the state of things
It's very windy and rainy here today. I cycled to the climbing centre - which felt so hard, in the headwind - climbed for a few hours with my friends, then cycled home in the wind and rain. I nearly got buffeted out of the cycle lane at one point. I complained about it and grimaced while I was doing it - but it's things like this that make you feel alive. Momentary unpleasantness that gets you something and moves your body. Type 2 fun. Also, it makes me feel like Calvin's dad:
I stopped on the way to get lunch and buy some pastries from my favourite bakery. I'd usually have enjoyed this but I feel too much dread about the current political situation. I understand that indulging in flagellating yourself over the state of the world helps no-one, but how do you stop?!
I'm beginning to think, with a sense of creeping dread, that even though disengaging from social media, touching grass etc, all that stuff is "good for you" the political battleground is on the web which has already been ceded to the right, and even if we think it's an absolute cesspit leaving it will do absolutely nothing, in fact burying your head in the sand away from the future won't do anything at all.
Maybe the future is something I hate. Or not hate, that's strong. Something I don't understand, that makes me sad, that wears me down. But just because that's true doesn't mean others don't thrive on it. I think of a post of Ava's I read about how some/most people use the web - which I can no longer find (Ava left a message to let me know it was a post called you can be proud of yourself - thank you!) - but what I took away from it is that for some people, they like the web as it is - they want to be advertised to, they want to be stimulated by drama, they want to be influenced to/be influencers.
This also makes me think of this article from the Garbage Day newsletter, that I've been thinking a lot about anyway, You can never truly go back, that posits the right controls the influencer economy. This feels true.
And, just as 20th-century mass media created the concept of the consumer a hundred years ago, so too has this current shift redefined how we interact with the world. And accepting that this shift is permanent, in the sense that we canβt simply reverse it, is, Iβm convinced, the only way forward. We are now either influencers or influenced. Trump and his cronies understand this acutely. The Democrats, clearly, still do not.
When I watched The Great Dictator (1940) a few weeks ago, a fantastic anti-fascist film that was remarkably early in calling out the key role antisemitism played in the Nazi party's rise, the comedian introducing it said that mocking dictators like this doesn't work any more. The Right have defanged mockery and we're beyond satire.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. But that's quite of my whole point, really. I'm not sure where we're going at all.