#9: Might and might
Things seem mighty bad already
hard times
Hard times
There is a blog post I’ve kept open in a tab for a few weeks by a Silicon Valley AI type, a guy that worked for Apple and HP and spent 6 years in the army, with the title “I'm Worried It Might Get Really Bad”. I found it droll. A hilariously myopic microcosm of Silicon Valley neoliberal thinking.
We know about Silicon Valley’s top down techno fascist authoritarian tendencies and this guy doesn’t seem to be completely that. The blog post is literally titled “I’m worried” so that alone at least hints at some empathy. That said, imagine how entitled and protected, and how deep into the neoliberal experience, you’d have to be to, in August of 2025, think that it “might get really bad.”
Imagine thinking that it might get really bad after two years of out in the open genocide, all the atrocities committed with full impunity, and an entire self-described moral liberal democratic west criminalizing and deporting those against it.
Try telling entire communities being torn apart by the chick-fil-a gestapo, migrants being disappeared or sent to foreign gulags, advocates intimidated, children unaccounted for, that things might get bad. All of it backed by national guard deployments in your own state. People are mobilizing to fight back (good video.) Ask them if things might get bad.
Try telling lawyers who read the idiotic arguments in this Supreme Court decision, wherein they literally say it’s OK to physically stop and detain people based on them having an accent, looking Mexican, or working a day job, that things might get bad.
Try telling trans people in the country that it might get bad. Or those that need an abortion to live (or those don’t want an abortion for any fucking reason), those sick from preventable diseases, the immuno-compromized, civil rights advocates, victims of abuse, scientists, fans of Drexciya, or anyone trying to pay rent and groceries at this point. It might get bad.
Trickle-down means those at the bottom drown first.
Just last week the United States extrajudiciously murdered a dozen foreign nationals, posted a snuff film to gloat about it on twitter, and the media mostly just went with it. The odd article, like this CBC story, adds the word “alleged” before copy and pasting the White House narrative1 almost verbatim. A tiny boat was an “imminent threat” to the United States over 2500 kilometres away? The lies have become paper thin.
For two years we watched a rogue state attack all its neighbours, bomb consulates, murder foreign civilian heads of states2, and blindly assassinate people by remote devices in their pockets, without consequence. Heinous acts contrary to international norms, now normalized. A state committing ethnic cleansing. A state that pretends to care about ‘hostages’ yet routinely murders the negotiators of their exchange, even in foreign nations. The lies have always been paper thin.
The fascists at the White House see this as an open invite to push their hegemony as they please. If nobody can stop Israel, who’s going to stop the United States of America? That’s how the cycle of violence starts with bullies. Little escalations, at home and outside, that grow more brazen. What’s tolerated out there eventually comes home. And liberals have been tolerating the escalation all along.
So yes, affluent “knowledge workers” are going to lose jobs. Myself included. Many are going to lose their homes, their livelihoods, maybe even their liberties. I do believe a depression is coming. It’s not AI. It’s not one particular person in power or one particular CEO. These are all symptoms of the capitalist system<3>. The colonial system.
And in that system all those things you think might happen to ‘knowledge workers” are already daily occurrences to migrant workers, immigrants, marginalized groups, and those that stand up to genocide. Some in these trillion dollar tech spaces are resisting, like those at Microsoft most visibly, and they are losing their jobs right now. They are not enough.
If you can’t stand up for those being trampled already and wait for things to get bad for your six figure salary job, then there’s going to be no one left to stand up for you.
Related Links
The Gaza family torn apart by IDF snipers from Chicago and Munich
Absolutely horrific reporting on Israeli sniper war crimes. If there was any justice in the world these men would be judged at the Nuremberg Part Two trials:
“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.
Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.
The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers (March 2024)
The unemployed actually opposed Hitler and voted en masse for the parties of the left. Hitler won the support of self-employed people, who were in decent economic shape but felt that their lives and livelihoods were threatened; of rural Protestant voters; and of domestic workers (still a sizable group), perhaps because they felt unsafe outside a rigid hierarchy. What was once called the petite bourgeoisie, then, was key to his support—not people feeling the brunt of economic precarity but people feeling the possibility of it. Having nothing to fear but fear itself is having something significant to fear.
Injury to Buildings and Vegetables
The problem frequently named as social murder or slow violence is, in other words, a particularly visceral form of the unintended consequences generated by class and market rule. Critics of complicity are right that we are all implicated in these harms to some degree. Yet this is largely because so many of our decisions are mediated by markets in ways that constitutively exclude social costs and divorce our actions from their effects.
The article presupposes the idea “what if living through the collapse of Empire was good actually.”
Either way, this meant that workers sticking around became scarcer and more valuable labour: they could bargain with their employers for better wages. Which is why we see both heights and wages rise after the Black Death in the 14th century. Women’s heights appear to have decreased, but this is likely due to an earlier onset of menarche (the first menstrual cycle, which slows growth). Earlier menarche often occurs when girls experience better living conditions with more resources, counterintuitively resulting in lower long-term height. Hence the decreasing height of women is likely an indicator that they too were benefitting after the Black Death.
So the way to benefit from societal collapse is to survive after all your peers die. This is fantastic news for me, an old man that makes websites.
Hugo Chavez In His Own Words (ADL)
The, uh, ADL has this page which I assume is meant to make former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez look bad. It just makes him look like he was right 20 years too early.
Who supported and armed Israel?...The mask is coming off the U.S. This fascism is something similar to what Hitler did: bombard cities, kill innocent children, women and men, and destroy the infrastructure of people. They are demolishing Lebanon. How can you justify that due to the kidnapping of two soldiers, which I condemn, they attack a population, bombarding by using the great U.S. machinery...This was a planned action of war. Behind are the hawkish brains of the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the executor of this fascist aggression is the Israeli military.
Listen to this
Rosa Pistola, on her NTS show, put together a “tribute to DJ Syztema, a Mexican tribal producer from Ecatepec, State of Mexico.”
I was going to write more about Mexico above. Ken Klippenstein’s report that the US was planning military strikes on Mexican cartels is even more relevant after the Venezuelan strike, and US media has been putting out stories about cartel violence and weaponry in a cluster that makes me think they are actively manufacturing consent (The World Cup city where young people are mysteriously disappearing, With Drones and I.E.D.s, Mexico’s Cartels Adopt Arms of Modern War - The New York Times, and if you want to get really suspicious here’s a ‘non-partisan’ think-tank that wants to “shape U.S. foreign policy”: The Rise of Militarized Cartels in Mexico - New Lines Institute, written by a former army guy that is also an AI guy. Is he worried that things might get bad too?)
It’s just too much man. These words are already depressing me to hell. So listen to some Mexican tribal coming to you from the suburbs on the other side of Río de los Remedios.