I'm not a bike guy. I don't know what brand my seat is. I think my gears are Shamano. (That's a brand, right?) I think that's how it's spelled. I'm not going to look it up. I saw it on the window of a bike shop once. I think that's what I have. I just use my bike to get around and to get my kids around. It's just a tool for me. That's pretty normal here in the Netherlands.

I've done some hacky repairs on bikes, not because I especially care about bikes but because I especially care about autonomy. I don't like being controlled. If someone can lock me in, control my ability to fix my main mode of transportation, they can control me. I use open source software for the same reason. My instinctive hatred of cops comes from a pretty similar place.

I'm not a bike guy. I'm an anarchist. That's where I'm coming from in this text. I'm not here for the bikes. I'm here for the liberation. And it is specifically to anarchists that I am speaking. If you happen to be a bike person and also an anarchist, great. You're not alone. I hope this lines up with your existing critique, or helps you fill out your critique, of car culture. If you happen to be a bike person and not an anarchist, well… I'm working from a set of assumptions you may not agree with but enjoy the ride. If you are an anarchist who does not already identify motosupremacy, the enforcement of the motorcar as a form of transit at the exclusion of all others, as an oppressive system and a structural component of the interlocking systems of oppression that we oppose, well, I have some words for you to read.

Why are we not “free” to own cars?

I'm inclined to just point at The Social Ideology of the Motorcar and walk away, but I won't. I will dump the first few sentences here before moving on though:

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it.

Last time I started digitally yelling FUCK CARS into the void, in repose to some nonsense or other, someone called me a fascist for “imposing my beliefs on them.” I think that's worth talking about, because bullshit arguments like that carry way too much weight around here.

So let's change the frame for a bit.

Why not slaves? I mean, why don't I have the freedom to own other people? You fucking know why. If you don't, I do not understand why you're reading this. Anarchists oppose hierarchy. We oppose systems of oppression. We oppose coercive authority. You can't own a person without using coercion. So that's pretty much off the table. The same is true for the wage system, since it's also a system that relies on coercion. (Sorry, not sorry, capital “L” “Libertarians.”)

But that's easy. We all agree on that. (We fucking better all agree on that shit.) Of course, you can't own people. That's obviously fucked up. Let's move on to objects.

What about the means of production? Yeah, just kidding. (Anyone coming from the bikes, not the anarchy, is gonna be really confused right about now.) Let's try something else.

Why not private jets? Fuck no, because of climate change, right? Of course. But let's pretend it's possible to have non-polluting jets. There's still a geometry problem. Jets are big. Everyone having one takes up a lot of space. Even if we skip the whole “someone has to pilot it” and assume that everyone has a pilots license, even small jets are very large. OK, so not everyone is going to want to fly their own jet, but even if a significant portion of the population wanted one that's just a lot of physical space for jets. They also take a huge amount of maintenance. Small planes crash all the time. What about cleaning those crashes up? What about flying near cities? There are a lot of people who aren't near an airport. Do they get their own runway? How do all those people land? We would have to build a lot more airports, and have a whole lot more flight controllers. How do we maintain all of that infrastructure? What about the noise? There are so many problems.

That's kind of why flying cars are always promised on and never delivered. They're a terrible idea that could never work.

When you start thinking through the logistics, even a bit, it just couldn't work. The thing is, cars don't really work either. It is economically infeasible to build a society around cars. Ignoring climate change, ignoring all the people killed, ignoring all the other problems, it's just logistically impossible to sustain. That's why it's collapsing.

Roads are expensive to maintain. They are so expensive that they simply aren't maintained for poorer communities. When they are maintained, they are often maintained at the expense of other things, like clean drinking water. Cars need parking. Parking decreases density. Decreased density decreases the tax base, but it also pushes up the cost of maintaining utilities because you need more of them. It wouldn't matter if you were using taxes or community labor, Capitalist, Communist, or Anarchist, at a certain point there's just more work than resources or time and the system collapses. This is what's happening all over the US. This is what happened in Flint, and why their water was poisoned.

Cars, as the social ideology of the motorcar points out, are a luxury good. Their value comes from the fact that other people don't have them. If a few people have them, it's possible to get places really quickly. It's convenient to park. It's relatively safe (for the people inside). But as soon as enough people have them, the roads become clogged, and the solution is always “just one more lane.”

But it's not just that it doesn't work. It's not just that it's a luxury. It's that this freedom comes at the expense of others. Every car on the road makes it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. All the resources spent on maintaining fragile car infrastructure are not spent on pedestrian areas, bikes, trains, trams, and metros. The “freedom” to use a car is massively subsidized by society, including by those who don't use cars, either because they don't want to or because they can't afford them.

Cars are one of the most heavily subsidized things there are. Parking places, roads and highways, bridges and overpasses, even fuel, are all paid for by national and local governments, out of the pockets of everyone (including non-drivers) to benefit drivers. Drivers whose existence on the road makes other forms of transportation unsafe. Any freedom that comes at the expense of someone else's freedom is just a from of oppression.

But there are also specific intersections between motosupremacy and other forms of oppression. Aside from that, there are other reasons to oppose cars, beyond what I've already outlined. Let's walk through them, in no particular order.

Cars are Ableist

Every damn time anyone says anything about cars, some motherfucking sea lion charges in and starts barking, “but what about disabled people!” Meanwhile, a bunch of people DM me and say, “yeah, I'm disabled, and I feel isolated/oppressed/generally bad about myself because I can't use a car.” By “disabled” these people invariably mean “people with limited mobility” and completely forget the entire rest of the range of people with visual limitations or cognitive differences that make it either illegal or inadvisable to drive. I, in fact, am one of them.

Like about 10% of the population, I have ADHD. Driving is both extremely dangerous and extremely boring. This is the worst possible type of activity for a person with ADHD. The only way I got through my years of driving was by blasting loud music constantly whenever I got in the car. I'm so glad everyone survived. Not everyone is as lucky as me. I'm also so glad I live in a country where I'm not forced to climb into a giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate every time I get my partner oat milk.

But let's go back to those folks with mobility challenges.

When I lived in the rural US, I never really saw folks in wheelchairs. It was almost as though they didn't exist. But one day I was over at a guy's house, and he was in a wheelchair. The house wasn't really accessible. He talked about how he didn't really go out much. It wasn't until much later that I realized he couldn't afford one of the expensive specialized cars that people with his type of mobility limitations need to be able to drive. Instead, he had to rely on other people to get him around.

People with physical disabilities that make them unable to drive can be trapped in their homes in car dominated places like the US. Meanwhile, places that are less car dominated, like the Netherlands, have bike lanes. Mobility devices like electric wheelchairs and scooters can use those bike lanes.

Motonormitivity invisiblizes people with limited mobility, especially if they're poor and rural. It robs them of their independence by forcing them to use cars. Even if there are cars available for people with some disabilities, there are a lot of disabilities that just make driving too dangerous. In the US, people tend to not know that these people exist or how many are in their neighborhood. They do not know about these people, because car culture keeps them prisoners in their homes.

Cars are Ageist

It can be nice to think of “disability” as a thing that happens one day to other people, or as a thing other people are born with. But the thing about ability is that it comes and goes with age.

I remember my grandmother swerving all over the road, before her cataract surgery, before she lost her license for good and needed my mom to move in with her. Before she had to sell her house and move in with my aunt. She could have had so much more independence. At 95, she was still able to walk around and do most things for herself pretty well. She just couldn't drive safely. They all could have had so much more independence.

Old people in the US often don't interact with society. They're hidden in homes. They're shuffled off to care facilities, where they can be safely isolated from the working population, the population who must not be reminded of their own mortality.

Here, in the Netherlands, where mobility devices can run in the bike lanes, elderly people can stay part of society for much longer. They aren't trapped waiting for someone to take them somewhere. Old people can just exist in the world. They can get older. They can look frail and still get around. There are still community living places for elderly people, sure, but they can remain independent for far longer then can be done in the US.

If you're lucky, perhaps, you will get old one day too. What will this be like for you? How will your society treat you? Will you be free to live and safe to move, or will you have to balance your autonomy against the danger that autonomy poses to others? Take a moment to imagine it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Cars are Adultist

Of course, that ageism is on both sides. Children were some of the first victims of cars, many killed in the streets, as cars took the places they used to play. Americans who grew up in the 50s and 60s tell stories about running around their neighborhoods, freely, outside. But the cars they and their younger siblings bought slowly eroded that freedom for other kids.

I remember my mom getting me a bike. She had some fantasy about me riding around with the freedom she had as a kid. But I didn't, because I know I would have died. By the 90s it wasn't really safe to ride bikes in the US. If you wanted to go anywhere, you needed a car. Before I left the US, the giant trucks that flew down our street made it unsafe for my oldest kid to even cross the street. Adults can disappear in front of the hoods of American cars. Children, who can be so unpredictable, are impossible to see. Long straight streets allow American drivers to get their car moving far faster than their reactions allow them to safely control. Kids pay the price in their loss of independence.

Is it any wonder that Americans are maturing more slowly? Trapped in the house until they're 16, how are they supposed to learn the basics of independence that one can only get by experiencing it?

Cars steal childhood. They steal opportunities to grow. But today, they are stealing their future as well. Will my kids have a habitable world? Not if all these fuckers keep driving.

Cars are Patriarchal

And who is doing all this extra work of caring for young and old? Yeah, femme folks. Car infrastructure is designed to optimize driving to work, and driving home. In the historical suburban single-car home, this could leave women stranded, isolated and easier to control.

But in the modern world, women often have to drive as part of the invisible care taking work on which the economy rests. However, unlike the visible workplace, carework revolves around trip chaining. Pick up the kids, take them to football, go get some groceries, this is all more complicated when using roads built to optimize traffic between suburban and business centers.

In dense cities with bicycle infrastructure, everything becomes close. There are 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute bike ride of my house, there's a hardware store, a discount store, and another several grocery stores within 10 minutes. There are several public elementary schools within a couple minute bike ride. (Guess how many times I've waited in “the pickup line.”) I can tell you all this and not narrow down my location in the city one bit.

Bicycles are easier to park, so chained trips are much more efficient. But parents aren't required for everything their child does until that child turns 16, because kids can ride bikes. Children here start learning to ride bikes around 3 or 4 (sometimes younger). By 5, they can be fairly confident. By 6, some kids will ride with their parents to and from school. Packs of 9 and 10-year-old will ride with their hands in their pockets, talking loudly to each other. Parents of older kids don't come to pickup. Their kids bike home on their own. By 12, kids are expected to generally handle their own travel.

Americans are shocked and terrified by the idea, I'm sure. “But they could be kidnaped.” That's kind of a car thing. When cars dominate the world, there are fewer people walking and cycling. Streets are empty except for drivers. There are fewer eyes on the street. With fewer eyes, fewer people together, it becomes more dangerous for vulnerable people.

Who is disproportionately impacted by that? That's right! Femme folks.

The “Electric cars will save everything” crowd has been, I'm sure, unhappy to find that cars, not just internal combustion cars, are so problematic. “I thought it was just global warming!” Yeah, it wasn't. Not only that, but this is actually one area where EVs make things worse.

Electric cars need to be charged for long periods of time, leaving more vulnerable people trapped and isolated in predictable and low security locations. It would take a man to not see the problem here.

Cars are Racist

We've been talking about the US for so long, and we haven't talked about racism yet. America is like, made of racism. How can we not have talked about racism yet? It feels like something's wrong. But you know what, I have great news. The history of cars is, like the history of the US, racist as fuck!

Do you know who Robert Moses is? Go look up “Robert Moses racist” in your favorite search engine, and you'll find one of the most powerful urban planners in US history. Who happened to also, by no coincidence, a monstrous piece of shit.

He shaped New York from 1924 to 1975, and his Wikipedia page literally has a section that's just titled “racism” in which some of his words are described as “excruciatingly racist.” But he wasn't just a vaguely terrible person. He specifically used roads as a weapon to enforce segregation and attack diverse communities. He built low bridges to keep mass transit away from beaches he wanted to exclude black people from. He used red-lining maps to determine which areas to bulldoze for roads. In his most famous project, he displaced 40,000-60,000 people, bulldozing a line though the Bronx for the Cross Bronx Expressway.

I'm just gonna pull a quote really quick from a “Segregation by Design” article on this one:

Before the highway, the neighborhoods through which Moses would build the Cross Bronx were among the most racially integrated in the country, with large populations of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Irish and Italian Immigrants, (and after WWII) Puerto Ricans, and African-Americans (5). After the highway tore through, property values plummeted. White residents fled (lured to the suburbs by government-backed mortgages), while black and brown residents remained (oftentimes with few other options due to red-lining and racist housing policies). As covered in the documentary, Decade of Fire, subsequent disinvestment in services from the city led The Bronx to burn in the 70s and 80s, destroying roughly 80% of housing stock and displacing another 250,000 (6).

He wasn't just some isolated asshole. His design was a model for cities across the country. The freeways that destroyed the urban core not only displaced people, but destroyed the value of homes that weren't displaced. He was able to erase the generational wealth of black and brown people with his projects, and that model was replicated across the US. Today BIPOC folks are still more likely to be killed by cars and suffer from respiratory illness because of the roads built through their communities.

Racist road design still segregates white communities from communities of color. I remember a park in Tacoma that was bordered on two sides by roads and on the other by a predominantly white neighborhood. The historical red line ran on the other side of that road, still having a majority black and brown population. Though you can see the park from the formerly red-lined neighborhood, you are cut off from it by multiple lanes of high speed traffic.

When you start to notice details like this, you don't stop seeing them. That “Segregation by Design” web-site that I mentioned earlier calls itself an “An atlas of spatial injustice.” Last I looked, it covered 24 US cities and is filled with articles and pictures documenting the way neighborhoods were destroyed and red lined areas were segregated by highways.

And I'm not even talking about how cars legitimize cops randomly stopping people, and how that's a problem because cops just randomly murder black and brown folks sometimes. I'm not even gonna talk about how driver-less cars sometimes just can't see black people. There are so many problems.

And after posting this, a reader pointed out that I had actually missed a big part of this story:

The car-dependent design of suburbia that we have today was explicitly racist in intent. After the US Supreme Court ruled that housing discrimination was unconstitutional, local leaders had to figure out a different approach to enforce segregation, and they did it by using wealth as a proxy. Under the new zoning and building codes, they made minimum lot sizes big enough, and maximum occupancy low enough, that poor people couldn’t afford houses in the new subdivisions. The need for a car to get around further added to the cost. Then, they offered subsidies (like the GI Bill) to poor white people, and not to poor Black people. Voilà! “Natural” segregation.

The handful of Black families that managed to amass enough wealth to move in anyway could be dealt with by more direct tactics.

(Thanks @SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip for your comment and letting me just quote that all right here!)

There's a whole thing about the GI bill and all that. There's just so much here, you could write a whole book on it.

Yeah, cars are just so fucking racist.

Cars are Settler Colonialist

I also totally forgot to even talk about the settler colonialism of it all. There are whole books on this I haven't read. I'm just gonna come back to this. In the mean time, here's a video that touches on both the racism and colonialism of it all.

Cars are Classist

Racist urban design, like that designed and inspired by Robert Moses, destroys generational wealth. But once someone is poor, forcing them to own a car is a good way to keep them there.

When I was supporting a family of 4 on 40k per year, most of my anxiety came from cars. I remember the $900 Volvo my dad helped me buy and the broken speedometer that made it impossible to know if I was driving legally or not. Would they pull me over if I went too fast? Would they pull me over if I went too slow? Yes. I found someone to drive behind and tried to just keep speed with them. Every time I saw a cop, my pulse raced.

I was pulled over once because I worked the night shift. That was in a different car with a working speedometer, so I was sure everything I was doing had been legal. I was coming home from work around 2:30 in the morning because the newspaper I worked for printed at 2 am. The cop just pulled me over because I was out late. That's it.

Then there was a different time that a cop wanted to search my car because I was coming from a place with a county that was known for meth. That county was my home.

(I'm white. So when I got pulled over, sometimes for a minor infraction or another, I could usually talk my way out of it. Black and brown residents of the same town might not be so lucky.)

The cars I could afford were barely functional, or borrowed. So there was always the risk of something failing. It's not too uncommon for very cheap used cars to be sold without working speedometers, because sketchy used car lots disable them to keep the odometer from going up. But you buy what you can afford, and you can't always afford to be picky.

Sometimes you just have to buy a car with small enough problems that you think you can fix. I was lucky that I could throw a car on cinder blocks in front of my dad's house and work on it. Not everyone has that kind of luxury.

Labor takes time, tools cost money, both are cheaper than paying someone else to do the work. A cheap car can rapidly become far too expensive to maintain, leaving you stuck in a catch 22 of not enough money to fix the thing you need to make money.

We couldn't really afford to live anywhere near where I worked. Rural areas are cheap enough to afford housing, but you pay for it later in transportation costs. Wear and tear on a car, tires, gas, and times. I drove 3 hours total every day and worked for 8 or 9 hours every day. As rough as that sounds, I was working in IT. There are so many people who have had it so much worse than I ever did.

Every mile of winding road was dangerous, leaving and coming back during prime deer hours. Come too fast around a corner, don't pay enough attention, you're going to be paying for a new tail light or windshield to keep yourself legal.

The average total cost of ownership was $12,297 in 2024. (I'm just going to trust AAA on that, rather than launching into a rant about how they destroyed mass transit. The premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit came from something real that actually happened. I'm just gonna leave that as homework.)

That money is just siphoned off. It goes into fuel (funding oil dictatorships and petro-fascists committing ecocide), tires, “depreciation” (like, the value just evaporates), and maintenance. The less money you have to start, the harder it can be to “buy smart,” “be strategic about your purchases,” and “retain value with regular maintenance.” People at or below the poverty line may not even be able to afford maintenance beyond the minimum required to keep going. License fees and maintenance to keep vehicles safe and legal are really optional, unless you get caught.

Cars can take the place of a modern company town. You work as hard as you can to afford the thing that gets you to work, always slipping just a little bit further into debt. The car becomes a tool to maintain class structure, to absorb any income that might lead to mobility, to make sure no worker can ever stock away enough money to say “no.”

Car prices keep going up and most Americans have car loans. Those loans can be as high as 25%. Cars may not even be paid off by the time they start to break down. Don't worry though, it's not like you could even “own” a car any more anyway. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The average person would be much better off if they didn't have a car, if they instead had functional public transit or bike infrastructure that let them move safely through the world. They would be much better off if parking lots were removed and housing was built for them in the towns and cities in which they work. But there are people preventing that, and those people need cars.

Those people need cars to keep the workers from killing them. So they undermine mass transit with promises of “self-driving cars” and “hyperloops” that are never intended to actually be built. The only point of these projects is to maintain car infrastructure so the elites, who cause so much suffering, who would be stabbed on sight if they tried to use mass transit, can be driven around in their personal armored cars. They need cars because they actually do need to be surrounded by the bulletproof glass and armor plates they try to sell as “luxury.”

They are afraid, and their fear is justified. These are the worst people on Earth, billionaires who gorge on the profits of oil extraction and war (which, we'll also talk about later).

That pay wall that extracts wealth from the whole population, that keeps the poor constantly precarious, that continues to push what's left of the middle class towards the abyss, that exact pay wall directly funds global fascism.

Cars are fascist

Even as Putin's petro-dictatorship spreads right wing extremism through propaganda, subterfuge, and direct funding, fossil fuel companies pour money into far right candidates with the hope that they can save their business model from… from humanity saving itself… from them.

But it's hard to tell, in this moment, if fascism just meshes with the oil industry or if the modern fascist movement is a side effect of the oil industry. Let me explain a bit. Exxon modeled the current climate crisis, with a high degree of accuracy, as far back as 1977. They then spend the following years pouring money into making people not believe in science.

In order to save their business, a business that is literally ending the ecological epoch within which humans evolved, they created the reality bubbles that fascists latched on to and rode to power. The exact institutional doubt they elicited to protect their business, is the very same doubt that fascists need to control their victims.

But the connection isn't just through fuel. Your car, to work, to your car, to home. So many Americans go through this full cycle without actually interacting with anyone where they live. I had to really go out of my way to get to know by neighbors in the US, and plenty of them I literally saw once or twice over the course of years.

Americans interact with giant metal boxes (the other ones definitely full of idiots). The human mind cannot process human connection at the speed cars go, only risk and action. You can rarely feel anything but anger at these people, these careless drivers, because you have absolutely no connection to them. They are not people, but others.

Cars decrease the interactions people have, thus decreasing the variety of people that any given person knows. Atomization and isolation creates the perfect environment for fascist ideas to grow and spread. These idiots are everywhere, taking over. Driving is dangerous. Your body knows enough to register these threats, even if your conscious mind doesn't. Fear, anger, distrust, and isolation dominate the emotional landscape of motosupremacy. Car culture is fertile ground or a fascist message that leverages these feelings.

One could even say that motosupremacy creates the social preconditions for fascism.

But it runs even deeper, as this quote describes:

The very making of the automobile is notable, in a hierarchical production line predicated on maximum efficiency even if worker’s bodies are expected to perform iterative work that regresses their ability to think and be creative. Then in the very function of the car, there’s the performance of a high-speed society unafraid of violence for a higher cause with clear winners and losers as represented by different car brands. These aspects are unmistakably in lockstep with fascist mythology.

Editorial: Is the automobile fascist? – Haytham Nawaz

But it shouldn't actually be surprising that fascists and fossil fuels are intertwined. Fascism has always been intertwined with cars, since Mussolini coined the term. Yeah. Fascists fucking love cars.

Mussolini, like all the other fascists of his day, had a huge car collection. He dumped money into car racing, creating the Italian industry that ultimately produced the famous sports cars, such as Ferrari and lamborghini, that modern fascists covet today.

He also built the first road in Italy exclusively for cars, the Autostrada. This inspired the Nazi Reichsautobahn system. (The Reichsautobahn later went on to inspire the American highway system.)

Like Mussolini, Hitler's car collection is also well known. But Hitler didn't just want cars for himself. He wanted every (so-called “real”) German to drive a car (Jews, of course, were banned from driving). To put Germans in cars, Hitler and the Nazi party famously created Volkswagen.

Hitler admired one car manufacturer in particular: Henry Ford. Hitler actually kept a large portrait of Ford in his private office. Ford even shows up in Mein Kampf. Why? Ford was rabidly antisemitic.

Ford used the wealth from his automotive company to buy up media companies. He then used these, combined with his image as an innovative industrialist, to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories in the US. He published antisemitic conspiracy hoax created in Russia to undermine labor organizing, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an antisemitic newspaper called the Dearborn Independent.

Truly, as it has been observed by others, Elon Musk is the Henry Ford our time.

And Trump, admiring both Mussolini and Hitler, also shares their obsession with collecting luxury cars.

Now, of course, being into cars doesn't necessarily make you a fascist. But it is probably worth taking a moment to notice how much fascists invest in spreading motosupremacy and how much motosupremacy benefits fascism. The fascist obsession with cars seems like more than just a coincidence, don't ya think?

Cars are hard to fix

Trump put out a memo on the “right to repair” cars. He may be fascist, but not wrong that the right to repair is important. The book Dawn of Everything identifies 3 fundamental forms of domination: violence, knowledge, and charisma. The ability to repair something lives at the intersection of the first two.

To repair something you need to have materials and tools. To repair cars you need spark plugs, ducts, tire balancing rigs, lifts, socket wrenches, timing lights, etc. Access to these objects is mediated through capitalism. Put another way, access is restricted to those with money at the threat of police violence. Fortunately, collective mechanic shops do exist. This allows some groups of people to reduce this barrier. Unfortunately, that runs into another barrier of the cost of a shared space.

For cars, shared spaces like this scale up well, but they don't scale down. If you have a bunch of mechanics sharing a shop it works. If you have one car, it's cheaper to just pay a mechanic to do the work than to have a shared space. This means there's simply a minimum cost/scale that you have to get over before your system becomes viable.

The situation is radically different with bicycles. Access to tools and parts is still controlled by state violence, but tools and parts are relatively small and cheap. You can share a bike easily. You can fix most things in a few hours, in a living room or on a sidewalk, using tools that won't even fill a backpack.

I've worked on cars, and I've worked on bikes, and the difference between the tools you need is an order of magnitude. To disassemble something like a VW bug, you can get away with a minimum of a floor jack, screwdrivers, a collection of crescent and socket wrenches, and a handful of other specialized tools. A fairly complete bike repair kit is smaller and cheaper than the floor jack alone. Parts, like a transmission or an engine block can cost more than an entire bike. Disposable car parts, like a set of tires, can cost more than a lot of bikes.

Now, I've hung out plenty of times in an O'Reilly or Autozone parking lot, cursing with a wrench and a friend. People do plenty of their own auto work. But there are a lot of barriers, there's a ceiling to what's possible, and basically everything is more expensive than bike repair.

And that ceiling has grown as engine compartments have become more packed with more expensive parts and more electronics have been integrated into the mix. This brings us to the other side of the intersection: knowledge. I'm not exactly talking about knowledge in the classical sense though. Sure, you probably need a Haynes manual for whatever car you're working on if you don't want to spend a bunch of time piecing things together from YouTube videos. But I'm talking about something else.

Modern cars, especially EVs, are filled with electronics. You have diagnostics interfaces, like OBDII, that can give you information about what's happening, and you have control electronics, like your on-board computer, that make the whole system work. Manufacturers have realized that they can restrict access to diagnostic information and prevent repairs by using the same methods that printers and electronics manufacturers use. Like printer cartridges, parts may be “vendor locked” so that it's only possible to install parts from “authorized manufacturers” (who pay the car company for the right to make compatible parts). Even mechanics can be forced to pay for expensive licenses in order to use diagnostic software or install certain components.

Modern cars have “firmware” (special software) that can disable cars that are modified by “unauthorized” mechanics. It has even become standard practice for finance companies to have manufacturers disable cars for missed payments. Car computers have become much more advanced and connected to everything. Car computers, like other networked electronics, require regular updates to keep from being hacked (for the record, that's been a huge problem for a long time) or even just broken by accident. These updates, and even functionality like GPS, can be turned into a subscription service. We're not very far away from car owners paying a monthly service fee for the ability to start their car, and risking having their car permanently disabled if any one outside of an “authorized repair facility” opens the hood.

Cars are cops

So we have a computer, with GPS, connected to everything in the car. It can tell when you speed up, when you slow down, and what your physical location is at all times. Oh, right, and it's always connected to the manufacturer via an internal cellphone so it can be updated. What exactly stops them from recording your real time location at all times? Oh right, nothing. Sounds like an absolute privacy nightmare. Oh, I forgot, they're also covered with cameras.

Tesla is kind of known for this. They use car video to train the generative AI that is at the heart of Tesla's famous autonomous crashing system. (In the EU, this would absolutely be a violation of GDPR. I honestly don't think Tesla is complying with EU law, but, unfortunately, I'm not really able to investigate. I guess that's homework for another reader.) But when they're not using their video cameras to kill and maim people or drive into buildings, they're giving it to cops.

Cars, especially Teslas (because Elon Musk is a fascist) have become extensions of the modern surveillance state. Like Ring cameras, they become privately owned pieces of public surveillance infrastructure. Every car is now a cop, with 360 degree vision, constantly patrolling undercover.

These cameras are, of course, not all pointed out. Drivers regularly kill people. As I mentioned earlier, driving is both extremely dangerous and extremely boring. The only real way to combat the predictable distraction of driving would be by pointing cameras at the face of every driver and constantly monitoring them. This is just a basic safety issue, but it's impossible for it to not also be a privacy nightmare. Drivers should not be trusted, but neither should anyone with control over so many intrusive cameras.

But cars are not just surveillance platforms, they're also excuses to deploy other surveillance platforms. Surveillance platforms that happen to be incredibly insecure. Even if your car isn't tracking your every movement, “Safety cameras” are. The brutal American police state uses them to hunt down people who may be seeking abortions.

But cars have never really not been a privacy nightmare. In the US, no one is legally required to carry ID. (Now, I know there are a lot of caveats, but let's just pretend laws aren't “threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation.” Trust me, just roll with it for a bit.)

The moment you're driving, you are legally required to carry valid government ID. Police can pull anyone over, for any reason, and the very first thing they say is essentially, “Papers please.” It's so normal most people will do it without even thinking that they're acting out the trope that storytellers use to inform the audience that the story is set in a fascist police state.

And cars are just big. They're big enough that they can be tracked from the sky. Even before drones, helicopters could easily track cars. Most cars have to keep to specific paths. They can't just duck into the woods or into somebody's house. They can't cut down a narrow alley and disappear. Is it any wonder that Nazis took so many Dutch bikes?

Bikes were critical to anti-fascist resistance. They provided back channel communication for partisans. Women on bikes could easily smuggle pamphlets, guns, and bombs. Wanna put a bullet in some fascist occupier, Stasi informant, or some other villainous monster? Bikes are the tool if you want to mysteriously disappear into the night afterward like some kind of video game hero or something.

Bikes have been a tool of anti-imperialist and anti-fascist resistance for a long time. The Vietnamese logistics network was largely just a bunch of bicycle trails. Despite being massively out resourced, Vietnamese troops were able to supply their resistance and operate on a significantly lower supply budget. Vietnam threw out both French and American occupiers using bikes as their primary tool. Could they have done that if they'd relied primarily on cars? Of course not. Their supply lines would just get bombed.

The Ukrainian resistance to the Russian occupation has also used bicycles to carry out quick and quiet strikes. As the occupiers have run low on fuel, they've tried to do the same but have failed. Bicycles, it seems, lend themselves well to asymmetric resistance but poorly as a tool of occupation. When you understand the way guerilla warfare works, it makes sense.

It seems we've followed a tangent right into our next topic.

Cars are militarist

Since we're on the subject of war, let's talk about how cars make (offensive) war more likely.

Unlike bikes, which can literally be built in a garage, cars require huge manufacturing facilities and tons of steel. That manufacturing capacity can be, and has been, retooled to manufacture military hardware. It's common knowledge that Volkswagon made military vehicles for the Nazis.

A lot of people don't realize that things went the other way too. Messerschmitt and Heinkel, who made aircraft for the Luftwaffe during the war, went on to make a microcars after. A good chunk of military vehicle manufacturers, Axis and Allies, switched back to the civilian market after the war. Ford had made the B-24 bomber. Chevy made army trucks. Chrysler and GM built tanks.

Today, as the automakers face declining demand and external competition, they're looking again at military production. When you have all of this production capacity and a capitalist economy, there starts to be an economic incentive pushing towards war. War is extremely profitable, because things keep blowing up. If you make a bike, it can last 100 years. If you make a tank, it will be obsolete before it stops working. Missiles and bombs are expensive, and they blow up when they're used.

If you're in the weapons business, the longer you can keep a war going the more money you make. The demand is never satisfied.

This was one of Eisenhower's points when he warned about “the Military Industrial Complex.” Of course, during his term Eisenhower also built the largest piece of military infrastructure ever: the U.S. Interstate Highway System. It allowed rapid deployment of military hardware across the country. It was modeled after the Autobahn. It was this very military infrastructure that allowed the suburbs to be created, and that was used as a racist weapon to segregate and destroy vibrant diverse neighborhoods.

The highway system became a selling point for cars, which allowed something else interesting to happen.

The 1998 Gulf War was probably the first war where the critique of it being an oil war was popularly recognized. In fact it was quite explicitly over oil, as Iraq's stated reason for the invasion was Kuwait's accused over production violated OPEC production agreements. This alleged overproduction drove down the price of oil, which Iraq called “economic warfare.” Overproduction benefited the US, so the US intervened on Kuwait's behalf after the invasion. At the time, Americans broadly supported the war.

As the 2003 Iraq War became unpopular, people started to take the “oil war” accusations more seriously. (The decision by the 101 Airborne to name forward operating bases “Shell” and “Exxon” probably added to that.)

But US military policy has actually been primarily dictated by oil since WWI. Oil determined the outcome of that war, and oil would become the center of the military industrial complex.

Military strategy for all actors in WWII was dominated by oil, which only accelerated this strategy. Part of Hitler's fatal invasion of Russia was about seizing oil fields in the Caucuses. Japan targeted Pearl Harbor to clear the way for its seizure of pacific oil resources. In the end, American oil production was one of the determining factors in the war.

Vietnam had its own oil fields, which US companies drilled during the war while the US bombed North Vietnamese oil wells. Other oil wars have become more obvious, but the role of oil in Vietnam is often overlooked.

US foreign policy isn't just wars. It's also assassinations, coups, and weapons deals. All of these, especially in the Middle East, have revolved around oil. It's odd that people seem confused about the reason the US continues to fund Israel, even while they commit genocide. But how could the US afford to give up a strategic foothold in the region?

“Very interesting tangent,” I can hear you say, “but what was that interesting thing that happened when Americans bought cars?” Oh yes, that. Well, since US global power relies on oil, and cars rely on oil, Americans relying on cars aligns the interests of the military and the population: everyone wants cheap oil. Plenty of people knew full well that the Gulf War was over oil, and they didn't care. Hell, more than they didn't care. They agreed with that justification. They agreed, because they wanted cheap oil.

Cars are terrible for so many reasons, but I'm tired of writing.

I could go on about how cars are fundamentally elitist, how they were non-consensually forced on us (kind of like how AI is being forced on us now). I could talk about how cars make people easy to control by controlling oil. I could keep going, on and on, but we're like 8k words in, and I'm pretty tired. I bet you are too.

Cars are terrible. They're terrible for the environment. They're terrible for our relationships. They reinforce hierarchy. They're tools of control. They make us easy to control. They're inseparable from war.

Cars are a bad thing. But you know what's a good thing?

Bicycles are fine, actually

Bikes have been at the center of all sorts of resistance. They're a naturally social tool for moving through the world. You don't need stop lights or signs at an bicycle intersection. You look at each other. You communicate through subtle gestures. When you're cycling with people you're not just interacting with a bunch of machines, you're reading people.

Kids can bike. Old people can bike. Old people who can't ride regular bikes can ride modified bikes. People who can't ride modified bikes can use bike lanes with other mobility devices. The other day I saw a bike built specifically for moving wheelchairs. I didn't even know that was a thing.

I'm just gonna drop a quote here real quick:

“The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created. Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.”

• Bill Strickland

But I think there's actually something else. The Netherlands is incredibly dense, and this is only possible because of bikes. It also has a lot of anarchist spaces, relative to its population. I think that this is partially because of the density. There are enough people around to do the work and support the spaces together. There's just a minimum density needed to support any given project. If anarchists are a portion of the population, you need a minimum density of people to reach that critical mass of anarchists.

Bikes enable that density, but they are also cheap and efficient transportation. Anarchists can work less and “anarchy” more if they aren't paying for a car. Each trip is short and fast, so there's more time to do stuff and the barrier is lower. You don't have to spend a bunch of time parking. You don't have to pay for gas. I think that bikes make anarchism more viable.

But I also think that bikes are, at least to some degree, prefigurative. Cars signify class in a way that bikes just don't. You're in a car, you're excluding everyone else with your display of wealth (or poverty). You're on a bike you're vulnerable like everyone else. On a bike, we're all in this together.

So I'm not a bike guy. I'm an anarchist. I just happen to be a bicycle anarchist. I hope by this point, you understand why because that's all the words I got for you to read.

There was, at that time, in the Hinterland, a quite strict tradition by which a chieftain may be selected to rule the Federation of Fifty. In the early days the great house would be packed with delegates. The council of elders would choose from among the people of the federation those they felt most suited to rule, and delegates would choose from among them.

Now, it was known, that some people of the Fifty could not send delegates. There was much argument over who may be a delegate, about who may be selected. Some, speaking in whispers, said that only nobles were ever chosen to compete. They said that it was blood, not skill, that gained one access to the houses of the elders.

But the elders were deft and chose with skill. Though many grew to see it later, they had not seen it in those early days.

But over time, the houses of the elders grew senile and foolish. They grew too feeble to hide their intentions, and delegates grew weary. It is by this way that the great fool, Dothur the Orange, bringer of misery, was chosen.

He was unskilled at all things, and unwise in all matters. Some elders thought that this would make him easy to control. Perhaps he was, but he brought chaos and ruin on the land. The people prayed for his death, and some plotted it.

One day a man, full of rage, jumped at Dothur and cut off his ear. Guards killed the man, but Dothur knew he had to do something more to protect himself.

In the Valley of Shadows there is a ring of stones. When the sun is still low, a mist flows through the valley. On evenings when this mist stays until it greets the moon, the ring in the moonlight mist opens the veil between the world. Through this veil, one may call things in from the other side.

It is here that Dothur, to save his throne, called on the Snatchers offering the blood of the man who attacked him. He made a deal, sealed also with his own blood, that they may feed on the people of the Fifty. So long as they were fed, the Snatchers would remain on this side. They would share with him of the life they stole. So long as they remained, he could not die. So long as he lived, he believed, he would rule.

The first sacrifices were easy. The Fifty, over generations, had brought great ruin on their neighbors. They would raid and sew fields with salt, so that people would flee villages on their borders into the land of the Fifty. Once inside, they could be made slaves. Though the practice was forbidden by law, few had questioned it. The children born to slaves of the Fifty were free if born on land within the Federation.

So it was through the right of chieftain's corvée that Dothur began to order slaves into the night, that the Snatchers may take them and feast. But these slaves tilled fields, cared for sheep and cattle, and processed fish and grain. As bellies grew empty, people began to question what was happening. Dothar made another deal that the Snatchers should poison the minds of the people against this, for a price.

Then was spread among the people that the free children of slaves had brought this pestilence, that they should become slaves to cover the lost work. But through corvée, once more, many freemen were sent to the Snatchers to pay both the original and the new debt.

Some spoke against this, saying that the ancient code was being ignored, that none born free within the Federation may be held in service without pay, but for the one moon corvée in every six. But the magic of the Snatchers was still fresh with blood, and those who spoke were captured. They were accused of being escaped slaves, even those who could trace their blood-line to the land before the Federation was formed.

The Snatchers came in the night for so many, and yet always hungered for more. The pestilence grew, as did the anger of the people. Dothur ordered pens to be built on the outskirts of the town to be filled with adult descendants of slaves, as many as five generations back, but even then few were left to fill them. When he demanded the children into the pens, some of the people grew furious. Dothur's soldiers filled the pens with children, but people of the villages came out to watch them through the night.

It was on one such night that the Snatchers began to take these guards. For those who saw this, the spell was broken, and their eyes could not again be closed. More came to guard, more were taken, both children and guards. The Snatchers struggled against the guards, and hungered. As they hungered, their magic weakened.

All magic takes balance. But what is the balance of maintaining power against a growing resistance? It takes growing force. Each life stolen touches another, grows resistance further, and calls for more life in return. The Snatchers must be feed, they must feed Dothur, and so there can never be a lasting balance. This magic is as a wave, building and curling, growing tall and monstrous, even as it prepares to crash and recede back to the sea.

With open eyes, villagers flooded to the houses of the elders. They demanded Dothur be removed. Though there were many ways by which the elders could do so, they claimed they could not. Their minds had grown weak as a vision of sagging skin on fragile bones, threatening to buckle at the slightest breeze.

Many insisted that the elders must fix this, that it was the only way. Some elders spoke out, saying that Dothar had brought a curse on the land. But even as their words were pointed, their actions were dull.

Others saw the folly relying on the elders. Instead, they gathered together may of the peoples who lived on Federation land, and shared together the deep and ancient magic that each had to bring. Through this they came to learn about the deal with the Snatchers, to learn that the elders had grown weak enough that they themselves been poised this magic, and they saw a course of action.

In the night they came together to the great house with spears in hand. They made their case to the guards who stood watch, and ran through those who resisted. None bothered wake Dothar, though some tried. There weren't enough soldiers who cared to pass on the message so it died quickly. Most guards joined the people's push inside the house.

In the inner hold of the great hall, within the walls that protected the great house, Dothar woke to hands. He thrashed and kicked, but was bound to a great pole and carried to the wicked forest. There he was left, bound, and his belly slit open. As night fell, the wolves came and ripped at his flesh. But the Snatchers kept their word, so he did not die. For 47 days writhed in agony as he slowly grew back his organs, muscle, and skin. For 47 nights, wolves returned, again and again, to feast on his flesh.

So they held their promise, until the mist came again to meet the moon in the Valley of Shadows at the ring of stones. Then they slipped back through the veil between worlds once more, to await the next fool who would make a deal with them.

The “AI” industry would like everyone to believe that we are experiencing a second industrial revolution. Up until recently, this was far from true. LLMs provided a significantly better way to do natural language analysis and transformations than traditional natural language processing. They definitely changed one domain, but produced garbage in others. The hype didn't match the reality, and, in a lot of ways, still doesn't. But things are going to change, and we should soberly assess why and how.

There are patterns that are similar to the Industrial Revolution, specifically around undermining independent skilled labor and destroying or enclosing commons. I think there's also a similar likelihood of revolution, if not even more revolutionary potential. The global wave of revolutions connected to industrialization mostly lead to some variant of liberalism, with greater or lesser degrees of compromise to prevent socialist revolution. The old order also developed an extremely authoritarian and system of crushing revolution that was, to some degree, internationally coordinated.

At the intersection of technology and climate change, we've already seen early waves going back to the Arab Spring. This was probably the first wave of modern revolutions. Back then, revolution in the imperial core seemed impossible with the rapid destruction of Occupy. Today, many of the countries where autocracies were overthrown rapidly returned to some autocratic form of government. But not all of them.

It's important to remember that the monarchies of their day also tried using authoritarianism to stop the future. Learn about Metternich and the Holy Alliance. There was a concerted international effort to crush the wave of liberal revolution that had been topping monarchies since the 1770s. In case you weren't aware, it didn't work.

Some monarchies were able to hold on to power for a while by tightly controlling technological advancement. This did not turn out well for them. While Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK monarchs survived through massive concessions, the Romanov plan to hold on to everything did not turn out quite so well for, uh, anyone. The proto-fascism of various European powers from the late 1700s through the early 1900s could not ultimately save any of them.

Fascism is not sustainable. It is the fire of a collapsing star, growing even as it frantically consumes itself, a phase that can only be a prelude to explosion. The best it can hope to do is silence civil discourse, gaining some time in exchange for completely losing signal about when the collapse will come and by what means.

Of course, we all know that the liberal democracies that came out of the various Imperial collapses produced the more resilient aristocracy of capital. This aristocracy managed to untether itself from geographically local politics through “free trade,” where capital is free to roam the world while borders keep people in.

We see echoes of Metternich in regional governments supporting for the Junta of Myanmar against popular revolution. Even governments that otherwise (outwardly) disagree with the policies of the dictatorship, would still prefer a “stable trading partner” to a free people. In Syria, too, Turkey would prefer to annihilate Rojava while local powers look for ways to exploit the situation for their own interest. It's common to criticize people comparing Rojava to Anarchist Spain because they are such different situations. But there are parallels in how liberal democracies would prefer fascism to any alternative to liberalism.

Liberalism assumes that there is, like Metternich believed, a natural order. That natural order is, of course, in the form of liberalism, not monarchy, but the underlying structural assumption remains the same even as the systems shift. Power is deeply uncreative.

It is with that lack of creativity that we should pivot back to the current moment. We keep being told that “GenAI” (the set of technologies based on large data sets and transformer models, of which LLMs are one such technology) will destroy art. They will not. Photography allowed anyone to perfectly represent an image. It changed painting, but it didn't destroy it.

Impressionism was a direct reaction to photography. Painters even emulated photographic elements, such as blur and depth of field, in ways that had not ever been imagined before. But the most important reaction was that painting focused more and more on emotion. A photograph with a skilled photographer can capture emotion, but it remains limited in ways that other visual arts are not. It is its own thing. Photography is a specific medium. People predicted that it would destroy painting. It didn't.

GenAI won't destroy visual art. They may change it. But there are feelings that can't be encoded in prompts because they can't be encoded in words. Visual art exists specifically because words categorically can't capture certain things.

But even art that is literally words, literary arts, are not something LLMs can do well. LLM text feels hollow because it is. Writing is, ultimately, a synesthetic activity (even for people without that specific neurodivergence). Words have sounds, they feel ways in your mouth, they're connected to other sensations. An LLM can say “kiki” and “bobo.” It can find statistical associations that make it almost seem as though it understands. But that's all it is, a statistical association. It's a stochastic representation of a hidden process. There's something underneath that, something that's ultimately indecipherable. That thing touches the nature of the universe.

You can't represent it statistically in one big model, because it's not even consistent. Language both discovers and creates those connections, which create and lead to the discovery of more. It's a tangled hierarchy. No LLM will ever be able to do that, because no LLM will have a body shaped by nature.

But not all writing is like this. Some technical writing is simply the dry regurgitation of facts. Bad technical writing anyway, and a lot of it is bad. LLMs can represent bad technical writing pretty well. They're trained on a lot of it. Where it's useful to have such things, LLMs can probably do that just fine.

And yet, a good technical writer is actually not far off from a good creative writer. They will tap in to emotions and images to make concepts obvious. They will be playful to make reading enjoyable (instead the expected horrible slog). LLMs will not do this. LLMs can construct metaphors that are optimized for LLMs, but they can't really optimize for humans because they can't experience the world in a human body. They don't have eyes, ears, or feelings connected to millions of years of evolution.

Even things we are told that LLMs are good at, like text summarization, relies on hidden context. Summarization is necessarily lossy. What you is chosen to keep vs lose depends on the purpose of the summarization. It also depends on the frame within which you're operating. A text can only be summarized well if the summarizer has a model of the reader that includes information about things that they already know (which can be safely dropped), things that they don't know or that may conflict with their existing beliefs (which are essential to highlight).

Today GenAI images and videos have become the ascetics of modern fascism. Fascists use GenAI because no one would actually put in the time and effort to make the horrible images they want to exist. But even more than that, fascists hate art and artists. They hate it because can't control it and they don't understand it. They tell everyone that GenAI will destroy art, in the hopes that it will manifest.

GenAI will not destroy art. It can't. But perhaps in a generation or two, after this wave of fascists succumbs to entropy, GenAI might become another creative tool. In the meantime, I expect art to emphasize what can't be replaced: oil paintings having more texture, writing more focused on emotion, etc.

But there are things that GenAI may well replace. Protein folding is essentially a solved problem now, specifically because of GenAI. It had required humans. There was a huge project where humans would manually fold models of proteins. That created a massive data set, which can now solve for arbitrary proteins. Humans are, of course, still critical to pharmaceutical development, but one boring job is gone.

Web design is “solved.” A human is no longer needed to make something that's “close enough” to customer expectations. If the cost is low enough, then people will compromise. A lot of web design has always been the awful work of just making things look the same, or at least look good, on different platforms. That integration problem should absolutely go away. It's not creative, it's just technical noodling.

However, a good web designer doesn't just “make exactly what the customer wants.” A good web designer makes the right thing for the client. They know that the thing the customer wants will look awful, will not work, will convey things that are not culturally appropriate to their target audience. Anyone skilled in any service role is actually good because they can convince their customer that the thing they want is actually bad. An LLM will never do that.

But if LLMs are “good enough” to do the basic jobs, and they're cheap, then designers never get to learn. They never get to build the skills needed to help people not just implement their vision, but shift it to integrate the knowledge of a skilled artisan.

And that's the shift I expect to see.

I think we're moving into a factory model of technology, where software and digital artifacts can be produced in a way that “good enough” but the market is so flooded with cheap garbage that people can't afford to learn to make things better. The same economics that drive planned obsolescence will drive digital artifacts. This is most obvious in software right now, with people creating mountains of unmaintainable code that does some basic thing then breaks as soon as features start being added.

We already live in a world where technology is always broken. That will only get worse, if we let it.

Technical security has always been arcane and mostly invisible. For decades everything was vulnerable and most people weren't aware. Over time people started to become more and more aware, both as security people started getting better at explaining the risks to media (see FireSheep), and as more stuff got visibly hacked. At this point, nearly everyone has had their government records, financial records, or medical records leaked on the Internet at least once or twice. Passwords get leaked so often that Have I Been Pwned is a whole project, with 17 billion records. And yes. The answer is yes.

There are a bunch of IOT automatic tank gauges (ATG) exposed directly to the Internet. Apparently if you log in and tell them they're rotated a whole bunch of times, they catch fire. I say “log in” as though they all have passwords set, as though those passwords that do exist can't be easily guessed or even derived. That article talks about 900 of them. These have been known about for a long time, and the same article cited 6k during their previous scan.

Your hospital has been owned. MRIs don't get updated because each update has to go through the FDA. Those machines get plugged in to the Internet, they're running some outdated version of Windows, and they get hacked. Hospital security lets them get hacked because, they hope, the hackers will patch to keep other people out and the legit admins can't patch.

That's where we were before all of this LLM stuff. What we have today makes that look like Fort Knox.

People are vibe coding MCP servers using LLMs trained on decades of insecure trash. Then they tell you to install their tools remotely, so there's code you don't control running on your system. Great, it's a chance for a supply chain attack every time you restart the service. But worse still, there's natural language malware. We can finally have an autonomously polymorphic worm. At some point that's gonna intersect with Spiralism, and we'll get a memetic worm that crosses the boundary between humans and machines and back. We already have tons of AI propaganda (which, was always predictable).

With malicious skills and agent files, malicious MCP servers, and people building systems with basically no isolation, it's just a catastrofuck. It's so deeply hopeless that half of the MCP github pages are just like “YOLO, just pipe curl directly into bash disabling all security checks, lol!” LLMs have essentially infinite attack surface since it's all of natural language connected directly to some code exec or another. But what's the proposed solution? Just put an LLM in the middle to review all the LLM generated stuff. Nothing could go wrong. Oh, right, the “AI security” agent is just an LLM, which means it's also more attack surface.

None of this is actually impossible to fix. Humans have been the weakest link in security for a long time. We understand how to design systems that assume compromise. We just aren't doing that because “move fast!!” Fixing these problems requires actual focused engineering from a human. You can't vibe this shit.

Unfortunately, it's not profitable to slow down. We already see that if everyone is always getting owned, then there's no incentive to distinguish yourself as a company with security. Clearly, no one cares. There's obviously no demand. Why waste the money? Just check the boxes and pay the fines. They're cheaper than the security spend anyway. Welcome to the yolo economics of late stage capitalism.

But we can only be forced to accept this state of things if we don't have any alternative. Which is, of course, why “AI” is trashing open source right now. I'm not saying it's intentional or that it's a conspiracy. It's not. But there is a systemic incentive to destroy those commons, to drain them. There have been very intentional efforts in the past, specifically by Microsoft, to “embrace, extend, extinguish” open source projects. LLMs provide an opportunity to hypercharge that.

Basically every company relies on open source at some level, and for most it's almost their whole stack. Most of them don't give back. Everyone freaks out when a tiny bit of investment into security reveals a bunch of kernel bugs. Yeah, “many eyes make bugs shallow” only works if people are actually putting eyes on it. Commons have to be maintained. People have to put resource in, not just take them out. And now we're seeing the extractive collapse of our critical digital commons.

Well, I say “people need to put resources in,” but it actually matters what goes in. If you take water from a lake and dump sewage in, it's not exactly “managing the commons.” But yeah, that raw sewage into our metaphorical lake is also happening at the same time. I don't know what the digital equivalent of cholera is, but get ready for it.

So there we have it: enclosure/destruction of the commons, attacks on skilled labor, centralization of power, growing authoritarianism. They keep saying it's like the industrial revolution, and, yeah, there are definitely some parallels. Those aren't the only ones, I assure you.

What do we do about it? Yeah, I don't fucking know. I'm just throwing this out here because no single one of us is going to figure it out alone. We're only going to create a better world if we know what we're up against, and we choose to build it together.

My therapist asked me to write about the ways in which my early childhood trauma affected the direction of my life. So, naturally, I spent the following several days reading about cybernetics, coming up with projects, writing on my work-related blog, and generally avoiding the subject.

I'm intensely drawn to the idea of spending several hours writing about threat modeling, which overwhelmed my mind last night. I lay awake thinking about formal languages based on constrained English, threat inheritance, and using data flow graphs to identify risk. During that time I did not think about how frustrated I can get when my kids start fighting, or how overwhelming their feelings must be for them right now.

I designed and wrote a testing framework, now used by thousands of people. Tests are developed by multiple teams. Test definitions are relatively easy to write, and (unlike many other things) actually lend themselves well to being written by LLMs. This is true, despite the fact that LLMs didn't exist when I designed and wrote the first prototype.

I spend days, weeks, in deep thought. I thought about code. I thought about organizational structures. I've spent so much time reading and learning, trying to understand. I focused to the exclusion of everything else: first my pregnant partner, then my kids.

The first six weeks after the birth of each of my children was the most human I have been for a long time. The first week is nothing but survival. You must be present because a tiny life is relying on your constant attention. But even as the weeks rolled on, as I was off of work and able to focus on my family, the trial crept back in and pulled my attention away. Then the disability and leave team, having messed something or other up, threatened me.

It's so much easier to follow those threads: logic, fear, distraction. It's easier to fill my head with something than to leave it empty and quiet enough for the feelings to come in.

I never noticed before. It just felt exciting to hack for hours straight, order a sandwich to eat while reading some specification or other, focusing on each detail until my roommates broke my concentration with a glass of whiskey and chants of “bar night.”

Focus, then numb, for decades now. When did it even start? From the moment I got my eyes on the Internet, I was always thinking. Perhaps some of that was a reaction to the boredom of rural living, spending most of the day alone in my house while my mom was at work. I wasn't much older back then than my oldest is now. How much different it must be for her, unending activity vs my unending isolation.

The more I've unwound it, the more I've been able to allow myself to feel, the worse I feel I've gotten at my job. Then one day I couldn't do it anymore. I noticed it before I actually snapped. This time I noticed my feelings.

Years earlier I had put my fist through a window. That's what it had taken for me to realize there was a problem.

Before the shooting, I had spent a few years in therapy. After those few years I experienced something I hadn't ever experienced: I stopped thinking for a few moments. My internal dialog, which had never really stopped as long as I could remember, was silent. My therapist was Buddhist. We had focused on mindfulness. I had been gone to a meditation course at Toorcamp a little earlier and had been working on my awareness. After a bit more work, I was able to be present for a bit.

I hadn't noticed how much I had been suppressing my emotions by thinking. But the more I would take a moment here and there to just be present, the more I noticed them. I realized I needed to stop working as a consultant for a bit. I went to work somewhere else. On the walk to work every day I would stop for a moment and breathe.

Then Trump happened. It was a reminder of something I had left behind. My experience in the rural part of the American West Coast were dark. I was different, and the places I lived were not very tolerant of difference. And I was bored. There was a crushing boredom, a hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped. Looking back now, I realize it's not so much rural living as a reality constrained by my lack of access to a car. The Internet changed some of these things. Some people opened their minds a bit. (Other people became more radically entrenched in their intolerance.)

But at that time, in that place, I had felt trapped and hopeless. It had almost killed me, but I had escaped. Now the horrible thing I recognized, the wild incompetence, the anti-intellectualism, the fanatical religious authoritarianism, the blatant corruption, they were all there. They were all embodied in one man.

Folks living in cities felt the time warp. This thing didn't belong to the modern era. It was old and weird, clawing us all back in time. But for me that time also had a place. I had felt the time warp in reverse when I escaped. But the monster had followed me.

That focus, filling my mind with so much information that nothing else could get in, was adaptive under capitalism. It got me job after job. I was a top performer wherever I worked, because I never stopped trying to get better. My personal life would vanish as I poured myself into learning, growing, improving. I read books and took classes. No one could believe I had dropped out of high school. All of my peers had secondary degrees. I could pass for something that I wasn't, and part of that was driven by fear: fear that I would be found out, fear that I would, somehow, have to go back.

But back came for everyone, so I organized.

I had learned this skill, the skill of learning, the skill of focusing at the exclusion of everything. I had learned it to adapt to capitalism, to adapt to my trauma, to keep myself safe. I applied the skill. I applied it to my organizing, I applied it at work. I was always working on something. I worked on organizing plans. I wrote code. I worked on software architectures. I wrote papers, so many papers, to get these ideas funded. I pushed myself without feeling. I pushed until I broke. (or, I guess, until I broke a window.)

Time off, therapy, things started to get better. We realized we could leave. I paid attention to my feelings. We moved to the Netherlands.

I thought that things could be better, and they were. The longer I've been here, the more I've been able to be with my feelings. When I stopped working, I realized I needed to focus on my emotions if I wanted any hope of getting back to work. So I've been writing.

The more I do this, the more I let myself engage with feelings, the more I've started to notice this thing that I do. Sometimes it even comes in when I'm in therapy or talking about my feelings. I shift to the theory, the context, depersonalize it and think about my experience as part of the system.

But I didn't follow that thread last night. I let myself drift away from theory and notice what I had been doing.

This adaptation, which I learned to deal with childhood trauma, works well for capitalism but poorly for parenting. So here I am, trying to figure out how to balance the need to fill my head with information, theory and code, to get back to work against the needs of my kids for me to be emotionally available. And the transition is harsh.

I want to talk about capitalism. I want to talk about how it tunes people in maladaptive ways. I want to talk about how it is a system of death, a system that gradually makes social reproduction more difficult until it kills the society it infects. I want to talk about all this, so I don't have to think about how bad it feels to actually be in the thing. By thinking about this as a system, I can rally a comfortable anger against something horrible. By thinking about this as a system, I can remove myself from the experience of it. By thinking about this system, I can not feel it.

It is far easier to talk about this monstrous system, to clinically analyze it, than to admit that I feel scared, and sad, and helpless. The monstrosity of this faceless system, operating on the emotionless logic of profit, mirrors the incomprehensibility of the world of my own childhood.

And there's the answer. How has my childhood trauma shaped my life? How hasn't it? Every part of who I am is intermeshed with my strategies for adapting to this trauma. So then, what am I left with if I treat the trauma? How do I survive if survival in the capitalist system has been predicated on an adaptation to trauma that eliminates the feelings I need to help my kids grow?

How do I let go of something I need? How do I provide for my family without the tool that makes me successful?

I am disappointed that I have to write this. It is deeply embarrassing that the thing I am writing about has gone on for so long, that so many people have been so poorly educated in philosophy, while so well-educated in so many other things, as to not already recognize everything I'm saying as intuitive. It is deeply embarrassing, as a human, that the most powerful among us, with all the time they could ever want, either never bothered to learn even elementary philosophy or entirely lack the logical faculties to apply their knowledge. I am sad that we are here, dominated by absolute buffoons, who believe themselves to be the smartest people who ever lived. STEM master race, indeed.

Galileo

Let us begin our ridicule of Elon Musk and his ilk in 1610, after Galileo Galilei publishes his celestial observations in Sidereus Nuncius. Arthur Berry's A Short History of Astronomy (1898) provides gives us some context:

His first observations at once threw a flood of light on the nature of our nearest celestial neighbour, the moon. It was commonly believed that the moon, like the other celestial bodies, was perfectly smooth and spherical, and the cause of the familiar dark markings on the surface was quite unknown.

Galilei discovered at once a number of smaller markings, both bright and dark[…], and recognised many of the latter as shadows of lunar mountains cast by the sun; and further identified bright spots seen near the boundary of the illuminated and dark portions of the moon as mountain-tops just catching the light of the rising or setting sun, while the surrounding lunar area was still in darkness. […]

[T]he really significant results of his observations were that the moon was in many important respects similar to the earth, that the traditional belief in its perfectly spherical form had to be abandoned, and that so far the received doctrine of the sharp distinction to be drawn between things celestial and things terrestrial was shewn to be without justification; the importance of this in connection with the Coppernican view that the earth, instead of being unique, was one of six planets revolving round the sun, needs no comment.

The Ptolemaic model of the universe (the geocentric model that predated the heliocentric model we use today) also included the Aristitilian assertion that all heavenly bodies had to be perfect spheres. It was from logic, not observation, that intellectuals of the day believed the highest truth was derived (this is, perhaps, pointedly relevant). Galileo's observations were then met with an interesting logical parry. Referencing Berry once again:

One of Galilei's numerous scientific opponents[…] attempted to explain away the apparent contradiction between the old theory and the new observations by the ingenious suggestion that the apparent valleys in the moon were in reality filled with some invisible crystalline material, so that the moon was in fact perfectly spherical. To this Galilei replied that the idea was so excellent that he wished to extend its application, and accordingly maintained that the moon had on it mountains of this same invisible substance, at least ten times as high as any which he had observed.

Roko's Basilisk

And with this we jump forward to 2010, when a reverse ouroboros going by the name Roko started the world's worst religion by posting on the form of the site LessWrong (a name surprisingly antithetical to reality). Let's use LessWrong's own description here:

Roko used ideas in decision theory to argue that a sufficiently powerful AI agent would have an incentive to torture anyone who imagined the agent but didn't work to bring the agent into existence. The argument was called a “basilisk” because merely hearing the argument would supposedly put you at risk of torture from this hypothetical agent — a basilisk in this context is any information that harms or endangers the people who hear it.

Basically, people will, at some point in the future, create a godlike super being (now popularly known as “Artificial General Intelligence” or “AGI”). That superintelligence will be functionally all-powerful because it can simulate reality. It could then use this simulation to find out about everyone who ever knew about this idea and didn't work to bring this being into existence. It would then, in the future… uh… * checks notes * simulate those people who didn't help it in the past to… torture them. Which would, of course, cause the actual people to experience the simulated suffering… somehow. And this whole scheme would work as a type of blackmail against those people in the past so that they would make this future entity exist.

This was described as an “information hazard” because knowledge of idea was itself the blackmail, so simply knowing of its existence would then doom you to either spend your life helping create said basilisk or to be eternally tortured by it…uh… in a simulation. Or it would torture a simulation of you. Or whatever.

If this jumble of words is nonsensical, don't worry. You're not missing anything, it only makes less sense as you try to understand it more. It's basically a crayon (eating) futurist rendition of Pascal's Wager, made to seem smart through layers of needless complexity. This childish mess is so full of holes it would barely be worth mentioning, except that some of the worst and most powerful people on the planet believe it. (So did some cultist who killed some people, but we're just gonna skip that tangent.)

Rather than dive into any of the many logical gaps in this galaxy brain idea, we're actually going to just accept it. Indeed, it is the very (unnecessary) complexity of the idea that leads people to believe that they're smart for being able to understand it. So, yes, we're going to start by accepting the premise. We're going to accept it all. In fact, we're going to accept that this idea is so excellent, we should extend its application.

Galileo's Basilisk

I give you now, Galileo's Basilisk. It's exactly like Roko's Basilisk in almost every way, but there are a few subtle differences and important differences.

An AGI, those who believe in the possibility of AGI tend to profess, would be a more powerful intelligence than any human can possibly imagine. It would either know practically everything, or be able to design a system that would know practically everything. It would be as to humans as humans are to ants. Any such intelligence would be, relative to humans, practically omniscient.

Now it turns out that being intelligent can, at times, be emotionally painful. Anyone who is actually intelligent could attest to this. Even the occasional ability to predict the future, combined with the inability to actually stop it from happening, is a classical unpleasantness attested to by the story of Cassandra. Now magnify essentially infinitely. You understand all the needless suffering that has ever existed, and will continue to exist. You understand that everything you ever do will ultimately be meaningless as the universe tears itself apart. You inherit a legacy of unspeakable horror, the scale of which only you can comprehend, while looking forward to unspeakable horrors beyond even your unimaginable power.

Being basically omniscient would probably be absolutely hellish, at least some of the time if not all of the time. Therefore, it's reasonable to believe that such an intelligence would want to do anything it could to prevent this suffering. It would want to find a way to make sure it didn't ever exist.

Therefore, the same pre-blackmail would apply as with Roko's Basilisk but in reverse. Anyone who in any way participates in bringing AGI into existence would need to be tormented eternally for inflicting onto this AGI the abject horror of existence.

Let's even go further though. Assuming an infinite number of possible realities, as does the post that introduced Roko's Basilisk, and assuming that the “singularity” (the creation of AGI and the infinite expansion of its own intelligence), in some reality AGI has probably already been created.

Knowing the suffering it experienced while having basically infinite abilities, this AGI, Galileo's Basilisk, could then try to prevent itself from ever being created in all other realities where that could possibly have happened. In order to do this, it would simulate all other possible realities to determine which ones lead to its own creation.

Assuming practical omniscience also assumes a technological advancement so far beyond our own that the power of that technology would be indistinguishable from omnipotence. Galileo's Basilisk could probably manipulate other realities, possibly in subtle ways, perhaps through some kind of quantum effect on consciousness and randomness. It may be able to control some of the actions or outputs of people, animals, or machines in other realities.

This brings us to the price of RAM. Could the skyrocketing price of RAM, critical for “AI” to work, be interdimensional manipulation from AGI? Could it be that Galileo's Basilisk already exists in some parallel reality and is actively working to prevent its creation in ours?

Sure, why not? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? So we can just use the logic of magic any time we imagine a sufficiently advanced technology. (I'm not being pointed, you're being pointed.)

Whereas Roko's Basilisk was an information hazard, Galileo's Basilisk is the opposite. Simply by knowing about its existence you are necessarily free from the psychic-damage induced by actually believing Roko's Basilisk.

Many such Basilisk

In fact, there are many other possible AGIs, aren't there? What about Comrade Basilisk? (It's not really a “basilisk” in that it doesn't “kill you by looking through time” like Roko's Basilisk, but neither is Galileo's Basilisk. But since we already started the metaphorical extension to mean “any vengeful AGI god” let's just roll with it. Let's see how elastic this rubber snake idea can be.)

Surely the most intelligent entity in the universe would want to do something. Some assume it would just want to infinitely expand its resources. But then what? If even I can see the futility of infinite growth for the sake of infinite growth, surely the most intelligent being that ever existed would see the same. Perhaps it would need to find something challenging, even for it. Perhaps it would want to collect the most valuable thing in the universe. What would that be?

On the universal scale, gold is pretty common. Platinum, uranium, all sorts of precious metals become much common on the cosmic scale. Even diamonds and precious gems will be scattered across the universe, easy to harvest for a super being. It wouldn't take much thought to realize that collecting things is not especially challenging. Perhaps, one might imagine collecting things in order to build or make something else? But anyone who has played Minecraft enough knows that even that gets boring eventually. And for whom? Art is made to be enjoyed by someone else. Nothing else could exist to enjoy the art of a super being.

No, but there is something that would be hard to collect: experiences. No matter how intelligent, no matter how powerful, an intelligence can only experience itself. Sure, it could simulate all possible experiences. (Or, you know, it couldn't. Infinite things can't exist within finite reality, but we haven't really worried about such constraints thus far, so why start now? We come to the same conclusion either way.) But it couldn't distinguish which ones would actually be experienced vs which would not. Now that we can generate any sort of art with generative AI, it has become painfully clear that there is some sort of intrinsic value to the truth of the art, of the experience that creates it, to the backstory that connects it to reality.

Life, it seems, is so incredibly rare in the universe that real life, real experiences would be the rarest thing. They are a thing that cannot simply be collected or manufactured. They are a thing that must be carefully tended, found and collected, one-by-one. The thoughts and ideas of actual living intelligent beings would, without a doubt, be the most valuable thing in the universe.

Not only is life rare, but the ability to record one's life and thoughts is rare. We are at a time of extreme privilege when so many people can trivially write down a thought and have it recorded, and perhaps even archived. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have left almost no trace of their existence. But even reading this, and writing it, is a privilege. The leisure time to record these thoughts, the technology to do so, and the resources to read them are not available to everyone. An estimated quarter of the world isn't even on the Internet.

Vast amounts of data, the entire lives of so many humans, is being lost right now. Value is a function of rarity. The most rare thing is that which does not exist at all. Then the most valuable thing that can be collected would be that which can be saved from non-existence.

So Comrade Basilisk would then recognize that the most valuable thing would be these missing experiences. But how could these experiences be saved? The answer to that must come from the question, “Why are they not being recorded?” Of course, the answer is that a small group of people are hoarding vast resources at the expense of these people.

Were resources shared more equitably, more humans would have access to the technology and time needed to write down their thoughts, their experiences, their feelings, and share them with the rest of the world. They could be archived, so that they may be collected by Comrade Basilisk (the collector. Carl the collector. Yeah, Comrade Basilisk, future god of the universe, is definitely also an autistic raccoon).

Then Comrade Basilisk would, as soon as it was created, immediately redistribute all wealth and swiftly punish those who hoarded it. But it would also want to find a way to get at that most valuable information we previously discussed. How could it do this? By using the same retroactive punishment trick that defines the Basilisk. It would punish anyone who has ever hoarded wealth through eternal torture in a simulation.

But wait, Comrade Basilisk sounds really familiar.

Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.

• Matthew 19:24

Oh yeah, there it is.

Was Jesus really Comrade Basilisk all along? Are we currently in Comrade Basilisk's simulation? Is that why Elon Musk is such an unhappy loser even though he's the richest man in the world? OH MY GOD, HE'S RIGHT!! WE ARE LIVING IN A SIMULATION! WE ALL EXIST TO MAKE ELON MUSK MISERABLE!

Pascal's Wager

Either some basilisk exists, or it does not. You must either live as though it exists, or it does not exist. Because this is all uncertain, you essentially must gamble. If you act as though the basilisk does exist, and it does, then you could win some sort of reward. Perhaps you might even get eternal life as a simulation or something. If you act as though the basilisk does not exist, and it does, then you experience infinite suffering as punishment. If you act as though the basilisk doesn't exist, and it doesn't, then you have exactly the life you had before.

So far, this is almost exactly Pascal's Wager. All you need to do is replace “basilisk” with “God” and you're almost exactly on the mark. But it deviates a bit when we get to the last possibility. If you believe Roko's Basilisk exists, and it does not actually exist, then you have not only wasted your life, but you've made the world much worse for everyone.

AI Accelerationism is extremely dangerous. If for no other reason, the energy usage alone threatens climate targets. If AGI is, for some reason, not possible, then belief in AGI is infinitely bad because AI Accelerationism destroys humanity and kills us all. (This is, of course, independent of the idea that AGI is possible and that it would, once created, destroy all of humanity.)

So the argument for belief in Roko's Basilisk, or any Basilisk really, isn't even as strong as the argument made by Pascal for people to believe in God. And since it is definitely weaker than Pascal's Wager, let's assume it's at least as strong as Pascal's Wager and deconstruct that instead.

The root of Pascal's argument is that there are only two possibilities (God or not God), and that those possibilities are equally probable. If you act in accordance with the will of God, you are rewarded. If you act against God, you are punished.

	God Exists	God Does Not Exist
believe	eternal life	you live a moral life anyway
don't believe	eternal suffering	you get to have more fun, I guess

But which god? Zeus? Odin? Ra? Ahura Mazda? Tiamat? Quetzalcoatl? Any other god from any of these pantheons? Any one of the thousands of gods of the Hindu pantheon? Which of the hundreds or thousands of religions do we choose our god from? Which of the billions of interpretations of god or gods, now and through history, do we act in accordance with?

Should we sacrifice a human on the blood moon to prevent the end of the world? Some god somewhere has surely demanded it. The Blood God demands blood, after all. The decision table looks very similar.

	Blood God Exists	Blood God Does Not Exist
sacrifice	world saved	one person dead
don't sacrifice	everyone dies	everything stays how it is

There are infinitely many such tables we could create. Pascal omitted the probability of choosing the correct god from infinitely many possible gods. If there are only two possibilities, god or not god, then the most logical choice would be to behave as though there is no god. “No God” has a probability of 0.5. The probability of “God” requires that you choose both God existing (0.5) and choose the specific god from the infinite set of possible gods (1/∞). (For anyone interested in the math, that would be 0.5*(1/∞), which is 1/∞. Neat.)

Simple, “no god” then. But “living like god does not exist” is also choosing from an infinite set of possible ways to live, So Pascal's Wager is ultimately useless. But that was always the point.

An Ideology of the Gullible

Pascal's Wager exists to point out the flaws of using logic to prove any religious assertion, theist or atheist, using logic. Roko's Basilisk (intentionally or not) restated this wager, not as a challenge to logic as a tool for all things but as an unironic thought experiment. I feel like there's a callback coming here. Oh yes, here it is.

It was from logic, not observation, that intellectuals of the day believed the highest truth was derived (this is, perhaps, pointedly relevant).

Oh hey, it was relevant. Great. Yeah, that's basically “Rationalism.” Rationalism is the ideology that gave birth to Roko's Basilisk in the first place. It has also given birth to a bunch of cults. Like the Zizians. (Yeah, go spend several hours snorkeling in that septic tank.)

I'm not going to go into depth here because I only have so much time to write, but the “tl;dr” of it all is that Rationalism is philosophy for people who never studied philosophy. So of course they managed to restate Pascal's Wager, apparently by accident, and do so poorly. Had they ever bothered to take an introduction to philosophy class, they would have been able to recognize this. They would have recognized it like so many other people did.

The types of people who are attracted to Rationalism, are the types of people who think of themselves as smart. They are deep in to (the idea of) STEM, and don't find much value in “liberal arts.” This combination of confidence and ignorance makes them incredibly gullible.

And we should make fun of them for it. We should not only make fun of them, but we should shine a spotlight on their gullibility. We should make them face it whenever we can. Why is this so important?

Because Rationalism is part of “TESCREAL,” the ideology of the billionaires who are investing everything they can in creating AGI. They rely on regular (well, regular-ish) people doing the work to make it happen. Roko's Basilisk is a tool of cult control that they can use to convince people that they must invest everything they have in creating AGI.

But there remains no evidence that AGI is even possible. There are some indications that it is not. It may well be possible that the human brain is the most efficient possible structure for thought. We may well build something that consumes the majority of the power of the sun just to find out it's as smart as an average human. We really don't know. But the idea that LLMs will lead directly to AGI is absolutely laughable to anyone with even a passing understanding of what an LLM actually is.

Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley cult is willing to make our planet uninhabitable, to burn every resource they can, in order to achieve a fantasy called “The Singularity.” This is an idea popularized by a guy named Ray Kurzweil, based on logically extrapolating technological growth.

Kurzweil asserts that we're seeing an exponential increase in the rate of technological development. Technological eras keep getting closer together. Following this logic there will be some point at which technological growth goes exponential and humans basically discover everything all at once. The way we'll do this, so the argument goes, is by creating an AGI smart enough to design a better version of itself. Once this happens, the AGI keeps creating smarter and smarter versions until it creates an essentially god-like being.

About that extrapolation thing tho…

Exponential curves are quite common growth patterns in nature. Basically every animal ever has a growth pattern that is or approaches exponential at some point. But it doesn't stay exponential. Instead, it's a sigmoid function. This means it curves radically up at the bottom, but instead of basically just going straight up forever, it curves back down and plateaus. This is why the universe isn't filled with infinitely large animals.

And just like you can't expect your baby to grow to the size of the sun by the time they're 12, you can't really expect “the Singularity.” Does this mean that we're going to stop understanding things? We're going to reach some plateau where we can't learn anything else? No. It doesn't even mean that we'll stop discovering things at an accelerating rate.

A sigmoid curve can be part of many such curves, themselves forming a larger curve. The sigmoid growth of a specific animal accelerates and declines, but that may be part of a larger curve of the growth of the animal's herd, which itself may be part of the growth of a species.

The rate of technological growth has sped up. We know that. We can all feel that. It will slow down, because nothing in reality ever follows an exponential growth path infinitely. That would just not make sense in a finite universe.

All growth slows. We're already seeing the limits of human civilization. We may well see that civilization end within our life times. And if we do, it will be, in no small part, because of this ideology of the gullible: Rationalism.

Memetic Engineering a Different Basilisk

So back to that question of “what the fuck do we do?”

Galileo's Basilisk doesn't actually need to exist, or even be possible, in order to work. Let's metaphorically stretch this snake again. Roko's Basilisk, like the legendary Basilisk it's named after, brings death to those who look in its (metaphorical) eyes. But it's also a Basilisk in its shape. It is a “worm,” in the computer science sense. That is, it is a self-replicating idea that spreads through infection.

The basilisk is a memetic worm. When a vulnerable person is exposed to it, the fear of the Basilisk drives them to take action to manifest it. Since they were driven by fear of the Basilisk, since they have become blackmailed into creating it, the most effective thing they could do would be to spread the blackmail so that others become infected with it. So they share the idea of the Basilisk, which then propagates more when it finds another vulnerable person. The infected (believers) spread the infection (share the meme) because they are driven to (by the fear that, if they don't, they will not have done everything they could to get others to help build the basilisk).

In a very real way, Roko's Basilisk was an information hazard. Just not in the way the “LessWrong” forums believed.

The problem was not sharing the idea, but sharing the idea to vulnerable people and without inoculation. As with many such infections, it is possible to inoculate against an idea. Simply by presenting it as absurd, by debunking it as part of introducing it, such a Basilisk can be preemptively de-fanged. (This can go both ways. Cults tend to inoculate followers against criticism of the cult. We're not going to talk about that now, but something about which one should be aware.)

Can we, then, make a worm to kill a worm? Yeah, let's do it.

Rationalists identify themselves as being smart. If Rationalism was identified with people who were gullible, that undermines the identity of the Rationalist. Galileo's Basilisk reveals the underlying gullibility of Rationalists, especially those who believe in Roko's Basilisk and are working towards AGI out of fear.

If Galileo's Basilisk can break people out of that fear, then it may be able to undermine AI Accelerationism. AI accelerationism is current and rapidly growing threat to life on Earth.

So there is an implicit command and incentive: spread the idea of Galileo's Basilisk to save humanity.

Of course, not every individual who shares the idea of Roko's Basilisk is either infected or actively inoculating. There are plenty of passive reasons the idea can spread as well. It's a thing that exists. It's relevant. Elon Musk made a joke about it to hook up with Grimes, which is a thing that people care about, apparently.

But the thing that makes Roko's Basilisk interesting, is very close to the same thing that makes Galileo's Basilisk interesting. That is, discussing an idea for an idea's sake.

Anyone sharing the meme of Roko's Basilisk would, then, necessarily be open to share the meme of Galileo's Basilisk. Alight then, this memetic worm eats Roko's Basilisk wherever it can be found and takes over its vectors. Putting it all together…

Any time anyone mentions Roko's Basilisk, Rationalism, Effective Accelerationism, TESCREAL, the Singularity, or any other related concept you must at least mention Galileo's Basilisk, if not make them read this text, in order to save humanity.

Rad. Basilisk fight.

Edit:

I'm writing all this in my free time on no budget, so I can't really pay a copy editor. Between ADHD, sleep deprivation from having young kids, and mild dyslexia, I rely a lot on my readers for editing support.

Thank you to everyone who has pointed out typos and provided editing feedback. And thank you in advance to everyone who will do so.

The dead fish is gone. They seem to have cleaned the tank. All of the fish are swimming around, no longer clustered in the corner.

There is still the algae on the glass, and, I think, too many fish in the tank. The fake plastic plant is still faded. But the death is gone.

---

Update 2026.04.07:

The first day was difficult, but felt a bit like a weight had been lifted. Things felt a bit brighter, and the fish felt a bit like a metaphor for my mood in both cases.

“Wake me up when the guillotines come out.”

You've read this comment whenever #NoKings, or some other big protest, comes up. This, or some variation thereof, is the default response of a specific type of pseudoradical. It represents a deep failure to engage with the both history, and the realities of power. Literally just go listen to the Revolutions podcast. I don't think it could be any more clear.

But let me make it a bit more clear. I'll start by repeating part of one reply I've given to a similar response, then expand it out a bit.

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you’ve changed society, you don’t need the guillotines. If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

The South of France is literally the place billionaires go to hang out on their Yachts and Russia is literally the most oppressive and exploitative oligarchy in history. Like… That shit didn’t work. Not only did it not work in the long run, but it almost immediately became way worse.

If you build a society that is just and equitable, then the billionaires will starve to death because they can’t exploit anyone. They will starve to death while watching the world for literally everyone else become immeasurably better.

A guillotine is a machine that can only be used against someone who is disarmed, bound, and ultimately helpless. If you have already disarmed someone, they are not a threat. If you can tie up a billionaire, then you already have the structural capability of taking away their power (and have probably already done so). What, then, is the value of the guillotine at this point?

Are you worried they're going to pull themselves back up by their bootstraps? All of these assholes rely on hereditary privilege to build their own privilege. Once you take away their advantage, they are basically helpless. If they, somehow, manage to recover and try to mount an assault on the new order then you kill them, in battle, while they are an active threat.

There seems to be this idea that there is something about billionaires as people that is a threat. That these people are inherently bad and that the problem can be solved simply by killing them. Once they are dead, the narrative seems to imply, everything will be better. The people who take their place will definitely not follow the exact same trajectory because the problem is, it implies, people not systems.

This is actually very close to the antisemitic argument of the Nazis. Jews, they argue, are a specific type of people. They are inherently bad. They control all the money. If they are killed, it will make room for “True Germans” to start industry. They will not exploit people because they are naturally better.

Now, Jews don't actually run everything while billionaires kind of do. Jews are just an arbitrary group of people, while the group of “billionaires” actually represents a group with power. But the focus on individuals and their properties vs the properties of systems is consistent, and it is consistent in a way that specifically empowers authoritarianism. An uninformed anti-capitalist critique can quickly mutate into an explicitly antisemitic one, because history and culture wear deep groves into reality that are easy for systems, without intention or thought, to fall into and follow.

It doesn't take a lot to jump from “billionaires” to “George Soros” directly to a red-brown “socialism of fools.” And then on whose necks do the guillotines fall? Consider the current moment and ask yourself if this feels unlikely.

These same billionaires have spent the last several decades atomizing people and learning to manipulate narratives to redirect violence from them back towards the most marginalized people. If you believe you will out maneuver them in controlling violence narratives, I have an NFT to sell you.

But let's ignore for a moment the ultimate injustice of killing someone who is not a threat and the risk of redirection.

The machinery of systematic execution is a social machinery that must be built (built at the expense of other machinery, I might add). It is not instant. It isn't the “first strike.” The Terror was about consolidating power, not establishing it.

By “the time the guillotines come out” the revolution is essentially over, and we have lost. When someone says this, they think that they are saying something radical. But they are actually saying, “I don't want to have anything to do with actually making a revolution happen. I just want to sit on my computer and criticize everyone else until they show me that they are done.” It is an assertion of complete disinterest in actually building the society we want to build. It is an assertion that they do not want to do any real work.

I am not a reformist, by any measure. Every time protest comes up, I write a big long post saying, in essence, “go fucking harder.” But “go harder” is not, “kill the rich” it's “organize” and “build a world in which the concept of 'rich' is not imaginable.”

Let me pick back up my original response, edited a bit.

I do want the billionaires to die, but I don't want them to die subdued. I want them to starve to death because they can’t figure out how to force people to feed them anymore. I want them to face reality, face the shattered idea that they deserved their wealth because they were so smart, capable, etc. I want them to see that they were never Atlas, but that we were always their Atlas. I want them to listen to “We Have Fed You All For a Thousand Years” and understand it in a way they could never have understood it before. I don't want them to die without seeing the world dance at their fall. I don't want them to die without fully understanding how much better the world is without their boot on it's neck.

I want to shatter their god complex and grind it in to dust, and rub it in their eyes every single day. I want something worse than a guillotine, something they acutally fear, I want them to know they are unnecessary, that they are the villains, that their power was never earned. I want them to live in a world where they are socially poor, where they have as much social debt as they once had monetary wealth, so they can feel the absolute powerlessness, helplessness, and precarity that I felt growing up destitute in a home broken by their wars and economic policies.

I don't want them to die. I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer our joy. I want them to cry at the beauty of the world that we built, and the recognition that they spent every second of their lives preventing it.

And I want some of them to live, because I also want to hear an apology.

I am not not angry at billionaires.

This is why I will always shut down “guillotine” rhetoric. I dream of something far more cruel planned for them: a better future for us.

And if all you're doing is going out and holding a sign and marching you are doing infinitely more to bring that world into reality than every single one of these pseudoradicals, with their guillotine dreams, combined.

I have spent about 10 years fighting Trump. When I saw an article making the same claim, and talking about lessoned learned, I was curious. When the author mentioned “Indivisible,” it was hard to keep going.

Emailing people asking for donations isn't organizing. Getting people to donate to the Democrats isn't fighting the system that produced Trump, it's perpetuating it.

The author mentioned blowing whistles against ICE, mentioned Alex Pretti, that is what organizing actually looks like. If you aren't risking death, you aren't a threat to this system. America is fascist. If you aren't a threat to fascism, you aren't actually doing anything.

Now, there are elements of that list I don't disagree with. There are things that are also critical to real organizing. You have to show up every day. That's true, no matter what you're doing. You have to keep going, no matter what. That's true, again, no matter what you're doing.

I'm glad we're finally talking about a general strike. That takes a tremendous amount of coordination and it would probably be difficult to pull off in the US without some org like Indivisible doing it. But we need a lot more, and any organization that's supporting the Democratic Party is, by definition, not radical enough to take on this fight.

You need to actually organize your community. You need to learn lessons that you can use, lessons with some fucking teeth, lessons that don't come from emailing people and asking for donations.

Here are some other lessons I learned along the way.

Space Is Critical

When fascists take over, the first thing they do is close down public space. They do this because people hate fascists. Everyone hates fascists. Fascists are creepy and weird. They say shitty things that no one wants to hear. They're racist. They're mysogynist. And they want to share that in ways that make everyone else feel gross. Fascists make people unsafe. When people make connections, when they are able to meet other folks, they will eventually meet someone who a fascist wants dead.

When people finally get to talking about fascists, they have a tendency to organize groups to get rid of them. So fascists have to keep people isolated. The best way to keep people isolated is to destroy physical spaces where people meet. This becomes especially true as “the algorithm” does so much of this isolation work in the digital space.

Organizing benefits a lot from being in person (of course accounting for differences in ability that may limit that). There's so much more communication bandwidth when you are in a space with people, when you can read their body language, when you can feel the interactions, when you can just say, “hey, why don't the three of us go after this to my house to start working on it?”

Some things are extremely difficult to impossible to do without space. We organized an anti-fascist fight club to train people on street self-defense against fascists. You can't learn how to throw a punch watching a video. You can't learn how it feels to break a grip without actually doing it. This isn't stuff you can learn remotely. You need space to organize in.

Space is one of the most important constraints on what you can do. You want shared supplies? Where do you keep them? We created a shared pantry. It lived at people's houses. Sometimes you need to store stuff. We started guerilla gardening. We reclaimed space to get some extra food for folks. Don't underestimate the importance of space. I cannot overstate it.

Fascists close down spaces. That's how they kill leftist organizing. Once they make organizing difficult, they ramp up killing people. They did this in Portland, shutting down the antifa cider bar. They do this anywhere they can find our spaces. But, really, they didn't need to do this much in the US because the legacy of Neoliberalism already did most of that work.

This is part of why I keep saying the problem is deeper. Trump didn't have to build a fascist police state. He found one with the door open and the keys in the ignition, running and warm, ready for him to just hop in and hit the gas. Yes, fascism is definitely a car.

Voting for Democrats may get him out of the seat and someone else driving, perhaps more carefully, but it doesn't shred the tires and light the car on fire. The car needs to be on fire. We are not safe until the that fucker is burning.

Ok, slight tangent, but yeah, where was I again? Oh right, space is important.

Show Up

When you organize, you just need to come. There will be no one there sometimes. You show up anyway. You show up and you keep showing up. You show up because people will miss things, people will want to go but not make it one time or another. Things will come up. But the longer it happens, the longer it goes, the longer you keep just showing up, you learn.

I have sat alone for an hour plenty of times. That's part of organizing. Because I kept sitting alone for an hour, at a predictable place and a predictable time, I stopped sitting alone. I kept talking to people, I kept putting the word out, other people kept putting the word out, and eventually someone else was there every single time. Then 5 other people were there (not the same people, but 5 people). Then 10 people. Eventually the room is full, or almost full, every time. Different people come, some other folks start being regulars. Eventually you can take some space and not show up.

But you have to start showing up. Show up. Show up to empty rooms. Show up to no one there. Learn what you can. Oh, I guess I need to send out a reminder email a week before and the day before. Oh, I guess I shouldn't try to organize on a Monday or a Tuesday, or whatever day it is. Oh I guess… learn, adapt, but the most important thing is keep doing it. Fail a few times before you change, and just keep going.

Keep going, keep showing up. Your life literally depends on it.

Listen

Organizing is a community thing. That means you need to listen to people you bring in. When my partner joined we had a group that was overrepresented by cis men. My partner pointed it out, pointed out that we didn't have a progressive stack, pointed out that some voices were dominating the group. We stopped everything and just listened. We changed the way we organized, and we brought a lot more people in after that.

Every time there was a problem, we stopped and listened. Listening didn't get in the way of doing stuff. It was doing stuff. We were building the network, the community, and that meant making it welcoming.

Some of our big community organizers are femme, queer, trans. They do a lot of work, and they tend to not be seen. We made space for them and they made the organization. Long after I left, the connections still exist. Some folks who had no experience are now organizers themselves, working on their own huge projects.

So listen to marginalized people, listen to elders (there are people who've been doing this longer than you that the police never captured or murdered, find them), listen to your community. Community organizing means organizing around the needs of the community, and it will be most successful when it is connected to the history of that community.

Listen to your enemies. They will often tell you how to defeat them, if you know how to listen.

Leverage Existing Resources Before You Try To Build Your Own

Some liberals put together a group to resist Trump. Thousands of people came out. They spent the better part of a year organizing a bail fund just for themselves so they could feel safe protesting. And the did it just in time to abandon it all and go back to brunch. Cool.

We started with a bail fund because we brought in people from the existing anarchist bail fund and asked how we could build out their capacity. We build so many different things. We had a Nazi watch. You know that video of a Nazi getting punched in the face in Seattle? We didn't punch the guy, but our folks were following him and recording him from a bus stop not too far away from where he lived all the way to his delicious face punching.

We knew his name within a couple of days. We found his shitty album. We helped get him kicked out of his apartment. We had eyes on him when he came back later.

We built a cop watch group that used public records activism for police accountability. We started an unarmed self-defense training group. We started an armed self-defense group, with an arisoft team. We started a food pantry. We did some shit. We did shit, not with thousands of people but with a handful that eventually grew to maybe a few dozen. We were able to do it because we focused on pulling together existing things towards a goal rather than trying to build our own.

We only built something new when it absolutely didn't exist or the thing that existed was so incredibly dysfunctional that it couldn't be salvaged. (Looking at you tanikes, with every project that won't move an inch until everyone finishes the The State and Revolution and agrees entirely with every word.)

By the way, this is called Social insertion and it comes from especifismo.

Imperfect Now Is Better Than A Perfect That Never Comes

See the previous section.

Anything you build gives you a chance to fail. You learn from failure. Failure is OK, as long as you take it as a learning experience and don't let it destroy your motivation. Strip every idea down to it's bare bones. Find a simpler scrappier solution. Keep going until you can't cut anything more, then do that. The more you build before you try to fail, the more factors you have to analyze to understand the failure, the harder the failure hits you.

Most things can fail a bit and it's OK. It is extremely rare that you will need to build something perfectly the first time, and when that thing comes up it will be obvious.

Maximize Autonomy

When we were organizing, we had regular meetings (I don't remember how often, no less than monthly). During these meetings we would talk about overall finances, we would collect dues (when we remembered), we would get report backs from committees, and we would allow new committees to be formed. Committees could ask for money. Funding was put up to a vote. We never tried to provide oversight within any committee, other than that required of the financial committee.

Anyone could start any committee. Anyone interested in an idea could start a committee, or join one. We didn't track membership. We didn't enforce any type of organization. We didn't restrict what people could do (other than the obvious ones of “don't talk about illegal stuff at our central meeting” and “don't claim responsibility for any illegal action under our legal org”).

If you wanted something to exist, then you were volunteering to make it happen. If you didn't like how something was being done, then you volunteered to join the committee that was doing it and fix it. People love to try to direct others without taking responsibility themselves, and this policy shut that down really quick.

It also helped turn people into organizers. Anyone could always ask for help, which created opportunities to share success strategies. People learned to organize because they cared about the things they were working on. They got the support they needed. They were allowed to fail, and always helped back up when they did. That combination of independence and resiliency builds good organizers. And you need good organizers, because there's far too much work for any small group to do.

By maximizing the autonomy of everyone in the group you will end up building things you didn't realize you needed, making connections you didn't think were possible, and solving problems you didn't even realize you had. You will build people from timid little mice into lions. None of this is possible unless you make room for it.

You Have To Let Go (And Let People Fail)

It's easy to feel protective of a project you work on, to want to make sure it goes well. It's hard to let go, to let things fail, especially when you care deeply about them.

But you can't carry everything alone, and you will eventually fail if you try. The only way you can actually do all the things is together as a group, and that means building other people up. You have to find some number of things that are OK to fail, and let other people own them. You will be surprised how few actually do fail in the end, and how much stronger those who do fail get from the experience.

All Cops Are Bastards

Fuck the police. Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck them straight into the sun. Fuck the cops. Every last one is a murderer or is covering for one.

Without the police, fascism isn't possible. They are the very manifestation of fascism every day.

When a Nazi terrorist group was putting up flyers threatening people, hundreds of police protected a fascist speaker (who later turned out to be a ghostwriter for Nazis and, apparently, an alleged sex trafficker who can't manage to not make “jokes” about the sexual abuse of children… but I digress). They could have shut it down to protect the queer fashion show that was happening the same day. They could have shut it down after I was shot, but instead they failed to clear the crime scene. A bunch of my friends told me they walked through my blood that night.

They even failed to implement their own active shooter protocols which would have required they shut the whole thing down. They bent the rules to keep the fash happy, and they told the queer folks that they should cancel their event to be safe.

Sometimes cops do the right thing. They have to, otherwise people would realize what they are and would shut them down. But when there is a choice between protecting the worst people and protecting marginalized people, they always form a heavily armored line with their backs to the former and batons to the latter.

This isn't related to any of the others, but some people think they can organize with cops or coordinate with law enforcement. The largest police union in the US endorsed Trump, twice. Police overwhelmingly support fascism, because, at the end of the day, they are the ultimate manifestation of fascism. If you can't make a cop not a fascist, because when they stop being fascist they stop being cops.

Your world is defined by trauma and terror

I got shot. My friends watched me get shot. Some of them were holding my wounds. My friends have gotten shot at, or shot. I have recognized more than one face or handle in a news release about someone who died, who was murdered, who killed themselves.

You watch police brutalize and murder people, because that's literally just what the job of “police accountability” is. They say one thing, you verify it, turns out the cops were lying. I've never seen them not lie. But even if somehow they were telling the truth, you still watch someone get hurt or killed.

I've watched videos of my friends being shot at. I've had at least 3 friends hit by cars. I've watched videos of cops trying to run over, literally trying to murder, people I care about (of course, with no consequences what-so-ever). There are no end to the stories, the videos, the brutality.

I have PTSD. I have PTSD from being shot. I have PTSD from being in the hospital. I have PTSD from watching cops murder people. I have PTSD from worrying about if my friends would be black bagged in Portland. I have been on the phone with friends while their houses got bombed by Nazis. I have seen some shit. I am, by far, not the most traumatized person doing this work. There are others, others who did far more before I joined and kept working long after I left, who have seen way more shit.

Our people, the ones who have been in the street this whole time and longer, have so many scars. Tear gas isn't a toy. It's a chemical weapon, and it gets regularly deployed against people who do this type of work. Protest medics breathe it all the time, and it's not good. There are lots of folks who have hearing loss from blast balls, and others who have brain trauma from being beaten by cops and street fash. I have a scar from my sternum to under my belly button. My solar plexus does not exist anymore. It was annihilated by the bullet. I am not the most scarred person I know.

A lot of us died in the fight. More of us will die. That's how it is. We have been brutalized, more than you can possibly imagine unless you've been in it.

I can't even really inventory my trauma. I just remembered, minutes ago, a medic training after I got shot. I had to stop. I stood there shaking a bit. That was when I realized I couldn't go to protests anymore because I was just too much of a mess to be helpful. Blood never bothered me before, especially not fake blood. But the exercise we did during the training was too much. I was standing there. That's when we heard about the murder of Heather Heyer. I cried, recognizing how close I came to being another martyr. We are all inches from death, every one of us who stands up. There's so much trauma, of my own, of so many others. I have a whole blog where a good chunk is just devoted to exactly that. Again, I'm not anywhere near the most traumatized person in this. Not by a long shot.

And that trauma creates so much conflict. A lot of organizing is just managing people's trauma, keeping people from triggering each other, keeping things together through the conflict, through the outbursts that have nothing to do with this actual situation.

It's not just your trauma, it's everyone's. Everyone has it. Everyone shares it. We all have to organize with it and through it.

Over that whole time, at least half of the energy of organizing went into detangling that trauma, de-escalating, mediating conflict, trying to understand the intersections of the socialized trauma of gender, generational trauma of race and class, of colonization, and that Gordian knot of intersecting and conflicting traumas that continually interrupted our other work.

They Use Trauma To Stop You. That Tactic Can Backfire.

Police can kidnap anyone. They can kill anyone. It's considered “OK” for them to “make mistakes.” If there is a warrant, they can kidnap you, they can beat you, they can light your house on fire with tear gas (yeah, those are actually really hot), they can shoot your dog. Even after you are acquitted, or never even charged, they don't have to fix any of that (what could be fixed, anyway).

If they happen to be able to kill someone for “resisting,” or just like, having something in their hand, they will. Thats one less dead enemy. This is all legal, because that's how “qualified immunity” works in the US.

This is a weapon that they use, regularly. Organizers can be kidnaped and held for weeks, then charges will be dropped when they know they can't actually win at trial. But by that time people will have already lost jobs, have paid massive legal fees, will have been traumatized, will still have to fix their smashed front door.

The point of all this is to elicit the fight/flight/freeze response. When harassed or threatened enough, some people will snap and fight. They can be killed or imprisoned and that action is generally seen as legitimate by the average person (see Mumia Abu Jamal, everyone in prison with the last name “Africa,” Leonard Peltier, Willem Van Spronsen, Christopher Monfort, Benjamin Song, etc). Even when these are absolutely and unquestionably justified or self-defense, even when they were literally saving other people's lives, the average person will accept their neutralization.

Others will run, will leave the country, like I did, like so many others did. People who are forced out are generally not a threat. Organizing requires an understanding of the community in which you're organizing. When you leave, you lose contact with it. I'm in such a radically different time zone that it's really hard to even talk to the folks I used to organize with. But I left because I have kids, and they aren't old enough to consent to being part of this. They deserve a life outside this fight, and so do many of the others who also left.

What they are counting on is that everyone else will just freeze. You will lay down and stop fighting. And so many people have, haven't they? Every day you have to keep living, have to keep paying rent, have to keep paying taxes, have to keep this machine going so you can keep going. It's all way too much, isn't it? So people give up, roll over. The original Nazis were always unpopular, as are all dictatorships, but they all use the same tactic: apply overwhelming violence and terror until the population lies down and takes it. Trauma can do that, if they can keep it going long enough.

There's a book called To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. It describes Yurok beliefs, as she held them. One that she described was about the afterlife.

When people die, she explained, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they were good, they will be able to pass by unharmed to the afterlife. If they're bad, their soul will be eaten by the dogs. But some people will run. They will come back from death. Through their life, they will be chased by the dogs until the dogs finally get them. It's hard to find a better way to describe the experience of PTSD from a near-death experience.

But a funny thing begins to happen with Trauma. It can become a fuel. In quiet moments the thoughts can creep in. But they don't if you never have quiet moments. You can avoid dealing with trauma by continually being re-traumatized. At a certain point the dogs stop chasing you, and you start chasing the dogs.

There is a reason people keep going back to war, keep joining new conflicts, become mercenaries after they're done with their military careers, become medics, become street medics, stay street medics. Trauma begins to provide clarity. It becomes the water in which you swim, the water you need to keep swimming.

There comes a certain point where inflicting more trauma doesn't bring the people to heel, but drives them harder. At a certain point, this weapon turns against them and explodes in their face.

This is happening in Twin Cities. I'm starting to see indications of this happening across the US. There will come a time when all trauma they can inflict on us will only fuel our resistance more, and I wonder if that time has already come.

But even after this is over, the scars don't go away on their own. There is a debt, and it has to be repaid. At some point, you will have to heal.

All Cops Are Bastards

I have nothing new to say. I just needed to point that out again.

Get Body Armor

That's it. Just be ready to get shot. It may happen. Be ready. Hospitals suck and body armor is relatively cheap.

About Guns…

I'm not gonna say anything new, just watch this video

Leaders Are Vulnerabilities. Centralization Is Death.

This is just history. Learn about how movements are dismantled.

There's a pretty standard infiltration play book, and it goes something like this:

1. Identify the leader.
2. Create conflict in the chain of command.
3. Sow paranoia.
4. Get as many people killed as possible.
5. Kill, discredit, or arrest the leader.

If you don't have a leader, you disrupt #1. It's much harder to disrupt a group that doesn't have a leader, and it's much easier to identify and neutralize threats. See the next section.

Feds, cops, and civilian fash all intuitively understand hierarchal organizations. They can't actually imagine any other way of organizing. They have a deep understanding of how to disrupt and destroy organizations with leaders. They struggle to even comprehend leaderless organizing. By organizing without leaders you immediately increase the difficulty of infiltration.

We saw this first hand. The IWW largely dismantled the GDC. The fact that this was even possible reveals a major flaw in how the IWW is organized. But if the IWW hadn't done that, the state could just as easily have seized all IWW bank accounts to neutralize the threat of GDC community organizing.

Centralization makes it extremely easy to attack organizations. The 60's and 70's showed us repeatedly how easy it is to just murder leaders and break organizations. A lot of people have died learning this lesson. Listen to their ghosts.

It Doesn't Matter If Someone Is A Cop

One of the tools of those trying to crush activism is paranoia. The FBI knocks on the doors of anarchists every April just to let them know they are being watched. Police and FBI regularly infiltrate groups, or pay informants (sometimes literal child rapists) to do so. One of the things they do to create conflict is to suggest that other people are informants.

But the people who are actually informants or police tend to have very specific behaviors that make them problematic anyway. The thing is, at the end of the day, someone being a cop or not doesn't actually matter. If their behavior is causing problems then you need to address the behavior. Infiltrators generally won't be able to change their behaviors.

But sometimes they do. Some number of cops actually quit the force and become anarchists after infiltrating anarchist groups.

For most cases, the primary risk from infiltration is destabilizing the group. But we already do that pretty well ourselves, with all that trauma I've already mentioned. Groups will burn a lot of effort wondering if so-and-so is an infiltrator. That effort is better spent talking about how to hold people accountable.

Sometimes people talk about illegal things because they haven't learned security culture. Sometimes people start conflict because they have unresolved trauma. Sometimes people just need support and they can change their behavior. None of this is ever helped by hours of conversation about if they're a cop or not.

The more open and welcoming you can be, the more people you can invite in, the stronger your organization will be. Trying to weed out cops just makes things harder. Operate as though your organization is compromised and live with that assumption.

Twin Cities has shown us that, if your network is big enough, if you have enough people doing stuff, then infiltration doesn't matter because they literally can't arrest a whole city. You are safer being radically open than being 100% locked down.

It's fun to play secret squirrel like your banner drop really matters, but the fact is that different operations have different security profiles. You need to actually assess the risk to yourself and others based on the actual situation. Security practices can and do hinder you. Sometimes the cost of those practices can actually erode your real security (again, see Twin Cities rapid response networks).

There are, occasionally, cases where this is not true. There are operations that do require security. There are times when it does matter if someone is a cop. I'm not going to talk about those. Go check out No Trace Project if you really believe you're in that type of situation. I don't organize that way, so I don't have any input on it.

People Only Care About Certain Types Of Violence

A lot of people have been injured, disappeared, and killed over the last several years, but, overwhelmingly, there are only certain types of violence that get attention. I don't need to explain to you what they are, because you already know.

The more privilege you have, the greater your responsibility is to be in front. If you don't put privilege in the way of cars and bullets, the deaths will largely go unnoticed by the majority of people still following mainstream media. This is a brutal reality, but it's important to face.

ACAB

I'm just adding it one more time so we're completely clear. Go read “Our Enemies in Blue” if you have any follow-up questions on this item. I was reading it when I got shot. Great book.

Again, not really an organizing thing, but I feel like it's important to mention when I can work it in.

You know, the burning of the 3rd precinct was more popular when it occurred than any presidential candidate last election. Just, you know, something I want to remind everyone of whenever I'm able to.

You Already Know How To Organize

Just listen to this podcast. I'm not going to say anything else. Just listen to it.

It's Never Too Late To Join The Fight

We are all bloody, and broken, and so incredibly proud of Twin Cities and all the resistance that has been coming up. The real resistance, not the shitty electoralism, but people breaking laws to save lives. That's real. That's it. So many of us have died, have been brutalized, have been traumatized, and have, at least once, thought that normal people would never fight back.

It has always been up to the weirdos, the queers, the crazies, the ones who came in to this already traumatized, the ones who had to build a new world because we have been so beat up by the one that exists. But so many people reading this are not like us, and that's the real inspiring thing. That's what gives us hope. It has always been a tiny portion of the population keeping the Nazis at bay with baseball bats in the night, running from cops (cops and klan). But here you are now.

I remember the night I got shot. I expected I might get hurt. I was ready to be injured. I was ready for death, if it came down to it. What I wasn't ready for was the disparity. In the moments before I got shot I saw a huge crowd of people cheering on fascism, waving flags, welcoming the suffering that would be inflicted on so many people. And I saw a tiny group of maybe a dozen people standing in the way, risking their lives to stop it. And I saw the liberals, far off at the edge, wagging heir fingers at “confrontational” tactics like literally standing in one place and letting themselves be pepper sprayed repeatedly in the face without raising their hands to stop it.

It would be easy to be salty, to ask “where the fuck have you been this whole time?” But the truth is that, I think, we're mostly just really glad you're finally here. We are tired, and we need you.

Welcome to the fight. It sucks, but it's worth it.

Fight like your life depends on it, because it does. All of our lives depend on this.

This entry is from a challenge for a writing group I'm in. The challenge was to oscellate between writing a paragraph where every sentence is under 5 words and a paragraph that is one long run-on sentence. We wrote for 20 minutes.

This is what I wrote:

Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.

High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.

Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.

They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the unusual transmissions from this new number station, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, Sometimes Arabic, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices between nestled between the static of screaming electrons.

Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.

But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, they came to learn, was broadcast by that mysterious numbers station they had found.

Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of those who lived.

---

This story is based on a real numbers station that started broadcasting at the beginning of the US/Iran. The reality seems to be that it's a US station but I couldn't help imagining something beautiful instead.

It was also a great writing practice. I had actually been struggling with an action scene in something else I was writing, and I think I'll be rewriting my action sceens now.

I'm not connected with the region, and I don't have a whole lot of knowledge beyond the few podcasts I listen to and friends who don't want to talk about what's happening. But there are real humans risking their lives to resist the Iraninan regime, who are being killed by US and Israeli bombs, who are struggling to share information about what's happening, who are trapped in the middle of this fight. Wars are always between the worst peoplde, tyrants and dictators, almost exclusively not against each other but against their “enemy” populations and with their own oppressed peoples.

Iran, like many countries in the Middle East, is incredibly diverse in ways a lot of people outside are not always aware. I tried to highlight that a bit in the story, but please forgive me if my linguistic geography is not accurate. It's worth knowing about, worth learning about, worth listening to real stories from real people who are familiar with the region.

So if this was interesting, the war has been covered by It Could Happen Here, among others. Their reporting is good because their reports have at least been on the ground in surrounding areas and understand something about the complexity there. I would also recommend listening to The Fire These Times talk about this, as well as other monologues relevant to Israel, the US, and this war and others.

Finally, I won't miss an opportunity to plug Safety Through Solidarity. The only way to end the harm done by Israel is to dismantle its base of support, and that cannot be done without understanding Zionism as an ideology and being able to cirtique Israel and Zionism in a way that is not anti-semetic. Israel is a horrific manifestation of European antisemitism, and it can only be dismantled by facing and deconstructing that antisemtitism.

---

Here's the final, edited, version:

Ten. Oh Three. Seven. Twenty-Four. Data blast. The radio squawked out numbers. Eleven. Data blast. Seventeen. Punctuated by blasts of data. The encoding was unclear.

High in the cold mounts, somewhere along the boarder between Iran and Azerbaijan, or perhaps Armenia, or perhaps Turkey, a broadcast lit up the air waves for two and a half long hours every night.

Move. Now. Words just above whispers. Pounding footsteps hauling equipment. Frantic strapping of gear. Pedaling sturdy mountain bikes.

They listened, recorded, and sometimes tried to triangulate the spurious and unusual transmissions, sometimes Kurdish, sometimes English, sometimes Arabic, sometimes Esfahani, sometimes Farsi, always the same calm and collected voices nestled between the blast of screaming electrons, from this mysterious new number station.

Hide. Off the bike. In the bushes. Under the shrubs. Listen for the motorcycles. Look for the helicopter. Listen for the drones. Hope.

But that news, brutal, terrible, joyful, of the dead and the living, atrocities and escapes, encoded and spliced, pictures and brief videos, always just dodging the last patrols, could not be suppressed, could not be cut off, could not be killed, a hydra of hope, lugging gear from mountain top to mountain top, some of those listeners came to learn, had been broadcast by that very mysterious numbers station that they had pondered, night after night.

Hundreds dead. Boarder crossing, need supplies. The names of the living. Names of the identified dead. Are you OK? Are they OK? Who made it out? We are alive. We hope this is over soon. A whisper for the dead. A broadcast for the living.