If a skyte falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it even exist?
Hey, folks.
Now on to the actual newsletter.
So I’ve been taking a little semi-vacation from social media, for a lot of reasons, and it’s having some interesting effects. I mean specifically I am getting a lot more reading done, and a lot more meditation, and a lot more handwriting. But also (yes, and) I am realizing that if I stop myself before posting some witticism to bluesky because I am looking for the dopamine pop of a little validation and feeling seen, then I’m not opting into the roller coaster of Performativeness.
And that feels right for me right now.
I’m not Giving Up Social Media or anything dramatic; it’s where my pocket friends and my colleagues live, after all. But I expect I will be using it a lot less and in a much more curated fashion.
I feel like this is linked to my desire last year to get rid of a bunch of metrics and gamification in my life, ditch the fitbit, determine for myself based on how I feel if I slept well last night, you know the deal.
I’m still trying to get my fiction brain to come back online but I am having lots and lots of deep thematic thoughts at least. And figuring out a little bit of the backstory that has been stumping me for basically a year now.
Theme, of course, is not story. But it is a sign that maybe the narrative engine is turning over again.
I know I have to be patient and give my brain time and space to want to create, but also
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thus the, well, meditation. Helps deal with generalized anxiety and specific performance anxiety both.
I also just got over my first (thankfully very mild but also very lingering) case of Covid (Made it five years, hope to make it another five years or longer before the next one) and Scott is currently recovering from a much worse dose than I had, but he’s on Paxlovid and on the mend.
The world is a lot right now. The nation I live in is well on its way, in under a week, to becoming the tiny New Hampshire in Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s brilliant book A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, with extra spicy authoritarianism. How you get the libertarians and the authoritarians on the same page I’m not entirely certain, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
It’s hard to keep one’s pecker up when one is surrounded by massive social and technological upheaval on so many levels. The AI slop is ubiquitous and so is the (pretty well founded) terror. But you just do the work that’s in front of your hand and you keep on existing and you try to limit your own exposure.
Anyway, I have been thinking about social media as a trauma vector, and repression and reactivity, and what it is that makes people work so hard to control other people. And some of it is that we’re all so broken by the world and so few of us realize it or are willing to admit it.
People try to control the things that make them uncomfortable. People try to control the things that point up their inner fragility. And of course that’s the scary thing about narcissists and authoritarians: they are acting out of weakness.
It was Robert A Heinlein who said, “Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you.”
And he wasn’t wrong. (Heinlein meant smallness of spirit, not smallness of body size, to be clear. And yes, there’s a whole lot of cultural unpacking to do with equating size and goodness, but this is not that essay.)
So social media becomes a trauma vector (doomerism, trauma dumping, bearing witness to awful things you can’t do anything about, cyber-mobbings and so forth but also just the cruelty of the public square and the ease of othering people you only encounter in 280-character bites) and a forum in which people attempt to control each other—dictate behavior—as trauma response.
Authoritarianism has its roots in fear—not just fear of the other, but fear of what the other shows us about ourself if we are deep down really unhappy with the life and identity we are inhabiting. The idea that there is a way out is threatening and terrifying because it would mean tearing down our entire existence.
It’s axiomatic that the most homophobic people are often repressing their own homoerotic tendencies. It’s axiomatic that we often hate the people who others see us having the most in common with. I know from my own experience that when something about someone else triggers a strong anxious/avoidant response in me it’s usually because it’s setting off my own personal trauma.
How does this help us deal with an authoritarian and catastrophic regime here in America? One designed to tear down the social infrastructure and replace it with a Russia-style pay-to-play oligarchy? One determined to punish anyone whose existence and happiness threatens the very fragile self-image of a certain subcategory of white cis het men?
I don’t know. I am usually of the opinion that understanding a thing can help you fight it. But right now all I have is the certainty that people existing under repressive governments here and abroad have existed, and persisted. The current American government is a catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen in we have not seen in the USA my lifetime, and the dismantling of the American social, political. and economic system is likely to result in the end of what Henry Luce termed The American Century.
(Which would bother me less if I were less worried about Putin’s imperial ambitions and the climate crisis.)
Health care outcomes, standards of living, and personal freedoms in the USA are about to get worse. Human beings are going to suffer because of that.
It’s my job to think about the future, and one of the ways you think about the future is by thinking about the past and the cycles of history. And perhaps by understanding the fragility of the authoritarian mindset, those of us who are opposed to it can continue to create webs of community, support one another and the most vulnerable members of society, and hold the fuck on until the opportunity comes to reassert liberalism and maybe use the inevitable backlash to push the needle a little further toward a just, equitable, righteous, and peaceful society.
Anyway, that’s the sort of thing I have been thinking about.
Eyes up, kick on.
--Bear