EDIT: This post has sort of mutated since I posted it last night, as my emotions keep going back and forth ("We're gonna fight Trump every step of the way" to "fuck it let everything burn" and back again.)
I didn't want to have to write this post, but here goes.
Since the election on Tuesday, a short story by William Gibson, aka "The father of Cyberpunk," has been popping into my head. That story is called "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose."
This story, witten around 1980, is about a future American society on the brink of economic collapse, and the immediate aftermath of that collapse when it happens. Some of the details are different than the actual future we are now living in: in 1980, it was expected that the USSR would still be around in about 100 years or so (and maybe they were prescient: since Vladimir Putin is basically getting everything else he wanted, he might as well get that too!) And Japan was also expected to still be an economic and technological powerhouse well into the future, to the point of eclipsing America (it seems no one expected the early 1990s crash that they still have not completely recovered from.)
But aside from all that: the story is about a young man who has escapes his indentured internship from a megacorporation as society collapses and descends into chaos and food riots, and what becomes of him afterwards. It's a story of how the world people knew in the early 1980s gradually develops into the Cyberpunk setting of Neuromancer and Gibson's other stories, through this character's eyes.
But, as with a lot of William Gibson's stories, it may soon reflect reality more than we'd like.
Face it, you know the meme: Baby Boomers were promised interstellar travel and flying cars. Gen X was promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and it looks like this is the future that is panning out.
But I think just the phrase "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose" is an apt metaphor. The shattered, decaying remnants of a beautiful illusion. Right now, that sounds like America to me.
I'm seeing posts like "I'm not going to let MAGA snuff out my light!" and I'm like, cool. But I'm tired of "Hopepunk." To continue with the William Gibson references: instead, I want to channel the rage of Molly Millions dueling with the corporate ninja on the Killing Floor. (From Johnny Mnemonic. The short story, not the film that was inspired by it.) Or giving Riviera a hot dose (in Neuromancer.)
A refrain I have heard a lot since Tuesday is, "MAGA just won. Why are they so mad?" And my response has been: because someone probably just explained to them how tariffs work for the first time in their lives. But also, because they expected us to still be shocked and despairing to the point of surrender. They didn't expect our defiance and rage. They didn't expect people angrily exclaiming "no, you stupid shit, he wasn't just bullshitting- he said he's going to do that stuff, and he meant it. No, this is how tariffs work."
The hangover is already setting in for some of them. There are reports trickling in of people who are already losing their jobs and having their bonuses cut because of the tariffs they just voted for. Some of them are starting to realize that cheaper groceries may not be in the cards after all, and they just played themselves.
The thing is: once Trumpers realize that Trump's policies are not just going to affect the people they hate - once they realize how badly they screwed themselves - they are going to first beg for, and then demand, our understanding, help and compassion. They'll demand our sympathy, after years of openly fantasizing about murdering everyone they don't agree with. They do not deserve it. But if by acting to resist Trump and protect ourselves, we prevent some of the hurting that these people have gone out their way to inflict on themselves, then I'm ok with that.
But I don't think the incels who are going around telling women "your body, my choice" realize that their only true source of relief, pornography, is about to be criminalized. I'm sure they've bought into the idea that once no fault divorce is gone, they'll be able to compel a woman to be with them - as if that is going to fill the empty, shrieking abyss of self-inflicted loneliness and existential despair in their hearts.
Remember Gamergate? The movement of angry adult-aged little boys with mommy issues, who freaked out about Evil Feminists like we were going to personally come to their homes and take their video games away, just because a woman in a plaid shirt and large hoop earrings talked about a lack of equal representation for women in gaming? The ones who were instrumental in Trump gaining momentum with young men in 2016? I wonder how they are going to take it when violent video games, the laziest scapegoat for the school shooting epidemic, are banned under Project 2025. And that's if they can even afford to update to the latest video hardware and/or next generation consoles after the tariffs kick in. Haha, oops.
(Meanwhile: even if we never see a release of Elder Scrolls 6 at this point, my rig will be able to run Skyrim, Morrowind, and Daggerfall Unity indefinitely. My collection of ancient Bethesda games are smiling at me, Simperials. Can you say the same?)
Trumpers don't seem swayed by the number of women who have died since Roe vs Wade was repealed: but then, we also know from school shootings and the pandemic that mass death isn't real to them (unless it's the "mass death" of clusters of cells that haven't become a human being yet.) The actual human cost isn't real to them, unless it somehow affects them personally. Only
then does it become a tragedy.
Immigrants have been the backbone of food production and construction in this country for decades. What happens when they're forced out? One thing I hear a lot is, "once all the illegals are deported, Americans will take those jobs again." Hahaha. Ahahahahhahaha. Do they really think Americans who have been indoctrinated to see those jobs as "demeaning" will "lower themselves" to perform manual labor for cents on the dollar? Immigrant workers shouldn't have even had to do it under the conditions and for the pay they were doing it for. They deserve living wages and benefits, whether or not they were born in this country or came here legally.
But this may be exactly how people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have envisioned it: deport everyone currently working those jobs, then starve everyone else to the point that they'll accept serfdom and feel gratitude for it.
I don't think people are ready to "embrace the pain" as Elon Musk is telling them they're going to have to do. But the pain is coming. And when it does: well, if schadenfreude is going to be the one pleasure we are afforded, it is one in which I will partake. And remember, above all: they wanted this. They voted for it. As we will be reminding them, over and over and over again.
"I didn't think the leopard would eat *my* face!"Shortly before the election, I re-watched 1977 Ralph Bakshi film
Wizards. It's a movie I grew up with. I suspect it was how I got "Elfpilled" (though Tolkien has an equal share of the blame for that.) And once you get past the framing device (nazi mutants vs cartoonish hippie/barbarian Fairies and Elves, and a comic, cigar-chomping Wizard) and the underlying message, "science and technology are inherently bad and always lead to war and oppression," (which is representative of the anti-nuke cold-war era hippie mindset that permeates and informs the movie) it does seem eerily prescient. A parable about the ways that propaganda can embolden and enable fascism and destroy democracy.
How can we "smash the projector" when it's a screen in everyone's pockets?
My first action after the election was called for Trump was to delete Reddit. We were manipulated into thinking Kamala Harris had the election in the bag, by a media that was desperately trying to milk as much engagement and clicks and revenue as possible by socially engineering a fake horse race narrative. This same media has been breathlessly anticipating Trump's return to power since 2020; because anxious, scared people stay glued to their screens, and that "engagement" makes them money.
EDIT: I've sort of changed my mind about "Echo Chambers." Especially since
Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez made the point that an echo chamber basically won the 2024 election, and she's right.
But it seems clear at this point that Elon Musk's goal of buying Twitter was to do exactly what he did: in the words of
Catherynne Valente, to take the world's biggest microphone, set it to reverb, and shove it up his own ass. To shut down communication and organization on the left, and to spread disinfo and radicalize everyone else.
The best time to delete Twitter was in November 2022, and the second best time is now.
For a while now, I've been evangelizing a return to Web 1.0. Personal websites, webrings, PHP forums, IRC. Platforms that bots, Russian trollfarms, MAGA, and Alt Right simps aren't looking for, are not tracking, and may not even be aware of because for a lot of them, it was from before their time. That, or Mastodon.
People used to bemoan the fact that Google doesn't categorize Dreamwidth pages. Now this could be to our advantage.
Other than that:
wake the fuck up, samurai. Once again, we have a Democracy to defend.
Let's see what people think when they start getting exactly what they voted for. It just sucks that the rest of us are going to get it, too. They might be screaming "this isn't what I voted for!" before long, after what they very much did vote for starts happening to them. But for the ones who literally did not vote for this, things are really going to suck for a long time. We're going to have to resist what and where we can, and we're going to have to show up for each other and be there for each other.
current mood:
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