The image above was made with stable diffusion.'
These last several weeks have been busy. I moved out of a house I'd lived in since 2009 and into an apartment in a nearby neighborhood. My new zip code has a density of 13k people per square mile whereas my last zip code had just 5.4k people per square mile. My new building has about a hundred units in it. The place itself is great, but the urban ecology emphasizes the reality that we're all mere tiny components in a vast machine.
While I've been preoccupied with the move, public discourse has become even more consumed by partisan nonsense. Big protests are starting and they're dominated by personality level drama regarding celebrities. My new neighborhood is 1000% blue and this crowd is is convinced that the country has literally been taken over by a fascist dictator. Or two fascist dictators, I guess.
The reds are of course celebrating the celebrities that the blues vilify. Much of what these celebrities are doing appears specifically designed to provoke their opponents. I suspect one of their larger aims is to inspire a mass uprising disruptive enough to justify brutally repressing a large swath of the population. The blues are working towards this uprising too, though their aim isn't to be brutally repressed, but rather to successfully exert influence over government using traditional protests.
In other words, both sides are moving us towards major disruptions. Personally, I'm expecting things to start falling apart in a big way beginning in the next few months. This may include chaos in the streets reminiscent of 2020, coupled with various corporate breakdowns and the unpredictable impacts of escalating cyber attacks. My inclination until now has been to stay out of it because the fight between parties isn't my fight.
More and more, though, the partisans are demanding that we all pick a side. They're poised to begin tearing each other apart and they all want their team to be the one that does the most damage to the opposition. Their fight is with each other and it has very little to do with me. The main thing I worry about is the collateral damage produced as their partisan conflict becomes more of a war.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic representative from Maryland, recently said:
If you look at the way democratic societies responded to fascism a century ago, it just takes time for people to realign and refocus and mobilise a concerted and unified response. Are we there yet? No. But are we going to be in a place where we can stand together and defeat authoritarianism in our country? Yes, we are going to get there.
This is how the blues see their struggle. The reds see their struggle similarly, as a fight against a slightly different variety of fascism. By framing their contests this way, both sides can justify even the most radical actions as appropriate responses to the gravest of threats. If you compare your enemy to Hitler, well, what wouldn't you do to stop him?
Notably, both the reds and the blues are attempting to create a totalitarian dystopia. And both sides have legitimate cause to use any means necessary to stop their adversaries from creating the particular version of dystopia they oppose. Everyone is, in this sense, fighting the good fight. But they're also simultaneously propelling our society as a whole further into dystopia in general.
While the red army fights to manifest A Handmaid's Tale and the blue army fights to bring about their Brave New World, no leader or group has yet emerged to lead us away from the conflict zone and out of dystopia entirely. There are good reasons for this. It's hard to organize effectively when our communication networks are mediated by interests that profit from keeping us apart. It's impossible to organize at all when the simple meeting of basic needs consumes all of the meager resources allotted to most of us.
Underneath it all, the pace of technological advancement is reaching terminal velocity. Our human ecology is consequently being fundamentally restructured. There's no stopping this. Our only real choice in the matter is whether we'll adapt willingly or unwillingly.
The current red vs blue contest may permeate American society right now, but I think the technological transformation of our species will ultimately swallow this partisan theater whole. In the meantime, more and more people are getting swept up in the drama. People on both sides are being targeted by the other side, with some facing cancellation, blacklisting, job loss, property destruction, deportation, and worse.
From my perspective, the legitimacy of a government is measured by its ability to ensure that society is free and fair. Neither the reds nor the blues can deliver this. Instead they both promise to make things less free and less fair for their opponents. So the only way we come out of this with a legitimate government is if both sides lose.
In an everyday sense, finding signal in the noise has never been more difficult. There's no way for most of us to know what's really going on. The big picture might end up looking very different from what we imagine. It might even end up better, if we make it that way.
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