The drawer

On grief, silence, and why I'm still writing.

I haven’t posted to Substack in a long time.

Part of it has to do with disillusionment towards social media and AI, which I see as increasingly disconnecting human beings from their humanity, isolating us from each other, and undermining what I used to love about writing and expression.

Part of it has to do with technofascism. I am in opposition to Marc Andreesen’s Techo-Optimist Manifesto. Andreesen’s venture capitalist firm is a major investor in Substack and I don’t think my content is safe here. My posts—and yours—are definitely being fed into LLMs.

Part of it has to do with overwhelm. Overwhelm from the actions of the Trump Administration, yes, because people are losing their jobs, being unjustly arrested, abducted, imprisoned, and killed in the streets. But the rage I feel toward that is motivating in a strange way. The discouragement comes from my personal life. People I know and love have reacted to these horrors by choosing ignorance, fear, apathy, despair, or silence.

And then my cat died. And my dreams died. And my dad died.

To try and bring myself a little joy, I got a puppy. I wanted to nurture something. My puppy has big feelings, and lots of needs, and has caused me more daily anxiety over the last six months than contemplating the potential eradication of humanity if the race to AGI turns apocalyptic.

It’s been a lot.

*****

This is not a complaint. It’s a confession.

Despite everything that is going on, this is not the worst time in human history. It’s not even as bad as I imagined it might get by this time—a year and a half after Trump’s election with the midterms around the corner and the labor economy in a tailspin. But it is very bad time for democracy and civil rights, which are actively being undermined by The Heritage Foundation—knowingly and on-purpose—because democracy no longer supports their moral worldview. I am encouraged by the swell of resistance and the cracks in the MAGA faithful, but it’s not big enough, or committed enough, or accountable enough (MAGA is not accountable at all), for me to feel like the tower is about to shake down and a reclamation is at hand.

We are at war in the United States. And I don’t mean with Iran. I mean civil war. This war is not being fought with boots and guns to capture a hill and put a flag on it. It is being fought with buttons and switches from the safety of conference rooms and evaluated in spreadsheets controlled by AI agents. The enslavement of human beings, the rape of the natural world, the hoarding of wealth, and the amassing of power is still the objective, but it’s being accomplished by brainwashing, not battles. The casualties are ramping up, but the losses are abstract, remote, and impersonal.

Those in power don’t care. They got into politics because they believed lies. They gained power by telling lies. And they intend to stay there by telling more of them — using AI to propagate those lies until we are too emotionally exhausted, too intellectually overwhelmed, too systemically disenfranchised to fight anymore.

I am concerned that even with all the negative sentiment toward Christian Nationalism right now that this engine has yet to be deployed to the degree it can be, and that minds can and will be changed just as they were when Kamala Harris announced her candidacy, appeared to be winning, and then… didn’t.

The scope of shared delusion has to be less than the swell of resistance.

I don’t know if it will be.

I’ve talked about Dark Gothic MAGA and the Dark Enlightenment movement. We are moving in that direction by the design of those in power.

We are facing a future where human beings will be worth less than serfs were to feudal lords, potentially with fewer rights or means to support ourselves.

I imagine a world where human beings are surveilled and sorted by race, gender, religion and political conformity, their data harvested and their opportunities determined by the lords who own the technology that controls the system. Jobs exist at poverty wages, just enough to subscribe to the infrastructure of your own enslavement. The poor and disabled are quietly urged toward death through the denial of services, or conscripted as raw material for transhumanist experimentation. Women are reduced to incentives, domestic assets for men of means. Only the men who own the technology can vote. Human connection grows shallower, and love becomes an impossible dream — though hope persists, because hope is constitutive of being human, and that is the one thing they cannot engineer away.

I wrote a book set in an America like this.

I put it in a drawer.

*****

I want to believe this is not the future.

I want to write something else, something that isn’t saturated with the existential emergency of this moment or that feels hypocritical because my privilege affords me the ability to evade the worst of these outcomes—at least for now.

But I find I can only write about what I know.

What I know is that growing up in an environment where narcissistic lies distort reality will destroy you in ways that will take decades to understand. I am still fighting the urge to abandon myself every day, to resist believing in someone else’s valuation of me. What I know is that I don’t want to be controlled. I don’t want to live in a world that is fake, impoverished, regressive, and sociopathic.

I want to write about agency, about the love you owe yourself, about the permission no one else can give you to speak. I want to scream about it until my throat is raw.

I am not sure anyone is listening. I am not sure, if heard, I will be understood. I worry that I do not understand.

So I sink back into my thoughts. I wrap myself in contemplation and try to find my center.

And then I take my dog for a walk. I feel the sun on my face and the wind on my skin.

And I pick up my pen again. And try again.

Because there’s nothing else I know to do.