’s easy enough to imagine that “Marxist-Leninism” means “the political ideology of Lenin, rooted in the ideology of Marx,” because that’s what it sounds like it should mean, but a more accurate word for it would be “Stalinism.” Followers of Lenin specifically are just called “Leninists.” I assume Stalin coined his beliefs “Marxist-Leninism” in order to present himself as the legitimate successor of Lenin, in contrast to his political rival Trotsky.

Meanwhile, the Soviets? They never saw power. The work of millions of rank-and-file socialists, communists, and anarchists was destroyed. Not by the capitalists, though the capitalists tried. Not by the monarchists, though the monarchists tried. The work of the people was destroyed by their own leaders.

This is why I’m an anarchist. Not because anarchism is the single true ideology or the only means by which to improve society, but because skepticism of power is core to my understanding of the world. But no part of me believes that only anarchists fight for what I would call genuine revolution. Some of the examples I look to have been built by people who call themselves socialists, or communists, or even Communists. Some of the examples I look to have been built by people with simply no time for western ideological labels.

I have no interest in trying to claim those revolutions in the name of Anarchism (or even anarchism). They are simply revolutions that I appreciate as someone concerned with individual and collective liberty. Political and ideological labels, after all, will only get us so far.

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I started with the saddest example I could think of, not because I revel in some kind of defeatism, but because it’s likely the most famous (and misunderstood) example of a revolution built on a foundation of local councils. The project of the Left in the early 20th century was to create and empower local councils. Some attempted to create soviets—often under that name.

The German revolution of 1918 was full of workers councils (defeated, this time, by a more traditional parliamentary republic, the Wiemar republic). The Limerick Soviet of 1919 in Ireland took over their own city. It grew out of a general strike, and for two weeks workers handled the distribution of food and utilities and all the needs of the people in the city.

The same time period saw the rise of syndicalist labor unions, in particular anarcho-syndicalist unions, that seek to empower workers directly to meet their own needs and to organize power in a decentralized way. It was the anarcho-syndicalists who built revolutionary Catalonia in the 1930s, after defeating Franco’s fascist coup (and before losing the longer, grinding civil war). During the revolution there, trade unions and local councils took power and kept the economy running.

It’s curious how American libertarians tend to view socialism as antithetical to freedom and democracy, but in revolutionary Spain, the workplace itself was democratic. In capitalist democratic republics, we’ve accepted the idea that democracy stops when the time clock starts. There’s simply no reason we should accept that.

The roots of socialism are fiercely democratic and liberatory. We tend to view the basic idea of socialism to be “everyone should share stuff,” and that’s a major part of it. But in the 19th century, socialists talked just as much about how the point was the empowerment of the individual:

When class-robbery is abolished every man will reap the fruits of his labour.
—William Morris, 1884

It sounds counterintuitive, after a century of capitalist and capital-C Communist propaganda, that socialism wants us to have what we make. But it’s really quite simple: the owners are stealing from you. That’s where their profit comes from. I would certainly rather share (and be shared with) than have the rich steal from me.

Before industrialization, the individual artisan had some degree of freedom. After industrialization, our best bet to actually control our own lives, and not have what we produce be stolen from us, is collectivization. A collective farm is actually the logical progression from individual homesteads, and represents preserved independence, not subservience. Subservience is what we get when we submit to top-down structures, like capitalism or capital-C Communism.

Cooperativism is what allows us to retain dignity and freedom in the modern, industrialized world, and that’s something we have learned in part from groups like the Colored Farmer’s Alliance and Cooperative Union, which was active in the US south from 1886 to 1891. They would not have described themselves as a revolutionary organization, nor even any sort of Left project, and there is shockingly little written about them, but for five years this group (that might have had more than a million members) worked tirelessly to break the sharecropping system that had replaced slavery but still kept Black people subservient to their same former masters.

The rise of industrial agriculture all but ruined the idea of eking out a living as an individual farmer, and it was by cooperative ownership that Black farmers had a chance in hell of competing. The Alliance set up cooperative stores across the South where people could purchase the tools they needed at cost, or take out loans to buy out their mortgages away from exploitative deals with white landowners.

That particular group came to an end after it called for a cottonpicker strike in 1891 that left a few dozen workers dead at the hands of white vigilantes, but its work continues. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, for example, works to this day to keep farmland in Black hands through cooperative ownership.

And that group, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives? It’s part of a larger radical economic project, one that is frankly one of the most revolutionary projects operating in the US today, a group called Seed Commons.

As full disclosure, I used to work for Seed Commons, mostly writing grants. I’m proud of that work though, and only left because podcasting takes up all my time these days.

Seed Commons is a group that works on reversing the economic extraction that continues to impoverish certain communities (especially but not exclusively racialized communities) across the country.

(Sorry, I wrote grants for them, so I accidentally fall into the jargon when I talk about them.)

In short, Seed Commons is a cooperative of loan funds (including the Federation of Southern Cooperatives) who work together to get money into the hands of cooperative businesses. They pool resources but share decisionmaking and retain local autonomy—it’s a bottom-up structure like those found in genuine revolutions, even if it is working on building economic power rather than political power.

Since it’s a cooperative itself, it got its start in all sorts of places. One group got its start keeping land in the hands of Black farmers through the power of collectivism. Another got its start as an immigrant community banding together to buy their own trailer parks. Another has been working to turn Baltimore into a hub of the cooperative economy, with infoshops and pizza stores and ice cream makers and cafes. Another got its start financing the workers who took over their own factories in Argentina, then returning home to the US to finance workers who took over their own factory in Chicago.

I’ll probably write about Seed Commons in greater length sometime, but basically, cooperativism is the mechanism by which we are able to stand on equal footing with larger power structures (whether state governments or international corporations). We have to band together to rule ourselves collectively, otherwise we’ll be ruled from above.

There are living examples of this model of “genuine revolution” (a phrase like that really does deserve scare quotes), though all of them are under attack (literally) as I type this. The same as individual farmers don’t stand much of a chance, individual revolutionary movements require other groups to work together with in solidarity.

In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatistas have been fighting for decades. The Zapatistas began as a traditional Marxist-Leninist revolutionary project. A handful of would-be revolutionaries moved to the mountains at the southeastern border of the country, presuming they could lead the people there in a traditional Marxist-Leninist way. They would be the vanguard, who would educate the masses.

They weren’t, however, bad people or fools. So when they showed up, rather than teaching the indigenous people of the area how to resist, they learned instead. Now the group is indigenous-led and focuses on the ideas of “good governance,” which involves, well, local councils that coordinate with one another to build a larger society. The exact details have changed over time, as they’ve learned from their mistakes and as their situation changes, but the basic idea has remained the same.

After years of preparation in the mountains as guerillas, the Zapatistas made an attempt to seize state power in Mexico, on January 1st 1994. Then, though, they listened to the people of Mexico who said that they didn’t want a violent revolution. So the Zapatistas have worked on building power through other means ever since.

They spurred on a series of “encounters” with grassroots groups all across the world to coordinate a global struggle against capitalism, colonialism, and what we might generally call “bad government.” This led to the successes of the alter-globalization movement of the turn of the century, which laid out the groundwork for much of the modern Left. And, if nothing else, the alter-globalization movement is what swept me up when I was a teenager. So without the Zapatistas, you might not be reading my words today.

They call what they do “Zapatismo,” and one of their slogans, one that is etched into my heart, is that they fight for a world in which many worlds are possible.

A few continents away, in Southwest Asia, there’s the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or what’s usually called Rojava. There, they practice a system called Democratic Confederalism. It’s an ethnically, religiously, and culturally pluralistic society that is trying to build a bottom-up democracy in the middle of one of the most protracted and complicated wars in the world today. They have built that democracy by, you guessed it, empowering local councils which then coordinate with one another to build a larger society.

The movement there has its roots in the Kurdish struggle for independence. Like the Zapatistas, it started with a traditional Marxist-Leninist group, this one called the PKK. But its leader, Abdullah Ocalan, started reading anarchist theory while he was in prison. In particular, he read books by Murray Bookchin (who spent most of his career calling himself an anarchist, but eventually started calling himself a “libertarian municipalist”).

Ocalan realized that these anti-authoritarian ideas better matched indigenous Kurdish culture and methods of decisionmaking. Ironically, since he was in charge, he was able to shift the politics of his group away from authoritarianism and towards what he calls democratic confederalism.

Then, when the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, people in Kurdish controlled regions began to practice that democratic confederalism. From the start, they were very clear that it wasn’t a Kurdish national project, but instead a multi-ethnic project. They were instrumental in the military defeat of ISIS, but as I write this are in a desperate situation.

There is a reason that this basic revolutionary strategy (of building power at a local level and then federating) has resonated with (or been developed by) so many different indigenous revolutionary groups in far-flung places. It works. It works both in terms of how to structure power but also in alignment with the human psyche.

This method of organizing happens so often that it seems to be the natural way we try to get things done. I’ve seen this pattern time and time again in both formal and informal situations. Left to our own devices, all of us understand the need for cooperation but also all of us understand that we are each other’s equals (or at least that no one is inherently in charge of us).

The Plaza movements of 2011 follow this pattern as well. Across the world, people began to occupy public plazas and build councils to take and exert popular power. Most of those movements collapsed after various lengths of time. Others toppled governments, though with mixed results.

How to actually build these councils, how to federate them, and how to use them to take power over our own lives, are more complicated questions that I don’t have the answers to. I suspect that the only way to learn the answers is to determine them collectively—no single theorist or movement is going to be able to accurately determine the best course for all of us. We have to actually get together and do this thing in order to find out exactly how we will do it.

History gives us a lot of examples though, of things that can go right and things that can go wrong. Most of the time, most of these groups don’t actually manage to take enough power to challenge state and corporate structures in a meaningful way. Other times, when groups do manage to challenge power (whether through mass protest or through armed insurgency or because of a power vacuum in a failed state), their energy is co-opted either by traditional state power (such as when mass movement energy is co-opted by a political party) or by authoritarianism within the council-based movement (such as in the case of the Russian revolution).

Other times, like in Chiapas and Rojava, groups manage to hold on to regional power for decades at a time. Best as I can tell, it’s through political education that they’re able to resist both state and internal co-optation—if you teach people what tricks to watch out for, they’re more resilient against those tricks, logically enough.

The best chance for existing revolutions like Chiapas and Rojava is if they are able to serve as an example for more of us to start our own revolutions, if they remind us to look at the crumbling state around us and form networks of regional councils by which to exert power over our own lives.

If there’s one thing reading history has taught me, it is that anything is possible.

Addendum

In case you were wondering “how will Margaret try to tie Tolkien into all of this,” I’d like to revisit, really quickly, the Russian revolution.

During the Russian Revolution, Lenin claimed to empower the soviets, which were numerous and built from different sorts of classes of people, but worked in secret to bind them all in service to him.

Or, as Galadriel described the Russian revolution in The Fellowship of the [Soviet],

It all began with the forging of the Great [Soviets]. Three were given to the [white collar workers]; [who perceived themselves as] immortal, wisest and fairest of all beings. Seven, to the [proletariat], great miners and craftsmen of the mountain halls. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the [peasants], who above all else desire power [as Marx famously theorized that peasants were inherently reactionary, although this has been proven incorrect]. For within these [soviets] was bound the strength and the will to govern over each [type of worker]. But they were all of them deceived, for another [soviet] was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord [Lenin] forged in secret, a [Congress of Soviets], to control all others. And into this [soviet] he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One [soviet] to rule them all.

With everything going on right now (a week of action in Minneapolis is underway, war is looming against Iran, ICE continues to ravage communities, Ukraine is entering its fifth year of holding back the Russian invasion) it seems strange to focus on, but I think it matters to understand that Elon Musk isn’t going to get you to Mars. I think it underlines the fact that the people in people are only somewhere on the spectrum between grifter and tyrant.

When my grandfather went to war, he served in the Pacific theater in the USS Scamp, a Gato-class submarine. The Gato class was the mass-manufactured submarine of the US Navy in World War II. Because the Navy decided to send a hobo from Iowa to college to learn naval architecture, my grandfather survived the war, though the Scamp did not. A couple missions after he left for school, the Scamp went down with all hands—or so we assume, since its remains have never been found. Survivor’s guilt haunted my grandfather until the end of his days.

A Gato-class submarine was built with a waterproof bulkhead in the middle of its engine room, dividing its two generators in case water intruded. Equipment designed for adverse conditions is intentionally over-designed with multiple redundancies. I’m certain every system onboard had multiple backups, and this was the mass-manufactured model.

The military uses the acronym PACE: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. You always have a plan and three backup plans. Not only should your backup systems have backup systems, but your backup systems’ backup systems should have backup systems.

Tesla makes deathtrap cars in which people routinely die because their electronic door handles don’t operate in an emergency. Most, but not all, of those doors have a manual override in case power is lost, but many of those manual overrides involve removing panels from the doors. And those overrides are only available from the inside. If power is lost, the pop-out door handles are not accessible from the outside. Cybertrucks have armored glass windows, which means emergency personnel are routinely unable to rescue people.

This is not a company that will get you to Mars.

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I don’t want to specifically extol the virtues of the US military, but my grandfather and engineers like him might have been able to get us to Mars (and engineers of his generation got us to the moon). Every ship my grandfather designed, he personally tested. He had the captain drive him into the worst storms imaginable, and he would stand on deck to feel the waves and the wind and see how his engineering held up.

Elon Musk would never do anything of that sort, because his company doesn’t design for reliability. It designs for cost efficiency.

The main reason I know that no one is seriously interested in colonizing Mars is that it’s been decades since anyone has tried to create a biosphere—a self-contained artificial ecosystem. Every attempt made to date failed, and it seems like most people simply gave up. Until we can prove that we can live in self-sustaining artificial environments, we can’t create self-sustaining colonies on lifeless planets.

Every science fiction book and movie takes this particular technology for granted, but self-sufficiency is one of the greatest unsolved problems between us and intrasolar expansion. I assume we take it for granted because it seems so easy from the outside, but we just don’t know how to do it.

All Elon Musk is trying to do is build rockets cheaply. For awhile, I was confused why so many of SpaceX’s launches end in these spectacular, explosive failures, when NASA has been able to land people on the moon for decades. Then I talked with a drunk NASA engineer at a show, and he told me SpaceX’s entire goal was to discover just how cheaply they can build rockets. The great technological problem they are trying to solve is “just how much can we strip away.” They ask themselves “what is the bare minimum viable product?”

There are all sorts of dystopian applications for technology like that. Like asteroid mining, hopefully done by robots but probably by a new class of indentured servants. But it’s not a way to build safe, reliable transportation to another planet. Just a way to stripmine the solar system.

If you ask an AI a question it doesn’t know the answer to, it will make up an answer. It’s not that it’s “lying,” it’s that what we call AIs aren’t actually intelligent. They aren’t thinking. Large language models are just fancy predictive text autocompletes that drain the earth of water and raise electricity prices and soon will destroy the entire world’s economy.

I grew up watching Star Trek, in which characters can ask a computer a question in plain language and get an answer. “How many times have humans visited the following planets?” or “Cross reference the following virus with all known alien cultures to determine its likely origin.” The computer never lies to them, because it is referencing databases and analyzing data.

It’s a more subtle technology than the warp drive or the teleporter or the food replicator or the holodeck, but the ship’s computer is mighty indeed.

And the thing is, we’re just as far away from it as we are from artificial gravity. Because LLMs are a technology that is fundamentally incapable of producing an artificial intelligence. The only people who are hallucinating are the believers in AI.

The other technologies that allow people on Star Trek to explore space are social technologies. Specifically, of course, the sort of democratic communism of the federation and its radical inclusivity and multiculturalism.

None of this addresses the ethical questions of space colonization, of course. “Should we go into space” divides the Left just as deeply as questions around authority and state power and tactics, and I almost never meet someone who is agnostic on the issue. People seem to either believe it is fundamentally good or bad to pursue space exploration.

I suspect that those of us who grew up reading science fiction are going to err much more heavily on the side of “yeah let’s go to space.” To put my own cards on the table, well, I grew up reading a lot of science fiction.

Octavia Butler, in her Parable novels, describes an essentially religious belief that humanity’s destiny is to explore the universe. Other people have criticized the idea, pointing out that it comes from the same “manifest destiny” that has spurred so much settler-colonialism and genocide.

But the thing is, theoretically, there is no life elsewhere, at least in the solar system, so most of the ethical critiques against colonization of the solar system fall flat on most audiences.

The problem for me is that the entities most likely to explore and colonize space—corporations and state governments—are exactly the entities that ought not be allowed to do it. Time and time again, systems of power take advantage of the best motivations of individuals—most scientists and engineers work to expand human knowledge and capacity, not with the goal of enriching this or that system. So a government, or a corporation, will say “we’re going to colonize Mars so that we better understand the universe and provide new ways of living!” to its citizens or employees, but its purpose is instead the consolidation of power.

Serfdom asteroid mining feels a lot more probable under the current system than any sort of utopian exploration.

Critics of space exploration often say “we have to fix our problems here before we should even talk about colonizing space,” and I think there’s some truth to this. Not necessarily as a moral requirement (I think with 8 billion of us, we can work on more than one project at a time), but as a technical requirement. One of the prerequisites of exploring space is destroying the society that gives people like Musk, Trump, Putin (or Biden, frankly) power.

If we want a Star Trek future, we’re going to have to abolish money and embrace multiculturalism, that’s all I’m saying.

And prove that we can live in a biodome.

Oh and solve the problem of space radiation.

Look, we’re probably not getting there anytime soon.

So maybe we should just abolish capitalism and the state and go from there.

We dream about fascism and famine like we might have once dreamed about being back in high school naked. We dream about stormtroopers that aren’t from Star Wars and we dream about tear gas and guns.

To be fair, I’ve been dreaming about the apocalypse for decades now, and sometimes those dreams are even halfway pleasant.

This moment though? My dreams are darker.

I’ve got a few friends who trust me with their dreams, and honored for that. There’s an intimacy and vulnerability to sharing dreams, and not just because they’re the work of our subconscious. Dreams are what our waking mind tries to shake, to destroy. Dreams are a threat to reality, so our brains work hard to keep them at bay. When we trust each other with our dreams, we’re asking others to hold onto something valuable, something we ourselves will likely soon forget.

So a few friends tell me their dreams, and I can tell you that those dreams are getting worse.

I came back from Minneapolis more on edge than I’m used to. I feel activated, not in the “now I’m even more of an activist” sense of that word but in the "therapy speak” sense by which I mean my nervous system is all fucked up. Well, to be honest, I’m both versions of activated, but I’m going to focus on the latter.

I’ve got a lot of experience with this activism thing, and I’m not used to feeling quite so raw, quite so vulnerable. I’m not used to crying when people describe what they’ve just gone through—for better or worse, I’ve always been decent at setting my emotions aside to sort through later.

Ever since I got home, I’ve been sleeping less and I’ve been sleeping more, and I’ve been tired and cranky, and it was only a day or two ago that I made it through my overflowing inbox to tell people “sorry you haven’t heard from me in weeks.”

I haven’t written a personal post in quite a while, because maybe part of being activated means I’d rather give reportbacks about Minneapolis at social centers, or talk with friends about how they’re going to talk to their neighbors, than sit with how I’m feeling. I’d rather do my strange podcasting job, for which I sometimes read and talk about partisans fighting the Nazis in the war my grandfather fought, than confront this pervasive sense of doom that I wake up to more mornings than not.

Because there was one dream I had recently that really shook me.

And since I’m an asshole, here’s where I’m putting the paywall.

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AI might destroy civilization, or at least the internet, but I don’t want to get your hopes up.

There’s something about AI that brings out the grand sweeping statements, the proclamations of new divinity or doom. There are people, people in power, who believe that the copy-paste machines they’ve built will soon ascend to godhood, and those people in power take reckless action presuming that to be true. Then there are people like me, writing essays that open with sentences like “AI might destroy civilization.”

I’m probably wrong. Of all the times civilization has shuddered, of all the times civilization has shaken, at least this past millennia or so, it’s held itself together.

But bear with me while I use hyperbole to make a point.

Modern society is built of interconnection, of global trade, of networking standards, of communication, of our ability to verify certain information. It’s built on a generalized sense of trust. That feels at risk.

Adults today, myself included, suffer from credulity. We’re used to the idea that if we pick up the phone and hear our mother’s voice, that we are talking to our mother. We’re used to believing the news when we see clear video of events. Sure, darkroom trickery and photoshop and CGI have existed for quite some time, but the overwhelming majority of the photos we’ve seen are actual representations of what the camera saw. If we see a single photo, we might not trust it. If we see photos and videos from multiple angles, and video testimony from multiple witnesses, we’ll believe it.

We suffer from credulity, and for us, reality is breaking down right now, because we’re so used to believing the evidence of our own eyes. All of us (or maybe it’s just me) have reposted funny or strange videos on social media, only to learn later (to use a specific example) that kangaroos cannot, in fact, jump backwards.

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Because we tend to believe what we see, we’re easily siloed off by social media algorithms that feed us distinct visions of reality. Just this past week, I saw both an AI video of someone outrunning ICE while wearing a ridiculous costume and I saw an AI photo of grateful residents of a city greeting ICE with free coffee and welcome signs. Whatever you already believe, there’s AI slop for you to lap up.

This siloing of reality was already a problem, and it’s one that will only get worse as false images and videos become easier to produce and harder to detect. “Media literacy” is getting harder to train for. AI is improving faster than the public is learning to detect it. This siloing of reality is the problem I’ve been aware of for awhile, the one I hear people talking about. Right now, the problem is that we tend to believe what we see.

The next generations will, I believe, suffer from an essentially inverse problem.

A child born today will never experience a world in which there is any reason to believe that realistic images, video, or audio represent reality, or that a person wrote the words that they read. Instead of presuming any photo-realistic image (or credible-sounding audio) is real unless proven otherwise, they might simply assume that every image and text was generated by the monstrous lying machines that sit in warehouses just outside our cities and suck up all our water and power.

A video used for court evidence will seem about as believable as if the prosecutor had shown up with a slideshow of oil paintings. There will be no reason to believe a comment on a forum was written by a human, no reason to suspect that the influencers on YouTube are actual people with actual opinions or actual information. Another player in an online game will be no more likely to be a person than not.

The only verifiable interactions will be those done with people we have met in person, or who have been vetted directly by people we have met in person.

If this culture of disbelief becomes the norm, the ramifications of it are astounding and wide-reaching. In essence, the only verifiable experiences will be face-to-face. Trust will only be found where it is earned, and in a culture ruled by lying machines, honesty and humanity might be valued above all else.

In crime activist circles, we call this a web of trust. Webs of trust are necessary when you’re planning direct actions that put you in harm’s way, but they haven’t traditionally been necessary when you’re trying to look up how to wire a ceiling light or when you want to find out how the war against authoritarianism in Myanmar (or Minnesota) is going.

The internet will be fundamentally transformed, no longer a place where you can learn things, but only a sort of strange collective hallucination. We will be drivers in a fog of disinformation, our paths lit only by the dim headlights of trust.

There are people working on technology like digital signatures, technologies that allow one computer to trust one another. Video cameras might be equipped with signatures that prevent (or complicate) spoofing. But I’m skeptical that this technology will be consistently reliable, let alone user-friendly enough to generalize far enough to turn the tide against disinformation.

I’m wary of anyone making grand pronouncements of doom, and you should be wary of me. But the best case scenario I can imagine puts us roughly back to the 18th century, before the advent of photography. Yet while newspapers and journalists have always been biased (and were more dramatically so before the 20th century), it used to be that you could at least trust that this or that written piece of news was written by a person, that it conveys if nothing else the opinion of the writer. Now, unless you trust the byline, there is no reason to trust it at all.

In the world of fiction publishing, we’re already several years into this collapse. No one can be bothered to read stories that no one has bothered to write, and fiction magazines tend to have fairly strict no-AI policies. Those policies are getting harder and harder to enforce. The best advantage I have as a writer, submitting to those magazines, is that people know who I am. I have a decent reputation, because no one has accused me of doctoring my writing with AI (though I sure do love emdashes, I must admit). I can’t imagine how much harder it is to break into the field today, and it’s only going to get worse.

Trust is already a social currency. This is the reason I do not share any fundraiser that was not personally vetted by either me or someone I know well and trust. The value of trust as a social currency, though, will only go up. People who trust information they’ve read on the internet, or any photos or videos they’ve seen, will seem hopelessly naive.

There’s a sort of beauty to the less credulous culture we might build, though. Science fiction has been promising us a fully-online dystopia for decades now, one in which people are fed slop and lap it up and let the physical world fall to ruin. I’m a professional optimist, and I don’t think that’s what will happen. Sure, my own generation, and even the zoomers, might not adapt, but younger people likely will.

The only logical response to an internet full of utter disinformation is to return to face-to-face interactions. Live theater and music will be all the more important. Journalists might give more talks in person about what they’ve seen. If we’re desperate for influencers and hot takes, we might even see the return of one of the oldest professions in the world—soapboxers, who stand on street corners to rant as entertainingly as possible on this or that subject. (Seriously, I was shocked by how universal this form of entertainment was until the advent of radio. A good soapboxer was a theorist and a comedian at the same time, able to captivate crowds of dozens or hundreds). Maybe I’ll move from podcasting to live storytelling. Maybe I’ll be happier, albeit likely poorer.

We might talk to one another more. We might build trust. We might build community. We might learn to prioritize the local. We might make things with our hands and speak with our mouths. If I’m going to make utopian pronouncements, I’ll say maybe we’ll learn to govern ourselves with local councils, then federate those local councils and build an egalitarian society from the bottom up. Maybe we’ll extend this culture of distrust so far that we stop trusting capitalists and stop trusting the people promising us authoritarian alternatives to capitalism.

Maybe this grand reset of trust will lead to a grand rebuilding. Maybe we’ll build a better world, largely (but probably not completely) offline.

And I’ll have to find a new job.

But that’s alright with me.

People accomplish things and governments rush to catch up. That’s the way it is, everywhere.

But Minneapolis in particular knows what it means to memorialize the dead. It knows that you fight in memory of people, and for the memory of people.

I spent four nights and three days in Minneapolis last week, when I came up to cover the rapid response and mutual aid networks that seemingly the entire population of the city is involved with. I met up with my colleague James Stout (from the podcast It Could Happen Here) and was happy to be with an experienced conflict journalist.

We spent our waking hours talking to as many people as we could and trying to sort out how to deal with the cold. It was so cold that the key to my truck stopped working in the door and I had to leave it unlocked. It was so cold that the brand new car battery wouldn’t turn over my engine and one time we had to bring the battery in overnight. It was so cold that my -20 degree windshield wiper fluid froze. It was so cold that half our electronics didn’t work: James’s audio recorders and even his phone just shut off.

But it wasn’t cold enough to keep Minnesotans inside. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t turn out, in the tens or hundreds of thousands, to fill the streets for the general strike. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t pour out of their houses in their pajamas and crocs when they saw commotion outside, in case they could do anything to defend their communities from ICE. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t resist what amounts to a foreign occupation of professional kidnappers. I’m not being hyperbolic, about the cold, about the pajamas, or the kidnappers.

The shortest version of what I saw is this: a few thousand federal officers are occupying Minnesota right now. They’re in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the suburbs, and even some of the smaller towns. No one wants them there—I’ve never seen a community half so united as the people of the Twin Cities.

ICE is there to kidnap black and brown people. They’re not subtle about their racism—even the local police have complained about how all of their off-duty non-white officers are being harassed by federal agents. Masked, unmarked men are simply snatching people out of their cars, throwing them into unmarked SUVs, and driving them away, often to never to see their loved ones again. People’s cars are left abandoned in the streets, sometimes still running, sometimes still in drive.

In response to this, many vulnerable people have essentially gone into lockdown. There are families that can’t leave their houses. Other people—friends, families, and neighbors—are looking out for them. The networks that are looking out for them are far and away the largest, most organized, and most successful networks like these I’ve ever seen, and they’re entirely decentralized. There is no central group or organization that is making this happen. It’s just people. People who are organized.

There are two sides to this struggle: rapid response and mutual aid. Rapid response networks organize to identify and track ICE vehicles and agents and to disrupt abductions in process. Mutual aid networks organize to get affected people food, medical care, rides, vet visits, company… whatever they need. These are two separate webs of networks. The mutual aid side is more secretive in its organizing, of course, because it is taking care of the people who cannot leave their homes without being kidnapped.

It’s strange to realize that the work people can do aboveground is harass federal agents, but the work that people have to do in secret is… feed people.

Partly because there’s no central organization, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale of these networks, especially the mutual aid networks. There are tens of thousands of people, at least, being cared for by these networks.

The rapid response network is slightly more visible. When an ICE vehicle is spotted, people follow it in cars honking and blowing whistles.

From afar, I have to admit I was skeptical about the efficacy of whistles and car horns. After a few days on the ground, I have no more doubts. I asked person after person: “does this work?” and all of them got some look of sorrow on their faces as they thought about every time they failed to stop an abduction. But all of them had interrupted multiple abductions, successfully.

Basically, ICE agents seem to back off as soon as they are outnumbered. They know they are not perceived as a legitimate law enforcement operation in the city, so they work quickly and in secrecy. Since abductions happen quickly—often stealing people in two or three minutes—the response needs to be just as fast. And it works because when people hear whistles and car horns, they start looking out. They come out of their houses.

It works because everyone knows what is happening is wrong, and everyone is willing to risk their lives to protect people.

Time after time, ICE has tried to abduct someone, only to be scared off by Minnesotans in pajamas and crocs. ICE will throw some tear gas, spray some pepperspray—and occasionally murder someone—and then run.

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There are so many cliches I have to dance around while writing about all of this, but some are just unavoidable. Anti-ICE is the side of love and courage, and ICE is the side of hate and fear.

I stayed up late my last night in town, talking with a house full of queers—most of them Jews—about their experiences over the past two months. Two people told me a story that is going to stick with me. It’s a shockingly normal story.

The murder of Renee Good didn’t stop people from observing ICE. That same day, a few hours later, elsewhere in the city, two queer folks were in a car in a parking lot, observing ICE. ICE could have gone around them, but ICE wanted them to move. The two folks in the car didn’t move.

So ICE smashed out their windows and sprayed them with bear mace (later bragging to each other that they used the good stuff on the two). ICE started beating them.

They held hands.

The two recounted this story in their own ways, listening to one another as they relived what must have been among the worst days of their lives, but they both remembered, and lingered just so briefly, on holding hands. Blind from bear spray, with broken glass everywhere, while gloved fists beat them, they held onto one another.

They’re both citizens, so after hours without medical treatment but full of homophobic slurs, they were released without charges.

When they got home, their car was there. Another observer had gotten into a car full of pepper spray and broken glass and driven it home. They don’t even know which of the observers did that for them, because whoever did it didn’t stick around waiting to be thanked. Probably, whoever rescued their car went back out to try to keep helping people.

I asked people in Minneapolis what they wanted other people to know about their struggle, and one person replied: tell people about the beauty here too. The most horrific acts of the state capture the headlines—and for good reason—but there’s a specific beauty to what’s happening here.

When I ask people where all of this came from, the answer was never some specific organization or network or coalition. Organizations, networks, and coalitions are part of this, absolutely. But the core of the resistance is just neighborliness.

The Friday of the general strike, the coldest day in Minnesota since 2019, my truck wouldn’t start. We’d packed up all our stuff to head off to the direct action to shut down ICE, but my engine wouldn’t turn over. My brand new battery didn’t have the power to get the cold oil moving, not even with a jump box attached.

A neighbor came out, almost dressed for the weather, to offer his help. He wasn’t a mechanic, he just saw people stuck and figured he should check on us. If nothing else, he offered, we could go into his house to get warm.

Three different people showed up to rescue us, in two different vehicles. Someone we’d met the day before offered to lend us a car. A mechanic I’d never met drove down to talk us through our options. In the end, with a combination of hand warmers, a hair dryer, and jumper cables, we got the truck running.

If there are problems that can be solved by hand warmers, the people in Minneapolis will solve them. Everywhere we went, there were people giving out hand and toe warmers.

But this spirit of “if your car is broken by the cold, strangers will save you” was presented to me by multiple people as the spirit that animates the resistance to ICE. Some people are trapped in their houses, so other people try their hardest to help them, whether or not they’ve got enough experience, whether or not they’re ready.

I can’t emphasize the decentralization of these networks enough, and everyone I’ve talked to is fully aware of the limitations of that decentralization and also fully aware of the fact that none of this would have worked if it was all being run by this or that org, this or that non-profit, this or that ideological position. (Although a history of anarchist organizing is certainly among the ingredients that has made this particular stew possible. What a good metaphor I just came up with. I’m so good at my job.)

Both the rapid response and mutual aid efforts are hyperlocal. There’s not some city-wide network, there are barely neighborhood-wide networks. People are organizing with people on their own block, or small handful of blocks. This hasn’t been presented as a limitation, but instead an advantage. This was one of the main things that people wanted me to emphasize, when I talk to people in other cities about how to organize: decentralization is a strength and should be leaned into.

Decentralized networks are harder to infiltrate and harder to destroy. This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement. Because it is built out of so many interlocking networks, even if a bad actor managed to disrupt an individual piece of the network (by, for example, bogging down some particular organizing group in minutiae and preventing it from accomplishing its work), the disruption would be minimal. Because the network is democratic (not in the sense that people involved vote on decisions, but in the sense that it is run by the people who are part of it rather than by some vanguard of leaders), people are listened to only when their ideas actually appeal to people.

Furthermore, democratic movements are inherently more inviting to a broader range of people, because the individuals who join can be part of shaping the culture and tactics of that movement. Someone who joins a Signal loop to stay informed about ICE activity in their neighborhood isn’t necessarily subscribing to this or that culture or political ideology.

The hyperlocal nature of the rapid response networks is actually an adaptation they developed. When ICE first arrived, they staged huge raids with hundreds of agents that took hours. There was time for people to gather, and responders could come from a comparatively large area. ICE soon learned it couldn’t operate in the open, so they moved to fast abductions. Now they just racially profile people on the street (or scan license plates for names) and snatch them, in a process that sometimes only takes 2-3 minutes. You have to be within a couple blocks of this in order to observe or interfere, so the organizing happens block by block.

This style of organizing works because the overwhelming majority of people in the city are very actively opposed to seeing their neighbors kidnapped. There is no shortage of people willing to yell at ICE.

Because there is no rigid authority within the organizing against ICE, it remains unpredictable to its enemies. Some observers are more likely to actively disrupt ICE than others. Some people who follow ICE do so calmly, some do it aggressively. People are empowered to take their own risks and make their own decisions, which means ICE can’t develop a single set of protocols of how to respond to the observers.

I really do need to emphasize the “leaderful” part of this. This is not disorganized chaos and randomness. This is, well, organized chaos and randomness. People are constantly adapting to the circumstances, changing protocols and tactics day by day, sometimes hour by hour. I have never seen a more nimble organization at anywhere near this size.

More than one person told me: the thing that you need to know about setting up rapid response networks is that they need to be decentralized. They need to maximize the autonomy of their participants. They need to be leaderful. None of this works top-down.

When I asked where this movement came from, why Minneapolis seemed to be so capable of protecting its people, everyone I spoke to pointed to a different root, though none claimed to be speaking to the only root.

An organizer from the American Indian Movement (AIM) who grew up in that movement talked about the community patrols indigenous people put together in the late 60s, and before that the solidarity between Black communities in North Minneapolis and indigenous communities in South Minneapolis.

Another organizer from the Powderhorn neighborhood told me about the arts community of that area, in particular the Mayday parades that have been happening every year since the mid-70s. “People just show up at Powderhorn Park and make puppets,” I was told. The parade is self-organized, self-directed, and legendary.

Other people told me about potlucks and barbecues. Last year, with the growing crisis of fascism, more people started throwing events for their neighbors, just to get to know each other.

Person after person talked about the George Floyd uprising of 2020 too, about the community networks people built back then. It’s not like people set up networks and kept them super active, but connections can lay dormant for years and then re-emerge. (Like seeds? Are we talking about roots or seeds? I’m so good at metaphor.)

Contrary to what every apocalypse movie tells you, people come together during crisis. Think about waiting for the bus. In some cultures, strangers don’t talk to one another, so you might be waiting for the bus in crowded silence. But as soon as the bus is five minutes late, everyone is friends, or at the very least sharing information and/or snacks.

These days, of course, people who are waiting for the bus are also looking out for the occupation forces.

While some connections between neighbors and communities run deep, most of the connections have sprung up in the past months (and especially the past couple of weeks) as the crisis deepens. People who used to know a dozen neighbors now know hundreds of them.

The other origin of this movement, of course, are the movements people have already started to confront ICE elsewhere. We all learn from one another. Maybe it all started with people from Chicago who made the trek up north to teach people about whistles.

Sometimes I just lay back and think, really think, about the fact that it’s whistles and car horns and crowds versus the modern gestapo, and before I visited Minneapolis I couldn’t really wrap my head around the idea that this could work.

But it does work. It works because people in pajamas and crocs will scream at fascists at seven in the morning and take a face full of pepper spray for their effort and just keep doing it day after day.

It’s working, and I think we’re going to win, and it’s going to be messy and nasty. But while ICE is tangled up in Minneapolis, they’re not able to exert as much force elsewhere.

Last Friday was the general strike.

Usually the motto of a general strike is “no business as usual.” But business as usual has been almost impossible in Minneapolis for months now already. The families who are hiding, the families who are being fed, they’re not and they’ve never been just “drains on society” like the right wing likes to paint them. They’re essential to the functioning of the city, and the economy of Minneapolis has been absolutely wrecked by ICE’s presence. Food service and distribution in particular has been hit hard. I talked to someone who works for a completely non-political food distribution company that joined the general strike because they’re as desperate as everyone else is to get people back to work, to get food moving into and around the city.

It’s a testament to the decentralized organizing in the city that while I talked with mutual aid and rapid response organizers, they weren’t the general strike organizers. But a strike is inherently leaderful, because it’s built by people withholding their labor. Even in the few days we were there, business after business joined the call for the strike, partly because their employees weren’t going to come in anyway.

Some social media posts say this is the US’s first general strike in 80 years (referencing, I assume, the Oakland general strike of 1946), but I’m not quite so old as you might think I am and this is my second general strike—Oakland had another one on November 2, 2011, during the Occupy protests, that was on roughly this scale.

But last Friday, tens or hundreds of thousands of people poured into downtown on the coldest day of the year (I am not done complaining about how cold it was. This is how you know I’m not a Minnesotan) to march against ICE.

Earlier in the morning, a few hundred people did their best to lay siege to ICE’s headquarters, over by the airport. Protesters have been there pretty much every day since ICE came to town, and once again, the people holding down those particular protests are different people with different support networks than the other groups doing other things.

So at nine in the morning hundreds of people showed up with banners and signs and shields and barricades and sound systems. James and I were late, because of the aforementioned car trouble. But don’t worry, we were there in time for the county police to box us and tell us we were under arrest if we didn’t disperse, without giving us any clear indication of how we could do such a thing. The cops told us to head east to some particular road, a road minor enough that no one around us had ever heard of it.

Instead, we left on the lightrail. Another argument for a robust public transit system.

Before we left, we saw the police arrest three people who had approached them, arms in the air, presumably just trying to ask for clarification on what they were being asked to do.

Meanwhile, hundreds of clergy from around the country had arrived in Minneapolis to protest and do civil disobedience to protest ICE and the deportation. We were busy being boxed in by cops elsewhere, so we didn’t see their action.

Some of the most high-profile arrests in the Twin Cities have been of people accused by the Trump administration of being anti-religious and anti-christian because they had protested at a church. But the marquee on every church I saw in the city was anti-ICE and pro-inclusion. The overwhelming majority of the arrests during the general strike were of clergy. Many of the people I spent the most time with were practicing Jews. Observant Muslims fed us sambusas while we talked to the people protecting a Somali day care. The AIM organizer spoke of the creator.

The fascists who hide behind crosses do not speak even for Christianity, let alone religion, spirituality, or the divine.

Our last night in town, we were guests of a house full of queer Jews who had story after story to tell us. Two things they said stuck with me.

Everyone compares Trump and the modern fascists to those most famous of fascists, the Nazis. It’s not actually a flippant comparison, but a sober look at history and at our possible future as a country. Many of the people we talked to had family who survived—and family that didn’t survive—the Nazi regime, and they’re not going to make these comparisons lightly.

One of our friends described how it felt to come upon an abandoned car in the middle of the street and try to figure out whose it was. This was a task they did almost daily. They had to sort through the glovebox and the console, looking for papers or notes, to find out whose life had just been ruined or ended. They felt like they were tracking ghosts. They felt like they were in 1930s Germany.

Another friend told us the stories they’d grown up with. Their family had been in Germany, in hiding for years before escaping in 1937. They’d grown up being told, again and again, that their neighbors hadn’t helped them. That the family had been alone until they’d escaped.

The person telling me this started choking up while they talked, and I started crying a little while I listened, and they told me that this time, this time, if they could have anything to do with it at all, families in hiding would know that they weren’t alone. That their neighbors were with them.

Unspoken, but written on faces of the people in the room, was the fact that neighbors, strangers, would die for one another. Renee Good already had.

The next morning, at 9:05am, Alex Pretti was disarmed and then executed in the street by masked feds. His last act was trying to help someone.

I didn’t sleep much my last night in town. James and I recorded podcasts, because that’s our job, the job we’d been sent to do, and then I slept a little and then I woke up and drove him to the airport after we put the car battery back into my truck—because, again, it was so damned cold we’d had to bring it inside for the night, then wake up and fiddle with tiny bolts in my engine well before sunrise.

There was a winter storm coming. Record snowfall. If you’re anywhere in the eastern half of the US, maybe you got it or the icy edge of it. It really is a two-day drive to or from Minneapolis from where I live, but once again I had to do it in one, because I had to beat that storm. I was going to get snowed in somewhere, and I wanted it to be with those that I love.

I’d been on the road two hours before I heard that ICE had killed someone that morning. I pulled off the highway and cried in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.

After about forty-five minutes of soul searching and friend-asking, I decided to keep driving. As much as I love Minneapolis, it’s not my city and I don’t know it well enough to navigate it during an emergency without assistance. People had taken time away from their other work, their life-saving work, to hold my hand through the crisis that has enveloped the city so that I could go home and tell people what I’d seen. It felt selfish to turn around. It felt selfish to go home. It even feels self-indulgent to tell you how conflicted I was.

I spent the next twelve hours driving, as fast as was safe, with the storm nipping at my heels. I would get ahead of the snow and then stop for gas or to pee only to find myself back in the storm. This happened three times, and I don’t want this to be symbolism, or a metaphor. I want it to be coincidence.

But the thing is, what’s happening in Minneapolis is happening elsewhere too, and has been happening for some time now. People are being kidnapped and disappeared. People are dying in custody and people are dying on the streets. Police are killing people, ICE are killing people.

And at least as importantly, people are trying to stop it. And it’s not just a bunch of die-hard activists, nor just the families of the people most affected.

What works to stop fascism, the Twin Cities is showing us, is when everyone steps up. When everyone feels empowered, even if it’s just to blow a whistle or honk a horn or yell in the snow in slippers. When everyone understands that the work of making the world better is the work of taking responsibility for one another.

When everyone understands that we are, all of us, neighbors.

I asked people on the ground to provide me with information about where people can donate to help. I only ever share fundraisers that are vouched for by people I personally know and trust.

Rent Support for neighbors in Phillips

Rent Support for neighbors in Central

Rent Support for neighbors in Powderhorn

Supplies for Political Art Making

Protective Gear for Legal Observers

Diapers and Menstrual Supplies

Abolish Ice Shirts (the shirt I’m wearing right now as I type this)

Northstar Front Line Street Medics

Twin Cities Swoletariat Bail Fund (Venmo and CashApp)

Yet there I was, driving to Minneapolis in January.

Before I decided to come up to cover the anti-ICE resistance up there, I reached out to a friend who lived there. “It’s going to be really, really cold this week. Will people still show up?”

“Minnesotans will be there,” they told me. “ICE will be miserable.”

Because, as another friend put it to me: “ICE made a classic Nazi mistake: they invaded a winter people in winter.”

The people of Minnesota have never been afraid of ice, and these days, they’re proving that they’re not afraid of ICE either.

I’m a little afraid of both, if I’m being honest. But you do what you can.

“You do what you can” might be the attitude that got me interested in visiting Minneapolis in the first place.

I had a conversation a week or two ago with a friend who lives up here. They’d been going out to guard apartment buildings from ICE, just standing outside the door to say “no, you can’t come in here.” They’d been sitting outside hotels known to house ICE agents and writing down license plates.

This friend of mine, they’re not a person I’ve ever seen put a label to their political ideology, or known them to be much of any kind of activist. They’re just a young queer introvert. I asked what has them doing this work—which isn’t exactly safe, as the news of the past few weeks has made clear. They told me that they had always told themselves that they would be someone who steps up if it’s necessary.

This friend of mine, they’re brave. But they’re not exceptional. Minneapolis is an entire city full of people standing up to a literally murderous regime.

That’s what I came up here to see.

I’m a professional optimist, in a weird way. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that people come together in crisis to take care of one another. And people here have come together.

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It’s a two day drive from where I live to Minneapolis, or it should be. It’s January, though, and the midwest winter doesn’t fuck around. On Monday, there was snow. On Wednesday? Snow. So I had to do the thirteen hour drive on Tuesday.

I’d thought about getting a head start, the night before, and I’m glad I didn’t—there was a 37-car pileup in Indiana, during whiteout conditions with ice across the freeway. I didn’t see it on the news, though, because there was a hundred car pileup in Michigan the same night. During one hour of my drive, I passed 32 cars and trucks abandoned in the ditch.

I wasn’t too worried, myself. The weather was clear and most of the streets were plowed and salted. I’m a bit of a prepper, and my 4WD truck has good tires, chains if I need them, and plenty of winter gear.

Minneapolis is cold in the winter, and it’s particularly cold this winter, and it’s particularly cold this week. I have winter clothes—I live rurally in the mountains, after all—but it’s one thing to have what you need to work outside in 10 degrees and another to have what you need to stand around for hours in -20. I’m fully expecting that Friday, the day of the upcoming general strike, will be (with windchill) the coldest temperatures I’ve experienced in my life.

So I drove for thirteen hours, and picked up my colleague at the airport, and made it to where we’re staying. We talked about audio recorders and gas masks, we talked about the narratives we had in our heads about what was happening, we talked about what we’d like to learn and see.

We have a lot of big questions, and one of them is just: what’s the scale of the crisis here? It gets described like the place is a war zone, but a lot of US cities have been described as war zones in the past few years and it’s rarely been true. Just how present was ICE, and the resistance to it?

First thing in the morning, a line of cars drove down the residential street we’re on, honking their horns. It was, as we guessed and later had confirmed for us, ICE watchers tailing an ICE vehicle, laying on the horns to keep the federal occupation from operating in secrecy.

I couldn’t lace up my new fancy insulated boots fast enough, and by the time I got outside, they’d passed us.

But yes, the city is under occupation.

We picked where to stay based on wanting to not quite be in the thick of it, but it turns out all of the city, as well as St. Paul and the suburbs, are the thick of it. We didn’t have to drive more than three blocks before we ran across a crowd of people guarding a childcare facility. Imagine needing to guard a childcare facility.

Half the street corners in the city seem to have people on watch for ICE, ready to call in suspicious vehicles to the decentralized networks that monitor the movements of kidnappers around the city.

It’s ICE that moves in secrecy around Minneapolis, while the rebellion wears reflective vests and puffy coats.

I spent yesterday talking to organizers, but the first thing a friend told me was that, unlike most social movements, there’s not “the guy” to talk to. There just isn’t a central leader, nor some central cadre. There is no vanguard leading the resistance.

The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is strong, generalized, and sustained. It’s also entirely decentralized and leaderless (or “leaderful” if you’d like). There are roles. There is organizing—there’s so much organizing. There are so many organizers, from so many communities and identities.

This, of course, makes my heart happy.

It’s also, I’m certain, frustrating as hell for the Federal occupation of the city. They want to pick off a few people and bring them up on charges. That might still happen, but it will be a farce of a trial. If there’s a conspiracy, it’s the entire city conspiring to be free.

In the US, most of us are used to seeing protest movements as a sort of internal rebellion. Against the local police, against the capitalist infrastructure. What’s happening here is fundamentally different. This is a rebellion against what amounts to foreign occupation. If I were to guess, I would say this is the reason that the weather isn’t keeping people out of the streets. Sure, people here own a lot more snow gear than the average American, and are more used to driving on unplowed roads, but I think more than anything else it’s that this situation is simply intolerable. People are more willing to risk more.

Because their fucking families are being kidnapped. Their neighbors are being kidnapped. Kids at their schools are being kidnapped. They themselves are being kidnapped.

Yesterday, while we were driving around, we saw teachers walking with students out of the schools. When I got home to read the news, I learned why.

We don’t yet know how many people have died in ICE detention, because they sure as shit aren’t telling us. We don’t know how many people have died upon deportation, but no one flees without a reason, and people who are in the US seeking asylum are doing so because returning to their home country is often a death sentence.

So killing one of the ICE watchers didn’t stop people from watching ICE.

There is too much on the line.

While we were talking with people outside the daycare, a Somali family put samosas in our hands. We tried not to take them: “we’re just journalists,” we told them. This was not an acceptable excuse to not take the samosas. Which were, honestly, the best I’ve ever eaten.

We talked with a 76 year old woman about what brought her out. Her father had fought fascists in Italy and France, and she knew he would be proud of her. These were her neighbors, she explained. I was a bit chilly, even in my new winter clothes, while talking to her. She wasn’t even wearing a hat.

An audio engineer I knew tangentially from the metal scene was there—just a nice small world moment—and he was supposed to be recording a reasonably important band that day, but his kid was in the local school system and there was no way in hell people would come for anyone’s kids, in his neighborhood.

People were aware of the gravity of the situation, both locally and nationally. They knew that frustrating ICE anywhere was essential to stop them everywhere. They would serve as a bulwark, if necessary.

And their numbers had surged after one of them had been shot to death.

I talked with a bunch of organizers yesterday—well, really, everyone was an organizer—and I asked them extensively about what kind of reporting they’d like to see, about what they’d like the world to know about their efforts.

One thing that came up, that stuck with me, is that while they’re glad the media is reporting about all the terrible things ICE is doing, they want more people to know how beautiful the resistance is. I can’t paint a rosy picture of what’s happening here, because it’s not rosy. It’s not idyllic. But it’s inspiring.

I’ve been involved in protest movements for 24 years now (maybe it’s cheesy, but I picked a specific protest as my starting point) and I’ve never seen a population so united, and it’s not even close. The entire city, it seems like, is rising up against the kidnappers.

I have more to say, but the sun is up and I’m only here a few more days, so I’ll say more later.

Of course, my actual journalistic goal is to put together some podcast episodes, but I figured I’d write these posts to collect my thoughts along the way.

Several hours later, I drove back the way I came, and nothing had changed, as the temperature dipped closer to freezing on the wet roads.

This week we talked about that book Parable of the Sower, about slow collapse versus fast collapse, about the hill we felt like we might go tumbling down.

This week a friend told me her partner, a US citizen, was abducted out of his car by ICE in Minneapolis. They scanned his face and let him out hours later, after intervention from a lawyer and from a massive protest outside where he was detained.

This week my other friends in Minneapolis are reporting the most heartbreaking and heartwarming stories, of repression and resistance.

This week I made plans with friends and loved ones about what we’re going to do if cell networks go down. Whose house will we rally at? Who knows the roads best without GPS? Who has all-wheel drive?

A few hours earlier, I heard from a friend who couldn’t afford his phone bill and relied on the internet that the internet had gone out at his house. He’d driven 20 minutes to Walmart to get on the wifi to tell people he was currently cut off. It seems as though the wind ripped the fiber connection right off the power pole.

Most nights this week I stayed up late doomscrolling, watching videos of ICE raids and ICE sieges.

It hasn’t been a good news week. Things appear to be spiraling faster and faster.

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I’m going to start this with the dark, but then talk about the light. The thing is, I genuinely believe we’re going to win. But it’s going to be hard, and scary. As always, the only way out is through.

I imagine that you, reading this, are aware that Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis. I’m certain you’re aware that she wasn’t the first person ICE have killed, that she won’t be the last. (I’ve been writing and rewriting this piece for days, and the news keeps shifting under my feet. ICE has shot at least three more people since Renee Good.)

Maybe you’ve seen the videos of ICE agent after ICE agent threatening to kill people in the days since, saying “haven’t you learned anything from what we did last week?” to threaten anyone who challenges their power.

More and more accounts are coming out about ICE profiling and kidnapping people, and if they can’t be deported, beating the shit out of them and leaving them bleeding, miles away.

ICE has detained numerous indigenous people, including several members of the Oglala Sioux. ICE won’t even give the tribe the names of the people it’s detained, and is refusing to do so unless the tribe recognizes ICE formally and enters into an immigration agreement with them. The tribe, understandably, has refused.

The thing it seems like everyone, including politicians, is dancing around is “well, can the world survive Trump in power until the elections, or does something need to be done sooner?” Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has mobilized the National Guard to put down any potential rebellion in the state, and consistently tries to stop people from rising up against fascism. But he is also seemingly aware that there’s a sort of moral imperative to use the national guard to stop ICE, and is trying to explain why he still won’t do it. He said to the press: “We’ve never been at war with our federal government.”

Everyone is aware that using police or the national guard against federal agents could trigger a civil war. Politicians are dancing around that, trying not to set off the powder keg. Which means allowing the atrocities to continue.

Even diehard moderates like Walz are starting to crack.

The last time the country was in this kind of stalemate—with half of the country aware of a moral imperative to stop a great atrocity, but afraid of the level of violence stopping it would involve—was the 1850s. That stalemate was broken by a bold raid on Harper’s Ferry by Black and white abolitionists, which sparked a civil war that stopped, with enormous bloodshed, one of the most evil institutions the world has ever seen. 2% of Americans died in that war.

If we had another civil war and two percent of us died, that’s almost 7 million people.

Of course, there’s no reason to believe a second civil war would look anything like the first one, in terms of casualties but also in terms of outcome. There’s no reason to assume so many, or so few, people would die. There no reason to assume the better side would win, or that there would be clear winners at all.

Maybe you’ve caught that Trump is actively considering invading Greenland. Greenland should be controlled by its indigenous inhabitants, but it is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Which is part of NATO. Which the US is part of. The invasion of Greenland would, at the very least, cut off the US from its own extensive bases in other NATO countries. It could lead to sanctions and presumably hyperinflation. It could also lead to a war against NATO, who is already landing troops on the world’s largest island.

And speaking of hyperinflation, Trump is trying to force the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. The Federal Reserve sets the interest rates that banks use to lend money to one another (which they do every day because they’re obliged to keep a certain amount of cash on hand, but prefer to invest all the money they can, so they’re all playing a delicate game all the time). These interest rates trickle down to the entire economy. When interest rates are low, people are more willing to take out loans, so the economy grows and there are more jobs created, but it causes inflation. When the interest rates are high, people borrow less, and inflation is controlled but the economy cools off. It’s all a bit arcane, but here’s a decent explainer.

Trump wants the interest rates cut even lower, because he wants short-term gains for the economy. The Federal Reserve is independent-ish for exactly that reason—it’s in the best longterm interest of the US economy to not be beholden to political maneuvering.

So Trump has come up with some excuses to try to oust the head of the federal reserve, which has actually pissed off a huge part of his base—the finance bros. If Trump succeeds at controlling the federal reserve, it could easily lead to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Even his threats against the Federal Reserve sent stocks down and the price of gold up. And since huge portions of the world economy is held up by the US dollar, hyperinflation at home will have knock-on effects worldwide. This is about the mildest way I can put it.

I don’t trust people who sell fear and anxiety on the internet, and you shouldn’t either. I love preparedness, but I hate 90% of prepper content, because the best way to get eyes onto a video—or substack post—is to tell people all the horrendous shit that is just around the corner.

I don’t want to do that. I try so hard not to do that.

One reason I try not to do it is because I don’t want to believe it myself. I don’t want collapse. I don’t want global or civil war. I want to play roleplaying games with my friends and write fantasy novels and organize community fundraisers.

Last year I told my friends: “look, I don’t think we’re going to have a civil war in the next year. I think it’s like a 5% chance. But the thing is, most years, it’s like .01%, so this is an issue worth taking seriously.” Anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons knows that 5% chances happen all the time. It’s when you roll a 1 on a twenty-sided die.

Now, of course, I’d made that number up wholecloth. But “hey there’s a 5% chance of something really, really major happening” is more than enough reason to be prepared for it.

And frankly, I’d put the odds of global or civil war a lot higher now than I did a year ago.

A final bit of precariousness: a physician’s assistant friend of mine told me that around half of clinicians are looking to change careers, then sent me this article from Forbes about why. There are a slew of reasons, but that list includes: patients use AI to misdiagnose themselves and doctors have to spend an increasing amount of their time debunking misinformation; insurance companies are making it impossible to give patients the treatment they need; the end of Roe v. Wade has made it illegal to perform basic reproductive healthcare.

A medical shortage is coming. 40% of clinicians are set to retire within the next decade, and the “big beautiful bill” capped loans for medical school at $50,000 a year or $200,000 total. So no one can afford to go into medicine.

And the EPA is no longer taking human health into consideration when it sets policy about pollution.

2026 is off to a rough start.

But as I harp on about all the time, the thing we can learn from winter solstice is that as the sun begins to return, the cold sets in. There is a delay between the return of hope and of things getting better. Spring is coming.

I believe that.

In a strange way, I’m more hopeful for the future than I’ve ever been. For the first time in its history, more Americans support abolishing ICE altogether than oppose abolishing ICE (46% to 43%). ICE has always been a problem. It shouldn’t be reformed, and any politician calling for its reform is woefully out of touch. Authoritarianism and capitalism have always been problems. More people are aware of that, and more people are doing something about it.

I said I’ve been watching videos of ICE raids and of ICE sieges. The sieges, oddly, give me hope. More and more and more people are standing up, and with shaking knees and quivering voices, saying “fuck you, you can’t steal my neighbors.”

ICE was certain that videos of them murdering Renee Good would cause the public to cower. They thought that terrorism (that is, in this case, a policy of causing terror) would silence their opposition. They were wrong. It’s emboldened people.

Last night, protesters chased ICE out of North Minneapolis, forcing them to leave vehicles behind. Protesters found all sorts of documentation inside those vehicles.

Earlier this week, a whistleblower from inside the DHS leaked the personal information of 4500 ICE and Border Patrol agents.

They’re so desperate for new hires that they accidentally hired an antifascist journalist.

I think resistance is working.

The politicians aren’t acting to save people. They know they should, but they aren’t doing it. People are acting to protect each other and themselves, and it’s working.

But things are going to get worse before they get better.

I drove through that power outage this week, because public infrastructure in America—or at least Appalachia and the Rust Belt, where I spend my time—is crumbling. Infrastructure is aging and going un-updated. Climate change has increased rainfall in some areas, leaving trees more vulnerable to wind storms. Power companies in Ohio are requesting permission to do a worse job, to take longer to restore power.

The country isn’t being run by politicians right now, it’s being run by thieves stripping the copper out of the walls of our society. They’re bankrupting us and leaving us in the cold.

The only question (and this is genuinely a question, one you should ask yourself and your family and your community, rather than listen to answers written by anarchists on the internet with newsletters) is “what is it going to take to change this situation?”

On a local scale, I would guess that what it takes to change the situation is people coming together with megaphones and whistles and trembling voices and the courage we’ve inherited from the bravest of our ancestors to say “get the fuck out of our city” directly in the faces of the gestapo. We’ve seen that that can work. Courage works. (The exact tactics with which we express our courage are likely to shift over time, in all sorts of directions.)

Refusing to let them divide us, along class lines or religious lines or ethnic lines or even tactical lines, that works. Solidarity works.

None of us know the future. Because the future is something we, collectively, determine.

By acting with courage and conviction, we embolden ourselves and each other. Fascism is an ideology of fear, and courage is its antithesis.

Thanks for coming to my pep talk. I needed it to get out of bed.

That’s something you need to remember this week, because people in power are going to be urging you to remain calm and they are going to urge you to distrust anyone mad enough to break a window, anyone mad enough to throw hands or throw rocks.

Yet you, reading this, you’re mad. You’re mad enough to throw hands or throw rocks. I know you are, because you’re human, and a woman was just murdered by agents of the state in broad daylight. The only thing that keeps you calm and orderly is a belief that throwing hands or rocks isn’t what should be done, whether strategically, morally, or for your own safety.

I am not here to tell you to act otherwise. I will never, ever, try to convince people to take actions that they don’t want to take, nor to take actions that I myself am not willing to take.

I am here to tell you that the only way we’re going to get through this is if we support each other, and that means supporting the people who are taking more dramatic and dangerous action.

Because they are likely not provocateurs, nor are they doing the work of the state. They are your neighbors. They are school teachers, doctors, line cooks, sex workers, middle management, baristas. They’re not all white and they’re not all men, and they’re throwing bricks because they are mad and because they know that, to quote Frederick Douglass, power concedes nothing without a demand.

Whether they’re right, tactically, is besides the point.

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I can tell you that I have been in hundreds or thousands of demonstrations, across two and a half decades, in about as many countries as I have fingers. I’ve seen all kinds of wild shit. I’ve been teargassed and I’ve escaped mass arrests and I’ve been caught by mass arrests. I’m not a rock thrower, not personally, but people I care about have spent real prison time for rioting.

And the one thing I’ve never, ever seen is the classic agent provocateur. I’ve never seen an undercover cop be the one to escalate the crowd.

I’ve seen undercover cops, to be sure. Some of them are obvious, though the signs aren’t what you think they are. If it’s your first rowdy demonstration, you’re not going to pick the right people.

One time, years ago, in Amsterdam, I was in a spirited demonstration that was organized in solidarity with a migrant who had died in police custody. I saw a broad-shouldered man right in the middle of the crowd with a cleancut haircut and an earpiece attached to a wire. I ran up to my friend to tell her.

“I think that guy is a cop,” I said.

“That’s my boyfriend,” she told me. “He’s got an earpiece in because he’s listening to the police scanner, so that we don’t fall into a trap.”

He just happened to be 6’3” and broad-shouldered. I wound up friends with him later. I sure never admitted I’d thought he was a cop.

A movie came out at the end of last year, One Battle After Another, that is, for the most part, unrelentingly radical. Our protagonists are a washed-up leftist bombmaker and his daughter, on the run from cops. The real heroes of the story are the people who hide people from ICE. It’s a good movie. I’m not going to spoil it.

But there’s one scene where an angry crowd is driving back a line of riot police. Then a cop puts on a mask, wades into the crowd, and half-heartedly throws a molotov cocktail back towards the police so that the cops have an excuse to break up the crowd with violence.

The film wants you to believe that the only people who would throw molotovs are cops. Are provocateurs.

The state wants to turn you into a conspiracy theorist. Yes, you, you progessives, who laugh at the conspiracy theories of the right wing. They want you to believe that anyone who fights back against the police is secretly an agent of the police. It’s nonsense.

Someone I knew, years ago, was convicted for throwing a molotov cocktail. She was probably all of 20 years old, and she was a guitarist and zinester who lived in a squat. Ironically, she hadn’t even thrown the damn thing, it had been in her possession when they arrested her. But she was convicted of throwing it anyway.

You are willing to believe that only provocateurs throw rocks, because you think you don’t know anyone who has done or would do such a thing. I can tell you that this is simply untrue.

I’m also not going to tell you to throw molotovs. Frankly, in the US, you probably shouldn’t. The cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t work out in your favor.

There absolutely are undercover police embedded into crowds of protesters. Some of them are there to observe people and film people to build cases against people later, and they are likely to stay undercover the entire time. Some are there to point people out for immediate arrest, to help the riot police who are outside the demonstration pick off the people who are helping the protest happen.

Sometimes the cops are there to pick off the window-breakers and the rock throwers, but the police like to target people who have specific roles, no matter how peaceful those roles. Legal observers and street medics are routinely targeted for arrest—so much so that a number of street medics have started running unmarked so as to avoid being targeted for arrest.

The police do not need an excuse to brutalize crowds. While they are more likely to attack a spirited crowd than a docile one, this is not absolute. And time after time, the police start the violence. If you read between the lines in newspaper accounts, it’s right there to see: “the violence erupted when protests began to throw tear gas canisters back at the lines of riot police.” (For more on how violence is defined, including the source of that quote, CrimethInc has an evergreen essay on the topic.)

The police see their job at demonstrations to control, contain, and/or disperse the crowd. They use violence if it is necessary to accomplish this. If the crowd won’t move how the cops want it to move, they will attack people. The violence of the crowd is somewhat unrelated to this.

The local police are not, however, particularly interested in larger questions of grand strategy. They’re not playing 4D chess. They’re there to beat us up and keep us in line. They don’t need to infiltrate the crowd to get someone to shove one of them in order to start pushing us around. They’ll just push us around.

Now, there are some government assholes trying to play 4D chess to ruin people’s lives and disrupt social movements. There are infiltrators. For years in the late 60s and early 70s, the FBI ran a program called COINTELPRO. This isn’t conspiracy theory stuff, this is long-established and documented. They infiltrated social movements with the goal of disrupting them as thoroughly as possible.

In particular, they liked to foster infighting. They would craft rivalries between various branches of the Black Panther Party. They would attend meetings and try to argue about minutiae so that nothing would get done. They would whisper poison into people’s ears. It was, unfortunately, incredibly effective.

It was revealed to the public by a group of activists who broke into an FBI office and found proof. While the COINTELPRO program was formally shut down, there’s simply no reason to believe the FBI has stopped using these tactics.

In the wake of 9/11, one thing the government seemed to delight in doing was go to mosques and convince young Islamic men to plot some kind of terrorism in order to arrest them. This tactic is, for reasons slightly above my head, legally distinct from entrapment.

They did it to anarchists too. Eric McDavid spent years in prison for a bomb plot he was pressured into by an informant. The Cleveland 4 were four young activists who were tricked into a bomb plot by, you guessed it, a federal agent. Two men were arrested for making molotov cocktails in advance of the 2008 RNC, which they’d been encouraged to do by the anarchist-turned-informant named Brandon Darby (the subject of the classic essay “why misogynists make great informants”).

I suspect that at least some of the major cases against “antifa” from 2025 will turn out to have been built in similar ways.

The FBI are predators who look for impressionable young radicals and implicate them in terror plots. It is evil. The best way to stay safe is to be alert for people who are trying to convince you to take radical action.

This might seem like a subtle distinction, but I think it’s an important one: what provocateurs do, historically, is try to convince other people to escalate their tactics (and in particular towards felony charges involving fire or explosives and usually outside of protest situations). What they don’t do is escalate things directly.

Social movements are at their strongest when the rowdier elements and the more peaceful elements act in solidarity with one another. When massive crowds march around holding signs, it doesn’t change much. When a few isolated people break windows, it doesn’t change much. But when the massive crowds refuse to let the radical actors be picked off and isolated, suddenly you have a social movement with real power.

So please, please, don’t let the state split the movement into “good protester” and “bad protester.” Even if there were agent provocateurs in the crowd, their goal in picking fights with the cops would be to convince us to do that splitting.

Remember at all times who your real enemies are. Keep your ire focused at them. Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.

And we’ll get through this. And if we’re lucky and brave and act in solidarity with one another, well, we’ve got a world to win.

When in doubt, I tend to recommend the work of CrimethInc, and their analysis here seems solid (the whole article is worth reading).

Unpopular wars without a clear mandate—especially wars that result in US casualties or other sacrifices at home—can spell downfall for a regime. It is our task to turn this war—along with Trump’s other errors, and the wars to come—into a millstone around the neck of the entire ruling class. It will require so much popular force to dislodge Trump that we should popularize similarly ambitious proposals—not simply demand a return to an unpopular centrist status quo.

Anyway, I feel some tension writing about anything else, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on these issues. But that’s not what I wrote about this week. I wrote about attention, instead.

I Don’t Think My Phone is My Friend

I don’t think my phone is my friend. There’s a distraction device in my pocket and it buzzes and chimes and gives me information whether or not I want that information, and I don’t think that it has my best interests at heart.

I love seeing messages from loved ones. I love being able to look up product reviews while I’m in the store. I love podcasts and audiobooks. I love wikipedia; god bless wikipedia. But when I leave my phone in the couch cushions by accident, I sure get more writing done.

Which means, indirectly, one of my goals for 2026 is to become harder to reach.

When texting took over phone calls as the default mode for remote communication, it felt like freedom. Asynchronous communication. No longer would I have to interrupt everything I was doing every time someone had a question, because no one expected a response right away. I could get to it later. Communication wouldn’t have to break my attention.

I’m beginning to think that text messages are the “buy now, pay later” of the attention world. Buying things on credit is convenient and dangerous, and it’s easy to fall deep into debt, into a vicious cycle from which you never emerge.

After diligently spending an hour in bed this morning reading messages, I still have 103 unread emails in four accounts, 54 unread Signal messages (many of them from people I love dearly), a couple messages in Bluesky that I will simply never read, a dozen or so messages here on Substack that I probably will read, I just might not get back to, and don’t even get me started on my Instagram messages. If someone messaged me through regular SMS, well, god be with them, because I won’t be.

I don’t think I’m in any way unique. Because I do public-facing work, I’ve probably got more messages from strangers than the average person, but the thing is—messages from my friends and family languish in my inbox too.

I’ve tried for years to maintain an inbox zero. I’ll probably continue pushing the rock up the email hill. But it’s simply too much, and I don’t think it’s good for me. I thought asynchronous communication would free my attention, but instead, every unread (or unresponded-to) message just chips away at my brain and my ability to focus. The cliched “death my a thousand cuts.” I find myself preferring to catch up over the phone—an hour of conversation every few months feels a lot more connected than the endless slow game of texting “how’ve you been?”

For whatever undiagnosed reason, I struggle in loud environments with a lot of noises all going on at once. When I watch movies with people, I have to pause the movie if someone starts talking. I don’t like a loud car stereo playing in the background when I’m trying to talk with someone in the car, and honestly a quiet stereo might be even worse. I listen to music or books when I drive alone, until I get too lost in thought—then I need to pause the music.

My own personal hell is a crowded bar with multiple TVs playing multiple shows while everyone yells louder than each other to be heard over the music and the din.

I mostly write in silence. It’s so quiet as I write this that I can hear my dog breathing. It’s also so quiet though that I can hear my shower dripping—just another reminder of the infinite to-do list of life.

If I’m writing somewhere with a lot of distraction, some public place perhaps, I listen to loud music to drown everything else out. Usually something repetitive and heavy like doom metal.

I’m skeptical of anyone, or any movement, that romanticizes the past. Anyone fantasizing about the “simpler days” probably takes the existence of antibiotics for granted or hasn’t spent quite as much time as I have reading about person after person who died young of tuberculosis.

I’m skeptical of people romanticizing the past, but I do it too. I think there genuinely was something better when “the internet” came through a box plugged into the wall in our living rooms and cell phones only let you call people. Because I don’t think being in constant contact with thousands of people is good for us. I don’t think it’s good for our self-esteem, and I don’t think it’s good for our attention spans.

I think attention is a muscle that develops through exercise and atrophies when unpracticed.

I’ve got a little hierarchy in my head of what sort of entertainment I can engage with, depending on how strong my attention span is at that moment. Long books, poetry, short books, short stories, long form essays, old movies, new movies, tv shows, video games, doomscrolling, in descending order. (Oddly, podcasts sit outside this hierarchy because I listen to podcasts while I’m cleaning the house or driving or doing something else). I engage with all of these, and this isn’t some call for everyone to quit looking at their phones in order to read War & Peace, but for fuck’s sake I’d like to imagine a version of me where one day I’ll actually read War & Peace. I spend so long in my day job engaging with Tolstoy (he is a side character in almost every story about European radicals at the turn of the 20th century) that I’d really like to know more of what he had to say than what his short stories have to offer.

But to sit down to read, you can’t have a million distractions.

And I’m sorry to say, being reachable all the time is one of those distractions. Not just because of the buzzing in my pocket, but because of the avalanche of backlogged messages that builds up quickly when we step away from our laptops and phones.

I actually looked into getting a landline put into my house, so I could turn off my phone and wifi for a couple days at a time but still be reachable in emergencies, but getting a landline is a pretty expensive proposition. So instead, I will rely on discipline.

The discipline to leave my phone in my couch cushions for twelve hours at a time. The discipline to leave people on read. The discipline to get shittier at communicating with people.

Now, to be clear I don’t want everyone to leave me alone. I love hearing from readers and listeners. It keeps me going, sometimes, like maybe I’m not a total fuckup, because something I did ten years ago is still helping people today. I love my friends, and I love that a lifetime of activism and wandering has left me with so many people that I care about, whose days and dreams and struggles and victories I want to hear about.

Buried in my inbox are genuine connections with people I love. Buried in my inbox are once in a lifetime opportunities to do amazing work. Buried in my inbox are incredible essays from brilliant authors whose work I love.

I don’t know where the balance is, of turning on and off access to information and connection.

I hope, this year, to come closer to finding it.

And yeah, I know the irony of ending this with a subscribe button. But if you want to read more of what I have to say, that’s a good way to do it.

I’d be remiss not to tell you that if you want a printed zine version of my latest Danielle Cain story, And the Bones Clean Gone, you have until Dec. 31st to sign up for the zine-a-month from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness’s Patreon.

The Punk Rock Good Life

Maybe this starts with an old friend of mine. We’ll call her Ember. I first met Ember in Asheville, North Carolina, twenty years ago, when she was living in an 8x8’ uninsulated shack she’d built in the backyard of a rented punk house. The ground floor of the shack held only a desk with her typewriter and her books. Above that was a loft with a futon mattress. The place was clean-but-cluttered, and I spent a lot of nights with her by a fire in the backyard of that house, talking about life.

She was a few years older than me, and I was wildly in love with her, or rather the idea of her, though this was in no way reciprocated. She wore a DIY carhartt overalls dress and she had better boundaries and clearer communication than anyone I’d ever met. She was so direct that she came across as severe and uninviting. She drank, some, but not the swill I was used to–despite having almost no money, she only drank good beer. “Better to drink one good beer than six cheap beers,” she told me, maybe the only life lesson she offered me directly. I saw her and I saw an inkling of how to live a beautiful life despite poverty.

I wrote my first short story collection, a zine I will not be reprinting, as bedtime stories for Ember. We didn’t really wind up dating—she had those good boundaries, and she knew what she wanted—but years later she was living on the other side of the country, in library school and working at the infoshop, and she drew and silkscreened a poster for an event for my first book tour.

This isn’t a story about her, not really. It’s a story about the romanticized ideal of the punk rock good life. It’s a story about zines and DIY, about simple cooking, about dumpstered feasts with friends and frenemies, about pie and record players and tea and punk mail and pen pals. It’s a story about turning your phone off more often, about skinny dipping in rivers, about building shacks or shacking up, about storytelling and basement shows. It’s a story about social centers and infoshops. It’s a story about punk houses and cabins in the woods and apartments in rust belt cities. It’s a story about loving half-feral dogs and half-feral friends, a story about Food Not Bombs and community organizing. It’s a story about doing art you’re bad at, making music you’re bad at. It’s a story about doing art you’re good at, about making music you’re good at. It’s a story about houseplants and books and pulling furniture out of the trash and owning so many knit beanies you’re not sure which ones came from which of your friends.

Which is to say: it’s a story about the good life. A life you can have. A life I can have. Or at least, an ideal we can chase. I know I’ve been chasing it my whole life–like all good dreams, it sits comfortably on the horizon, giving us a direction to walk. We’ll never reach it, not really, but the joy is found in the walking.

I’m not making a moral claim about this life. It’s not objectively better than any other. I’m instead making an aesthetic claim: this is a beautiful way to live.

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For the first two years of the pandemic, I was living in an off-grid 12x12 cabin I’d built on some friends’ land. I’d built it more or less as a bedroom, with no electricity, water, kitchen, or bathroom. It just held a queen-sized bed, some books, and a propane heater—there was a communal kitchen and shower on the land, and I did my work in cafes in town. When the lockdown first hit, I spent my days in a frantic rush to build everything I needed to survive in the house alone in a pandemic in winter. I had very little money to work with. It was hard as hell.

At the start of the pandemic, in February and March, I was washing my clothes in the nearby creek with a bucket and washboard, then drying them slowly on a clothesline. I was showering with a solar shower, 80 degree water in 50 degree air. I was using a camp stove to heat up canned chili and mixing it with wild greens from the forest. I read books and played music and stared at the sky and slowly lost my mind. It was more or less horrible. I had barely any human contact for months at a time and I worked on my cabin most of my waking hours. When I finally, after months, managed to get water barrels hooked up to a 12v pump (powered by solar panels) plumbed into a propane shower on my porch, I stood under actual hot water and literally cried with relief. I just sobbed as my body got warm and clean.

Was this the Simple Life that people romanticized? All those tiny house videos on YouTube told me that you’re supposed to want a life like that.

But by the second year of the pandemic, I had a propane stove and I had enough electricity and I had a strange cheap collapsible soaking tub and I had a little shed full of mice, spiders, and woodworking tools, and things were going well enough that I was able to romanticize my own life again. Romanticization made it more bearable. Some days I would lie in my hammock reading books and listening to the birds and the bugs. I learned to carve wooden spoons, and I listened to audiobooks on my porch while I whittled. For a week straight, an owl showed up outside my house during the day every time I played my handmade kantele. I had friends over, and we had a handle on the pandemic enough to know what we were risking.

It’s a good thing to romanticize your own life. It’s a good thing to embrace the aesthetics of how you live, and to play into those aesthetics. We should seek to wring as much beauty as we can out of our life. Some of the aesthetics we romanticize were born from suffering. But if it’s your own suffering you’re romanticizing, then there’s not so much of a problem. What’s dangerous is romanticizing other people’s suffering. What’s irritating is when other people romanticize your suffering.

It’s useful to decide, for yourself, what constitutes the good life and seek out to live that way. For me, I want the punk rock good life. I don’t want to move back into that cabin–I never did get a handle on the humidity and mildew, and my dog is wild enough that he needs a fenced yard. But I want to consciously take stock of who I am, what I enjoy doing. What habits serve me, what habits don’t.

Baths on my porch serve me. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Reading books before bed serves me. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Cooking hearty, protein-rich, simple meals serves me. Doomscrolling doesn’t. Buying new stuff rarely serves me, while repurposing old stuff or making my own stuff generally does.

Maybe this is early-aughts nostalgia, through and through. I don’t really care. The early aughts punks I’m nostalgic about the lives of, they themselves were nostalgic for 90s punk, who were nostalgic for 80s punk, and so-on back through decades and subcultures. Nostalgia is dangerous when it keeps us from appreciating the present, but useful when it informs how we want to find beauty in the present.

There’s been a sort of joke going around my friend group for awhile now, about what an “anarchist tradwife” culture would look like. Maybe this “punk rock good life” is my overly earnest answer to that joke. It even rhymes with tradwife. Tradwife is nostalgia for an imagined, simpler past, and so is this. The punk rock good life, though, isn’t gendered. It doesn’t involve subjugating yourself to a patriarchal protector. But fortunately, it still involves sewing, DIY, and baking pies.

I’m not herein describing the life that I lead, not really, so much as the life I strive to lead. I’m writing this as a challenge to myself, a challenge to embrace the habits I want to have, the aesthetics I want to indulge in. This is a challenge to live my best life, a beautiful life. It’s a challenge to live the punk rock good life.

Everyone’s punk rock good life is going to be different, I suppose. But this is mine. Most of these ideas are built around some basic principles: it’s best to do things with intention and to build small rituals into our lives. It’s best to live aesthetically and to decorate yourself and your space. You can build your own space and you can build your own identity and body. We ought to celebrate the physical realm and only use the digital when it enriches the physical. And we ought to celebrate our friends and our connections with others as best as we can.

Create for the joy of creating, share your creations for the joy of sharing them. Most punk bands get by more with earnest fervor than with talent, and we can carry that attitude into everything we do… including into making music in genres we might like more than we like punk. The joy of being punk is celebrating people doing things whether or not they’re amazing at those things. We celebrate our friends making music, making food, making clothes, or writing stories whether or not those people are likely to be able to make it professionally in that given field. Sure, some punk bands go on to tour the world, but we can have at least as much fun at a basement show played by local bands just giving it their all. Some zines will go on to be photocopied everywhere and influence hundreds of thousands of people, while others are read by maybe ten people. It doesn’t matter. What matters is making things and sharing them.

Write letters. The time and intention that goes into a letter shows care, and receiving things in the mail is always exciting. You can write letters to your friends whether or not you expect them to write you back. You can send punk mail—if you have a friend who is traveling somewhere you know people, have that friend carry letters or zines or presents to folks at the destination. You can write to prisoners, both political prisoners and those who are just caught up in the nightmarish carceral system. If you were locked up, wouldn’t you want people to show they are thinking of you?

Cook more. Part of living with intention is cooking. You don’t have to be a good cook to enjoy cooking or to enjoy the food you cook–potlucks are like punk shows, everyone brings what they can and the amazing cooks are just as celebrated as the people who only know how to make one thing. Some good punk staples include: the forever soup, a big pot of soup on the stove that gets new stuff added to it daily; what German punks call Reis mit Scheiße (rice with shit), which is to say rice with whatever vegetables and proteins you feel like adding; tofu scramble; homefries. Anything you can add siracha, nutritional yeast, and/or braggs liquid aminos to is good punk food. Anything you feel like calling “good punk food” is good punk food. Eat protein with most meals and you’ll have more energy. Avoid snacking on carbs between meals and you’ll have more energy. Eat fewer processed foods and you’ll potentially have more energy. Every body is different and wants different stuff. Veganism works for me–eating lower on the food chain has done me a world of good. Other friends are far better off with animal products. Let meals be something you eat with intention, with friends if possible. Learn to cook not just for your own dietary restrictions, but for those of your friends.

Grow food. Gardening is one of the most offline things you can do and is the cornerstone of a lot of DIY practices. You don’t have to be good at it. Grow simple foods, maybe in buckets, maybe on windowsills, maybe in raised beds, maybe on reclaimed public land, maybe at your friend’s house, maybe in community gardens. Just grow some food and eat it and share it. Potatoes, tomatoes, kale, all the staples. Save some money and eat better and get your hands dirty.

Embrace aesthetics. Decorate your space, whether or not you plan to live there long. Even if you live in a squat and might get evicted at any moment, decorate your space anyway. Hang show flyers, your friends’ art, or art and pictures you find in the trash. Collect houseplants–it’s always good to find small things to be responsible for. Hang dried flowers. Collect books. Put instruments on the wall. Collect little crossstitched things from your friends. Candles are good aesthetics too, but this is only for expert level punks: never ever leave candles burning unattended, too many punks have been killed by their candles. Display your medieval weaponry–maybe that’s just me. Maybe write on the walls, or just some of the walls. Leave pens around for your friends to do the same. Don’t be afraid of maximalist aesthetics, don’t be afraid to cover every surface with art. Don’t be afraid to then strip back your decorations to something less cluttered; let your decoration ebb and flow. Paint the walls. Paint them with murals or paint them with deep colors, dark colors, bright colors, contrasting colors, whatever you want.

Alter, repair, and make your own clothes. You don’t have to be good at sewing to alter or patch your clothes. You can get better as you go, but bad repairs have their own aesthetic too. Cut the sleeves off your tshirts (follow the two rules of tshirt sleeves: “sun’s out, guns out” and the corollary “sun’s gone, sleeves gone” to determine whether or not you should have sleeves on your tshirt). Midriff shirts are for every body. Make your clothes your own. Let them be affected by the elements. Patch up your pants. If you want to go old school, sew black patches on black fabric with white dental floss. Old pants can become punk miniskirts easily enough. Overalls make great dresses. You can do all kinds of things with tshirts. Learn to silkscreen, or support your friends that do, and silkscreen art onto shirts, vests, dresses, patches.

Your body is not a prison; your body is not a temple—your body is your home. You can and should decorate your home however you’d like, with piercings and tattoos and jewelry, or without any of those things. You should style your hair however suits you. You should change the shape of your body or the sex of your body through hormones, surgery, exercise, or whatever you’d like. You should learn about your body and work with it. Embrace your physical form. Stay as fit as suits you. Exercise every morning. Lift weights. Do yoga. Go for runs. Go for silly little walks after dinner. Get massages. Or don’t.

Support other DIY creators. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Go to craft fairs, or punk rock flea markets, or find creators online. Buy pottery, buy clothes, buy patches, buy soap, buy candles, buy art. If every mug in your kitchen is different, you’re doing it right.

Write stuff down. Keep notes in a physical notebook. Write in an actual journal. Write down your dreams, write down story ideas, write down your garden plans and your woodworking plans. Write down recipes. Write stuff down.

The physical is better than the digital. Meet your internet friends in real life. Socialize in person. Travel and see things.

Online isn’t the enemy. Connections made with people online aren’t inherently less real than connections made in person. Social media isn’t any kind of absolute evil. Friends, community, and activism can all happen online. It’s just a space more rife with danger and more pitfalls to navigate.

Throw and attend DIY events of every kind. The basement show is a perfect aesthetic experience. There is DIY theater, storytelling, comedy and dance. There are teach-ins and barn-raisings, apple cider pressing and seed-swaps. Potlucks and book clubs. Birdwatching clubs, astronomy clubs. Whatever you’re into, there are people doing it at small scale and large scale. Go support your friends. It’s worth it.

Tell your friends your literal dreams. If you dream about your friend, tell them. Make a habit of telling people your dreams anyway, and make a habit of listening to people tell you their dreams. Our dreams are important, but our brains work hard in the morning to excise them from our memories–since they could otherwise become confused with reality. So it’s best to write them down, or tell them to each other.

Tell your friends that you love them. Everyone you know is going to die. You are going to die. Let nothing stay unsaid.

Keep the internet out of your bed. Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning or last thing before bed. In bed, pay attention to your thoughts, or read a book, or cuddle with whatever person, persons, or animals might be in the bed with you.

Read zines and books. While movies and tv and social media are indeed ways to learn about the world and experience culture, and it’s okay to interact with them (or create them!), they serve a different purpose than zines and books do. Zines create a horizontal culture, sort of like social media does, but physical and generally more honest and less about chasing clout and clicks. Books open the world up to us, with history and theory and narrative. The written word matters. No one is monitoring what you read in print, unlike what you read on social media. When you read printed matter, you also can’t share your thoughts on that reading in real time and the whole act becomes less performative, allowing you to engage more earnestly with what you’re reading. It’s fine, of course, to bingewatch a TV show every now and then. It’s fine to play video games. Just read books and zines also.

Write zines and books. You don’t have to be good at writing to write a zine. You get better through the practice, but you likely have unique things to say regardless of how much you’ve developed the skill. Make zines. Make books.

Become responsible for others, whether houseplants, pets, or friends. Caring for each other, or other non-human living things, helps us take care of ourselves. If you have a dog, you will go for a walk every day whether you want to or not. If you have a cat, you will clean up after them even if you can barely clean up after yourself. You will hydrate your plants whether or not you hydrate yourself. Taking care of things helps us be our best selves. Taking care of friends helps us from becoming isolated, and positions us into a web of interconnectivity and interreliance.

Make a habit of doing things you’re bad at. People who only do things they are good at are cowards. Do things you’re bad at–but try to get better at those things. Sing out of key, until one day you sing in key. Learn skills that don’t come naturally to you. Always have something you are bad at that you are working on, and your brain will stay flexible and probably you’ll never die. Well, at least, I haven’t died yet, so it’s working so far.

Drink tea. I don’t know why. It just seems like something people who are living the good life do. Maybe because tea drinking is drinking with a little bit of ritual. Tea is a little treat to give yourself. I’m bad at this one.

Be an anarchist. I wasn’t sure whether or not to include an ideological framework in the Punk Rock Good Life, but I think it would be disingenuous to leave it out. Anarchism is a framework that teaches us that we are our own masters, but that we’re also deeply interconnected with everyone around us. Anarchism believes in you, and it believes in your community. Anarchism believes that we can make the world better and we shouldn’t be afraid to speak honestly about what we really want: a world built on mutual aid and solidarity, a world of equals where differences are celebrated instead of erased. The label isn’t what’s important here, but it’s a label that has helped keep me focused.

Get involved in local mutual aid or activism. Go cook with Food Not Bombs or distribute things to people who need them. Find groups of local people (whether they share every aspect of your ideological framework or not) who are involved in things you care about and then help them out.

Listen to tapes and records or even bandcamp downloads more than streaming music. Music is powerful, wonderful. It is part of living an aesthetic life. Let listening to music be an intentional act. Physical media is a good way to do this. Putting on a record should be an event, a little ritual for your day. Some wordless music is designed to sit in the background, but never let music with words play half-silently in the background–you’re either listening to songs or you’re not. Listen to music while cooking, driving, and cleaning. Not while in conversation.

Let social media be less of your life. This is not a call for absolutes or abstinence in any form, but instead a call for us to understand what habits serve us and what habits don’t. Social media is addictive and while it can offer a great deal to our lives (keeping us informed of what’s going on with the world and our friends, entertaining us, teaching us), it’s very easy to run past the point of diminishing returns and stare into the void of our screens for longer than does us any good.

Be emotionally responsible to your partners. Our romantic lives, like everything else, should be intentional and considered. We should treat our partners well and respect them as our equals. We should always try to keep our promises to them and be honest to them, whether we are monogamous or polyamorous or whatever labels we might use. We should be emotionally responsible to our friends too.

Let intoxication be less of your life. Maybe the core of this entire lifestyle is to live with intention, to do things with intention. Intoxication, by whatever means, might be part of an intentional and beautiful life. But it can easily become habitual, and soon hits diminishing returns. I learned the punk rock good life from someone who drank a good beer more nights than not but was almost never drunk. Myself, I’ve become “witch sober” over the years, where I only consider drinking or drugs for ritual purposes. Those rituals might be as elaborate as a Samhain dinner with food and wine set out for the dead at the table, or they might be as simple as “I would like to drink tonight under the stars to consider my place in the universe.” But it’s always intentional, and for me, it’s vanishingly rare. Maybe inebriation is an important part of your good life, and that’s fine–just always let it be intentional, even if it’s common.

The punk rock good life can be lived in so many different ways. It can be lived by a rubber tramp living in a van or a school bus, drifting from town to town. It can be lived by people living in punk houses in the city, crammed to overflowing with people, houses that have someone living in a tent in the yard and someone renting space under the kitchen table to sleep. It can be lived by people living in shacks in the woods or their friends’ yard. It can be lived by people who live alone in apartments or houses, or by couples, or throuples, or nuclear families in the suburbs, or three-or-four-generation households. You probably can’t live the punk rock good life in a mansion, though, unless you’ve filled that mansion to the brim with people.

Ironically, the punk rock good life is inherently non-performative. It’s non-competitive. Getting caught up in who is living the most authentic punk rock life, or comparing yourself to others constantly, disconnects you from the authentic punk rock good life. Any influencer in the punk rock good life space (as we might imagine existing) will have to contend constantly with this tension, much as a tradwife content creator is not living her authentic tradwife life while she is working the job of content creation.

The punk rock good life is about living intentionally and aesthetically, however suits you. No one truly lives this life perfectly. We will never master every habit we set out to adopt. We will always fall back on easier routines from time to time. But life is not about the destination, it’s about the journey. My goal is to embrace the process of trying to live an aesthetic life, not beat myself up for all the ways that I regularly fail. Because I will fail. But like the great anarchist bards of the band Chumbawamba once prophesized: “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.”

So for now, I will fill my house with flowers, and I will walk my dog every morning, and I’ll try to remember to spend more of my time playing piano and less of my time doomscrolling. I’ll cook food for myself and house guests, and I’ll clean the house with Godspeed on the record player, and I’ll try to remember to watch the sunset, or the dawn, or to notice the phase of the moon. And I’ll succeed, and I’ll fail, and I’ll succeed, and I’ll fail, and one day I’ll die, and that’s alright too. My friends will know I loved them.