TOTW: The Days Ahead

Yet in some regions it will likely open up possibilities for the spread of civilisations rule. Some lands may remain (relatively) temperate — climatically and socially. As for civilisation, so for anarchy and anarchists — severely challenged, sometimes vanquished; possibilities for liberty and wildness opening up, possibilities for liberty and wildness closing. The unevenness of the present will be made more so. There is no global future. - Desert

Changes in the world and stories about those changes go hand in hand. People identify shifts, assign importance to events, assign roles to participants. Right now we are clearly going through some kind of widespread shift as we live through the contradictions of society’s supposed racial, scientific and technological progress and surely when (or if) the smoke clears many, anarchists included, will be quick to identify the movers and shakers, winners and losers, important and not so important events of the current moment.

While there may be some truth found in these forthcoming assessments, I am not particularly interested in world-scaled explanations for events and changes that ultimately effect us in both large abstract ways and intimate ones. What I am interested in, dearest of readers, are stories of how this current moment, of upheaval, of plague, of depression, has affected your specific locale. Have these events energized anarchism in your town? Changed it? Changed your view of the possible? Is this merely a blip when the boot hovers over our face for a few moments more? Are you merely bracing for a perhaps inevitable wave of repression? Have you found ways to break through the increased isolation of screens? Tell me!

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"What I am interested in, dearest of readers, are stories of how this current moment, of upheaval, of plague, of depression, has affected your specific locale."

Making a person sized story is easier when your dealing with a story shaped person. Some people can be summed up in some accidental facts on the corner of an index card. For me, now more than ever, everything seems to be happening elsewhere, and I'm oblivious to it unless I tune in or look it up.

"Have these events energized anarchism in your town?"

It would seem to me that it has taken energy away out of everything. Everyone is either readjusting to new work (or unemployment) conditions, telework or in different stages of getting sick of/from it. If before people had to resort to some excuse to stay at home instead of hanging out, fear of contagion becomes easy implicit excuse, so no need to say anything, and it doesn't even come across as insincere, specially when someone in your circle/neighborhood already manged to get covid-19 in spite of precautions. Some people are resorting to more regular phone calls as a way to vent and stay in touch, and sometimes I get to overhear the same side of these conversations from those nearby.

"Changed it? Changed your view of the possible? Are you merely bracing for a perhaps inevitable wave of repression?"

More like inevitable wave of electoral fervor, and eventual activist backlash when the new elected representatives disappoint once again, or new leaks or scandals lead to new waves of indignation. Right now, for months now, party politics had fallen to a second plane due to covid talk, now they're trying to get to the spotlight once again nearing elections. Though the way things are, i think most people are more afraid of recurrent natural disasters, or coming evictions, or coming(or ongoing) recession, the deterioration of their quality of life, than repression. And I think the people here at least in my proximity are feeling like these elections have little or no immediate bearing on their quality of life, still many vote out of principles or thinking of a future.

These protests elsewhere all around seem to be fearless in the face of repression. But repression has struck permanently scarring or even ending the lives of many, and it will keep striking. It might not be as an effective deterrent if everything seems to be going to shit. The state has the stick but it has seemed to run out of carrots. People are given money for unemployment and covid stimulus package, but this seemed like life-support to people, not as a gift or incentive to play nicely. Government printed a lot of money and doesn't seem willing or capable to keep on giving these checks.

"Is this merely a blip when the boot hovers over our face for a few moments more? Have you found ways to break through the increased isolation of screens?"

It's funny because being shut-in before was a like a failure to keep up with the expectation of going out and having fun, mingling in public places. Now it's seen as an expectation or a civic duty. So before it had an anti-social flavor, now it tastes more like boot-licking. Screens, now as they did then, maintain a simulation of liveliness, seeing activity elsewhere, chatting with people. Fun to see people living story-shaped lives. Everyone is responsible for their own liberation, complicity (passive or active, makes no difference) makes governance run smoothly.

21st century oppression intensified, more of the same, exactly as i felt was gonna happen. Lack of ability to parse out narratives. Murder rates way up in many places because carrots were eaten by the special/gifted bureaucratic rabbits. Poverty in the land of blood stained gold bricks. More blood. More suffering.

I recommend taking social media fasts. The internet is being vastly weaponized against us on down to warring on our sense-making abilities. It's a distorting lense. When Qanon is the fastest growing religion, we've got a great counter-insurgency strategy to grapple with.

Go outside. Play, move, and breathe. Do whatever you've got to do to stay on top of the mental and physical and finding inner peace, inner calm in a world of constant pollution (why let corporations own our sleep with blue light interference?). Not much has changed outside. Our social nature's are being hijacked by fragmenting segregation. Sometimes I shut the human world out and meditate gratefully to the rhythms of birdsong around me. We planted a lot of flowers this year, and appreciating the tiny things like a new bloom has been great for keeping my mind owned by algorithm-induced patterns of thinking. Life is diverse, and bursting through the cracks. Change is inevitable.

That said, culture has been shifting but economics have not. Expect more deranged people to be herded into indentitarian dead ends (for they stink of the fantasies of dead aesthetics and mass graves as their only offering). Expect also that people of the right and the left will just simply wish the protesters and counter protesters would just go away for the election. We anarchists need to be careful, and stop being the pawns of political movers and shakers.

Nothing's coming down the pike for anyone, whether they lick boots or not. Financilization has impoverished daily life. To make sure that everything changes to stay exactly the same will bring forth a techno-feudalism. The language of financilization is risk management and avoidance. Innovation means taking risks. So, capitalism will likely stagnate. But, in order to manage an increasingly complex and fragmented society those in power will retreat to whatever cheap and easy (just like the junk and sludge they try to sell us as "food") management mechanisms are on offer: we are the AI being created and shaped into behaviorally being more predictable.

The base has been plundered, and largely offshored into Panamanian bank accounts. Who is going to pay for infrastructure, for the tax breaks, for the pandemic related stimulus and bailouts? Last I checked, 1/4 of millennial men have never left mom and dad's, 2/3 will never own a home, and their average pay is $20k. And then for these corporations to speak of automation!? How are any of us to pay for this system? Even if we fought back like in the stories of how how we had in the past: it was deemed acceptable that 200,000 people die off to keep the economy going. (Would it have to take more than that for BLM to get what it wants?). And yet, I don't want to forget the power we do have.

Folks like Sir E and I have joked for years that to grind the system to a hault we should all stay in bed instead of starting a revolution. And how quickly the system ground to a hault when we did stop working. For how disposable we're made to feel, and how replaceable by AI...we still have power.

I do wonder if billionaires will cut and run, or how authoritarianism will be installed by constant background ambience of pandemic/climactic events/mass migration of folks in search of work, etc... Will camps be used to kill off the poor? Or are mediated fear, doubt, hopelessness better salves for reducing population in the continuation of what the system has on offer: exclusion, displacement?

The West is at a fundamental spiritual dead-end with its relationship with the earth.

Expect giant mining projects even when indigenous have won land back on paper.

But...we can quietly take land left unused by capital's waste. There's a lot of excitement and coming together over regenerative agriculture right now. Sure, vegans/prims/reds/strugglismo might not like this, but here's a tool to shore up our own infrastructure and start no longer paying for food here and now.

I have just begun to explore the hundreds of square miles of unpopulated backwoods that can be reinhabited by intelligent ("savage") humans near my planned Sanctuary, when the Forest Service no longer exists.

Collapse (starting with Great Depression 2.0) will grind the system to a halt (tho not in a day). Even if working people never do. Pathetic Collapse warlords will fight over scraps in the ruined megopoli with no viable infrastructure and little food. And nobodies smartphones will work anymore.

But they must first overcome the Inner Great Depression that conditioning has put 8nto some people ( not me hahaa) before they can even get there heads around the external outer Great Depression 2.0 before they can even contemplate taking a shovel and planting a seed in a place off the grid.

And other symptoms: Late capitalist slavery is built on a 5000-10,000 year accumulation of epigenetic damage from previous slave systems, consolidated by growing up/existing in the present slave system.

This is the biggest underlying reason why Revolution Around the Corner (the few times this even happens) has had disappointing outcomes.

The cure is deeper than politics.

for the cure? Is it the Rorschach test?

Yep its primarily a psychological affair, one has to shed and piece through all the crap conditioning and returning to the quintessential intuitive human feelings.

people to use their bodies as opposed to parsing out information, Because there wont be a great singularity revolution. It already happened, run to the hills. Office jobs are there for obfuscation and better crafting corporations bureaucracy...

i tend to have a better relationship with the internet when i view it as a pressure valve and a dopamine hit. I recently experimented with twitter, i found it pretty damn disturbing. The ultimate based validation machine.

"The West is at a fundamental spiritual dead-end with its relationship with the earth."

It's not a dead-end, but rather an infinite trench line, or ditch, between property (the civilized realm) and the wild realm. An infinite empire, if you want a cooler term. Just like D & G as well as the Situationnists observed, it's more of a shallow spirituality driven by this material schizophrenia than a kind of "spiritual crisis". I connect with what you seem to mean by "dead end" but that's just not how I'd call it.

And it's what makes me frown when anarchists in NA are advocating buying more land to develop their utopia. Same old schizo colonial pattern, rite?

At least some leftists get it right with coop land trusts, but just like reformism in general it's only an archipelago of the same old systemic psychosis; you don't need a fucking big concept and plenty of papers to "live off the land"... you just need to get there and do it.

Love that term "material schizophrenia" sooo succint and connects to the psychology of consumerism.

Yeah it's funny how I got that one off the top of my head, while D & G had to use such arcane terms and syntax...

I think I'll use it as song title in my upcoming EP. :-)

I knew it! Only a poet free spirit can pull stuff like that straight of the top of their head/heart.

I have often identified with Jamaica Kincaid’s question: ‘Why’ she asks, ‘must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility that comes with being a human being?’ Why indeed? In her writing Kincaid reads the garden as a metaphor for colonisation, the way in which nature is owned, histories erased, plants moved and exploited around the globe, and she shows the way in which the formal culture of gardening is so bound with ideas of Empire. She saw, as Foucault did, that ‘the garden is the smallest parcel of the world, and then it is the totality of the world.’

Out here in Portland, a lot has changed and yet very little has changed. People are discovering more confrontational strategies and desires while at the same time somehow connecting them strongly to portlands respectability politics plague (IE shields being for defense and not to push police lines). Beyond that, the leviathan of social media is getting a lot stronger, with everyone and their mom being a livestreamer. Being a very polarized city, theres few spaces that don't have a watered down political stance of the events happening nightly which leads to what feels like a stagnation of useful strategies. Portlands struggle hasn't expanded beyond the street demonstration in over 80 days

I have friends who go to the demos, and its at most a few thousand people out of a city-wide population of more than a half-million people. As always a scene that exists for the entertainment of scenesters can't engage with the larger world outside of this.

This may sound absurd, but I admire Camus, and it may actually be a better future for the anarch if Trump wins a second round, so that a final death blow may be dealt to the remnants of the liberal leftist politicians who have all unified intoa sickening self-righteous smug core of fake smiles, fake altruism and fake empathy, all to feed their greed for power and prestige.

talking to my mom about some of the themes i read about often on here a few hours ago. We were talking about absurdism and a book about camus (i don't actually know anything about camus). It was a literary critique with a post-modern writing style.

As far as trump: he has his "back to the wind", and i think he does that way better than any other president so far. He can't be any worse than any of the other presidents of the united states of america. There are actually other presidents across the world that mildly resemble him. Duerte, Obrador? No, i don't cast the vote in any direction, in the US elections always have deeply disturbing implications...but yes i have put thought into voting for trump. I also don't think all of the worlds presidents are the same, and i seriously DO NOT care about the sexy masturbating behind the booth! My masturbations are the best, the most decadent, the cheesiest, the old world calls for me comrade!

I love absurdity. I wish my mom had the intellect to discuss literature by an existentialist. She sounds hot!

Im just extremely flattered by that. What was ya mama like?

We normally talk about things more political and business related...coronavirus, trump, idenity politics, that kinda stuff. Thats why it was surreal to start talking about camus, the main thing waa talking about is how a lot of the post modern writing style was geared towards criticizing binary thought processes, and this other book she mentioned, as i interpret the conversation, about psycho politics and binary thinking. I forget the name of it.

Dasien?

What I fear most for the future with Biden and his trick is a revalorization of neo-liberalism.

With a lot of those people, and they deny it. And every single person i know believes in the "there needs to be more control". I cant stand the whole leftist unity thing, no wonder why i have wierd thoughts about voting for either candidates. We arent going to be able to change our lives if we keep falling for these traps.

Btw, im happy to say this is the only post i have made all day on any social media platform or forum. and im trying to more permanently ignore the internet because its really a lie that i need it for anything whatsoever. So seriously thanks everyone for playing wierd posts with me, they are often sarcastic ..i know im not always so great about it. I want to get out of here though, if my entire life is taking a walk then thats better than any other option i see.

"a final death blow may be dealt to the remnants of the liberal leftist politicians"

and what about the conservative rightist politicians? like, the ones seemingly gaining power far more than any leftists.

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