the burden of transparency

It started in 2022. After the forced closures of public spaces during the pandemic had been lifted, when it still felt a little naughty to return to them, but the social void had made so many of us hungry for the presence of others that the risks were worth weighing. I had started conceptualizing an essay in response to conversations I was having with people at bars during this time. Something felt different.

I held people while they cried, people scared they may be schizophrenic, people afraid to leave their partners who had become their abusers after so many months of closed-door clarity, with no where to hide. I spoke to people who got their lives together after losing the job they didn’t know they hated, and were feeling the vertigo of looking out over the carnage and confusion from their safely insulated suite in the ivory tower. I spoke to people about the books they read, and the surge in digital communication infrastructure, and how they appreciated getting back in-touch with distant family members. I spoke to people about politics, and the state of the world, and I sensed patterns fomenting in conversations that could only be explained by a demographically defined algorithm. The most disturbing pattern I encountered, was how many conversations led to somebody describing to me what an “ethical genocide” would look like, to which I would respond, that every genocide seems ethical to the people committing it. It’s called eugenics. Purge the unclean thing. These “ethical genocide” folks were all white-passing, able-bodied men in lucrative positions, who had never been coerced into taking on predatory debt, suggesting that a purge of people with terminal illnesses, mental instability, a need for constant assistance due to cognitive or physical disability, “bad genes,” and/or old people, is something they could get behind.

It is still difficult to parse whether these beliefs existed in them before, or if they were driven to them through social isolation and a privileged nihilism—maybe something they were all watching and reading on the internet. Maybe something that just tends to happen to people when they spend their lives existentially concerned with competition. It’s never just-one-thing. This was far from my first time encountering biologic-supremacists in my close circles, but this was different. This wasn’t a slip up, one of those things you don’t know you believe until you say it out loud and then say “wow, that’s awful, isn’t it?” and consider your programming, where those thoughts come from—these were fully formed philosophical arguments, offered as solutions, at the bar. Was my community suddenly teeming with eugenicists, or had they always been there? And if they were always eugenicists, what emboldened them to start bringing it up in casual conversation?

We all experienced a collective trauma—a broad-strokes terrifying dance with the fragility of mortality and the social infrastructure that kept society moving. Millions of people were dying, our hospitals overcrowded, our medical system exposed to be desperately inadequate, gurgling under the burden of endless waves of terrified bodies, drowning to death from the inside, and our voices of leadership told us we weren’t allowed to hug our loved ones, or breathe too close to them, or they might die too. People lost their jobs and their homes and their every scrap of stability. People reached desperately for something to hold on to in the fog of fear and uncertainty. Many people also had their first brush with a true stillness of the mind. An enforced period of introspection. It’s not easy to extricate oneself from the cycle of busyness. That is by design. It’s part of a construct we are watching struggle to remain salient in a period of mass dissolution.

In 2021, we saw protests against institutional racism and the police state in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and then we saw the movement co-opted, and then we watched it die. We saw Donald Trump’s second impeachment. That was the year MAGA zealots broke into the White House with intent to incite a violent coup, or perhaps just a legendary rager, two weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th POTUS, who immediately brought the “war on terror” into the domestic sphere in response, and made a show of withdrawing US military troops from Afghanistan, glossing over fact that Pentagon contractors, special operations forces, and covert intelligence operatives would remain.

Gamestop stock prices went crazy for a minute and suddenly a lot more people started gambling on the stock market using apps on their phones. NFTs were pushed as a hot new response to enforcing copyright and intellectual property laws in the digital age—NFT trading had just gone from $82 million to $17 billion in one year, before ultimately collapsing in 2022. A lot of money was being funneled from the middle class to the wealthy class through these trading bubbles. Elon Musk set his SpaceX shares to $420-a-share because he thought his girlfriend would think it was funny, bought Twitter, and officially seized the title of richest-man-in-the-world.

We were still in the early phases of picking apart the OPCW whistleblower accounts that the Douma story was a lie that manufactured consent for bombing Syria—imperial designs in the middle east were bending into a more-than-certain clarity. It had only been a couple of years since The Great March of Return—the massive peaceful protest movement in the Gaza strip in 2018-19 that was met each week with deadly violence from Israeli soldiers—which had done such incredible work drawing public attention to the ongoing and vindictive apartheid violence there. The neo-Macarthyist Russiagate operation that led to bizarre sanctions on Russian artists and athletes was persistent. Hard hitting reports about the treatment of Julian Assange, who was still in Belmarsh, were coming out. Knowledge of a CIA plot led by Mike Pompeo to kidnap and assassinate him, and revelations of an almost-comical level of secret surveillance—entirely reminiscent of the CIA plot to drug, kidnap and “incapacitate” Daniel Ellsberg, and the illegal surveillance that ultimately got his charges dismissed. Yet Assange, at that point, remained captive, for over a decade.

Issues of net neutrality were finally becoming mainstream, too little too late, and more people began to consider the consequences of mass surveillance and the privatization of digital spaces, as people relied on privately owned social media sites to interact with other humans, and privately owned streaming services for entertainment, and privately owned cellular networks to call their friends, and privately owned financial institutions to access their money, all of which track and store and sell information about us with no burden of transparency.

We were just becoming exposed to the fact that a cadre of our own elected leaders had inside knowledge that a pandemic was coming, months before it devastated the world, and chose to rearrange their financial investments about it, remain silent, and do nothing else. Disaster capitalism is a devil’s bargain. There was a deadly heatwave in Portland, Oregon, and people in the Pacific Northwest started really noticing the unprecedented weather—and with that came more doubling down on denials of anthropogenic climate change.

Then in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the social divisions grew deeper, dividing even the voices for justice and peace. For some, the narrative began at that moment, where for others, the narrative began in 2014 with the Minsk Accords and the Maidan coup, and still for others, the narrative began with a complicated legacy of Cold War power-jockeying from the United States’ and NATO’s well-documented war plans and pressure campaign on what was once called the “Sino-Soviet Block.” Somehow, once again, we were fighting about who should “win” the war when we should have been discussing how to end it. Hailing Azov as heroes of the people instead of extremist tools of the empire. Praising weapons shipments to Ukraine as “aid” instead of calling for our diplomats to stop meddling in peace talks and undermining the sovereignty of the Ukrainian people. To stop bribing their leaders with stock portfolios and political immunity and convincing them to privatize and sell off their resources to western corporate entities, trading Ukranian lives for capital investments. To stop playing the infernal game.

It’s a lot to track, and bear witness to. The hermetic seal on the pretty lies of Empire was cracked a long time ago, but that crack just keeps getting bigger, and the truth keeps coming and the emperors keep thrashing. You pull one thread, and it leads you down a dark storied legacy of corruption, and then leads you right back to the present, where the saga continues. I don’t blame anyone for dissociating, denying reality, or grasping at illusions for safety. These are natural and protective responses to trauma. We can’t stay there, though. We have to grieve.

We are all still processing this trauma, and at the heart of it, is betrayal. In the peeling back of the veneer of altruism to reveal orchestrated scandal after scandal designed to exploit and extract and manipulate and dominate, a lot of people became really paranoid that everything has a Machiavellian cabal behind it. This is false. Of course, there are habitual schemers, who find a way to turn every creative idea into an efficient system to extract wealth. It’s disturbingly pervasive, actually, and it is a learned behavior that is highly prized and rewarded here in the belly of the empire. This is what I would say is the result of being “damaged by capitalism.” The engine-building isn’t even necessarily the dark part. It’s what the engine is meant to accomplish, and what it requires to run, that matter the most. Building incredible interconnected constructs that are greater than the sum of their parts is part of the never-ending folding and refolding of the chaos and order of existence. These constructs are meant to be ephemeral. To be dissolved and considered and iterated or left to blow away. The quest for permanence has always ended in ruin.

Some things happen organically, and the halls of power are filled with more opportunists than puppeteers. But all of this rapid-fire exposure and narrative struggle, these grandiose displays of hubris and the rapacity of power, casts doubt on everything we thought we once knew, and makes us grasp for answers, which makes us vulnerable to logical fallacies and false idols. We grasp onto figures like Francesca Albanese or Greta Thunberg or Elon Musk, or any one of the political “influencers” of our times, and think that they will do the work to save us. Not as allies, but as heroes, releasing us from the burden of trying. Some people swung the other way to cope, choosing to deny what’s right in front of them, insisting that all people are good and nothing is a lie.

This has nothing to do with whether or not we carry on living out our joys. It has to do with living those joys in alignment with the reality and knowing of our place in the context of the past, present, and future.

When I speak of an inflection point, and a deeply transitional time, what I’m getting at is that we all are faced with a choice that we can no longer put off grappling with. The game has been laid completely bare on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented stakes. With these vast tools of sharing, and connection, the excuse of naivety has lost all of its teeth. It’s a question of morals, and it runs deep into the core of each and every one of us.

The most painful thing to accept in all of it, is the fact that it’s all so deeply human. All of it. Every act of selfless bravery, kindness, vindictive cruelty, opportunism, and cold unaccountable obedience has been enacted by human people in this deep and legacied web of humanity. I see a reflection of myself in every person I meet. We are all part of the same thing. To really take that into you, to stop holding yourself separate, as a consciousness set apart from & unequal to its surroundings, is what it is going to take to truly pass through this moment with any hope for peace, on any scale. When we encounter something so unlike ourselves and the framework of what we understand to be true, we so often try to turn it over in our minds, we try to understand it, to make it fit into the shape of the world we know. How often do we let ourselves simply bear witness, to marvel at the unknown, and to let it change us?

The three books that have been swimming around in my consciousness for the past few years are Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, and Edward Said’s Orientalism. It’s an incredible trifecta of observation of the legacy of what has lead to the current conflicts. Our prevailing narrative of history, the reality we co-sustain and exist within, including our academic institutions, our sense of the “exotic,” our sexual proclivities, our creation stories, the metaphors we live by, the values we engage with, our sense of place in the world, our art, has been built with bricks and cogs forged from the engine of western white indo-European intellectual and biological supremacy, and that machine is so much bigger than you could possibly imagine.

If you want to be free, it starts with you. Beginnings and endings are only as useful as the momentary illusions of clarity they can provide. Dig deeper, breathe deeper, & take care of yourself. It isn’t over yet.