In the wake of the dodgy crowd rampaging through the United States government, it is sometimes hard to remember that there are others – mostly corporate others – out to wreak havoc in our lives.
But there are and while we’re organizing in various ways to try to preserve the valuable parts of the United States, we need to remember to address these problems at the same time. Yeah, it’s all exhausting, but we really don’t have a choice.
If we don’t push back, we’re ceding the planet and its resources – resources that belong to all of us and that, if properly used, would provide us all a good life – to the kind of destructive forces who consider ordinary people to be NPCs (non-player characters in gaming).
But we’re real and we’re players and we cannot let them run the world. So here’s a list of some of the things to be concerned about in addition to the grifter, his pet broligarch, and the dodgy minions:
Tech Enshittification:
Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, and while the use of it is expanding, the crux of it is that tech companies woo in users of various types by various means and then start making the product harder to use. So first it’s easy to get on Facebook and you see all your friends. Then it’s easy to advertise on Facebook, which annoys the other users but makes the business people happy, and then they screw over the business people and now nobody’s happy, but everyone’s stuck there.
Right now this is personal to me, because I’m going to have to buy a new phone since I can’t replace the battery (even though I was told I could when I bought it) and Microsoft is throwing AI garbage into Word and I have to figure out how to keep some version of Word so I can read and use all my files (thousands of them) without AI cooties.
I’m sure people can tell me all kinds of things I can do about both things, but all those things require a lot of extra work. I just want to be able to keep my perfectly good phone and easily get software that isn’t contaminated.
The truth is that all tech is full of crap these days and you have to spend excessive amounts of time paying attention to it instead of just having a nice tool you can use. It’s enough to make one nostalgic not just for Word Perfect and the early days of Google search, but for a fucking typewriter and an encyclopedia.
“AI”:
AI is either the greatest new thing – as long as it can suck up all the energy, water, and money it needs – or an existential threat, or something that is useful for a few things, but is not going to either save or destroy the world. I hold with the last of these, but people are still throwing lots of money at it. Check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter Where’s Your Ed At to see where that is going.
The Network State:
This is truly scary stuff. Some of the broligarchs want to build libertarian cities that don’t pay any taxes or provide any services within the the boundaries of various countries. I’m not sure how they expect to get utilities and other infrastructure, though I suspect they plan to steal it from the actual governments in place. It’s pretty clear these cities are only for the super-wealthy and that the rest of us would be admitted only as gig workers or worse.
I recommend Gil Duran’s newsletter The Nerd Reich for keeping up with these people. They tried to do something last year up in Sonoma County just north of the San Francisco Bay Area, but the first attempt failed. No doubt they’ll be back.
This is like the sovereign citizen movement – the people who proclaim a separate government and claim they don’t have to pay taxes – except that unlike the sovereign citizens, who are cranks, these people have real money.
Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a good example of what these people are planning.
Private Equity:
Joann’s stores are the latest victim of private equity, near as I can tell, and Walgreen’s drug stores are about to be bought by one of those companies. And I recently saw that Southwest Airlines is now at least partly owned by a private equity firm, which explains why it is laying off workers and going to charge for bags.
Private equity firms buy up all the stock of companies, sell off the assets, lay off workers, run the companies into the ground, and then go into bankruptcy once they have milked them for everything. These companies have destroyed local newspapers and a number of business chains. They also buy up nursing homes, understaff them, and occasionally close them, leaving a bunch of frail people with no place to go. Their greed is boundless.
Climate Change:
This remains the proverbial 800-pound gorilla. The clowns destroying our government are gutting the little we’ve done about it so far and cutting deals with the fossil fuel companies and others to try to stop renewable energy (even though that’s probably not possible, even for vicious people like them).
We’re going to have disasters and more disasters. We’re going to have climate refugees, some within our own country. Many people are going to suffer. Much damage is going to happen. Government efforts could ameliorate it, but the government was already doing way too little, and now they’ll be going backwards.
The thing about climate change is that it doesn’t care about your ideology. It’s happening now and it’s going to get worse. And while there are many people doing amazing things – here’s one example – we’re going to end up with a lot of suffering that could be avoided if we had good policy and the rich weren’t so greedy.
I also recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future to get some kind of grip on what might happen and what could happen.
In many of the superhero stories, there is one evil villain out to destroy the world, but in the real world, there are many of them. It feels like Whack-a-Mole.
I’m often told I’m impatient, and it’s true. We have the skill and technology to address many of the problems that are undermining our lives, but our systems and processes are slanted against doing it. I applaud the people who do have the patience to push for small changes, with the hope that they will eventually pay off. I think they’re right, but it’s hard.
I am still trying to be an optimist. I think it’s possible that the world will get through this period and maybe develop systems such as those suggested by Kate Raworth in her groundbreaking book, Doughnut Economics. And I frequently remind myself of the vision of David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything.
There are other ways to run a world. I hope we stumble into some of them.