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

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

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

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

The Barbarian Queen

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

Here’s a teaser for it, fuck it:

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

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

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

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

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

Preparedness

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

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Things I’ve read recently

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

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

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

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

Things I’ve watched recently

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’m really happy with it.

So I’ll talk about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Bag

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

The Stuff

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

The top pocket

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

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

The upper front pocket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lower front pocket

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

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

Outside the pack

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

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

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

Loose in the main pouch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food

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

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

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

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

For my dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survival kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hygiene kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical tape: For keeping gauze on.

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

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

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

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

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

Ace bandage: For wrapping sprains.

Bandaids: For minor wounds.

Butterfly bandages: For keeping larger wounds shut.

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

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

Digital Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notably Absent

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

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

Rousing Conclusion

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

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

The Packing List

Clothes

• 2 pairs wool socks

• 2 pairs wool underwear

• thermal top

• thermal bottoms

• beanie

• puffy

• rain coat

• wool buff

• bandana

• baseball cap

Light

• flashlight

• blinky light for walking

• headlamp

Shelter

• Emergency bivy

• Medium-weight rescue blanket

• Cordage

Food

• Survival rations (3600 cal)

• Protein bars (2000 cal)

• Caffeine

• Electrolytes

Water

• Titanium bottle

• Insulated steel bottle with gorilla tape

• Water filter

• Chemical treatment pills

• Portable water bladder

Dog Care

• Trazadone

• Prozac

• Simparico Trio

• 3 days dog food with tupperware bowl

• Collapsible bowl

• Poop bags

• Peanut butter packet

• Dog treats

• Dog GPS and cable

Hygiene

• Sleep mask

• earplugs

• toothbrush

• toothpaste

• deodorant

• floss

• disposable razor

• nail clippers

• tweezers

• soap strips

• tampons

• lube

• condoms

• hair ties

• wet wipes

• travel john

• compressed towel

• chapstick

• hairbrush

• backpacking bidet

• Toilet paper

• shaving cream packets

Tools

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

• Multitool

• Eyeglass screwdriver

• Small screwdriver

• long-handled spork

• 8way silcock

• carabiner / gear hanger

• ultralight trowel

• prybar

• folding knife

Survival

• whistle

• contractor bag

• binoculars

• rite in rain notebook

• pens

• marker

• pencil

• compass

• hand warmers

• toe warmers

• signal mirror

• p38 can opener

• 2x butane lighters

• survival multitool credit card

• chemlight

• storm matches

• fire starter block

• tinder

• tiny survival guide

• fresnel lens

• zip ties

• fishing kit

Medical

• gloves

• shears

• leukotape

• ACE bandage

• 2x gauze rolls

• dental kit

• irrigation syringe

• super glue

• bandaids

• butterfly bandages

• petroleum jelly

• sterile prep pads

• medical tape

• iosat

• trauma dressing

• chito gauze

• compressed gauze

• nasal airway

• chest seals

• triple antibiotic

• acetiminophen

• aspirin

• ibuprofen

• loperamide

• famotodine

• cat9 tourniquet

• diphenhydramine

Electronics

• solar battery bank

• octopus cable

• survival radio / scanner

• GMRS or ham radio

• pay per minute phone

• faraday bag

• nintendo switch

Misc

• N95 masks

• $500 or $1000 or whatever

Documentation

• passport

• rabies info

• paper map of USA

• laminated emergency contact card

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

• encrypted USB A and C drive with personal docs

  • passport

  • SSN card

  • birth cerfiticate

  • vehicle title

  • mortgage or rental info

  • home insurance info

  • car insurance info

  • drivers license

  • credit cards

  • medical insurance card

  • union card

• unencrypted USB A and C drive with books etc

  • survival guides

  • medical guides

  • movies

  • tv

  • audiobooks

  • ebooks

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

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

• Go bags

• Revolution as preparedness

• Hurricane relief in Asheville

• Storing food

• Storing water

• Intro to preparedness

• Building resilient communities

• Home preparedness

• Why be prepared

I Don’t Have to be Organized to be Prepared

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did my apocalypse start?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Accord is simple:

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

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

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

Four: Membership in the group is voluntary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lies. It contains lies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there’s hope.

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

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

If so, I’m here for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So… things might get bad.

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

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

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

I’m genuinely very worried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you know what? That’s fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone.

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

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

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

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

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

Wild Roving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people are just that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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