February 10, 2025

📡 – 2025-02-10

They invented this new kind of debt

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You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.

Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way.

Good-bye, Pamela Paul: The contrarian columnist showed us the intolerable side of liberalism

Pamela Paul: A Good-bye to the New York Times Opinion Writer

The contrarian columnist showed us the intolerable side of liberalism.

That is the entirety of Pamela Paul’s political vision: It’s bedtime again in America. One gets the sense that we have woken her up in the middle of the night, racing around the kitchen banging on pots and sobbing incoherently. It falls to her, the adult in the room, to wrestle us kicking and screaming back under the covers. “Refuse to react,” she advises in her most recent column, telling readers that the best response to the authoritarian shock and awe of the past few weeks is to engage in cheeky acts of private rebellion. “Personally, I avoid using favorite Trump words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘huge,’” she writes, “which nobody else notices but which brings quiet satisfaction.” This is a very nice thing for the book lady to say to people who have been forcibly loaded onto planes or refused urgent care by their own doctors. But it is not alarmist to notice fascism; it is quietist to hate alarms.

What’s New About Woke Racial Capitalism (and What Isn’t)

https://spectrejournal.com/whats-new-about-woke-racial-capitalism-and-what-isnt/, from 2020

The fact that there has been a material change is part and parcel of racial capitalism’s ideological strategy: wokewashing offers itself up as an explanation for the real and substantive changes in political economy, though it is a largely misleading explanation, as it centers individual success stories as evidence of supposed progress towards full inclusion, which obscures the largely class-bound nature of the changes in racial hierarchies. The potential small numbers of the middle class of racial minorities to enter the increasingly multiracial global elite has often come alongside the cementation or even acceleration of exploitation and vulnerability for working class people of all races. Since the global and horrifically violent campaign of repression and terrorism against the Left (particularly anticommunism) helped eliminate the basis for alternative explanations, the neoliberal racial progress narratives go without substantive challenge.

Let's Get Real

Let's Get Real - by John Ganz - Unpopular Front

I'm going to use the F-word and the C-word

It’s often said by critics of the fascism thesis that it’s absurd to compare Trumpism to fascism since we clearly didn’t live under a repressive fascist regime in Trump 1.0. Very few people said we were living under a fascist regime, they said Trump was substantively a fascist, a different stipulation. The critics try to elide the difference between a fascist movement and a fascist regime to ridicule their opponents, but they also ignore what actually—existing fascism looked like. In Italy, Mussolini governed in tandem with the old political system from 1922 until 1925, when the true dictatorship phase started in the wake of the Matteotti crisis, a debacle that seriously threatened his rule. At first, Mussolini tried to avoid a confrontation on the question of dictatorship vs. parliamentary rule even though radical members of his movement demanded a revolutionary move because he was uncertain he had the political strength to force the issue. He attempted to consolidate power and conservatives tried to normalize his movement and channel its energies into conventional political forms. ***The first years of fascism saw the coexistence of fascist rule and accelerating repression with competitive elections, a free press, and a pluralist public sphere. (***Giacomo Matteotti was murdered for publishing a book and giving speeches in parliament, where he was a socialist deputy.) And until a crisis forced Mussolini’s hand, it appeared that the situation had stabilized into a kind of hybrid regime.

To Stop The Coup, We Must Be Clear About The Truth: Two Plus Two Equals Four

To Stop The Coup, We Must Be Clear About The Truth: Two Plus Two Equals Four | Techdirt

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate act of rebellion comes when Winston Smith insists that two plus two equals four, defying a system that demands he accept whatever re…

The stakes couldn’t be higher. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a series of policy disagreements or political maneuvers—it’s a coordinated assault on the very foundations of constitutional democracy. Every time we accept a distorted explanation for clear violations of law, every moment we hesitate to name reality for fear of seeming alarmist, we participate in the erosion of our own democratic safeguards.

But history shows us that even in the face of sophisticated autocratic tactics, democratic resistance is possible. It requires clarity about what we’re facing, courage to name it without hedging, and coordinated action focused on specific institutional targets. Most of all, it demands that we maintain our collective grip on reality—that we refuse, no matter how much pressure is applied, to accept that two plus two equals anything other than four.

The path forward is clear, if challenging. We must organize sustained, peaceful pressure on our representatives, making them more afraid of constituent anger than of partisan retaliation. We must frame our demands in clear, constitutionally grounded terms that cut through attempts at reality distortion. And we must maintain both the urgency this crisis demands and the discipline required for effective action.

Vanishing Culture: What Early Internet Era GIFs Show Us About Preserving Digital Culture

https://blog.archive.org/2025/02/05/vanishing-culture-what-early-internet-era-gifs-show-us-about-preserving-digital-culture/

When we preserve digital culture that would otherwise vanish, we don’t necessarily gain the keys to a richer creative future. Again, the web has largely moved on from early GIFs. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t become more virtuous by being enthusiasts of outdated image types (in the same way that listening to music on vinyl records doesn’t necessarily make you cooler or a more conscious listener). 

But when we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history, it behooves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it. And maybe if we realize that, we can start to again play a more active role in shaping a better collective future that many of us want. In the meantime, the GifCities database of millions of GIFs provides plenty of entertaining throwback material for your browsing pleasure. Heck, maybe it’ll even inspire your own GifCities-themed website, as it did with my recent website update. (I spoke to Chris Freeland, the Director of the Internet Archive’s Library Services, about it earlier this year. Yeah, it obviously features the bubble-gum blowing Furby.)

In praise of zines

In praise of zines

Zines (handmade mini magazines) leave behind the best roadmap for an authentic newsletter people will want to read.

The zeitgeist-setters shut down their zines when they’d run their course, turned off the copiers, moved on to the next thing. Along the way they changed things, as only crazy ones could do. You have to be crazy to put your ideas out into the world, crazy to think someone will care. And the fun fact is, they will care. You’ve got this chance to find people who are wired like you, for whom the same ideas will light up their eyes. You and they are hungry for connection, for ideas, and your zine, or its more modern encapsulation in a newsletter, is just crazy enough that it might work.

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a PSA for anyone who ever encounters me in person

Relaxing Experimental Ambient [Vinyl Studio Session] with RAICA

Is Doechii an industry plant, or do you just hate women?

Motion Detection and Music | Max/MSP Tutorial

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Lots of new stuff over at Never Post the last couple weeks. First and most importantly: we RELAUNCHED OUR MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM, now with a single $4 tier that gets it all. That’s right! Ad free feed? Extended segments? Side shows? All yours, for $4/mo or $48/yr. This week we put out:

• A Mailbag episode, where we respond to listener comments, messages, voicemails and voice memos

• An extended cut of Georgia’s segment with skincare and beauty critic Jessica Defino

• A good old fashioned newsletter (that you can get for FREE! as a free member)

• An extended cut of my conversation with Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs, about his time Logged Off hiking the Appalachian Trail

• The newest episode of Never Watch, our watch-along pod where the staff sits down to watch the movie HACKERS together

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That’s all I got for you this week! It was nice to see you, and I hope you’re doing well during these, the final days of the American Empire.

Thanks, also, so much for all the feedback you sent last week. I asked you leave to comments because Buttondown has them now … and you did! and they were amazing! but! guess what? Buttondown is working on a bug that prevents me from RESPONDING TO THEM.

I want you to know how much it kills me to not be able to say anything back. Please, if you have thoughts… leave them below (or just respond to this email) and I will see them, and respond once it’s fixed. LOL.

xo
-Mike