What’s beyond the edge of tomorrow? Well, technofeudalism/fascism/eco-meltdown. Duh.

Marc Maron has a line I like “And don’t misunderstand me, I have no hope. I think if you have hope, what are you f—ing seven?.”

Yes, yes, Sarah Connor and “no future but what we make.” But we “make” the future under the constraints – “not in the conditions of our own choosing” – of what has been destroyed in the past and the present. And rather a lot has been destroyed, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t mean just all those other species, and ecosystems (with their “lost cures for cancer” – because, you know, they didn’t have their own value, independent of what could be extracted for some of the hairless apes, did they? If you say ‘yes’, you’re clearly a loonie tree-hugger parasite…)

I mean the dream of the Enlightenment; that we could become self-governing, that we didn’t need to believe in some Bearded Sky God who would dish out pie in the sky when we died. That we could understand what made us “tick”, that we could see through the tricks that the warrior and priest classes had used for millennia to keep us rabble in line. That we could have both bread and roses.

That, surely, is off the table. Even if we “tech out” (as per 1990s visions of the future), it’s going to be grim as all hell, even for the asshats who think bunkers in New Zealand are the answer.

There’s some great writing about what is unfolding in Gaza, and why, and how it fits. Try Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books.

Here’s a clip –

‘What fills me with dread,’ the Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh told me in an email,

is that we are at an inflection point in world history. Deep ongoing shifts over at least the past two decades that have been giving rise to right-wing and even fascist movements (and governments) were already building up, so I see Hamas’s slaughter of civilians as roughly equivalent to Sarajevo 1914 or maybe Kristallnacht 1938 in accelerating or unleashing much broader trends. On a ‘lesser scale’, I’m furious at Hamas for basically erasing all we fought for over decades, and aghast at those who can’t maintain the critical faculty to distinguish opposition to Israeli occupation and war crimes, and who turn a blind eye to what Hamas did in southern Israeli kibbutzim. Ethno-tribalism.

Seems to nail it to me. To come back to what I wrote a couple of minutes ago. I didn’t say “what has been lost” – I wrote “what has been destroyed.”

Because those in charge of ANY system are not looking to transform it, unless they are 100% sure they get to stay in charge. And since you can never be 100% sure, they gravitate to creating closed loops, where troublemakers are either absorbed or rejected. This is fractal. The same mechanisms that apply at the level of a local council and climate policy (to choose an example entirely at random) are to be found in public sector, private sector, you name it.

And to take the big picture – the 19th and 20th century were processes of increased “democratisation”. Long, bloody battles with lots of pushback from the status quo actors. But the franchise was won, the state had to become marginally more responsive. And then the post-war boom in the West (an astonishing period, 1945 to 1973) created expectations and demands among not just the working classes, but women, people of colour, homosexuals and even dread “environmentalists”. The share of wealth created was changing. The rich could see the writing on the wall. If they did nothing, they would not just have to share more wealth, but more power, more decision-making. Something had to be done. And it was.

The 1970s are a fascinating period. In the background you can see climate scientists becoming more and more certain that carbon dioxide is going to be a game changer. But hardly anyone is paying any attention to that. Because in the foreground, there are other, fierce battles being fought, over who will decide what about what gets taught in schools, what the state will regulate, what gets built, what gets invested, what gets celebrated, who will serve and who will eat.

You see it in the Trilateral Commission’s “The Crisis of Democracy” (the crisis is that there’s too much of it). You see it in the forceful memory-holing of the idea that workers might decide what gets manufactured at armaments factories (see here). And most of all, you see it in the triumph (still unfolding) of Thatcherism.

After the defeat of organised labour (the air traffic controllers in the US and the miners in the UK), and the collapse or the rotten Soviet Union, it was an open goal. And the goals have continued to be kicked.

And as per the quote above, there are bad faith actors wanting to make sure that the wins that started in the second half of the 1970s keep on coming. They’ve developed game plans (Brexit, Trump, the Australian Voice Referendum) around memes and targetted social media, around brilliant slogans (“War is Peace,” “Take Back Control”, “Ignorance is Strength”, “Stop the Boats”…) They have realised that ambit claims – like a march for a ceasefire on Armistice day is a march of hate – will land with enough confused people to be worth making, even if they only demoralise and confuse, rather than prevent an actual march happening (and whose to say some provocateur shit won’t happen this Saturday?!). The play book is constantly revisited, refined. New techniques are tried out. Just because they are the “bad guys” does not mean they are stupid, or smug, or lazy. They are none of those things.

Meanwhile, the looting has continued. The rivers full of shit, the public sphere full of shit and hate.

Older people so confused, so full of fear and disappointment, so willing to be told who to hate.

Younger people having never figured out (never seen?) that social movements are not only possible but essential, but that they involve a lot more than emotacyclic marching and smugospheric rallies. The skills and aptitudes required for grinding out dissent and resistance as part of small tough social movement organisations are foreign to too many. There are too many ways to fail (ourselves).

Loneliness and terror eat the soul. Despair, guilt and shame dismantle us.

The climate crises will escalate quite rapidly now. We are going to be taught some lessons about the meaning of the term ‘non-linearity. Call me odd, but I hope James Hansen lives long enough to win his “bet” with Michael Mann.

Trump is quite possibly going to win the 2024 election. That such a sentence can even be written tells you just how desperate the shituation is.

What was to be done?

As Ray Williams said, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

Even at this late late stage, I think there are useful innovations to be implemented, refined, spread (if the bastards can do it, so can we?). But I don’t think we have the stomach for it, tbh. And even if we did, too much has been set in train. Everybody knows the war is over…

Thoroughly disvisioned. So it goes.