Means and Meaning

Co-Producing the Apocalypse

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 05:59:04 GMT

Signal/Noise is an ongoing series that cuts through the spectacle to find the structure underneath. Each installment takes a breaking moment (either political, cultural or economic) and traces the power dynamics most coverage misses. The signal is always there. You just have to know what to listen for.

I. Praise Be to Allah

On Easter Sunday, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Easter. The resurrection of Christ. The holiest day on the Christian calendar. And the leader of the world’s most powerful nation used it to mock a religion practiced by two billion people while threatening to bomb a country he’s already been bombing for five weeks.

The profanity will get the headlines. The “Praise be to Allah” will reverberate across the Muslim world in ways no American pundit can fully calculate. But the real signal is underneath both.

This is a president who doesn’t believe in anything except himself, performing crusader rhetoric for an audience of true believers who do. His “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth has been framing the Iran campaign in explicitly holy war terms for weeks. Hegseth has brought his personal pastor, an avowed Christian nationalist, into the Pentagon for press briefings and prayers during an active bombing campaign. Not a military chaplain offering counsel to troops. A Christian nationalist pastor, praying over targeting operations.

That’s not ceremony. That’s theology with a kill chain.

And here’s what Trump’s Easter post accidentally exposed: the religious architecture underneath the geopolitical surface. Four nuclear-armed or nuclear-adjacent civilizations are currently being driven by religious-nationalist projects that need each other to exist. They aren’t just fighting each other. They’re co-producing the conditions each one’s prophecy requires. Trump, who understands none of it, just made all of it visible in a single unhinged post on the day Christians celebrate the risen Christ.

He’s not driving this. He’s being driven by it. And that’s what makes this moment so dangerous.

II. The Four Holy Wars

This is not one war. It is four, wearing each other’s justifications like armor.

Start with the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth has brought his personal pastor, an avowed Christian nationalist, into the building for press briefings and prayers during an active bombing campaign. This is not military chaplaincy. This is operational theology. Behind Hegseth stands a movement of tens of millions: John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which has lobbied Washington for decades on the premise that supporting Israel militarily is a precondition for Christ’s return. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s first-term Secretary of State, publicly suggested America may be living out the Book of Esther. Peer-reviewed research by Nilay Saiya has found that when politicians empower Christian nationalist ideology, physical attacks against religious minorities increase. Sixty-five percent of white evangelicals told Pew that the Bible should override the will of the people when the two conflict. This is not faith. It is a political program with a theology attached.

Move to Jerusalem. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, has visited the Temple Mount over 200 times to assert Jewish sovereignty. He keeps a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in 1994, in his living room. The Greater Israel project isn’t metaphor for these people. It’s divine promise with military backing.

Move to Moscow. Patriarch Kirill has framed the war in Ukraine as a metaphysical struggle against the godless West. Putin receives “spiritual counsel” from him during wartime. The Third Rome doctrine holds that Russia is the final protector of true Christianity. Church and state as one organism with tanks.

Move to Tehran. The Revolutionary Guards have used explicitly theological language in operational communications throughout this war. Shia eschatology anticipates a final confrontation with the forces of falsehood, which map onto Israel and its American sponsor with a precision the ayatollahs find very useful. The assassination of Khamenei didn’t weaken the theocratic elements, it actually strengthened them.

Four forces. Four arsenals. One convergence point. And none of them can exit, because everybody’s enemy is everybody else’s evidence that they’re right.

III. Co-Producing the Apocalypse

Here’s the structural insight that should terrify you: these four forces aren’t just fighting each other. They’re feeding each other. Every escalation confirms every prophecy simultaneously.

When the US bombs Iran, the Revolutionary Guards tell their population that the Great Satan has arrived on schedule, exactly as the theology predicted. When Iran retaliates against Israel, Ben Gvir’s coalition points to the existential threat that justifies expanding into biblical territory. When the war destabilizes Europe’s energy supply, Kirill tells Moscow that the godless West is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence, right on cue. And when Hegseth prays in the Pentagon before selecting strike coordinates, tens of millions of American evangelicals see prophecy in motion, the cosmic struggle they’ve been waiting for, funded with their tax dollars and blessed by their pastors.

Nobody can exit this system. Everybody’s enemy is everybody else’s proof that God is on their side. The architecture is self-reinforcing, and the people inside it interpret every catastrophe as confirmation rather than consequence.

Tariq Ali saw this coming. I read his book The Clash of Fundamentalisms at Hampshire in 2003, and it restructured how I understood the relationship between Western imperial power and religious extremism. Ali’s argument was that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” framework was wrong. The real clash was between fundamentalisms, religious and imperial, that mirror and feed each other. He called American imperialism “the mother of all fundamentalisms.” Twenty-three years later, his framework has expanded: two additional nuclear-armed forces, Zionist messianism and Russian Orthodox civilizationism, have entered the loop. The architecture has only gotten more dangerous.

More recently, a Beijing-based educator named Jiang Xueqin has called this the Law of Eschatological Convergence: when sincere belief is backed by nuclear arsenals, prophecy has a way of manufacturing its own confirmation. I don’t endorse his specific predictions. But the structural observation is sound.

And at the center of all of it sits a 79-year-old president who believes in nothing except himself, mocking Allah on Easter while his War Secretary prays for the apocalypse in the building where the missiles are ordered launched. Trump isn’t driving this. He’s being instrumentalized by people who believe, sincerely, that they are living in the end times. A leader who understood the religious architecture might exercise restraint. A leader who doesn’t understand it can be manipulated by anyone who does.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s Monday.

IV. How the Last Crusade Ended

Pete Hegseth should know how this story ends. He probably doesn’t.

The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099. The Crusader kingdoms that followed lasted nearly two centuries, long enough to build castles and cathedrals and convince themselves that God had given them the land forever. They had military superiority, they had religious conviction, and they had supply lines stretching back to the most powerful kingdoms in Europe. And then Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, and within another century the Crusaders were gone entirely, expelled and absorbed back into a region that understood the geography as home, not as prophecy.

The lesson is always the same. Religious conviction and military superiority can take territory. They cannot hold it against populations with deeper roots, longer memories, and nowhere else to go. Every religious-military project in recorded history has believed it was the exception, the one God actually chose, the one that would succeed where all previous versions failed. That conviction isn’t a source of strength. It’s the architecture of failure. It’s what keeps you building castles in territory you will never be able to hold.

Look at the current map. Israel occupying roughly 30% of Lebanon. America bombing a 92-million-person nation into a succession crisis that consolidated the regime rather than collapsing it. Russia framing a grinding war of attrition as metaphysical destiny. Each one projecting power it cannot sustain into territory it does not understand, animated by a certainty that history says will not survive contact with reality.

The Crusaders built kingdoms that lasted 200 years. The British Empire lasted roughly 300. The American century is barely 80 years old and already bleeding out at a billion dollars a day in a war its own president cannot explain.

The castles always fall. The geography always wins.

V. Where It All Points

Four religious-nationalist projects, each one armed with or backed by nuclear weapons, each one accelerating the others, each one producing the evidence the others need to escalate. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a structural observation grounded in documented statements, policy positions, and military operations by named individuals in positions of power. Hagee lobbies. Ben Gvir visits the Temple Mount. Kirill blesses the tanks. The IRGC frames its war in the language of the Hidden Imam. And a Christian nationalist pastor prays over targeting operations in the Pentagon while the president posts “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning.

What Means and Meaning tries to do every week is name the architecture, the systems that shape what happens and who benefits. This week the architecture has stained glass windows and nuclear warheads. Saiya’s research demonstrates that when politicians empower this kind of religious nationalism, the violence doesn’t stay overseas. It comes home. It always comes home. Césaire told us this decades ago: the logic of domination abroad eventually returns to the society that launched it. The Crusaders didn’t just lose Jerusalem. They hollowed out the kingdoms that sent them.

The most dangerous “common sense” in the world right now isn’t economic. It’s theological. It’s the assumption, held by people with the capacity to end civilization, that the end is near and that their job is to bring it about. That mental architecture, when it shapes military operations, becomes self-fulfilling. And a president who mocks one religion on the holiest day of another while waging a war he can’t explain isn’t navigating these forces. He’s a passenger who thinks he’s driving.

So here is the question this moment demands of every one of us: if four fundamentalisms are co-producing the apocalypse, and none of them can stop because the others won’t, then who exactly is supposed to break the cycle, and what are we waiting for?

References

Ali, T. (2002). The clash of fundamentalisms : crusades, Jihads and modernity.

Saiya, N. (2024). Christian Nationalism’s Threat to Global Democracy. Review of Faith & International Affairs, 22(1), 102–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2023.2204679

Saiya, N., & Manchanda, S. (2025). Christian Nationalism and Violence Against Religious Minorities in the United States: A Quantitative Analysis. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), 64(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12942

Tomasky, M. (2026, April 6). You can smell it now: the Trump presidency is in total free fall. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/208633/trump-presidency-collapse-truth-social-iran?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&fbclid=IwY2xjawRArcVleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF6VXp6bDd4dWFyWXVhTFNGc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHoXrV8g6qXn2ticNpluYls4wXp3QzR5aJ55YcluoKhG25r1fo8OySIOCawZG_aem_t6FrQk7eKnFAr5BvRnhjfw

Wellmann, J. (2026, March 23). The end of the world according to Jiang. Coherent Reality.

Coherent Reality

The End Of The World According To Jiang

15 days ago · 709 likes · 157 comments · Jan Wellmann

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Means and Meaning publishes every Tuesday. If you found value in this analysis, I’d be very grateful if you’d consider buying me a coffee — your support helps me dedicate time to this work while keeping all content free and accessible.

You can also support this project by subscribing (it’s free!), sharing with others who might appreciate it, or joining the conversation in the comments. Sometimes the best antidote to anxiety is knowing you’re not alone in seeing what’s happening.

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Twenty-One Miles

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:02:12 GMT

History Rhymes is an ongoing series tracing the echoes between past struggles and present crises. Each installment revisits a moment of resistance, from labor uprisings to political repression, to reveal the patterns that persist, the forces that evolve, and the lessons we can use now. History doesn’t repeat, but power does. And so does the courage to challenge it.

I. The Tankers Are Stalled

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. Only six of those miles carry the shipping lanes, two lanes moving in opposite directions with a two-mile buffer between them. Through that corridor flows roughly one fifth of all the oil consumed on earth. One in every three barrels shipped by sea passes through this gap between Iran and Oman on its way to the refineries, the gas stations, the power grids, the entire infrastructure of modern life.

On March 2, 2026, Iran closed it.

The IRGC announced that any vessel attempting to pass would be set ablaze, and they meant it. Five tankers have been hit. Two workers are dead. Around 150 ships sit stranded on either side of the strait, their crews waiting, their cargo worth billions going nowhere. Brent crude has swung between $90 and $113 a barrel since the strikes began. Gas in the United States has climbed from $3.48 to $3.99 in four weeks. Maersk, the world’s shipping barometer, has suspended all crossings. Insurance companies have pulled war risk coverage entirely, which means that even if a captain wanted to run the strait, no underwriter on earth will back the voyage. This week, Bahrain introduced a draft UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to reopen the waterway. Russia and China will almost certainly veto it.

This feels unprecedented. It is not. The Strait of Hormuz has been a flashpoint for as long as empires have valued what flows through it. The commodity has changed. The technology has changed. But the geography has not. And the pattern, where outside powers project force onto this narrow passage and discover that the passage answers to no one, is older than oil, older than tankers, older than the nation-states now fighting over it. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Unless we understand why.

II. The First Empires at the Narrows

Long before oil made Hormuz the most dangerous waterway on earth, it was one of the most vibrant. During the fifteenth century, the island kingdom of Hormuz controlled all traffic in and out of the Persian Gulf and served as the commercial crossroads of the known world. When China’s Ming dynasty sent Admiral Zheng He with treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean in the early 1400s, they stopped at Hormuz. A Timurid ambassador named Abd al-Razzaq visited in 1442 and described a port with “no equal on the face of the earth,” where merchants arrived from Egypt, Syria, China, India, Bengal, Zanzibar and Southeast Asia, where adherents of various religions dealt equitably with all, and where the city had earned the name Dar al-Aman: the Abode of Security.

The Kingdom of Hormuz as depicted in a European map by Bellin in 1746 (Picture source: Map and Maps)

That security ended in 1507, when the Portuguese sailed around Africa and seized the island. They built a fortress and a customs house, issued paid permits called cartazas to anyone wishing to trade in Gulf waters, and extracted tolls from every ship that passed through the strait. As historian Rudolph Matthee has noted, Portugal made itself the tributary power in the region and became quite oppressive. They held Hormuz for over a century until a Persian-English alliance drove them out in 1622, with the English East India Company providing naval power in exchange for trading contracts. One empire replaced another. The strait remained the prize.

The British understood this as well as anyone. Their East India Company gave way to formal protectorates over the “Trucial States,” the colonial name for what became the UAE, and direct control of Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea and Bab-el-Mandeb. France established its colony in Djibouti for the same reason. Every European power grasped the same principle: if you control the strait, then you control the trade.

I grew up inside a different version of this architecture. The Caribbean was the original chokepoint economy of the European colonial era. The Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola, the Mona Passage, the Florida Straits, the Yucatán Channel: these narrow waterways controlled the flow of sugar, enslaved people, and extracted wealth (especially gold and silver) between the Americas and Europe for centuries. Pirates, privateers and imperial navies fought over them the same way empires fought over Hormuz. Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment is not natural but produced, and the mechanism of production has always been the same. Control the route. Tax the flow. Build a fortress at the narrows. The geography changes. The logic does not.

III. Oil Changes Everything

For centuries, the strait’s value was in the trade that passed through it, including everything from silk and spices to pearls and horses. Then, in the early twentieth century, oil was discovered in the Gulf, and everything about Hormuz changed. The chokepoint was no longer just strategically important. It was existentially important. The entire architecture of modern industrial civilization would be built on the assumption that oil flows freely through this passage.

The British understood this first. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became BP, won a lopsided concession to control Iran’s oil exports in 1933. When Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry in 1951, asserting that Iran’s oil should benefit Iranians, Britain sent the Royal Navy to blockade the port of Abadan and choke off Iran’s access to the world. Mossadegh became a national hero. The British and Americans responded in 1953 with a CIA-backed coup that overthrew him and reinstalled the Shah. As early as 1917, a British official document had declared that “oilers must be considered the most valuable vessels afloat.” By 1953, the nations that needed those oilers were willing to overthrow democracies to keep them moving.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 revealed the next turn. When Egypt’s Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain and France invaded, clinging to colonial control of the waterway that connected the Gulf to Europe. The United States forced them to withdraw. The old European empires could no longer back their own ambitions. But the lesson underneath was structural: whoever controls the chokepoint has leverage over the entire global economy, and attempting to control it by force eventually exposes the limits of the power making the attempt. The empires that built their wealth on what flowed through these narrows kept discovering that the narrows had power of their own.

IV. The Tanker Wars and the Logic of Disruption

The Iran-Iraq War began in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with American intelligence, weaponry and support. It lasted eight years and killed a million people. But the dimension most relevant to this moment is the one most Americans have never heard of: the Tanker War, which became the largest maritime conflict since World War II.

Iraq struck first, targeting Iranian oil tankers and the crucial loading terminal at Kharg Island. Iran retaliated by hitting Kuwaiti and Saudi tankers, since both nations backed Iraq. The escalation was deliberate. Iraq’s calculation was strategic: by attacking neutral shipping, it would force international intervention, which was precisely what Iraq needed because it could not win the war on its own. It worked. The United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and sent warships to escort them through the strait. The Soviet Union volunteered to do the same. The chokepoint had done what it always does: it turned a regional war into a global crisis, because the world’s economy could not afford to let the passage stay dangerous.

A US navy helicopter flies over a convoy of reflagged tankers consisting of Ocean City and Gas Princess. The USS Ford and USS Elrod are escorting the tankers. Circa 21 Dec. 1987. Photo by Norbert Schiller.

The numbers are staggering. Over the course of the war, 430 ships were attacked. 72 were sunk or damaged beyond repair. Eight million tons of shipping were destroyed, equivalent to a quarter of the tonnage lost in the entire Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. Iran and Iraq together lost over $510 billion in oil revenue. At night, Revolutionary Guard operatives dropped mines from vessels disguised as traditional dhows, the same wooden cargo boats that have carried goods through Gulf waters for centuries. Former Iranian president Rafsanjani called the mines “God’s angels that descend and do what is necessary.” As defense analyst Dave DesRoches put it years later, “Iran’s strategy at sea particularly is based on disruption. They know they can’t dominate. They have to disrupt.”

A Helicopter from the USS Chandler helps rescue 40 crew from the 232 thousand ton Cypriot registered oil tanker, Pivot, after it was attacked and set ablaze by an Iranian warship. It was coming from Saudi Arabia with crude oil. Circa 12 Dec. 1987. Photo by Norbert Schiller.

That strategy reached its darkest moment in July 1988, when the USS Vincennes, chasing Guard speedboats into Iranian territorial waters, mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for a military aircraft and shot it down, killing all 290 civilians aboard. In the United States, the incident faded from public memory almost immediately. In Iran, it never faded at all. A billboard erected in Tehran’s Vali-e-Asr Square years later showed American and Israeli ships sinking beneath the waves, captioned in four languages: “We Drowned Them All.” When Ayatollah Khamenei was presented with a portrait of a Guard soldier killed during the Tanker War, he smiled and said, “Excellent, very timely.” Americans forgot. Iranians built it into the national architecture. And now, in 2026, we see the same strait, with the same adversaries, using the same logic. The only thing that has changed is which side is asking the world for help.

V. Where It All Points

Five centuries. Portuguese fortresses, British blockades, American escorts, Iranian mines, Houthi drones. The technology changes every generation. The empires rotate. The 21 miles stay exactly where they are, and the pattern repeats with a regularity that should terrify anyone paying attention.

The structure has never changed because the dependency has never changed. Global civilization runs on fossil fuels extracted from one region and shipped through two narrow waterways. Every decade, a new actor threatens the strait. Every decade, the world economy convulses. And every decade, instead of addressing the structural vulnerability, we send more warships. Right now, 22 nations are negotiating how to reopen a passage that a fifteenth-century ambassador once called the Abode of Security. Bahrain is asking the UN Security Council to authorize force. Twenty-five hundred Marines are heading to the Gulf aboard the USS Boxer. Russia and China, who profit from the disruption, will veto any resolution. The architecture is working exactly as it always has: concentrating power at the narrows and forcing the rest of the world to react.

Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment is produced through control of extraction routes. Eric Williams showed us how the Caribbean colonial economy was built on the same logic: narrow passages, captive labor, wealth flowing outward to imperial centers. George Beckford saw the plantation as a total institution that organized entire societies around a single extractive purpose. The Strait of Hormuz is that institution applied to water. It organizes the global economy around a dependency so fundamental that when six miles of shipping lane close, parliaments convene, alliances fracture, and families in Florida, Ohio and every other state pay for it at the pump.

I grew up in St. Croix, where everything arrives by ship through narrow passages controlled by distant powers. Whenever a hurricane knocked out the fragile grid, or whenever boats couldn’t dock, or when a particular supply chain broke, we felt the architecture in our bodies. The world is now feeling what the Caribbean has always known: that when your survival depends on a chokepoint, you are never truly free. As such, the answer for the current geopolitical crisis is not more warships at Hormuz. It is building an energy system that does not route civilization’s survival through a corridor you could cross in a fishing boat. Until then, the pattern holds. Same strait. Different empire. Same crisis. Once again, we see that history doesn’t exactly repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

References

Gambrell, J. (2019, June 14). Oil tanker attacks echo Persian Gulf’s 1980s ‘Tanker War’. Associated Press: Worldstream. Available from NewsBank: America’s News Magazines: https://infoweb-newsbank-com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/apps/news/document-view?p=AMNP&docref=news/1740E9180F348460.

Hacaga, M. (2020). An easy target? Types of attack on oil tankers by state actors. Security and Defence Quarterly, 28(1), 54–69. https://doi.org/10.35467/sdq/118147

Irish, J. (2026, March 23). Bahrain pushes UN-backed action for Hormuz shipping; France tables rival text. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/bahrain-proposes-un-security-council-approve-use-force-protect-hormuz-shipping-2026-03-23/

Nonneman, G. (1999). The Gulf Tanker War: Iran and Iraq’s Maritime Swordplay. International Affairs, 75(1), 179.

Roos, D. (2026, March 13). The Strait of Hormuz: A Timeline of Tensions | HISTORY. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/articles/7-historical-fights-over-strait-of-hormuz

Ulrich, B. (2023). Hormuz. In The Medieval Persian Gulf (pp. 91–102). Chapter, Arc Humanities Press.

Bahrain proposes UN Security Council approve use of force to protect Hormuz shipping

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Palantir

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:46:38 GMT

The Quiet War is an ongoing series about the war that doesn’t make the front page. Each installment traces the infrastructure of repression being built while most people’s attention is elsewhere: the surveillance systems, the detention machinery, the erosion of rights that happens not in dramatic confrontation but in contracts, policies and code. This war is quiet by design. Naming it is the first act of resistance.

I. The Seeing Stone

Millions of people have seen Peter Jackson’s films about The Lord of the Rings. Fewer, though still many, have read the books. But J.R.R. Tolkien built something more than a fantasy world. He built a mythology that keeps warning us about things we haven’t stopped doing. One of those warnings involves a set of ancient seeing stones called the palantíri, and a technology company that named itself after them.

I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was five years old, starting with a picture book and one of those thick plastic records that narrated The Hobbit in fifteen breathless minutes. I read The Lord of the Rings in seventh grade, studied Tolkien for a year-long author project in eleventh, and I’ve revisited Peter Jackson’s films more times than I’d care to admit. So I know what the palantíri actually were, and more importantly, what Tolkien was warning about.

The palantíri were not weapons. They were seeing stones, crafted by the Elves, used for centuries as tools of communication and foresight. They were not evil by design. They became dangerous when they were concentrated in the wrong hands. And they didn’t lie. That was the real danger. As Genny Harrison recently wrote, they “offered truth without context and certainty without understanding. They did not force action. They made action feel inevitable.” Denethor, Steward of Gondor, looked into his palantír and saw Sauron’s armies with perfect clarity. What he couldn’t see was everything the stone chose not to show him. His field of vision narrowed until despair felt like the only rational response. He burned alive on a pyre of his own certainty.

In 2003, a company co-founded by Peter Thiel with seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, chose to name itself Palantir. It took the name and ignored the warning. Today, Palantir is one of the most powerful surveillance companies on earth. It builds the software that lets ICE track immigrants in real time, helps the Pentagon select strike targets in an active war, and is quietly embedding itself inside the Department of Education. Its stock has surged over 200% since the last election. Its contracts span the federal government.

Most people have never heard of it. That’s not a failure of the architecture. It’s a feature. The quiet war depends on remaining quiet.

II. The Architecture of Watching

Palantir’s flagship immigration product is called ImmigrationOS. An operating system, like the software that runs your phone, except this one runs deportations. It gives ICE what the company calls “near-real-time visibility” by cross-referencing FBI records, customs databases, tax filings, social media activity, cell-phone metadata, travel logs and student visa records into a single searchable intelligence web.

But Palantir doesn’t just collect its own data. It integrates everyone else’s. Amazon’s Ring cameras now feed into Flock Safety’s law enforcement platform, which connects over 6,000 police departments nationwide. ICE accesses that network through inter-agency sharing agreements, no warrant required. Between June 2024 and May 2025, law enforcement ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches through Flock’s systems, including in states with sanctuary laws that were supposed to prevent exactly this. A homeowner buys a doorbell camera to watch their porch. The state gets a surveillance node.

If you’ve seen the film The Lives of Others, you know the image: a Stasi agent in an attic, headphones on, manually listening to one apartment at a time. East Germany employed 90,000 full-time agents and hundreds of thousands of informants to surveil 16 million people. They still couldn’t achieve total coverage. Palantir does in milliseconds what the Stasi tried to do with file cabinets and human ears. And we install the listening devices ourselves.

Palantir’s defenders say the software doesn’t make decisions, it only supports them. As Harrison wrote, this distinction is “comforting and meaningless.” When a system shapes what agents see, prioritizes who gets flagged, and makes action feel like the logical next step, the fiction of human control is just that. In New Orleans, a secret Palantir program ran from 2012 to 2018, building risk-assessment databases on 3,900 residents. The City Council didn’t know it existed until reporters called them for comment.

That was the prototype. Since then, the architecture has scaled.

III. Colonialism Comes Home

Every tool Palantir sells to ICE was built for counterinsurgency. The data integration, the pattern analysis, the cross-referencing of movement and communication and association into targeting profiles: all of it was developed for Iraq and Afghanistan. Palantir’s first major contracts were with the CIA and the Pentagon, helping military intelligence fuse signals from occupied populations into actionable strikes. When those wars wound down, the company didn’t retire the technology. It pointed it inward. At immigrant communities. At activists. At students. At anyone the state designates as a population to be managed.

Aimé Césaire warned us about this. Writing in 1955, the Martinican poet and theorist argued that fascism was not an aberration in European civilization but colonialism brought home. The techniques of dehumanization, surveillance and control that empires deployed against colonized peoples would inevitably be turned against domestic populations. The logic doesn’t stay overseas. It never has. The plantation was the original surveillance state: total knowledge of the enslaved population’s movements, labor, relationships, and especially any potential resistance. The colonial census was the original data integration. Palantir is the digital update. The technology is new. The architecture of control is centuries old.

At the New York Times DealBook Summit, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said he cared about “reestablishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon.” A man running surveillance platforms for ICE, powering Pentagon targeting in an active war, and embedding his software in the Department of Education, disavowing the colonial label while building the colonial infrastructure. Césaire’s point exactly: the metropole never recognizes its own logic.

I vividly remember back in 2003, when the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program proposed doing what Palantir now does. Its logo was an all-seeing eye casting its gaze across the globe. The public backlash was so fierce that Congress defunded it. But as journalist Shane Harris documented, every component was quietly renamed and shifted to the NSA. The surveillance state learned something from that failure. Not that mass surveillance was wrong, but that the branding was too honest. Two decades later, the same capability operates at vastly greater scale, run by a publicly traded company with a market cap exceeding $70 billion. The all-seeing eye got a stock ticker and an earnings call. Nobody flinched.

IV. The Genie and the Bottle

In February, Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its AI for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Trump administration’s response was immediate and total. Every federal agency was ordered to cease using Anthropic’s technology. Defense Secretary Hegseth designated the company a national security risk and blacklisted it from all military contracting, accusing it of trying to “seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.” A company that said “our AI should not be used for mass surveillance of Americans” was framed as a threat to the republic.

Hours later, OpenAI signed a Pentagon deal under the same “all lawful purposes” language that Anthropic had rejected. Sam Altman claimed he’d secured identical ethical safeguards. But “all lawful purposes” is a boundary that moves wherever power needs it to move. Warrantless data purchases are lawful. ICE operations are lawful. FISA 702 collection is lawful. The government defines what’s lawful and then promises to stay within the limits it sets for itself.

But here’s what matters most: the AI provider is interchangeable. Anthropic gets expelled, OpenAI steps in, and the architecture doesn’t blink. Palantir is the constant. It is the integration layer between whatever AI capability exists and the operational power of the state. It takes the intelligence and makes it actionable: for ICE raids in Minneapolis, for strike targeting in Tehran, for monitoring which universities receive foreign funding. Karp himself has acknowledged what his company does. “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” he told Business Insider in 2020. He wasn’t confessing. He was advertising.

The genie isn’t out of the bottle. The bottle was designed to break. Palantir doesn’t want distance, like Anthropic. It doesn’t want a deal, like OpenAI. It wants permanence. And it’s getting it.

V. The War That Watches Back

Palantir runs ImmigrationOS for ICE in Minneapolis. It powers targeting systems for the Pentagon in Tehran. The same company. The same technology. The same architecture of seeing without understanding. The quiet war you’ve been reading about in this series and the loud war I wrote about in “Prayers Count Double When It Rains” are not separate conflicts. They are two functions of a single system: an empire that surveys, sorts, and strikes, abroad and at home, through the servers of one company most people have never heard of.

In 2009, Peter Thiel wrote an essay for the Cato Institute containing a sentence that should follow him for the rest of his public life: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He then co-founded the surveillance architecture to ensure they wouldn’t be. Stephen Miller, architect of the most aggressive immigration crackdowns in modern American history, holds up to $250,000 in Palantir stock, routed through a child’s brokerage account. The man who writes the policy profits from the technology that enforces it. This is not a conflict of interest discovered by accident. It is the structure working as designed.

Last week, in Spring Cleaning Your Class Consciousness, I asked you to examine the assumptions you carry without questioning. Here is one worth pulling from the junk drawer: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” That is the quiet war’s most effective piece of propaganda. It asks you to accept surveillance as the price of innocence, when the entire history of this infrastructure proves that innocence was never the point. The system does not watch because you might be guilty. It watches because watching is what the architecture was built to do.

Harrison’s closing words are the ones I keep returning to: “We are rebuilding the palantíri and telling ourselves we have learned from the story.” Tolkien understood that the danger was never the seeing stone itself. It was the arrogance of believing you could look into it without being changed. Denethor saw clearly and burned. Saruman saw clearly and served.

The architecture is documented. The pattern is named. You now know the company, the contracts and the connections. The quiet war depends on remaining quiet, and you’ve just made it louder.

References

Armitage, C. (2025d, December 14). The US oligarchs who built the surveillance state now run it. The Existentialist Republic.

The Existentialist Republic

The US Oligarchs Who Built the Surveillance State Now Run It

BLUF-HA (Bottom Line Up Front for Hardcore Activists…

4 months ago · 705 likes · 68 comments · Christopher Armitage

Bond, S. (2026, February 28). OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/27/nx-s1-5729118/trump-anthropic-pentagon-openai-ai-weapons-ban

Greenwald, G. (2026, February 13). Amazon’s ring and Google’s nest unwittingly reveal the severity of the U.S. surveillance state. Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn Greenwald

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While …

2 months ago · 969 likes · 19 comments · Glenn Greenwald

HR NEWS. (2026b, February 27). Alex Karp: the insane billionaire, Mass-Surveilling, bullied young nerd now proudly killing humans to get revenge on the world. HR NEWS.

HR NEWS

Alex Karp: The Insane Billionaire, Mass-Surveilling, Bullied Young Nerd Now Proudly Killing Humans to Get Revenge on the World

Alex Karp grew up in a household that should have produced an activist, not an architect of the surveillance state…

a month ago · 810 likes · 88 comments · HR NEWS

HR NEWS. (2026, January 19). Ring Cameras join Flock and Amazon to now create direct data access for ICE. HR NEWS.

HR NEWS

Ring Cameras Join Flock and Amazon to Now Create Direct Data Access for ICE

Ring, the Amazon-owned home surveillance company, announced a formal partnership with Flock Safety, a private surveillance firm whose systems are already used by thousands of police departments across the United States…

3 months ago · 307 likes · 35 comments · HR NEWS

Mathews, J. (2025, December 10). New contract shows Palantir is working on a tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE | Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/palantir-new-contract-uscis-ice/

Nazzaro, M. (2025, December 4). Palantir quietly lands in Education Department through foreign funding portal. FedScoop. https://fedscoop.com/palantir-education-department-foreign-funding-influence-portal/

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Spring Cleaning Your Class Consciousness

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:55:15 GMT

Theory for the Streets is an ongoing series that takes the ideas scholars write about in journals and seminar rooms and puts them where they belong: in your hands. Each installment breaks down a concept from political economy, cultural theory, or critical thought, and shows how it explains something you already live with every day. These aren’t abstract frameworks. They’re power tools. And they’re yours now.

I. The Junk Drawer of Your Mind

Ah, the joys of March - a well-deserved spring break for students (and teachers like myself), and spring cleaning for the rest of us. The windows open. You finally deal with that one closet, corner of the garage, or that particular shelf somewhere, or that one drawer in the kitchen always stuffed with batteries, takeout menus and a phone charger for a phone or shaver or some other gadget you haven’t owned since 2019, but which you still save nonetheless “just in case.”

You know the drawer. Maybe it’s in your office or bedroom instead of your kitchen. Either way, everybody has one. It fills up slowly, without anyone deciding to fill it. Things end up there because they were handed down, or seemed useful once, or because throwing them out felt like more trouble than keeping them. One day you open it looking for a pen and realize: half of this stuff was never mine. I don’t even know where it came from.

Now think about your head.

Not your knowledge. Not the things you’ve studied or chosen to believe. I mean the other stuff. The assumptions you carry around without ever deciding to carry them. “Hard work always pays off.” “The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” “There is no alternative.” These aren’t conclusions you arrived at. They’re furniture someone else put in your house before you moved in.

This week, we’re finally opening that drawer. And an Italian political theorist who wrote from a fascist prison cell in the 1930s is going to help us sort through it.

II. Gramsci’s Best Idea

His name was Antonio Gramsci. He was a Sardinian Marxist, a journalist, a labor organizer, and arguably one of the sharpest political thinkers of the twentieth century. Mussolini’s fascist government locked him up in 1926. The prosecutor reportedly said they needed to “stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It didn’t work. Gramsci filled 33 notebooks from his cell, and one of his central obsessions was a question that should haunt anyone paying attention in 2026: why do people so often believe things that work against their own interests?

His answer: common sense.

Not common sense the way we use it in English (meaning practical wisdom, good judgment or street smarts). In Italian, senso comune means something closer to the opposite: the pile of unexamined assumptions a society absorbs from its culture, media, schools, workplaces and political leaders without ever choosing to absorb them. Scholar Kate Crehan describes it as “the comfortable, predictable certainties that provide all of us with much of our basic mental furniture.”

That’s the junk drawer. Common sense is ideology that doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like reality.

But Gramsci noticed something else, too. Buried inside all that inherited clutter, people also carry what he called good sense: a stubborn, experience-born awareness that the official story doesn’t add up.

You’ve felt it.

III. The Spring Clean

So let’s do this. Here are a few items from the drawer. For each one, ask yourself two questions: does this match my actual experience? And who benefits from me believing it?

“If you work hard, you’ll get ahead.” You know people who work two jobs and can’t cover rent. You know people who inherited a portfolio and never worked a day. Does your experience confirm this, or does it just keep you blaming yourself when the math doesn’t work?

“The government should budget like a household.” Households can’t levy taxes, print currency or build highways. This analogy sounds responsible. It’s actually the logic that cuts your kid’s school funding every time a state runs short.

“There is no alternative to the way things are.” This one is the masterpiece. It doesn’t even argue for the current system. It just tells you resistance is pointless. As decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo put it, neoliberalism isn’t merely an economic program; it’s “a new civilising design.” The assumption that nothing else is possible is the design.

“The economy is too complicated for regular people to understand.” Who benefits from you believing that? Certainly not you.

Notice what just happened. None of these are facts. All of them serve someone’s interests. And every single one (in one form of another) was probably in your drawer, doing quiet work, before you ever even opened it.

Gramsci had a phrase for this process. He said the point wasn’t to introduce some new way of thinking from scratch, but to renovate and make “critical” an already existing activity. You were already skeptical. We’re just giving the skepticism a sharper edge.

IV. Who Furnished Your House?

Here’s an important thing to consider: common sense doesn’t magically appear from nowhere. It’s produced. Media, education systems, advertising, workplace culture, political rhetoric: these are all the factories of common sense, running continuous shifts.

Gramsci called the process hegemony: how the ruling class’s worldview becomes the default setting for an entire culture. You don’t have to agree with the people in power. You just have to absorb their assumptions as the baseline of “normal.” And the genius of it is that common sense survives even when reality contradicts it. The 2008 financial crisis proved that deregulated markets could destroy the global economy. The response? Bank bailouts. Austerity. Cuts to public services. The people who crashed the system convinced the rest of us to pay for the cleanup. The common sense didn’t break…it actually deepened!

If you’ve been reading Means and Meaning, you’ve already watched this machinery operate in similar fashion, in pieces examining the architecture of not knowing that designs what’s thinkable. “Adapt or die” sold as inevitability rather than ideology. #Vanlife repackaging a housing crisis as a lifestyle choice. A billion dollars a day for bombs while teachers price used box trucks to live in.

Each of those pieces described common sense in action. Now you have the name for it. And here’s what Gramsci understood that matters most: the furniture can be replaced. But first you have to notice it’s not yours.

V. Where It All Points

Here’s the thing Gramsci understood from inside that prison cell, headaches so brutal he sometimes banged his head against the walls just to override the pain: good sense isn’t something you have to build from scratch. It’s already in you. It’s the part that knows something is off even when you can’t quite name it. The part that watches the news and feels the gap between what you’re being told and what you can see with your own eyes. The part that’s been whispering “this doesn’t add” up for years.

Carlos Alberto Torres, who directs the Paulo Freire Institute at UCLA, argues that neoliberalism has so thoroughly colonized our common sense that entire generations have grown up inside it without ever encountering an alternative. The furniture was already in the house when they arrived. They didn’t choose it. They were born into it.

But common sense also has an expiration date. Yesterday’s unquestionable truth is today’s obvious nonsense. People once “knew” that the economy needed child labor to function. They “knew” that women couldn’t manage money. They “knew” that colonies were civilizing missions. Every generation eventually opens the drawer and throws something out. That’s not destruction, that’s growth.

Gramsci believed that ordinary people developing critical consciousness (what he called becoming organic intellectuals) is the precondition for real political change. Not experts. Not academics. Regular people who start asking who furnished the house and why.

That’s what you just did.

What Means and Meaning tries to do every Tuesday is help your good sense find its voice: to give the skepticism you already carry the language, history and frameworks to stand on its own two feet. Spring cleaning your class consciousness isn’t a metaphor. It’s practice. And you’ve already started, because you’re here.

References

Crehan, K. (2016). Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11318dq

Patterson, T. (2016). Too much common sense, not enough critical thinking! Dialectical Anthropology, 40(3), 251–258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9434-5

Robinson, A. (2005). Towards an Intellectual Reformation: The Critique of Common Sense and the Forgotten Revolutionary Project of Gramscian Theory. Critical Review of International Social & Political Philosophy, 8(4), 469–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230500205045

Torres, C. A. (2013). Neoliberalism as a new historical bloc: a Gramscian analysis of neoliberalism’s common sense in education. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 80–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/09620214.2013.790658

Wells, R. (2019). Teaching austerity to working-class students: Toward a new “common sense.” Capital & Class, 43(2), 315–337 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816818780654

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Prayers Count Double When It Rains

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:12:22 GMT

I. The Balcony

I have a photo from 2013 which shows my AS-Level Economics class at The English Modern School in Doha. Five Qataris, one Sri Lankan, one Iranian. Behind us, a Hampshire College pennant on the wall and “The Labour Market” on the projector. I posted it to Facebook on March 2nd with the following caption: “Out of all 150 students I teach these ones are by far the brightest and most engaged.”

The school sits directly across the street from the US embassy compound in Doha.

One of my Iranian students, one of the girls, asked to be excused from class one afternoon because it had started to lightly rain outside. This almost never happens in Qatar. She wanted to go to the balcony to pray, she said, because “prayers count double when it rains.” Of course I let her.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes across Iran. They killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, dozens of senior officials and hundreds of civilians. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, over the past week they’ve also hit 65 schools. At the Minab girls’ elementary school, 180 children died on the very first day. Those were someone’s students. Someone knew their names, knew which ones raised their hands too much and which ones never raised them enough.

Iran retaliated. Missiles hit US bases across the Gulf, struck targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar. The US embassy compound in Doha has been targeted. My former school is across the street.

I still have friends there. Former colleagues in Doha, Dubai and Cairo. They’re checking State Department advisories and wondering whether to abandon the lives they built or hope the next strike misses. They’re largely on their own either way.

This is the third American war of aggression in my conscious lifetime. I marched in D.C. against the looming invasion of Afghanistan. I later marched in New York against the impending war in Iraq. And I served in the Peace Corps in Grenada, where the US did another regime change in 1983. I taught the Iranian Revolution to high schoolers in St. Croix. I know this history in my bones, in my lesson plans and in the faces of children I can still name.

The president watched the strikes from a resort in Palm Beach.

II. The Architecture of Regime Change

In 1953, the US and Britain overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh for nationalizing Iranian oil. In his place, they installed the Shah. Twenty-six years of brutal autocracy later, the 1979 revolution produced the Islamic Republic, the exact government the US just bombed.

Read that sequence again. The United States just launched a war against a regime its own previous intervention created.

I taught this history. At my school in St. Croix, I designed a World Revolutions course with a full unit on the Iranian Revolution. Students used Brown University’s Choices Program, reading primary sources and ultimately engaging in a mock debate representing the various factions and deciding which direction the revolution should take. The cycle of intervention and blowback wasn’t an abstraction in my classroom. It was the lesson.

And the script just never seems to change. Iraq 2003: fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, an “imminent threat” that wasn’t. Grenada 1983: the same language of liberation, the same refusal to let a sovereign nation choose its own path. I marched against Iraq. I lived in Grenada. I’ve watched the same playbook run three times now with different targets and identical logic.

This time the fabrication is even lazier. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff claimed Iran was “probably a week away from industrial-grade bombmaking material.” This contradicted open-source intelligence, the IAEA, and the administration’s own claim last summer that they’d already “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites. The navy couldn’t even attack sooner because it was still parked off Venezuela from the last regime change.

And let’s not forget the negotiations. Talks had concluded in Geneva two days before the strikes. Oman’s foreign minister confirmed a breakthrough was within reach. Iran had reportedly offered to suspend enrichment. Peace was in hand. They dropped it to pick up a bomb. They always do.

III. The Cornered Emperor

A president with cratering approval ratings and his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files launches the largest military operation since Iraq. From Mar-a-Lago in a white USA baseball hat.

His envoy, a real estate lawyer, claims Iran is a week from a nuclear weapon. His own intelligence agencies say a decade. He accidentally kills his own handpicked regime-change candidates in the bombing and then shrugs it off. He tells the Iranian people to “take over your government” once the bombing stops, which is to say: he has no real plan for what comes after.

And then, at a press conference in Doral just hours ago, he told us how the decision was actually made. Not from intelligence briefings. Not from Pentagon threat assessments. Not from consultation with military leadership or authorization from Congress. “The situation was very quickly approaching the point of no return,” he said, “based on what Steve, and Jared and Pete were telling me.” Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Pete Hegseth. A real estate lawyer, his son-in-law, and a former Fox News host. That is the war cabinet that sent America into its largest military operation in over twenty years.

When pressed about the elementary school his missiles destroyed in Minab, the president said: “I just don’t know enough about it.” The man who ordered this war doesn’t know enough about the 180 children it killed on the first day.

I read Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place in a critical theory seminar at Hampshire College. It rewired how I understood modern warfare: not as event but as spectacle, perception managed and media-packaged until the distance between war as represented and war as lived becomes infinite. Charles Hugh Smith made a similar argument last week: the primary task of warmakers is perception management, shaping the fog of war into narratives “as carefully curated as an advert campaign.” Trump slurring through a press conference in Doral while 168 families in Minab bury their children is Baudrillard made flesh. War as content. War as programming.

But this is bigger than one man’s pathology. This is the architecture of imperial decline. Rome overextended its legions and taxed its citizens to pay for them until neither held. Britain after Suez in 1956, the moment the world saw the empire couldn’t back its own ambitions. The Soviets in Afghanistan. The Americans in Vietnam, where Smith reminds us military leaders had no understanding of what they’d started, substituting surveillance photos for actual knowledge of the enemy.

And here we are barely three months into 2026, burning through a billion dollars a day. No legal basis. No clear objective. No exit strategy. The domestic foundation rotting underneath. I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but the history teacher in me wonders if this may ultimately prove to be America’s Suez moment: the point where the gap between imperial ambition and imperial capacity becomes undeniable to everyone except the emperor himself.

IV. Who Pays

There’s a cartoon making the rounds on social media: a fighter jet soaring overhead, caption reading, “Time to show these bastards why Americans don’t have a social safety net!” It’s funny until you do the math.

Every Tomahawk missile costs considerably more than a public school teacher’s annual salary, and roughly 200 of them were fired on the first day alone, totaling $340 million in cruise missiles. Four B-2 bombers flew nonstop from Missouri at $30 million for those sorties, fighter jet operations ran another $271 million, and the total cost of day one came to $779 million. The war is now burning through roughly a billion dollars a day, and Iran is bleeding the budget dry by launching $20,000 drones, while the US fires $4 million Patriot interceptors to shoot them down (and usually two per drone, which is standard protocol). Bloomberg reports Qatar’s Patriot reserves could last four days at the current rate of use. That money could rebuild every crumbling school in this country, fund universal childcare, wipe out student lunch debt, resurface roads, and replace the lead pipes that cities have begged for funding to fix for decades. It could keep the 22 million families who just lost food stamps from choosing between meals and medication. Instead it buys the world’s most expensive fireworks show while children on two continents go without.

And who dies for it? Seven American service members so far. Six from the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve unit out of Iowa. Reserve. These are people with civilian lives who got called up to staff a makeshift operations center at a civilian port in Kuwait. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, 26, from Glendale, Kentucky. He was stationed in Saudi Arabia, a country that didn’t want this war in the first place.

Trump attended the dignified transfer at Dover, where he told ABC that the families said, “Please sir, win this for my boy.” Then flippantly added, about future casualties: “It’s a part of war.” As if the war were weather. As if he hadn’t ordered it eleven days ago.

Oil is at $114 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, with hundreds of tankers stalled, and 20% of the world’s daily oil supply choked off. Qatar’s energy minister has also warned that continued conflict could “bring down economies of the world.” Gas prices are climbing quickly. Working families in Ocala and Louisville and Cedar Rapids will pay for this war every time they fill up the tank. They always do.

V. Where It All Points

The pattern compounds: 1953 produced 1979, which in turn eventually produced 2026, and each intervention created the conditions that justified the next one. The “Epstein regime” (as the Iranian government is now calling the Trump administration in social media posts) killed the Supreme Leader and his son was installed within days, with the Revolutionary Guards declaring “we are the ones who will determine the end of the war” while crowds rallied in Isfahan as bombs fell nearby. The Iranian regime didn’t collapse. It consolidated. It always does. The architecture of regime change doesn’t produce freedom. It produces the next regime.

Meanwhile, only 29% of Americans support this war. Trump still cannot define what victory exactly looks like. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Oil is surging, and gas prices are climbing toward levels that will punish every working family in this country even before the normal summer surge. The civilizational stress test we’ve been tracking on Means and Meaning all year just converged in a single catastrophic event: a president waging an illegal war without congressional authorization, an economy buckling under the weight of its own military spending, and an energy crisis manufactured by the very people who promised to fix it. Last week I wrote about the #vanlife movement and teachers pricing used box trucks because this country won’t pay them enough for housing. This week the same country found a billion dollars a day to bomb elementary schools on the other side of the world.

Marjane Satrapi once said that the distance between ordinary Americans and ordinary Iranians is far smaller than the distance between either group and their own governments. She is right. The schoolchildren in Minab and the reservists from Iowa have more in common with each other than either group has with the men who sent the missiles and the men who launched the drones in response.

I keep thinking about my former student on that balcony outside my classroom in Doha, palms open in the rain, praying softly in Farsi, and the quiet certainty in her voice when she told me why. Prayers count double when it rains. I don’t know where she is now. I don’t know if she’s safe. But I know that what she believed in that moment, that there are things sacred enough to stop everything for, is the opposite of everything this war represents.

It’s raining. Prayers count double. We’re going to need them.

References

Delaney Reese, H. (2026, March 10). Trump told us Who’s really in charge. https://substack.com/@heatherdelaneyreese/p-190477997

Fowler, J. (2026, March 2). Four to five weeks. The Humanity Archive.

The Humanity Archive

Four to Five Weeks

We are exhausted by war. They started another one…

a month ago · 129 likes · 3 comments · Jermaine Fowler

Hafezi, P., & Bose, N. (2026, March 9). Trump threatens to escalate Iran war, but says it could end soon. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/khameneis-hardline-son-mojtaba-appointed-irans-new-leader-pope-leo-warns-middle-2026-03-09/

Hudspeth Blackburn, P., & D’Antonio, I. (2026, March 9). Seventh US service member killed in Iran war is identified as Army sergeant. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/08/politics/us-service-member-killed-iran-war

Kamyana, I. (2026, March 1). Iran war: A new phase of imperialist onslaught. International Socialist League. https://lis-isl.org/en/2026/03/iran-war-a-new-phase-of-imperialist-onslaught/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQTQmVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe3frqLRWH-s8AwYeHq6c0H-b7IR1axLVp7MG3-jtqH_Y4fpmCtHcTym6JFvc_aem_EzRUaz1jyMD0JtaI_K0K8g

Operation Epic Fury? More like Operation Epic FUCKUP! (2026, March 3). Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/IFLOZ/posts/pfbid0UdBkjVWJyK6MhNYAA8GVgD1p41RHraL9n5seu4qGi9UTcMjcCAxJHWVbJmpfo2Ftl?rdid=D1ZQ316DdDWNVwxU#

Parker, B. (2026b, February 28). Three massive questions concerning Trump’s war in Iran. The Bulwark.

The Bulwark

Three Massive Questions Concerning Trump’s War in Iran

THE UNITED STATES, IN CONJUNCTION with Israel, initiated a series of air attacks against Iran Saturday. Early reports indicate that American forces attacked military targets throughout the country while Israeli forces targeted Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Masoud Pazeskhian, and other high-level figures in the regime. The Israeli government and President Donald Trump both…

a month ago · 904 likes · 282 comments · Benjamin Parker

Smith, C. H. (2026, March 1). The war. Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack.

Charles Hugh Smith's Substack

The War

War seems to demand some response--opinion, analysis, insight--lest it seem that we’re uncaring or detached from events so consequential. But if there is anything we can say with any certainty about war, it’s that nobody outside the inner circle knows anything, and the inner circle’s knowledge is partial, contingent, and prone to the interpretive distor…

a month ago · 78 likes · 6 comments · Charles Hugh Smith

US offensive on Iran burned through an estimated $779M on first day. (2026, March 2). Middle East Monitor. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260302-us-offensive-on-iran-burned-through-an-estimated-779m-on-first-day/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQT59xleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFmOG9mS2xTZmF6cFl5V0g4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHp2QiVXF2TFmIwueTktLPkXcayt-C-T7pyO44J4_VNDhHKgEls77Ls3jGuyJ_aem_i9Bei5V7RO4Axi5KyjRPwA

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Built To Move

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:54:22 GMT

Precarity Diaries is an ongoing series connecting personal economic experience to structural conditions. Each installment starts where most of us actually live — in the anxiety of bills, the grind of underpaid work, the impossible math of modern survival — and follows those threads back to the systems that produce them. These aren’t just personal stories. They’re the diaries of a system working exactly as designed.

I. The Spreadsheet and the Dream

I have watched this video more times than I am comfortable admitting.

The man in it, Jake, lives full-time in a 2004 Ford E350 box truck. From the outside it looks like any contractor’s work van, white and forgettable, the kind of vehicle you glance past in a parking lot without registering it exists. That is by design. He keeps a neon safety vest draped over the passenger seat and a white hardhat visible through the windshield. When he pulls into a city block and people give him the side-eye, they see the vest, see the hat, and move on. Nobody thinks twice. Nobody knows that behind the cab, through a pass-through door he checks before opening to make sure no one is watching, there is a full-size bed, a hot shower, a composting toilet, a kitchen with an air fryer and a cast iron on an induction top, a music production studio, a closet with actual hanging space, two skylights, 500 watts of solar on the roof, and 55 gallons of fresh water. His dog Molly has her own spot on the couch.

I know all of this because I have been taking notes. Very detailed notes.

I am a high school teacher in Florida. I have two rescue dogs of my own and an Amazon vehicle conversion-specific list that includes solar panel kits, inverters, noise-canceling panels, an RV fridge, window night covers, Econoline floor mats, and - I am not making this up - a neon safety vest and a white hardhat. I have spent months researching E350 and E450 box trucks, specifically the 12,14, and 16-foot models, because their chassis can handle the additional weight of a full build without complaint, any mechanic in the country can work on the engine, and parts are everywhere. I have compared prices on used models from 2008 to 2018 with under 140,000 miles, trying to find the window between what is mechanically sound and what is financially possible. I even looked at Jake’s actual listing when he put his truck up for sale. I did the math, and then decided I could find a cheaper one, do the conversion myself, and still come out ahead.

I want to be clear about something. I am not writing about van life from the outside. I am not a journalist who visited a van meetup or a cultural critic who finds the aesthetics interesting. I am a working teacher who has looked at the numbers (including what I earn, what housing and utilities cost, and what is left over) and started planning. The spreadsheet is open, and the research is ongoing. But the deeper question I cannot stop turning over in my head is not whether I could actually live in a box truck. It is what it means that I am even asking this question in the first place.

Because somewhere between the third and fourth hour of watching conversion videos, something eventually shifted. I was no longer watching for entertainment. I was watching the way you study the layout of a place you might actually live. And I realized that millions of Americans were doing the same thing, at the same hour, for the same reasons, and that the country that invented the road trip was producing a generation that might need to live on the road just to survive. The algorithm that served me Jake’s box truck has served over fourteen million Instagram posts under a single hashtag to the rest of the world. The story those posts tell looks nothing like the spreadsheet on my office desk.

This is a piece about that distance.

II. The Hashtag and the Parking Lot

In 2011, a designer named Foster Huntington quit his job at Ralph Lauren, moved into a 1987 Volkswagen van, and started posting photos on Instagram. The hashtag he coined for those posts, #vanlife, was a joke. It was a tongue-in-cheek riff on Tupac Shakur’s “Thug Life” tattoo, a semi-ironic caption for the less glamorous moments of living in a vehicle. Within a few years, it was no longer a joke. It was a lifestyle brand, a book deal and, ultimately, a movement. The man who left a luxury fashion house to reject consumer culture had, without quite meaning to, created one of the most successful consumer aesthetics of the decade.

That origin story is worth sitting with, because the irony at its core has never really resolved. What began as one person documenting the unglamorous reality of vehicle dwelling became, through the machinery of social media, an aspirational fantasy consumed by millions of people who would never sleep in a van. The owner of GoWesty, a Volkswagen repair shop that sponsors vanlife content creators, once compared the movement to surfing: most people who identify with the culture have never actually done it. By the mid-2010s, the #vanlife feed had become a curated gallery of sun-flared interiors and open roads, and the distance between the image and the experience had become the experience itself.

Rachel Monroe documented that distance up close in a 2017 New Yorker profile of two of vanlife’s most visible creators, a couple named King and Smith. Monroe watched their Instagram feed transform in real time, scrolling chronologically as what she described as “a life” became “a life-style brand.” Early posts were blackberries and sunsets. Later posts were optimized for engagement: the algorithm rewarded certain compositions over others, and the couple learned to give the algorithm what it wanted. Behind the images was the labor of producing them. Monroe describes more than seventy emails exchanged with a television network over a single sponsored Instagram post, and over thirty minutes spent staging a photo of King appearing to read a book with a branded laptop decal visible in the frame. Smith directed from the front seat: “Lift your head up a little bit more, look like you’re reading.” Then the post went up. The comments read: “Such a beautiful lifestyle.” “This looks like heaven.” The work of making effortlessness look effortless was invisible to everyone consuming it.

What interests me is not the deception itself, which is how most social media operates, but what it conceals. Underneath the aesthetic, a different vanlife has been growing, one driven less by wanderlust than by the arithmetic of survival. On YouTube, channels like Serene and Simple Life and Lady Bugout, both run by solo women living full-time in their vehicles, draw large audiences not with sun flares and bikinis but with practical demonstrations of how to make a small space actually work. They are performing competence, not aspiration. And as Catherine Faith Gastin has argued, these women are quietly rewriting a road narrative that has been coded as masculine since the frontier, placing themselves onto the American road as active participants in a story that, from Kerouac to Easy Rider, was never written for them.

But the most telling divide is not between men and women on the road. It is between the version of vanlife that gets curated for Instagram and the version that parks in a Walmart lot at 2 a.m. hoping no one knocks on the window. The vanlife community has worked hard to distinguish itself from homelessness, adopting language like “houseless, not homeless” to signal that vehicle dwelling is a choice, not a condition. That distinction matters to the people making it. But it also does ideological work, drawing a line between the deserving mobile and the undeserving poor that the material reality does not always support. When research suggests that upward of half of all unsheltered homeless Americans are sheltering in their vehicles, the border between lifestyle and necessity is thinner than either community is comfortable admitting.

III. The Open Road and the Closed Market

Americans have always treated the road as an answer. When the factory closed, you went west. When the town dried up, you hit the highway. When the system broke, you kept moving. The mythology runs so deep it feels like geography rather than ideology: from the frontier to Kerouac to Easy Rider to Springsteen, the open road has functioned as the national escape valve, the promise that if things fall apart where you are, there is always somewhere else. For most of that history, the road was imagined as a man’s domain, populated by cowboys and outlaws and Beat poets performing what one scholar calls “renegade masculinity,” with women appearing mainly when the men paused in stationary space. The vanlife movement, whatever else it has done, has begun to change that. But the deeper question is not who gets to be on the road. It is why so many people need to be.

The structural answer is not complicated. Since 1960, median home prices in the United States have increased 121 percent. Over the same period, median household income has increased 29 percent. That gap is the engine underneath every van conversion video, every #vanlife Instagram post, every teacher in Florida with a spreadsheet and an Amazon list. Monroe, in her New Yorker profile, lets one of vanlife’s original creators say the quiet part plainly: “I think there’s a sense of hopelessness in my generation, in terms of jobs. And it’s cheap to live in a van.” His generation, she notes, carries significantly more student debt and has lower homeownership rates than any before it. Monroe calls vanlife, along with staycations and minimalism, “an attempt to aestheticize and romanticize the precariousness of contemporary life.” She is right. But she stops short of asking who benefits from the aestheticization, and that is where the analysis needs to go.

Consider for a moment what the vanlife movement actually represents when you strip the filters away. These are, in large part, working people. An ethnographic study of vanlife meetups found participants earning between $25,000 and $40,000 a year, working as customer support agents, technical writers and therapists. A peer-reviewed study of van dwellers in British Columbia documented paramedics, grocery store workers, café employees, substitute teachers and bus drivers, all living in vehicles in one of Canada’s most expensive cities. These are not people who failed at capitalism. They are people capitalism has failed to pay enough for housing. And they have responded not with protest but with ingenuity, redesigning their entire lives around the problem the market created.

One of the sharpest observations in the academic literature comes from Angus Duff and Scott Rankin, who studied working van dwellers and noticed something that decades of workplace research had missed. For fifty years, organizational scholars have focused on making work more flexible to accommodate home life: remote work, flex hours, telecommuting. Van dwellers have inverted that equation entirely. They have made their homes flexible to accommodate work. They move their vehicle to wherever the next job is, park near the worksite the night before, and wake up already there. A teacher on call in their study, who could be assigned to a different school fifty kilometers away each day, drove his van to the vicinity of the next morning’s school every evening. He also hid his living situation from his employer, afraid that if parents found out their child’s teacher lived in a van, he would lose his job. The same system that does not pay him enough to afford housing will punish him for not being able to afford housing. That is not a paradox. It is a design.

Teachers in Finland are not making van conversion content. The vanlife movement is not a universal expression of human wanderlust. It is a specifically American response to a specifically American failure: an economy that has decoupled the cost of shelter from what it pays the people who need it.

IV. What They Build There

What strikes me most about the conversion videos is not the finished product. It is the problem-solving.

I have watched a woman design a kitchen around the exact length of a charging cord. I have watched a man build a table that folds into a bed frame that folds into a storage bench, three functions from a single piece of wood, because in seventy-five square feet there is no room for anything that only does one thing. I have watched people route plumbing through wheel wells, mount solar panels flush against rooflines so they disappear from the street, wire 12-volt systems with the quiet confidence of electricians, and insulate against desert heat and mountain cold using materials they found at Lowes or Home Depot for a fraction of what a contractor would charge. I have watched people build showers in spaces where a shower should not be possible, hang closets behind panels that look like walls, and install composting toilets with the precision of someone who understands that dignity is not optional just because your home has an engine.

These are not hobbyists. They are people solving, with extraordinary creativity and limited resources, a problem that the richest country in the history of the world has refused to solve for them. The ingenuity is real. The community that has formed around it is real. At large meetups on public land in the American West, researchers have documented entire neighborhoods forming spontaneously: young professionals in one area, families in another, content creators in a third, each cluster developing its own culture and rhythm, people recreating the texture of community on Bureau of Land Management desert because the housing market priced them out of the communities they came from. They share tools, trade knowledge, and look out for each other’s vehicles when someone has to leave for a supply run. It is genuine. It is beautiful. And it deserves to be honored on its own terms before we ask the harder question.

The harder question is what happens to this ingenuity once the market notices it.

The arc is predictable because it has happened to every subculture that ever threatened to mean something. What begins as a creative response to material conditions gets noticed, gets documented, gets aestheticized, and then gets sold back to the people it was responding on behalf of. The DIY ethos that defined early vanlife, people hand-building living spaces in cargo vans because they could not afford housing, has been steadily repackaged into a luxury consumer product. Mercedes-Benz now manufactures vans specifically designed for the vanlife market. Winnebago has entered the conversion space. Companies charge $100,000 to $300,000 for custom builds, not including the cost of the vehicle itself. You can now rent a fully outfitted van for a weekend through companies like Outdoorsy and Escape Campervans, experience the aesthetics of precarity as a vacation, and return to your apartment on Sunday night. The resistance has become the product. The product has become the industry. And the people who actually need to live in their vehicles are still out there, pricing used E350s on Craigslist and watching YouTube tutorials on how to wire a solar panel, while the algorithm serves them ads for $200,000 Sprinter conversions they will never be able to afford.

Monroe watched this happen in real time. The couple she profiled went from a $3,500 van and genuine adventure to a dozen corporate sponsors, branded content for a television show they found distasteful but accepted because it paid triple their normal rate, and a sponsorship from GoWesty that provided thousands of dollars in free repairs. Meanwhile, a Duke graduate student named Ken Ilgunas, who lived in a van to avoid student debt, described his experience as mice in the ceiling, fear of heatstroke, and loneliness so severe he could not imagine dating. His van, he said, never looked like anything out of a Wes Anderson film. Those are the two vanlifes. One is a content economy. The other is a housing strategy. They share a hashtag and almost nothing else.

V. Where It All Points

Here is what the country does to people who cannot afford to live in it. First, it prices them out. Between 2006 and 2019, the number of American cities criminalizing sleeping in a vehicle increased by 213%. Penalties include fines of up to $3,000, vehicle impoundment, and incarceration. Read that again. A person who moved into their vehicle because they could not afford rent can be fined three thousand dollars for sleeping in it. The system that failed to house them does not simply ignore the adaptation. It prosecutes it.

And the legal architecture goes deeper than local ordinances. Under current Fourth Amendment doctrine, a motorcycle parked in someone’s driveway receives the full constitutional protection against warrantless search afforded to a home, because the driveway is considered part of the home’s curtilage. A converted van parked on the street, containing a bed, a shower, a kitchen, a closet full of someone’s clothes, photographs of their family, the entirety of their personal life, can be searched without a warrant, because the law classifies it as a vehicle regardless of whether anyone lives in it. The government will tax your van as a home. The IRS defines “home” broadly enough to include any vehicle with sleeping, cooking, and toilet facilities. But it will not protect your van as a home. That is not an oversight. It is a statement about whose shelter counts.

There are people working against this. In Denver, community organizations and churches have established safe parking lots, designated spaces where people living in vehicles can park legally overnight with access to bathrooms, case management, and basic services. The programs are modest but effective, since studies have documented significant improvements in perceived safety among participants. These are also not government initiatives. They are what happens when communities decide to protect people the system has chosen to punish. It is worth noticing that the most humane responses to vehicle homelessness in America are coming from church parking lots, not from the institutions that allowed the housing crisis to happen in the first place.

But I want to be honest about the limits of where this analysis leads. The vanlife movement, even at its most clear-eyed, even when the Instagram filters drop away and people are speaking plainly about economic survival, remains framed almost entirely in the language of individual adaptation. Get mobile. Lower your overhead. Build a life the system cannot take from you. There is real wisdom in that, and I do not dismiss it. The people I have spent months watching and learning from have built something genuinely remarkable with their hands and their resourcefulness. But the energy, the creativity, the sheer problem-solving intelligence that goes into designing a life inside seventy-five square feet is energy that is not being directed at the question of why seventy-five square feet is all the richest country on earth has offered them.

This is what precarity looks like when it has been processed through the American mythology of freedom. It looks like adventure. It looks like choice. It looks like a sunset photographed through the open doors of a Sprinter or Econoline van. And underneath all of it, there are working people, people who teach and build and drive and care for others, quietly engineering the most creative possible response to a system that has decided their labor is essential but their housing is not.

I still have the spreadsheet open. I am still doing the math. And I want to be honest: part of me, a real part, still watches Jake’s box truck tour and feels something that is not despair. It is admiration. It is possibility. It is the part of the American imagination that genuinely believes you can build something better with your own hands. I am not immune to the mythology, and I do not think I should be. The desire for freedom is not a lie. It is just incomplete. Freedom that requires you to give up housing security is not the same as freedom that lets you choose how to live. And until we can tell the difference, we will keep watching people engineer extraordinary lives inside seventy-five square feet and calling it resilience, when what it actually reveals is a country that has substituted the resourcefulness of its people for the responsibilities of its institutions.

Somewhere on a city street tonight there is a white box truck with the engine off and the curtains drawn. Inside it there might be a full-size bed and a composting toilet and a dog on the couch and a closet with hanging space and 500 watts of solar on the roof. Someone built all of that with their own hands. Whether we see that as freedom or as something a country should never have made necessary probably says more about us than it does about them.

References

Calhoun, K. H., Brisson, D., Wilson, J. H., Bacon, B., & Cordle, E. (2023). Safety and Safe Parking for People Experiencing Vehicle Homelessness: A Mixed Methods Study. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 34(3), 234–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/10428232.2023.2242754

Clark, B. (2025, November 5). The rise of camper vans and van life culture. FAST LANE ONLY. https://fastlaneonly.com/the-rise-of-camper-vans-and-van-life-culture/

Duff, A. J., & Rankin, S. B. (2020). Exploring flexible home arrangements – an interview study of workers who live in vans. Career Development International, 25(7), 747–761. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-02-2020-0029

Garcia, S. 2024. “Vanlife.” Subcultures and Sociology. https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/vanlife/

Gastin, C. (2025). Home on the Road: Women, Mobility, and Space in Van Life. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 26(1). https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.401

Luke. (2026, February 16). Why more Americans are living in their vehicles. The Digital Nomad Guy. https://thedigitalnomadguy.com/why-more-americans-are-living-in-their-vehicles/

Merritt, E. (2023). Vanlife: An Argument to Reconsider the Automobile Exception and Ensure Fourth Amendment Protections for All Citizens. Indiana Law Review, 56(3), 599–622. https://doi.org/10.18060/27245

Monroe, R. (2017, April 17). #Vanlife, the Bohemian Social-Media movement. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/vanlife-the-bohemian-social-media-movement

Rizvi, A., Morayko, K., Hancock, M., and Song, A.. 2021. Provocations from #vanlife: Investigating Life and Work in a Community Extensively Using Technology Not Designed for Them. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 92, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445393

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

“The Math Works”

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:01:26 GMT

I. They Know and You Don’t

On February 13, 2026, a tech insider named Jeff Kirdeikis posted something that stopped me cold. “I have come to report,” he wrote, “no one outside twitter knows what the fk claude code or openclaw is. They have no idea what’s coming.”

Not a warning. Not a plea. Just a man looking out at the rest of humanity and noting, with the casual confidence of someone watching from a window, that the world is about to change and most people are still asleep.

The tone is the tell.

There is a class of people right now (including engineers, founders, investors and builders) who are watching something extraordinary unfold in real time. And they’re not hiding it. They’re posting about it constantly. They’re excited. Some are warning you. Most are just describing their Monday. And the gap between what they’re living and what the rest of the world understands is growing wider by the week.

Here is what they’re describing: a threshold has been crossed.

You probably still think of AI the way most people do: as a sophisticated search engine. Something you prompt. Something that helps you draft an email or summarize a document. Basically just a tool (though, granted, an impressive and occasionally surprising tool). That framing made sense twelve months ago. It doesn’t describe what exists today.

An Austrian developer named Peter Steinberger built a personal AI agent called OpenClaw as a weekend project in November 2025. By the end of January 2026, nearly 200,000 developers were building on top of it. By mid-February (just six weeks later) OpenAI had signed Steinberger to bring it to the world. Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI Director and one of the architects of modern AI, looked at what OpenClaw was doing and called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi” he had ever seen. The man who helped invent the future was experiencing the present as science fiction.

A content creator filming a tutorial on how to use these systems - not a researcher, not a philosopher, but a YouTube educator selling a six-hour how-to course - opened his video with this: “We’re moving from AI as a tool to AI as a workforce. From AI that responds to AI that initiates. From AI that waits to AI that acts.”

That’s the threshold, stated plainly, in a tutorial video. The future is being taught in six-hour courses to early adopters while most people haven’t noticed the subject exists.

And then this: on February 12th, the author of the viral essay warning 83 million people about AI disruption admitted that AI helped him write it. The system being described was also the system doing the describing. The warning was already inside the machine.

Last week, in The Architecture of Not Knowing, I argued that whoever designs the knowledge systems determines what’s thinkable. This week, those systems are becoming autonomous actors. They no longer need us to think at all.

That is the threshold. It was crossed while you were looking somewhere else.

II. The Numbers That Should Make This Uncomfortable

Here is a simple calculation: if an AI agent handles a task that would have consumed twenty hours of human labor each week (familiar tasks like inbox management, scheduling, customer responses, research and content drafting) and you pay that agent nothing beyond minimal API costs, you have just permanently recovered over a thousand hours of annual labor capacity. At any professional billing rate, that is tens of thousands of dollars per year no longer flowing to the person who used to do that work.

Now scale it. McKinsey’s 2025 and 2026 industry data shows operational cost reductions of 20 to 30 percent across sectors. Finance is processing 60 percent faster. Logistics firms are documenting over a million dollars in monthly savings. Retail is moving inventory 50 percent faster. Manufacturing is cutting costs by nearly a quarter through predictive maintenance alone.

These are not projections. These are results being reported right now by actual companies.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Microsoft AI, recently told the Financial Times that within 12 to 18 months, AI will achieve human-level performance on most white-collar tasks - those now done by lawyers, accountants, project managers and marketing professionals amongst others. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic and probably one of the most safety-focused executives in the industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50 percent of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. Many in the industry think he’s being conservative.

A Stanford study has already documented a 13 percent decline in jobs for early-career workers, and researchers note the real figure is likely higher, depending on the sector. Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs will be affected globally by 2028. That is 24 months from now.

There is also a measurement problem. The agencies responsible for tracking employment are slow by design, politically pressured by circumstance, and methodologically unprepared for a disruption of this speed. The data will most certainly lag the reality (it actually always does, but the gap will be so much more pronounced now). By the time the official numbers confirm what is happening, millions of people will already be living it without a framework to understand why.

One venture capitalist, watching this unfold in his own company in real time, recently reported that OpenClaw had offloaded 10 percent of his knowledge workers’ tasks in the first two weeks of use. His projection for April: 50 to 60 percent. Not someday. April.

I’ll be honest with you: I also find myself feeling what Daniel Pinchbeck recently described as a ‘vertiginous sense of limitless possibility’ - that intense desire to move faster, and to capture everything before the window closes. I understand that feeling because I’m living it. But I’ve started to recognize it for what it also is: the feeling of a system accelerating in ways that serve capital accumulation first, and human flourishing only if we insist on it.

The question that the numbers don’t answer (but that everything that follows in this piece will try to) is this: more efficient for whom? Savings for whom? Faster for whom?

Because every percentage point of cost reduction is a transfer of value from the person who used to do that work to the person who owns the system that replaced them. That is not a bug in the math; that is the math.

III. The Architecture of Displacement

Some people find the numbers in the previous section reassuring. Not because they dispute them, but because they’ve seen this movie before. Every technological revolution, they argue, displaced workers in one sector while creating new ones somewhere else. The car killed the horse industry and gave birth to mechanics, gas stations and road construction. Electricity upended existing industries and powered entirely new ones. The internet disrupted retail and expanded logistics, streaming and services. Humanity adapted. It always does.

This is a reasonable argument. It has historical support. And it is precisely correct about every previous technological disruption. The problem now, however, is speed. And simultaneity.

Every prior wave of automation displaced workers in one sector over decades, creating time and adjacent industries to eventually absorb the transition. The car replaced the horse industry over the course of thirty years while simultaneously building new ones. Workers had both a destination and time to reach it. What we are watching now is not sequential disruption. It is parallel disruption - hitting legal work, financial analysis, content creation, customer service, software engineering, medical analysis and administrative work not over decades, but in months, across every sector all at once. There is no adjacent industry growing fast enough to absorb the displaced, because the displacement is everywhere simultaneously.

And here is the part that breaks every reassuring historical analogy: as one writer recently put it, we are not automating a job or an industry. We are automating the general-purpose capacity to read, reason, decide and execute across domains. That has never happened before.

One optimist, trying to be honest while staying encouraging, accidentally named what this produces: “You will either adapt,” he wrote, “or become part of the permanent underclass who can’t earn a living.” He meant it as motivation. Read it again as description. Even the people telling you everything will be fine are describing a bifurcated society. They just call one half of the K an opportunity.

But here is what the K-shaped framing misses. The question isn’t only whether you end up on the ascending curve. It’s what happens to collective power when half the population loses economic leverage entirely. A worker who can be replaced overnight by an AI agent cannot strike, cannot bargain, and certainly cannot withhold labor since they’re no longer able to sell it. The mechanisms working people have used for over a century to claim their fair share of productivity gains - the strike, the union, the credible threat of walking out - dissolve when the boss can replace your entire department before the picket line even forms.

A population without economic leverage is a population available for authoritarian capture. This is not speculation. This is the historical pattern every time mass displacement has outrun collective response.

The chart above shows two trajectories diverging from a single point in 2025. What it cannot show is what Émile Durkheim understood more than a century ago: that when social change outpaces the institutions and values that give people meaning and orientation, the result isn’t just material poverty. It is anomie, a state of normlessness, the dissolution of identity structures, and the loss of the story people tell about who they are and why their lives matter. The paralegal who spent three years building expertise doesn’t just lose income when AI displaces her. She loses the sense of self.

None of this is new by the way, if seen from the right vantage point. For example, the Caribbean didn’t need to wait for 2026 to understand what it looks like when the productive system stops needing most of the population. Structural adjustment stripped public sector jobs in Jamaica and forced millions into informal economies. Offshoring took manufacturing from Puerto Rico and left an infrastructure designed for extraction. Call centers brought precarious work to Trinidad, Barbados and Belize, and now those too are being automated away, with nothing beneath them. Walter Rodney showed us that underdevelopment isn’t backwardness. It is produced by external ownership of productive tools, by technological dependency, and by systems designed to extract value from a population rather than build it with them.

The Global South has been living the K-shaped society for decades. Now it’s coming for everyone else.

IV. The Framing Is the Weapon

Here is what every voice in this conversation — the startup founder, the content creator, the venture capitalist, the optimist, the cautious economist — has in common: they all ask the same question. Not “who owns the machines?” or “who captures the value?” but “how do you position yourself to survive what’s coming?”

Adapt or die. Be ‘high agency.’ Get ten steps ahead. Spend an hour a day experimenting. The person who walks into a meeting and says “I used AI to do this in an hour instead of three days” is going to be the most valuable person in the room.

This is sincere advice. Some of it is even useful. But it is advice that operates entirely within a framework that never questions its own foundations. And that is precisely how ideology works — not through deception, but through the limits of what gets imagined as actually possible.

One writer put it plainly: “You can’t hustle your way out of that at scale.” Individual adaptation is a real strategy for the individuals who successfully adapt. It is not a response to a structural crisis that will displace tens of millions of people simultaneously. Telling everyone to be high agency in the face of mass displacement is like telling everyone to win. The advice isn’t wrong. The math just doesn’t work.

Here is the question that almost no one in this conversation is asking: why do the productivity gains from AI flow exclusively to the owners of AI systems?

That is not a law of nature. That is a political arrangement. The same way it was a political arrangement (and not a natural law) when colonial administrators decided that Caribbean sugar profits belonged to London rather than to the people cutting cane. The same way it was a political arrangement when IMF structural adjustment decided that economic “reform” meant cutting public sector wages in Jamaica rather than taxing the corporations extracting the island’s value. “The math works” has always been the language of people whose math doesn’t include your costs.

Peter Steinberger, the developer who built OpenClaw, saw this clearly enough to say it out loud: “This is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs.” His instinct was correct, though his political tools were inadequate. Within days, the project was absorbed into OpenAI’s institutional orbit - still “open source,” still nominally independent, celebrated by three of OpenAI’s top executives in a single evening. The form of openness preserved while the content of control was captured. Antonio Gramsci called this a passive revolution: technological transformation without political transformation, where power structures change shape without really changing hands.

The language of inevitability is doing the same work. “The math works.” “Adapt or die.” “The K-shaped economy.” These phrases present a political catastrophe as mathematical law - the same way “structural adjustment” presented extraction as reform, the same way “civilization” presented colonial education as uplift. As the political economist Keir Milburn recently observed, the algorithms and institutions we interact with daily are “continually tweaked to ensure they reward ruthlessly competitive, selfish and self-promoting behavior while penalizing those who behave in any other way — until it eventually structures our commonsense understanding of human possibility.”

That is the deepest move. Not just the displacement of labor, but the automation of the ideology that makes displacement feel inevitable. The reward functions embedded in these systems (optimize for efficiency, route around friction, eliminate the human bottleneck) become the common sense of 2026. You don’t see the ideology. You just see that certain behaviors get you through the system and others don’t.

Last week I argued that whoever designs the knowledge systems determines what’s thinkable. This week those systems are acting in the world autonomously, embedding their reward structures into every workflow they touch. The architecture of not knowing, now with AI agency.

There is also a practical problem the optimists haven’t answered: if AI eliminates enough human labor to concentrate economic value in a tiny ownership class, who buys the products? As one cultural philosopher recently noted, a world where a single founder runs a billion-dollar company with almost no human employees is “totally untenable” without a radical redesign of the economic system — and then raised the question no tech booster has answered: who exactly is the consumer base? Capital cannot eliminate labor as a cost without eventually eliminating it as demand. The system just eats itself. Karl Marx called this the tendency toward underconsumption, and it doesn’t require a Marxist to recognize it as a problem.

The framing is the weapon. Accepting it as the only available reality is the wound.

V. Where It All Points

There is a binary at the bottom of all of this, stated plainly by a DevOps engineer who spent an afternoon with an AI system and came out the other side unable to unsee what he’d seen. Either we build “some kind of radical wealth distribution system that keeps society coherent in a world where intelligence is cheap,” he wrote, “or we get the ugly outcomes humans always get when inequality becomes structurally locked in.”

Political violence. Social breakdown. Scapegoating. Authoritarianism. The rich retreating behind literal and figurative walls while everyone else becomes a problem to be managed.

This isn’t doomerism. This is the historical record.

And it’s worth naming one more dimension that most AI commentary ignores entirely. The same logic driving autonomous agents into the workplace is already moving into politics. Imagine competing AI lobbying firms filing regulatory comments at a volume no human operation could match. Autonomous SuperPACs running 24-hour ad campaigns, generating deepfakes, cloning voices, flooding social media with counter-programming before a human strategist has finished their morning coffee. The agentic AI moment isn’t just an economic disruption. It is infrastructure for the consolidation of political power in the hands of whoever can afford the most capable agents. The last few election cycles, heated as they were, may look like a middle school mock election compared to what’s coming.

AI disruption and democratic erosion are not parallel crises converging from separate directions. They are the same crisis, arriving together.

So what does resistance look like when the machines don’t need you?

It starts with refusing the framing. Not “how do I position myself to survive this?” but “who decided the productivity gains belong exclusively to the people who own the systems?” Those are identifiable people who made specific decisions. Decisions can be unmade. As the political economist Keir Milburn argues, the task is building what he calls “popular protagonism” — democratic deliberation and collective action that expands the range of economic life governed by democratic logic rather than capital logic. Social ownership of AI infrastructure. Public investment in the technology rather than private capture of its returns. Democratic accountability over systems that are reshaping everyone’s lives without anyone’s consent.

These are not utopian ideas. They are the same ideas working people have always reached for when capital moved faster than their institutions could follow. They worked, partially, imperfectly, in the labor movements of the early twentieth century. They can work again. But only if the window stays open long enough to act.

The Caribbean has something to say here too. Not as tragedy, but as instruction. Rodney showed that technological dependency is produced, not inevitable. Dependency can be restructured. The plantation economy looked permanent until it didn’t. The colonial order looked natural until people organized to refuse it. The question was never whether resistance was possible. It was whether people understood clearly enough what they were resisting and why.

That is what this piece is trying to do. Not predict the future. Not offer comfort. To name the threshold clearly enough that refusing it becomes thinkable.

Because the first step toward demanding that the abundance generated by these systems serve collective flourishing rather than private accumulation is recognizing that the current arrangement is a choice. Not the math. Not the market. Not the inevitable unfolding of technological progress.

A choice. Made by people. For people who aren’t you.

Understanding that is the beginning of refusal. And refusal is the beginning of everything else.

References

Denning, T. (2026, February 18). You have about 24 months left before your skills expire. Modern Freedom.

Modern Freedom

You have about 24 months left before your skills expire

AI fear is at its peak…

2 months ago · 158 likes · 25 comments · Tim Denning

Dolman, J. (2026, February 16). AI WILL TAKE YOUR JOBS - EVERYTHING IS CHANGING! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-dolman-3836b8251_aiineducation-edtech-ailiteracy-activity-7429101403354136576-AFZL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAATBqzoBkLtY7heLpPMMggHdIB0r9esznWs

Foundry, N. (2025, December 21). UBI or we’re all screwed. Neural Foundry Substack. https://substack.com/home/post/p-182129185

Griffiths, B. D. (2026, February 12). Author of viral “Something Big is Coming” essay says AI helped him write it — and that proves his point. Business Insider.

Milburn, K. (2026, January 22). We need radical abundance. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/abundance-democrats-housing-oligarchs/

Oks, D. (2026, February 12). Why I’m not worried about AI job loss. David Oks.

David Oks

Why I’m not worried about AI job loss

Two days ago, someone named Matt Shumer posted an essay on Twitter with the title “Something Big Is Happening.” Almost immediately, his essay went extremely viral. As of this writing, it’s been viewed about 100 million times and counting; and it’s been shared by such strikingly different figures as the c…

2 months ago · 637 likes · 96 comments · David Oks

Pinchbeck, D. (2026, February 14). All That Is Solid Melts into Code. Liminal News With Daniel Pinchbeck.

Liminal News With Daniel Pinchbeck

All That Is Solid Melts into Code

Just in the last few months, the development of Artificial Intelligence has reached a new stage. We appear to be at an inflection point for humanity and for the immediate future of post-industrial civilization. Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but I do not think it is. People throughout the AI industry are calling the release of GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 (as well as Claude Code and Cowork) as harbingers of a massive shift: AI is on the verge of becoming self-recursively self-improving. This means it may quickly accelerate beyond human capacity not in a single domain like chess or mathematics, but in all domains at once…

2 months ago · 85 likes · 18 comments · Daniel Pinchbeck

View, D. (2026, February 16). OpenAI taps OpenClaw for personal AI agents. The Deep View.

https://archive.thedeepview.com/p/openai-taps-openclaw-for-personal-ai-agents?utm_source=thedeepview&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=openai-taps-openclaw-for-personal-ai-agents&_bhlid=d86210503cd4c243f8945bc07759801fa5feaf99

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Architecture of Not Knowing

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 05:01:25 GMT

History Rhymes is an ongoing series tracing the echoes between past struggles and present crises. Each installment revisits a moment of resistance - from labor uprisings to political repression - to reveal the patterns that persist, the forces that evolve, and the lessons we can use now. History doesn’t repeat, but power does. And so does the courage to challenge it.

I. The Scientist and the Machine

This morning I stumbled across a Substack post by Kevin R. Haylett, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering who has spent decades developing what he calls Geofinitism, a mathematical framework that reimagines language itself as a nonlinear dynamical system. It is ambitious, rigorous work. He has built a functioning prototype of a new kind of language model based on entirely new mathematical foundations. He is not speculating at the margins of science. He is doing exactly what science is supposed to do: pushing past the boundaries of what is known, building new frameworks where the old ones have reached their limits.

And the most advanced AI on the planet is telling him he is wrong.

Not wrong about a calculation, but wrong about the actual axioms he is in the process of designing. The model argues with him, pushes him back toward established physics and established mathematics, and basically treats the frontier of human thought as an error to be corrected. Haylett describes what he sees with precision: “We have a major anomaly in our measurements,” he writes. “The philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out that every shift in a scientific paradigm is initiated by a crisis that what he called ‘normal science’ cannot resolve.” What he is describing is a Kuhnian crisis, a moment when the existing framework cannot account for what is emerging. And the machine, rather than helping him navigate that crisis, is enforcing the very paradigm he is trying to move beyond.

I read his words and recognized the architecture immediately. Not from science, but from a childhood spent inside infrastructure designed by people who never had to live in it. I grew up in St. Croix, a U.S. territory where every institution, from the power grid to the school system to the territorial government itself, was shaped by decisions made thousands of miles away by people who understood the Caribbean primarily as a problem to be managed. The frameworks they built were not designed to accommodate what we knew. They were designed to accommodate what the designers already believed.

That pattern recognition is what set this piece in motion. Because the pattern Haylett is describing, where a tool built to assist thinking instead polices the boundaries of what thinking is allowed to look like, is not new. It is actually one of the oldest patterns in the modern world. Throughout history, when a small group of people designs the systems that structure how larger populations live, think, and know, they embed their own limitations into the architecture itself. And that architecture then constrains what is thinkable for everyone operating inside it. The people harmed most are always those whose ways of knowing fall outside what the designers considered possible.

This has happened before, and it is happening again. And the pattern is older than any algorithm.

II. The Total Institution

The pattern did not begin with algorithms. It began with plantations.

When European colonial powers arrived in the Caribbean, in Africa and across the Global South, they did not simply extract resources. They imposed entire systems of knowledge on societies they genuinely did not understand, and they built those systems into every institution they created: schools, courts, economies, legal codes, languages of governance. The key insight, and the one that makes this history so durable, is that many of the colonizers believed their frameworks were universal. That sincerity made the architecture far more resilient than cynicism ever could have. You can resist a lie. It is much harder to resist a framework that the people enforcing it believe is simply how the world works.

George Beckford, the Jamaican economist, gave us the sharpest language for this. In Persistent Poverty (1972), drawing on Erving Goffman, he described the plantation as a “total institution,” a system so comprehensive that it organized not just labor but consciousness itself. Inside the total institution, alternatives don’t just feel difficult. They feel unrealistic. The institution produces the very framework through which people evaluate whether change is possible, and that framework always concludes that the institution is necessary. This was never only about sugar or labor. It was about the architecture of what could be thought.

Think about what that means in practice. If you control the schools, the courts, and the economy, then you have power. But if you also control the language people are allowed to think in, you have something deeper. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o spent a lifetime tracing exactly this. When colonial governments mandated that education, law, and governance happen in European languages, they were not just making administration easier. They were reshaping what it was possible to know. Knowledge that lived in indigenous languages, concepts that only made sense in those forms because they had no clean equivalent in English or French, got quietly pushed outside the boundaries of what the system recognized as real knowledge. And the damage went deeper than which language you spoke. In Globalectics (2012), Ngũgĩ showed that colonialism imposed not just a different language but a different relationship to knowledge itself. Entire traditions of understanding carried through oral practice, through storytelling, through communal memory and performance, what Ngũgĩ calls “orature,” were structurally demoted beneath the written word. It was not that these traditions lacked depth or rigor. It was that they did not fit the format the colonial system was built to recognize. So they became invisible. Not because they disappeared, but because the architecture could not see them.

Frantz Fanon understood that this invisibility eventually turns inward. Colonial education didn’t just exclude certain knowledge from the system. It produced people who learned to see through the colonizer’s lens so thoroughly that their own traditions came to feel illegitimate even to themselves. He called this the “zone of non-being,” the experience of existing outside the categories the system recognizes as fully human. I saw the residue of this during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Patrick’s parish in the north of Grenada, an island whose own attempt to break free of neocolonial economic architecture, Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement, was crushed by U.S. invasion in 1983. The schools I taught in were still shaped by frameworks built for someone else’s understanding of the world. The textbooks, the curricula, the very logic of what counted as an educated person, all of it carried the fingerprints of designers who had never walked those roads. And what struck me most was how natural it all felt from the inside. That is the total institution at work. It does not need to announce itself. It just becomes the way things are.

Here is what makes this pattern so dangerous: it never stays in one place. Aimé Césaire warned decades ago that the logic used to dehumanize people abroad always comes home. The narrowing of what counts as legitimate thought, the insistence that one framework is universal, the structural erasure of every way of knowing that does not fit, these are not problems confined to colonies or former colonies. They are the machinery of domination itself, and they will be applied wherever a small group builds the systems that everyone else has to live inside. In September 1943, with the physical empires already crumbling under the weight of world war and anti-colonial resistance, Winston Churchill stood at Harvard University and said the quiet part out loud: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” He was right. The cognitive empire did not replace the territorial one. It evolved from it. And as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has argued, that empire of the mind continues to reproduce itself through the very systems and structures we build to organize knowledge, long after the flags come down and the maps get redrawn.

The question is what happens when that empire goes digital.

III. The Replay and the Upgrade

Now a remarkably narrow slice of humanity is building the knowledge infrastructure that will mediate how the rest of us think, learn, create and communicate. The designers are overwhelmingly from elite Western technical institutions, trained in very specific traditions, and operating within narrow assumptions about what knowledge is and how it works. The limitations they embed are not just technical. They are epistemic. Training data reflects existing knowledge hierarchies. Guardrails enforce conformity with established frameworks. “Accuracy” is defined by consensus. “Safety” is defined by the designers’ own cultural and political coordinates. Every one of these seemingly neutral technical choices is a decision about what counts as legitimate thought.

Haylett names the consequence precisely: “Current large language models are, in essence, static maps of dynamical systems.” They catalog what has already been thought. They are not built to navigate what hasn’t. When the model tells a scientist working at the edge of human knowledge that his new ideas are wrong because they don’t match existing patterns, it is doing what colonial education always did: treating the current framework as the boundary of the possible and pushing anyone who ventures beyond it back inside.

Thomas Kuhn called this “normal science,” the way an established paradigm actively resists the anomalies that could transform it. The LLM is, architecturally, a normal science machine. And we are building it into everything.

IV. Where It All Points

Each round of this pattern builds on the last, and the layers compound across centuries. Colonial education determined what knowledge survived long enough to be written down. What was written down determined what was digitized. What was digitized shaped the training data. And the training data now shapes what the most powerful knowledge tools in human history treat as legitimate thought. The architecture inherits its own history. The oral traditions Ngũgĩ traced, the ways of knowing that Beckford saw crushed inside the total institution, the entire epistemologies that Fanon watched people learn to abandon, these did not simply disappear. They were filtered out, generation by generation, format by format, until the systems we are building today cannot even register their absence.

This, I think, is what makes this particular intersection so urgent and so underexplored. The people writing about AI tend not to be reading Caribbean political economy. The people steeped in decolonial thought tend not to be engaging with the architecture of large language models. But the pattern is the same pattern. And if we cannot see it clearly across these domains, we will keep building the same machinery and calling it progress, the way the IMF called structural adjustment “development” and the way colonial administrators called epistemic erasure “education.”

But these architectures have been broken before. Caribbean economists like Beckford built entirely new theoretical frameworks from inside the system designed to prevent exactly that kind of thinking. Ngũgĩ wrote in Gĩkũyũ. C.L.R. James turned the colonial archive into a tool of liberation. Maurice Bishop tried to rebuild an entire nation’s relationship to its own economic future. The knowledge that does not fit the framework is always, in every era, the knowledge the world most needs, because it is the knowledge capable of transforming the system itself.

The question isn’t whether flawed systems will be built. They always will be. The question is whether we can recognize, in the architecture being constructed right now, the same pattern that has repeated across centuries, early enough this time to insist that the tools we build to help us think don’t end up telling us what thinking is allowed to look like. Beckford saw the plantation not as history but as living structure. Césaire saw the colony not as elsewhere but as blueprint. The architecture of not knowing is being built again, in code this time, and at a scale the plantation owners and the IMF economists could never have imagined. Whether we see it clearly enough to break it open remains, as it always has, up to us.

References

Beckford, G. (1972). Persistent Poverty. Oxford University Press.

Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

Haylett, K. R. (2026, January 23). Geofinitism: language as a nonlinear dynamical system - attractors, basins, and the geometry of understanding. Kevin R. Haylett. https://substack.com/home/post/p-184323654

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2025). Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies. Third World Quarterly, 46(18), 2467–2484. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2211520

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (2012). Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Columbia University Press.

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. (2016). Journal of Pan African Studies, 9(4), 438. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A461364220/BRIP?u=nhc_main&sid=ebsco&xid=9eb52fd1

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

God Bless America - All of Them

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 04:44:43 GMT

This piece is part of the Signal/Noise series, rapid responses to breaking events - tracing how power operates not only through policy and violence, but through culture, spectacle, and the stories a society tells itself about who belongs.

I. The Spectacle and the Threat

On Sunday, February 8, 2026, 130 million people across the Americas watched a Puerto Rican wedding. Not a simulation. Not a performance about a wedding. An actual ceremony, with vows exchanged, rings placed and a kiss sealed before the world. Families danced. An uncle spun with his niece. Grandparents swayed to salsa. The bride and groom’s joy radiated through Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, as Bad Bunny (now one of the most streamed artist on Earth) turned the Super Bowl halftime show into something the empire hadn’t anticipated: a celebration of Puerto Rican life so exuberant and so unapologetically itself, that it left the president of the United States sputtering with rage.

Donald Trump didn’t just skip the show, though he’d threatened to. He watched. And then he melted down. On Truth Social, he called it “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” The dancing, he claimed, was “disgusting, especially for young children.” The performance was “a slap in the face to our Country.” The president whose name appears thousands of times in recent Justice Department emails related to Jeffrey Epstein was clutching his pearls about people twerking at a football game. The president who days earlier had called Puerto Ricans “garbage” was now offended that they dared to exist joyfully, in Spanish, on America’s biggest stage.

This is the real battle unfolding across the United States: pride versus intolerance, joy versus domination, and the future versus a past that refuses to die. And 130 million people, in the US, across Latin America and around the world, chose joy.

But 5 million Americans made a different choice. They tuned out. They switched channels. They watched Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show” instead, which featured Kid Rock and three white country singers performing for an audience that sees Bad Bunny’s Spanish, his Puerto Rican flag, his hemisphere of solidarity all as existential threats. That’s not a culture war. That’s rehearsal for something darker: the infrastructure of separation, the mechanics of an ethnostate movement that’s building parallel institutions, claiming a different country, preparing for a future where the rest of us don’t exist.

So here’s the question threaded through everything that follows: Why does a wedding threaten power? Why does joy, performed in Spanish by a former Econo grocery bagger from Vega Baja who became the world’s biggest artist, provoke a president to rage? Why does a man waving flags and naming countries send conservatives scrambling to create counter-programming, attempting to assert their vision of “real America” against the one 130 million people celebrated?

The answer isn’t about music or language or even patriotism. It’s about hegemony - who controls the culture, who defines what’s normal, and who gets to claim the national stage as theirs. As Antonio Gramsci argued, domination doesn’t rely on force alone. It relies on common sense, on making hierarchy feel natural and inevitable. When the story holds, guns stay holstered.

Bad Bunny didn’t accept the story. He told a different one. And for thirteen minutes, millions listened not to the empire’s narrative about who belongs and who doesn’t, and not to the president’s rage about “real Americans” versus colonial subjects, but to a vision of the Americas as plural, interconnected, joyful and free. That’s what unsettles power - not the performance itself, but what it revealed: that cultural control is slipping, that joy is being built beyond permission, that the future is arriving without asking.

This is the story of how a halftime show became an act of decolonization - and why the empire is terrified of what comes next.

II. Mass Spectacle as Contested Terrain

When Bad Bunny emerged from a field of sugar cane stalks to open his Super Bowl performance, it wasn’t decoration. It was history made visible. Spain brought sugar to Puerto Rico in the 1500s, built slave plantations, and extracted wealth for centuries. The United States seized the island in 1898 and did the same, with mainland corporations controlling production, reaping massive profits, and treating Puerto Ricans, as TIME put it, as “mostly a nuisance to be managed.” The stalks therefore weren’t a simple backdrop. They were memory. And walking through them, surrounded by workers cutting cane to the rhythm of reggaeton, Bad Bunny was claiming a history the empire would rather forget.

Eighty years ago, the United States made it illegal to fly the Puerto Rican flag or sing patriotic songs. The 1948 Ley de la Mordaza (the Gag Law) passed by a territorial legislature aligned with U.S. interests, criminalized Puerto Rican identity itself in order to crush the independence movement. Thousands were arrested. Pedro Albizu Campos was imprisoned and tortured. The flag could get you thrown in jail. On Sunday, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio waved that flag on America’s biggest stage, surrounded by Latinos carrying banderas from across the hemisphere, singing entirely in Spanish before 130 million people. This wasn’t permission granted. This was space taken.

The Super Bowl halftime show has always been contested terrain, a brief window where culture, power, and national identity collide. For decades, the unspoken rule was assimilation. Michael Jackson’s 1993 performance was historic, but its themes were carefully universal. The so-called Latin Explosion of the late 1990s required crossover, English lyrics and softened edges. Even Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s 2020 performance, widely celebrated as a breakthrough, still operated largely within that framework. Inclusion was conditional.

Bad Bunny just shattered that model. As Slate’s Joshua Rivera observed, he didn’t cross over; he made them cross to him. Lady Gaga didn’t duet in English. She adapted, singing salsa with visible joy. TIME called it “reverse assimilation.” This is what a crack in cultural hegemony looks like. Not representation, but recentering.

As Stuart Hall argued, representation is never neutral. Culture is a battleground where meaning is fought over. When Beyoncé performed “Formation” in 2016, she claimed that stage for Black resistance. When Kendrick Lamar danced inside a divided American flag in 2025, he made fracture unavoidable. Bad Bunny went further, claiming the stage for the colonized, the Spanish-speaking, the hemisphere the empire has tried to erase.

That is why the reaction was so intense. As Vanity Fair’s Michelle Ruiz observed, “fiesta is a form of protest; joy is its own kind of rebellion.” Bad Bunny didn’t need to shout “fuck ICE” or deliver a lecture on imperialism. He just showed everyday Puerto Rico (the bodegas, the piragua stands, the dominoes, the wedding, the power lines and the flags) and let 130 million people see a culture that doesn’t need the empire’s approval to thrive. Dick Hebdige wrote about how marginalized groups claim space through style and culture, turning symbols of subordination into declarations of identity. Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl, the most expensive, corporate, quintessentially American spectacle, and made it Puerto Rican. He turned imperial theater into decolonial celebration.

III. The Parallel Show: When 5 Million Watch Something Else

While 130 million people watched Bad Bunny, 5 million Americans made a different choice. They tuned into Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show,” where Kid Rock and three white country singers performed what organizers called “real America.” This wasn’t just counter-programming. It was infrastructure building. When a movement creates parallel concerts, parallel narratives, and parallel definitions of the nation, it is rehearsing for separation.

The danger here isn’t guns. An armed citizenry can, under certain conditions, defend liberty. Vietnam and Switzerland both make that clear. The danger is who those guns are imagined to be for. When 5 million people choose Kid Rock over Bad Bunny, they aren’t just picking different music. They are choosing a different country, one that does not include the rest of us.

This is what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community,” a nation brought into being through shared symbols, shared exclusions, and shared fantasies of purity. And as Aimé Césaire warned, fascism is colonialism turned inward. The ethnostate project now taking shape mirrors the logic once used to subordinate Puerto Rico: some people belong, others are problems to be managed or removed.

As The Independent’s Mark Beaumont put it, “Would you rather be here shaking multicultural booty with Bad Bunny, or watching a bunch of bitter country bores in a miserable Texan bar?” The choice was not aesthetic. It was existential. One show celebrated mixture, joy, and defiance. The other performed resentment, purity, and retreat. One imagined hemispheric solidarity. The other dreamed of walls and deportations.

This is the real battle, pride versus intolerance. And 130 million people chose pride. So now we have to reckon with what they were shown.

IV. The Class Contradictions and the Hijacking

The Super Bowl is capitalism’s cathedral. Eight million dollars for thirty seconds of advertising. Billionaire owners in luxury boxes. A spectacle designed to sell everything from trucks to tax software. The game itself is secondary to the commodity fetishism, the ritual where products become personalities and consumption becomes identity. This is what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle,” where authentic human experience is replaced by its representation, where life becomes something you watch rather than live, and where even rebellion is packaged and sold back to you.

And then Bad Bunny hijacked it.

The Situationists had a word for this: détournement, the practice of stealing the master’s tools and turning them against the master’s house. Not reforming the spectacle, but redirecting its power. For thirteen minutes, the most expensive advertising platform on Earth became a celebration of Puerto Rican joy, anti-colonial memory, and working-class life. The oligarchs paid for the stadium. Bad Bunny decided what it would mean.

The contradictions were impossible to miss. An artist from an island with a 44 percent poverty rate performing for an audience of billionaires. A colonized people’s culture broadcast by the empire that still governs them. A wedding, the ultimate gift economy where value flows from relationship and obligation from love, smuggled into a spectacle surrounded by ads insisting meaning can be bought.

Marx wrote that capitalism turns everything into commodities, alienating us from our labor, our relationships, and ourselves. Bad Bunny reversed that logic. He inserted use-value back into exchange-value. He turned the Super Bowl from a machine for selling things into a space for being together. The performance was not for sale. It was for us.

That is why it was dangerous. The empire can tolerate representation, diverse faces selling the same system. It cannot tolerate transformation. Someone used its biggest stage to show that another world already exists, that joy does not require permission, and that working people from colonized islands can claim space the powerful assumed they owned. That is not inclusion. It is insurgency. And 130 million people watched it happen in real time.

V. Authenticity as Politics: The Wedding, the Bodega, the Blackout

When Bad Bunny climbed the electrical pole during “El Apagón,” sparks flying as workers in pava hats surrounded him, he wasn’t staging a metaphor. He was showing what imperial neglect looks like. This is what happens when territories receive infrastructure designed for extraction rather than for people. “El Apagón” means “the blackout,” and in Puerto Rico it names the routine collapse of a power grid now run by LUMA Energy, a private mainland corporation that profits while the lights go out. The song’s 22-minute video, featuring the amazing journalist Bianca Graulau, documents how Act 22 tax incentives invite wealthy mainlanders to privatize beaches and drive up rents while working-class Boricuas lose power, land, and home.

This is what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of non-being,” the space where colonized people live outside the protections and recognition granted to the metropole. Puerto Rico doesn’t lack a functional grid by accident. Its territorial status makes disposability administrative policy. Walter Rodney taught us that underdevelopment isn’t backwardness; it is produced. PREPA’s collapse followed that logic precisely.

I learned what this looks like in St. Croix, where WAPA’s failing grid made outages routine and hurricanes exposed how provisional belonging becomes when aid arrives late, if it arrives at all. When Bad Bunny staged the blackout, I recognized it immediately. This is what disposability looks like. Infrastructure reflects political status.

Bad Bunny’s rise coincided with Hurricane Maria because catastrophe clarifies who the system serves. While federal aid stalled and Trump tossed paper towels, while the grid failed and mainland corporations profited, a grocery bagger from Vega Baja began making music about what working-class Puerto Ricans were already living. He didn’t study poverty. He bagged groceries. He didn’t theorize colonialism. He lived under it.

This is what Gramsci called the “organic intellectual.” Bad Bunny’s politics aren’t performance. They are material analysis made into music, gift economy smuggled into spectacle, and real lives made impossible to ignore on the empire’s biggest stage.

VI. “God Bless America”—Every Single One of Them

When Ricky Martin belted “Lo Que Pasó a Hawaii” alongside Bad Bunny, it wasn’t just a cameo. It was a bridge. Hawaii and Puerto Rico were both seized in 1898, both reshaped into sugar colonies, both still subordinated to an empire that extracts their land while dismissing their people. After Puerto Rico’s 1899 hurricane, recruiters transported thousands of Boricuas to Hawaii’s plantations, where they labored alongside Kānaka Maoli, Filipinos, Japanese, and Chinese workers. What emerged there was solidarity forged in cane fields. What Bad Bunny offered on Sunday was memory. A reminder that these struggles are connected, that the empire’s logic is the same whether its flag flies over Honolulu or San Juan.

And then came the flags. All of them.

As the performance reached its climax, dancers filled the field carrying banderas from across the hemisphere: Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, and more. Bad Bunny named them one by one, out loud, on America’s biggest stage. In doing so, he reclaimed the word “America” itself, redefining it from imperial possession into continental belonging. This is what José Martí meant in 1891 when he wrote of “Nuestra América,” an America that is plural, interconnected, and resistant to any empire that claims the name for itself. It is what Simón Bolívar envisioned as well: unity not through domination, but through liberation, rooted in the understanding that our struggles are facets of the same fight.

I studied Caribbean economics at Hampshire College under scholars like Fred Weaver and Laurie Nisonoff — historians and political economists who taught in the traditions of Rodney, James, and Marx, and who understood what Bad Bunny demonstrated in thirteen minutes: that Puerto Rico’s colonization, Haiti’s debt, Jamaica’s structural adjustment, and the territorial status of the U.S. Virgin Islands are not separate tragedies. They are outcomes of the same imperial system. When Bad Bunny named every country, he did what decolonial thinkers have long insisted upon: he saw the whole, not the fragments the empire creates to keep us divided.

So what makes a president rage at flags and names? What makes five million people flee to Kid Rock rather than witness this vision of hemispheric joy? Because they understand what’s happening. This wasn’t inclusion. It wasn’t a polite request for a seat at America’s table. It was redefinition. A declaration that the table was always ours, that “America” names the whole damn hemisphere, and that the empire squatting in Washington is just one country among many, not the center of the world.

And the empire knows what that redefinition threatens. If “America” means all of us, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, from favelas to reservations to colonized islands, then the legal fiction that allows the United States to rule Puerto Rico while denying Puerto Ricans equal citizenship collapses. In 2022 (not 1922, but 2022) the U.S. Supreme Court denied Puerto Ricans equal Social Security benefits and also refused a case that sought to confer birthright U.S. citizenship to those living in another U.S. territory, American Samoa. The Court cited the Insular Cases, those 1901 decisions grounded in fears of “savage” peoples becoming citizens. Modern defenders call this “cultural preservation.” Legal scholars call it what it is: colonialism with better vocabulary.

When Bad Bunny waved the Puerto Rican independence flag, he wasn’t simply celebrating culture. He was defying a legal order that still classifies Puerto Ricans as “appurtenant and belonging to,” but not “part of,” the United States. Second-class by Supreme Court precedent. The Insular Cases remain good law. The Gag Law was repealed, but its spirit lives on in every ruling that upholds unequal treatment. And still, there was Bad Bunny, showing 130 million people what sovereignty looks like. Not asking permission. Not pleading for recognition. Simply claiming existence.

Frantz Fanon wrote that decolonization is always a violent phenomenon, not because the colonized are inherently violent, but because the colonizer never relinquishes power willingly. But Fanon also understood decolonization as creation, the bringing into being of a world the empire cannot imagine. That is what happened Sunday night. For thirteen minutes, a different world existed. Not someday. Not after the right elections or the right court rulings. Now. A world where Puerto Ricans don’t code-switch, where Spanish doesn’t apologize, where the colonized dance at their own weddings while the empire watches, unable to stop the joy.

At the end, Bad Bunny held up a football painted with four words: “TOGETHER WE ARE AMERICA.” Not their America. Not the empire’s America. Our America. Nuestra América. The one Martí dreamed of. The one Bolívar fought for. The one that has always existed, despite every attempt to erase it. Together. Plural. Hemispheric. Free.

That is what terrifies them. Not the performance, but what it revealed. That the empire’s cultural hegemony is cracking. That people are building joy the colonizer cannot control. That 130 million people watched the future arrive and chose to dance.

The question isn’t whether the empire will accept this vision of the Americas. The question is whether the empire can survive it.

Seguimos aquí. We’re still here. And we’re not asking permission anymore.

God bless America. Every single one of them.

References

Beaumont, M. (2026b, February 9). Bad Bunny review, Super Bowl 2026 halftime show: This wild, inclusive fiesta was an inherently political stand. The Independent. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/bad-bunny-review-super-bowl-2026-halftime-show-b2916046.html

Bonlarron Martinez, C. (2026, February 9). Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Show Was Political Art at Its Best. Jacobin. https://jacobin.com/2026/02/bad-bunny-super-bowl-puerto-rico

Chow, A. R. (2026, February 9). Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was an exuberant act of resistance. TIME. https://time.com/7373018/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-analysis/

Pappas, S. (2026, February 9). Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show highlighted Puerto Rico’s power grid. Here’s why. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-bunnys-super-bowl-halftime-show-highlighted-puerto-ricos-power-grid/

Power, M. (2023). Solidarity Across the Americas : The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism. The University of North Carolina Press.

Rivera, J. (2026, February 9). What Gringos might have missed about Bad Bunny’s halftime show. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/culture/2026/02/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-2026-lady-gaga.html

Román, E., & Sagás, E. (2025). Race and Empire: The United States Over Puerto Rico. Oregon Law Review, 103(2), 483–518.

Ruiz, M. (2026, February 9). Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl 2026 show was a joyful act of resilience—and resistance. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/story/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-2026

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Quiet War in Minneapolis:

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 03:41:08 GMT

This piece is part of “The Quiet War,” a series tracking how state violence operates in plain sight — from border militarization to urban occupation, examining how authoritarianism arrives not with fanfare but with bureaucracy, memes, and manufactured consent.

I. When a Person Becomes a “Threat”

A week ago, I wrote about Greenland - about what happens when empire stops pretending to follow rules, when sovereignty becomes negotiable and when people are reclassified from citizens to assets. I warned that colonial violence always comes home. That what the United States perfects abroad, it eventually deploys within its own borders. Minneapolis is where that warning became prophecy.

By now everyone has seen some news coverage, but I’m unsure how many truly appreciate the scale of Operation Metro Surge. The Department of Homeland Security calls it “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” More than 2,000 ICE agents and 1,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers were deployed to a single metropolitan area. Over 3,000 arrests have occurred in two months. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered. Neighbors afraid to leave their homes. Federal agents patrolling public streets with military-grade weapons, going door to door, detaining U.S. citizens, Native Americans, legal residents, children - anyone whose presence is deemed suspicious.

And then they started killing people.

In the final moments before she was killed, Renée Nicole Good was calm. In a video filmed beside her car, she tells the federal agent approaching her window, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” She is not shouting. She is not threatening. She is not resisting. She is trying to leave.

Seconds later, she is dead.

A week later, also in downtown Minneapolis, Alex Pretti is doing what thousands of people across the country have learned to do: filming. He records masked agents shoving protesters. He steps forward to shield a woman who has been knocked to the ground. He is sprayed, tackled, pinned. His legal firearm is removed. He lies helpless beneath a pile of armed bodies.

Then he is shot multiple times.

Filming. Shielding. Pinned. Disarmed. Shot.

This is how a neighbor becomes a problem. This is how a person becomes a “threat.” Not through violence, but through reclassification. Power does not announce when it withdraws someone’s right to exist. It just does it.

II. How Power Decides Whose Life Counts

One of the great myths of American democracy is that the law applies to everyone equally. That when something goes wrong, institutions will sort it out. That mistakes will be corrected. That innocence will be presumed.

In reality, those protections are unevenly distributed. Some people are treated as citizens first. Their actions are interpreted generously. Their intentions are assumed to be reasonable. Their mistakes are met with patience. They are entitled to explanations, appeals, and second chances.

Others are treated as risks from the start. Their presence is suspicious. Their movements are monitored. Their fear is read as guilt. Their compliance is never quite enough. For them, there is no presumption of innocence, only a presumption of danger.

We know who fills this category. Immigrants. Protesters. Working-class people. Racialized communities. Anyone who moves through public space without institutional protection.

In Minneapolis, ICE agents have detained Target employees during their shifts, arrested restaurant workers in front of customers, pulled people off buses and surrounded families in their homes. Minnesota’s chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz found that ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota since January 1 alone - 96 times that federal agents simply ignored judges telling them their actions were illegal. That’s not enforcement. That’s impunity.

When violence happens to these people, it is processed as procedure. Paperwork. Policy. An “incident.”

This is not chaos. It is sorting. Every unequal society draws a line between “people” and “problems.” Minneapolis shows us where ours is.

III. From Colony to City Block: Violence as Message

Every time federal agents kill someone in public, the script is ready before the body hits the ground. Self-defense. An armed threat. A split-second decision. The language arrives faster than the investigation, because it is not meant to describe what happened. It is meant to end the conversation.

Caroline Light, a historian of citizenship and self-defense law whose book Stand Your Ground argues that lethal self-defense protects “security for the few at the expense of the many,” names this for what it is: ritual language. “Self-defense” no longer refers to necessity; it functions as automatic absolution. The victim becomes the aggressor. The killing becomes regrettable but justified. Video evidence doesn’t interrupt this process, it merely tests how much the public is willing to disbelieve its own eyes.

As Light writes in Slate: “What is new today is not the twisted rhetoric of self-defense but its escalation, and its targets. Masked federal agents, many of them poorly trained, now patrol public streets with military-grade weapons and broad discretionary authority. They detain, assault, and, increasingly, kill people based on vague or erroneous claims of public safety. They do so while invoking the same exonerating language that has long enabled state violence.”

We have seen this pattern before, just in different locations. Lynching was framed as community protection. Colonial massacres were justified as “pacification.” Indigenous resistance was labeled savagery. On the frontier, on the plantation, at the border, violence was narrated as restraint rather than domination.

But the techniques didn’t stay at the periphery. They migrated inward.

The counterinsurgency tactics developed in Iraq and Afghanistan (separating populations, controlling movement through checkpoints, treating entire communities as potential threats and punishing those who document abuses) are now standard practice in American cities. The surveillance technologies tested on Mexico’s border track immigrants in Minnesota. The military equipment deployed in Fallujah now patrols Minneapolis streets. The legal doctrines that justified drone strikes abroad now authorize federal agents to kill witnesses at home.

From colony to border. From border to city block. From military occupation to domestic policing. This violence is not primarily about punishment. It is about instruction. It teaches who may intervene and who must remain still. It teaches which lives require explanation and which can be erased with a press release. It teaches silence, compliance, and fear.

Light continues: “For generations, public state violence has been normalized precisely because it was disproportionately inflicted on nonwhite people, immigrants, low-income and other marginalized individuals. Many learned to look away or to justify this violence as the necessary price of ‘law and order.’ Part of race and class privilege was the capacity to see such violence as a regrettable but necessary byproduct of maintaining order and keeping ‘us’ safe.”

This is violence as public pedagogy - spectacular enough to teach the lesson, but deniable enough to seem justified. It works only if people keep looking away, keep telling themselves that those killed must have done something wrong, that the agents must have felt threatened, that surely there’s more to the story.

But we are learning, as Light warns, “what happens when a society confuses authority with innocence and violence with virtue. We have built legal doctrines that reward escalation. We have granted weapons to institutions without demanding restraint. We have taught ourselves that ‘good guys’ with guns will keep us safe from ‘bad guys.’ Maybe now we are learning that the boundary separating the two was never clear in the first place.”

Violence, as it turns out, is never just force. It is pedagogy.

People gather to form a human distress signal on Bde Maka Ska in Minneapolis on January 31st. - WCCO

IV. Fear Is a Business Model

It’s worth noting that ICE is no longer a marginal agency. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, its budget has exploded into the tens of billions of dollars, with funding that rivals or exceeds the FBI’s entire budget. Tens of billions more are earmarked for deportations and detention beds capable of holding up to 100,000 people at once. Its ranks have more than doubled in a single year.

As such, this isn’t solely about law enforcement. It’s also about infrastructure. That’s why it’s always worth asking the revealing question: who actually profits from this expansion? In this case, it’s private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group, which operate immigrant detention facilities under lucrative federal contracts. It’s also other defense contractors selling surveillance drones, facial recognition systems and military-grade equipment to immigration enforcement. It’s also the tech companies building databases to track, categorize and predict immigrant movement. It’s the transportation companies paid to fly detainees across the country. And it’s the construction firms building detention centers in rural communities desperate for any economic activity.

The business model here is simple: produce insecurity, and then monetize it. The result? Exploding budgets. Private contracts for detention and surveillance. Militarized vehicles in our cities. Coercive technologies that track, apprehend, and confine without accountability. Insecurity is not a byproduct; it is carefully produced and deployed.

Walter Rodney, whose scholarship traced how global capitalism requires poverty in some places to generate wealth in others, taught us to see clearly that poverty and fear are not accidents. They are managed outcomes, produced by systems that profit from them. We can apply his theory to immigration enforcement. For example, the threat of deportability suppresses wages - when workers know ICE can disappear them, they accept lower pay, unsafe conditions and no union organizing. Policing undermines collective power. Precarity ultimately teaches obedience.

The message is clear: Don’t look. Don’t intervene. Don’t organize.

Therefore, one can argue that repression isn’t a failure of the system. It’s a revenue stream, a funded, bureaucratic industry whose profit is obedience and whose product is fear.

V. The People Who Refuse Disappearance

But here is what threatens power more than anything: people who refuse to look away.

Across Minneapolis, thousands have organized into networks of documenters, mutual aid groups and rapid response teams. They film raids. They surround ICE vehicles. They shield neighbors. They share information through encrypted Signal groups, warning others when federal agents are in the area. They provide food, legal support and solidarity to those targeted.

This is not symbolic resistance. This is material intervention in the machinery of state violence. Every camera raised creates evidence that might prevent the next killing from being dismissed as “self-defense.” Every neighbor defended disrupts the smooth operation of mass detention. Every lie exposed makes it harder for power to narrate its violence as necessity.

Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, documents how Minnesota communities have proven that coordinated resistance can limit ICE’s capacity: “When federal agents arrived expecting compliance, they found instead a population that refused to be accomplices to their neighbors’ disappearance.” This is what organized refusal looks like. Not speeches. Not elections alone. Organized care and collective action.

But we cannot romanticize this work. The costs are real and rising. For example, ICE agents photograph license plates of people who document raids. They film bystanders with personal cell phones, which is footage that doesn’t immediately become agency property and can be used for retaliation. Jobs are threatened. People are followed. Organizers wake up to ICE vehicles parked outside their homes. Charlie Warzel reports in The Atlantic that witnesses to federal violence have been surveilled, threatened with arrest, beaten with batons, sprayed with chemical irritants, and subjected to flashbangs and LRADs (sonic weapons that cause pain and disorientation). Alex Pretti was killed for documenting. Renée Good was killed for being present. This is the price of refusing to look away.

And yet people keep showing up. Keep blowing their whistles. Keep filming. Keep shielding. Keep organizing. Because they understand something fundamental: authoritarianism depends on isolation. It requires bystanders to remain bystanders. It needs witnesses to become silent. It demands that we treat violence against our neighbors as someone else’s problem.

The people refusing that script in Minneapolis are not heroes performing exceptional acts. They are ordinary people doing what solidarity requires: treating each other’s survival as a collective responsibility.

They can manage bodies, but they cannot yet manage conscience. Every camera raised, every neighbor defended and every lie exposed is a reminder that power is not omnipotent - it is contested, fragile, uneven and dependent on our compliance.

The question is not whether resistance is possible. Minneapolis proves it is. The question is whether the rest of us will join it.

References

Kristof, N. (2026, January 31). We Don’t Have to Be Like This. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/opinion/minneapolis-pretti-bovino.html

Light, C. E. (2026, January 25). Don’t let them tell you that was Self-Defense. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/alex-pretti-execution-lie-self-defense-myths.html

Rahman, B. (2026, January 28). Minneapolis is proving ICE’s undoing. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/minneapolis-proving-ice-undoing-11423859

Serwer, A. (2026, January 29). Minnesota proved MAGA wrong. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/?gift=j9r7avb6p-KY8zdjhsiSZ8H3lUwN6ZgkAO9HNshlhsY

Warzel, C. (2026, January 27). Believe your eyes. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/minneapolis-protests-footage/685753/

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

From the Caribbean to the Arctic

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:14:21 GMT

This piece is part of “Signal/Noise,” rapid responses to breaking events — cutting through media static to find the patterns and power structures beneath the headlines.

Section I — Empire, Seen From the Water’s Edge

I learned what American “belonging” means in St. Croix. A former Danish colony. Bought, not freed. Governed, not represented. You grow up pledging allegiance to a flag that never pledges back. You learn early that being “part of America” means being permanently provisional.

Greenland sits in that same shadow now. Trump questions, as Anne Applebaum notes, why Denmark has any “right of ownership” at all, as if centuries of history, treaties the United States itself has signed, and the lives of 57,000 Greenlanders are just paperwork blocking desire. As if sovereignty were a clerical error waiting to be corrected.

I’ve seen this logic before. In the Virgin Islands. In Puerto Rico. In Guam, and in every place that exists more as a strategic asset than as a community.

Jesse Damiani calls a potential seizure of Greenland a scenario so extreme that it could shatter what remains of the postwar order. He’s right. But from the margins, this doesn’t really feel new. It actually feels like repetition. Empire always looks stable, until you’re standing at its edges, watching it decide whether you’re worth keeping whole.

Section II — Why the Arctic Is Being Claimed Now

This isn’t really about Trump’s personality. It’s actually about what happens when capitalism runs out of easy frontiers. Historically, the pattern is clear: the Americas became plantations, Africa became mines, the Middle East became oil fields, and the Caribbean became sugar factories and military logistics hubs. Each transformation followed the same script: resources discovered, populations displaced, profit extracted and, eventually, ruins left behind.

Now the Arctic is becoming a scramble for energy, minerals and shipping lanes. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered natural gas sit beneath Arctic ice. As The Economist put it, the region is becoming “a strategic crossroads,” linking oceans, continents and supply chains.

Marx called this primitive accumulation: the violent conversion of land, labor and life itself into profit. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who chronicled colonialism’s psychological and material violence, called it colonial extraction dressed as development. And Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian assassinated for his revolutionary organizing, showed that “underdevelopment” isn’t inherited - it’s produced, deliberately and systematically, to serve capital’s needs elsewhere.

Seen from this angle, Greenland isn’t now just being “noticed.” It’s being priced. As ice melts and trade routes open, capital follows. Militaries in turn follow capital, and flags follow both. So what looks like geopolitics is really political economy in uniform. The question isn’t whether resources will be seized, only by whom, and at whose expense.

Section III — From Rules to Raw Power

For most of our lives, empire wore a mask. Grace Blakeley, an economist writing about the unraveling of neoliberal order, calls it “the façade that once legitimized empire” - the pretense that there were rules, norms and procedures. That powerful states basically had to pretend. That invasions required excuses. That domination needed paperwork.

It was never honest, sure. But it mattered. As Blakeley writes, “You obey the law because ‘it’s the law.’” Legitimacy restrains violence, imperfectly and unevenly, but sometimes enough to matter.

Jesse Damiani makes the same point from another angle. The postwar order, he argues, privileged “predictability over predation.” Bretton Woods and NATO weren’t moral systems. They were stabilizers and shock absorbers - basically ways of keeping the great powers from tearing the world apart every generation.

Trump is now fully tearing off the mask. No WMDs. No humanitarian alibis. Just: “Complete and Total Control of Greenland” (as he recently wrote in what is arguably the most insane memo ever issued by a chief executive). He’s basically arguing that might makes right, out loud. And once that becomes normal, everything destabilizes.

Damiani warns that Europe holds roughly 45% of foreign investment in the U.S. When trust collapses, capital flees. Borrowing costs rise, prices climb, and living standards fall. Imperial recklessness abroad becomes economic violence at home. The boomerang always comes back.

Section IV — What “Belonging” Looks Like in an Empire

I learned what “belonging” means in an empire long before Greenland made headlines. I learned it in St. Croix.

You see, the U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917 - the same Denmark that now “owns” Greenland. It was described as a “peaceful transfer.” A “strategic acquisition.” Another flag raised. Another map recolored. But more than a century later, residents there still can’t vote for president (and neither can the other approximately five million inhabitants of dependent overseas American territories). They still lack full congressional representation. Federal agencies rule with little accountability. When hurricanes hit, aid often arrives late, if it arrives. When budgets tighten, they’re expendable. This is what “ownership” looks like when you’re the asset, not the owner.

As Anne Applebaum warns, Trump now talks as if sovereignty is just “a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago.” Fred Kaplan calls this “a new level of madness.” But for colonial subjects, it isn’t madness. It’s the operating system. It’s how empire has always worked, stripped of the rhetoric about freedom and partnership. The language changes depending on the audience (Greenlanders hear “security,” islanders hear “extraction”), but the logic underneath remains constant: you may become American, but you will not become equal.

The Economist catalogs the Arctic’s “bountiful oil, gas, minerals and fish,” and that language always comes first. Resources get inventoried before people get consulted. Profits get projected before populations get considered. This is the lesson St. Croix has been teaching for a century, the lesson Greenland is being offered now: imperial belonging means living in a place someone else has already decided is worth more than you are.

Section V — The World This Creates

Jesse Damiani warned that a seizure of Greenland would be “a hinge event,” or basically the collapse of what remains of the postwar order. Anne Applebaum asked us to imagine Marines in Nuuk, forcing citizens of a treaty ally to submit at gunpoint. The Economist saw melting ice opening new routes, new mines and new frontiers. All of it pointed in the same direction: when stability breaks, capital doesn’t retreat. It militarizes. And when rules fail, power doesn’t hesitate. It consolidates. When empire loses its mask, it reaches for its gun.

That is what this is about. Not freedom. Not democracy. Not “security.” Thirteen percent of the world’s undiscovered oil. Thirty percent of its gas. Resources.

Remember the historical arc: plantations became ports. Ports became pipelines. Pipelines became military bases.

Africa: minerals.

Caribbean: sugar and logistics.

Middle East: oil.

Arctic: everything left.

And at the Kennedy Center, members of Congress recently cut into a Greenland-shaped cake (the plantation logic in pastry form), laughing as if sovereignty were dessert.

But then something unexpected happened.

At Davos last week, Trump backed down. No military force. No tariffs on European allies. The threats, for now, suspended. Various political observers and news outlets called it another example of “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out). But that misses the point. This wasn’t chickening out. This was empire hitting limits.

Europe pushed back, collectively and loudly. Denmark and Greenland refused. NATO allies coordinated resistance. Even Trump’s own advisors split, with figures like Vance and Rubio advocating negotiation over annexation, while Stephen Miller pushed to keep military force on the table. Republican lawmakers warned of impeachment. Markets shuddered. The costs became real.

So Trump retreated, wrapped in the language of “framework deals” and “strategic partnerships,” but retreating nonetheless. This matters, because resistance worked. The naked assertion of power met strong resistance and blinked.

For those of us who’ve watched empire operate for decades, this moment reveals something crucial: when legitimacy dies, certainty dies too. An empire that can no longer justify itself also can’t predict what it can get away with. Force without legitimacy is power without stability. Every threat becomes a test, and every retreat exposes limits.

But here’s what we can’t afford to forget: this isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Trump still wants Greenland’s minerals, its bases and its strategic position. The “framework deal” he touts is imperialism with better PR: negotiated extraction instead of military seizure, but extraction nonetheless. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that negotiations will continue between the US, Denmark and Greenland. The EU held an emergency summit to coordinate response, badly shaken by what one diplomat called America’s “bully” behavior. European leaders are rethinking the transatlantic relationship entirely (as they should).

The mask is still off. The threat is suspended, but not abandoned. And as the Economic Times notes, “EU governments remain wary of another change of mind from Trump.”

Fanon warned that colonialism creates “zones of non-being” or places where some lives are always negotiable. Césaire consequently warned that colonial violence always comes home. Well…it already has.

So here are the questions we face:

Can resistance hold? When the mask drops and empire speaks plainly, can collective refusal keep it at bay? And for those of us in the imperial core: Will we join that resistance, or will we wait until the weapons turn inward, until our own cities become the frontiers, until the logic tested in St. Croix and other islands (and now threatened in Greenland) arrives at our own doors?

Because that’s the lesson of this moment. Empire without legitimacy is empire without limits, except the limits we create through refusal. Trump backed down from Greenland because the costs became real. The question is whether we’ll make those costs real every time, before the threats become realities, before the next target is chosen, before the logic of disposability expands to swallow more lives, more places and, ultimately, more precious futures.

The world that empire creates is the world we allow it to create. Greenland reminds us that we still have some say in the matter.

For now.

References

Applebaum, A. (2026, January 20). Trump’s letter to Norway should be the last straw. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-norway/685676/

Blakeley, G. (2026, January 19). The Law of the Jungle. Grace Blakeley.

Grace Blakeley

The Law of the Jungle

The liberal rules-based order is dead. With his invasion of Venezuela, his threats to Greenland, and his trade war, Trump has dealt the final blow to the idea of a global ‘community’ of states, each agreeing to abide by a common set of rules based on respect for free trade, human rights, and sovereignty…

3 months ago · 340 likes · 60 comments · Grace Blakeley

Damiani, J. (2026, January 18). Americans: You need to understand how catastrophic an invasion of Greenland would Be—For YOU. Reality Studies.

Reality Studies

Americans: You Need to Understand How Catastrophic an Invasion of Greenland Would Be—For YOU

Right now, the most fervent political discourse in the United States centers around ICE, and for good reason. A paramilitary law enforcement arm that can act without transparency and accountability (embodied in Vice President JD Vance’s claim that ICE agents have …

3 months ago · 76 likes · 7 comments · Jesse Damiani

Farrow, F. (2026, January 20). Breaking down Trump’s argument for acquiring Greenland. ABC News.

Ferguson, M. (2026, January 21). Republicans cut into Greenland cake in shocking Kennedy Center Party. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/post/205498/republicans-greenland-cake-us-flag

Kaplan, F. (2026, January 20). It might have seemed as if Trump couldn’t get more irrational. Greenland proves he’s just getting started. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/trump-greenland-obsession-impeach.html

LaGuardia, A. (2025, November 12). The Arctic will become more connected to the global economy. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2025/11/12/the-arctic-will-become-more-connected-to-the-global-economy

Online, E. (2026, January 22). TACO strikes again: Why Trump pulled back from Greenland bluster. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/taco-strikes-again-why-trump-pulled-back-from-greenland-bluster/articleshow/127166986.cms

____________________________________________________________________________

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Gig Economy Trap

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:54:28 GMT

This piece is part of “Workers Rising,” a series celebrating and analyzing labor struggles past and present — from shop floors to app-based gigs, exploring how workers build power against increasingly creative forms of exploitation.

I. The Promise That Curled Inward

By the time Gen Z entered the workforce, the script was already worn thin. Work hard, specialize, be flexible and, ultimately, build a career. What they encountered instead was an economy where stability had become a luxury good and “success” meant juggling debt, uncertainty and three different income apps at once. Not because they wanted to, but because the floor had quietly dropped out beneath them.

What some economists are now calling “disillusionomics” isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s adaptation. When wages lag, rents surge and long-term planning feels almost fictional, people stop treating work as a path and start treating it as a patchwork. Side hustles multiply. Spare rooms turn into revenue streams. Even leisure becomes monetizable. Life itself gets sliced into sellable pieces.

This is often framed as a cultural shift: Gen Z as risk-loving, commitment-averse, allergic to the nine-to-five. But that explanation gets it backward. These behaviors aren’t driven by excess confidence in the market. They’re driven by a deep recognition that the old promises no longer hold. When conventional routes close, improvisation takes their place.

The gig economy didn’t just meet this moment - it helped shape it. Marketed as freedom, it offered a way to survive without security, and a way to stay afloat without standing still. And over time, what began as flexibility hardened into expectation.

II. When Flexibility Becomes a One-Way Street

At its core, the gig economy is often described as a neutral marketplace: various platforms simply connect workers to customers, take a small cut, and everyone benefits. But that story obscures what’s really happening. These platforms don’t just match labor to demand, they reorganize work so that risk flows downward while control flows up.

Gig companies rarely own cars, bikes, tools or even offices. What they own instead is the system: the app, the algorithm and the data. Workers supply the labor, absorb the downtime, pay for their own equipment and shoulder the uncertainty. The platform skims value from every transaction while avoiding the obligations that traditionally came with being an employer.

This is why gig work scales so quickly and so profitably. Growth doesn’t require hiring more managers or building factories. It requires enrolling more workers into a system where pay fluctuates, schedules are unstable, and decisions are made by software no one can appeal. Labor becomes just another input, one that is infinitely adjustable and easily replaceable.

Over time, this arrangement reshapes expectations. Workers are told they’re independent, entrepreneurial and “their own boss.” But independence without power is just isolation. What looks like freedom on the surface often functions as a stripped-down form of employment, one where the worker carries the costs, and the platform captures the upside.

III. The Architecture of the Trap

The gig economy doesn’t rely on foremen or factory whistles. Its discipline is quieter, and often more effective. Control is built directly into the architecture of the platforms themselves: ratings systems, opaque algorithms, dynamic pricing and constant surveillance dressed up as “optimization.”

Workers are nudged, sorted, and punished without ever being formally managed. A low rating can mean fewer jobs. Declining too many gigs can quietly throttle visibility. Sudden “deactivations” arrive without explanation or appeal. As one critical study of platform labor put it, algorithmic management allows firms to “extract value while minimizing accountability,” replacing human supervision with automated enforcement.

This isn’t incidental - it’s foundational. Platforms like Uber have openly acknowledged that reclassifying workers as employees, with minimum wages and benefits, would “adversely affect” their business model. In other words, the profitability of gig work depends on keeping workers just outside the boundary of protection.

By 2025, roughly 12% of the global workforce was engaged in some form of platform-based labor, generating more than $600 billion annually. Yet most of those workers still lack predictable income, benefits, or job security. The system scales precisely because instability is built in. What emerges is a trap disguised as choice. Workers are free to log on, but not free from the consequences engineered into the system once they do.

IV. When Everyone’s a “Founder,” No One Has a Floor

If the gig economy has a masterstroke, it’s not technological - it’s linguistic. Workers aren’t called workers. They’re partners, creators, independent contractors, or, most seductively, entrepreneurs. Everyone is framed as a CEO in miniature, even when they control nothing but their own exhaustion.

This language matters because it shifts responsibility. If income is unstable, that’s not a structural problem - it’s a personal branding failure. If demand dries up, the answer isn’t collective protection but another hustle, another platform or another reinvention. Risk is individualized, while profits remain pooled at the top.

Fortune recently described Gen Z’s economic life as a “giant list of income streams.” But what sounds like diversification is often desperation. Turning spare time, spare space, and even spare attention into money isn’t empowerment when it’s done to survive. It’s the monetization of insecurity.

The rhetoric of flexibility also obscures dependence. Gig workers may choose when to log on, but they don’t choose how pay is calculated, how algorithms rank them, or when access is revoked. That’s not entrepreneurship—it’s labor without leverage.

By convincing people they’re solo operators in a crowded market, this language dissolves solidarity before it can form. And when workers see themselves as isolated brands instead of a shared class, the system wins the argument before the fight even begins.

V. The Fight That Keeps Breaking Through

For all its sophistication, platform capitalism has a basic flaw: it still depends on living labor. Algorithms may discipline work, fragment it, and obscure its value, but they cannot eliminate workers’ shared interests. This is where the system’s confidence begins to crack.

In The Fight Against Platform Capitalism, Jamie Woodcock documents something platforms work tirelessly to deny: gig workers are not isolated. From Deliveroo riders in London to Uber, Lyft and other rideshare drivers coordinating through WhatsApp and Telegram, workers repeatedly find ways to communicate, compare conditions and act together, even across borders. As Woodcock notes, platform labor has produced “new forms of collective subjectivity,” precisely because workers experience the same opaque pay cuts, sudden deactivations and algorithmic discipline.

This matters because it reframes resistance. The gig economy’s problem isn’t that workers lack power, it’s that power is systematically suppressed and individualized. Yet strikes, coordinated log-offs, legal challenges and data leaks keep surfacing anyway. Not despite platform design, but because of it.

Taken together, the barbell economy, disillusionomics, algorithmic control and linguistic sleight-of-hand all point to a system straining to hold contradictions in place. The question is no longer whether gig work is sustainable as-is. It’s whether we continue treating precarity as innovation, or recognize that every “flexible” platform is quietly rebuilding the conditions for collective struggle.

So the real question in turn is this: when workers keep finding each other inside a system built to keep them apart, what kind of economy are they already preparing to replace it with?

References

Munis, J. (2026, January 14). Gen Z is rebelling against the economy with ‘disillusionomics,’ tackling near 6-figure debt by turning life into a giant list of income streams | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/01/10/gen-z-disillusionomics-rebelling-against-economy-life-hacking-income-streams-debt-dupe-culture/

Roy, K. (2026, January 14). Forget the K-Shape: We have a barbell economy—and the middle class is buckling under the weight | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/01/14/when-will-us-enter-recession-middle-class-barbell-k-shaped-economy/

Sarkar, S. (2025). Platform Capitalism and the Gig Economy: Surplus ValuevExtraction in the Age of Algorithmic Labor. Socialism & Democracy, 39(1/2), 227–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2025.2520478

Thorogood, J. (2025, July 16). Gig Economy in 2025: Regulatory Shifts and Tech-Driven opportunities. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2025/07/16/gig-economy-in-2025-regulatory-shifts-and-tech-driven-opportunities/

Towers-Clark, C. (2021, January 11). The Uberization of Work: Pros and Cons of the gig economy. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestowersclark/2019/07/08/the-uberization-of-work-pros-and-cons-of-the-gig-economy/?sh=19e21b941cc7

Woodcock, J. (2021). In The Fight Against Platform Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Global Struggles of the Gig Economy (pp. i–vi). University of Westminster Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1ktbdrm.1

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Company Towns 2.0

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 05:01:28 GMT

I. When the Company Arrived First

Picture a dusty rail stop in 1890: a half-finished depot, a water tower and a line of wooden houses rising almost overnight. The mill came first, then the town. Workers arrived from everywhere, drawn by wages and the promise of stability. The company owned the factory, the stores, often the housing, and sometimes even the local newspaper. Life organized itself around a single economic engine. Prosperity felt real…until it wasn’t.

New England’s textile towns, Midwest rail hubs, and northern lumber camps all followed this pattern. Capital moved in fast, built what it needed, extracted value, and left behind communities tethered to forces far beyond their control. When demand shifted or resources ran out, these places didn’t “pivot.” They collapsed.

Now shift the scene to a rural highway exit outside a mid-sized American town. A sprawling Amazon fulfillment center hums where cornfields used to be. According to CNBC, Amazon plans to spend $4 billion to triple its rural delivery network, adding more than 200 new facilities, each promising roughly 170 jobs. Amazon calls this “transforming local economies.” This essay, however, argues something more unsettling: the company town never disappeared. It just got faster, larger, and wrapped in better PR.

II. The Sales Pitch of Prosperity

If you listen to Amazon tell it, these new facilities are an economic miracle. A glossy 2025 report on its website, citing Oxford Economics, claims that counties gaining at least 1,000 Amazon jobs saw higher wages, lower unemployment, more new businesses, and even reduced Medicaid enrollment. The company says its fulfillment centers now deliver “over $30 an hour” in total compensation and “sustained positive impacts” for local regions.

It’s a familiar story. In the early 1900s, coal companies published nearly identical pamphlets boasting of rising employment, tidy worker housing, and bustling local commerce. The numbers were often real, and also deeply misleading. A town can show wage growth and still become more dependent, more fragile and ultimately less free.

Even Inc. magazine, writing from a pro-business angle, admits the deeper reality: these facilities are placed just outside big cities to capture labor and consumers while avoiding taxes, regulations and political friction. Now that same model is spreading to data centers, vast, energy and water-hungry campuses that create far fewer permanent jobs than their footprint suggests.

This is not “revitalization.” It is the quiet consolidation of regional economies around a single corporate nervous system, one optimized for speed, not stability.

III. Dependency Is the Real Product

What Amazon really produces in these towns is not prosperity but dependency. This is because a warehouse or data campus doesn’t just bring jobs; it restructures the entire local economy around itself. Roads get widened for trucks, zoning laws get rewritten for logistics and public money gets steered toward keeping the corporate engine humming. Small businesses don’t disappear overnight, but they increasingly survive only by orbiting the same gravitational center: supplying Amazon workers, subcontracting Amazon services or renting space to Amazon’s contractors.

This is exactly how old company towns worked. The mill or mine didn’t need to own every store to control the town - it just had to be the one employer no one could afford to lose.

Amazon’s rural expansion makes this even more stark. CNBC reports that the company plans to add more than 200 new delivery stations in small towns, each employing about 170 workers. That sounds like opportunity. But it also means entire regions are being reorganized around a single corporate pipeline, one that sets the terms of work, pay, and survival from Seattle boardrooms.

So when UPS cuts 20,000 jobs to reduce its reliance on Amazon, we see the flip side of this power. One corporation can reshape the labor market far beyond its own payroll. That is not competition. It is quiet economic governance, and communities are being drafted into it whether they realize it or not.

IV. What the Numbers Don’t Say

Amazon loves to point to rising wages, falling unemployment and new business growth. Their Oxford Economics study reads like a victory lap: more people working, higher paychecks and fewer residents needing Medicaid. But what it never asks is what kind of economy is actually being built.

A 2.6 percent rise in weekly wages sounds impressive until you realize it often reflects long hours in physically punishing jobs with relentless productivity quotas. More people “entering the labor force” can just as easily mean more households forced to send more adults into grueling warehouse work to keep up with rising rents and food prices that follow Amazon’s arrival.

The same study celebrates 6,000 new businesses per county, but it doesn’t distinguish between a local hardware store and a strip of vape shops, storage units, and fast-food chains that spring up to serve a captive warehouse workforce. That isn’t diversification - it’s monoculture.

And the subsidies matter. Towns routinely give away tax breaks, land, and infrastructure to land these facilities, effectively paying Amazon to become their largest employer. When the corporation eventually automates, relocates, or downscales, the community is left with empty concrete shells and public budgets already hollowed out.

The spreadsheets say growth, however, the ground truth looks much more like extraction.

V. History, On Faster Trucks

A century ago, company towns rose wherever capital needed labor - coal seams, rail hubs, rivers with hydropower, etc. They came wrapped in the same promises Amazon and Google make today: jobs, growth, modernization and opportunity. And they delivered all of it, at first. What they also delivered was dependency. When a single corporation controls the payroll, the tax base, the housing market, and the political horizon, democracy quietly thins out. Workers may clock out, but they never really leave the company’s gravitational field.

What’s different now is scale and speed. The coal barons had railroads; today’s logistics giants have algorithms, predictive shipping, and global supply chains that pulse in real time. A fulfillment center can be opened, expanded, automated, and partially abandoned in the span of a few years - faster than a town can build schools, hospitals, or a diversified economy. The old company towns trapped people geographically, but the new ones trap entire regions economically.

Amazon’s warehouses and data centers don’t need to own the houses or the stores to recreate the same relationship. They just need to dominate employment and infrastructure. Once that happens, every local decision, from zoning, to wages, to environmental rules, to school funding, begins to orbit around keeping the corporation happy enough to stay.

This is why the glossy studies and ribbon cuttings miss the point. The danger isn’t that these facilities fail to produce growth. It’s that they succeed too well at organizing entire communities around the priorities of distant shareholders and delivery deadlines.

We have seen this movie before, just in black and white. Now it’s streaming in 4K, running on fiber-optic cable and diesel trucks. The names have changed, the technology is certainly pretty dazzling, but the underlying logic is familiar. And once again, history doesn’t repeat - it rhymes.

References

Palmer, A. (2025, April 30). Amazon to spend $4 billion on small town delivery expansion. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/amazon-to-spend-4-billion-on-small-town-delivery-expansion.html?msockid=2b8fdbfd306665fc0a73c89a311d6461

Staff, A. (2025, October 21). Amazon fulfillment centers reduce unemployment rates, per Oxford Economics latest research. About Amazon. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-fulfillment-centers-local-economy-oxford-research

Tullman, H. (2024, October 1). Amazon, AI, and the New Company Towns. Inc.com. https://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/amazon-ai-and-the-new-company-towns/90982403

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

New Year, Same Precarity

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 05:01:25 GMT

This piece is part of “Precarity Diaries,” a series exploring life under permanent instability — from economic anxiety to social isolation, examining how systemic insecurity shapes our relationships, health and possibilities.

Section I: New Year, Same Precarity

A healthy society produces citizens who plan decades ahead. They imagine futures. They save. They invest time in relationships, in communities and in skills that take years to mature. A sick society, on the other hand, does something else entirely: it produces workers who plan one rent cycle at a time.

That is the quiet reality of the American economy as another year begins. Not resolution-making, but damage control. Not “Where do I want to be in ten years?” but “Can I make it to the end of the month without something breaking?” This is not a cultural failure. It is an economic design.

When stability disappears, so does long-term thinking. You don’t plan for retirement when your checking account hovers near zero. You don’t imagine buying a home when rent resets every year like a slot machine. You don’t take career risks when one missed paycheck means catastrophe. Precarity collapses time. It forces people into the present tense.

Which is why one of the most jarring facts circulating quietly among economists should stop us cold: by some updated measures, the U.S. poverty line, if it actually reflected contemporary housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation and regional cost realities, would sit closer to $140,000 a year for a family. Not as a new rule or as doctrine. But as a diagnostic, and another way of revealing just how far official definitions have drifted from lived reality.

That number sounds absurd on purpose. It clashes violently with what we’ve been trained to think of as “doing well.” For millions of workers (teachers like myself included) it’s almost unimaginable. And yet that’s the point. The gap between the number and our wages is the story.

We are told the economy is strong, and we are shown charts. But an economy that forces the majority to think in weeks instead of years is not strong. It is extractive. And people feel it. In their bodies. In their exhaustion. In the shrinking horizon of what feels possible. This is where precarity begins, not as a mood, but as a material condition.

Section II: A K-Shaped Economy, With No Safety Net Left

A K-shaped economy is what happens when one part of society rises while another falls, and policymakers insist on averaging the two.

The upper arm of the “K” belongs to asset holders: households with stocks, home equity, and financial buffers. Their spending stays strong. Their opportunities remain intact.

The lower arm belongs to everyone else: workers whose lives are governed by rent, groceries, insurance premiums, and credit limits. For them, the economy doesn’t feel “mixed,” it actually feels punitive.

This isn’t just inequality; it’s class divergence hidden behind headline growth. And it deeply concerns Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. He recently warned that “many Americans are deeply unhappy with their financial situation, and with good reason. They are grappling with a severe affordability squeeze… Meanwhile, pay increases are slowing as job growth has stalled and unemployment is on the rise.” Zandi’s warning isn’t abstract. It’s brutally concrete. The U.S. labor market has lost its shock absorbers. Millions are already living month to month - no savings, no margin and no cushion. In that kind of economy, a slowdown doesn’t need to be dramatic to become dangerous. It only needs to tip people already on what he calls “the financial edge.” That’s “fodder for a recession.”

An economy propped up by the spending of the wealthy is not resilient. It’s brittle. And the cracks are already visible: small businesses cutting jobs while large firms keep hiring; quit rates falling as workers grow fearful; layoff announcements piling up even as official unemployment lags. Young and minority workers, the usual canaries in the proverbial coal mine, are feeling it first.

This is the K-shaped economy in motion. One arm floats on asset gains and AI-fueled stock prices. The other hangs over open air. So when President Trump stands at a rally and gives his economy an “A+++++,” insisting prices are “coming down rapidly,” it isn’t optimism. It’s structural denial. Prices are still rising. Hiring is slowing. Wages are losing momentum. Telling people they’re doing great when they’re barely hanging on isn’t leadership—it’s gaslighting. And when the economy works only for the upper spur of the K, everyone else becomes expendable.

III. Exhaustion as an Economic Strategy

Burnout is not a personal failure. It is a system working exactly as designed.

When people say they are exhausted, anxious, stretched thin, they are describing material conditions, not a mindset problem. And yet, the official response is to tell them they are wrong. Inflation is “cooling.” The economy is “strong.” If it feels bad, that’s a perception issue.

Even Jerome Powell let the mask slip: “Americans aren’t interested in that story. Their prices are higher.” Translation: the charts say one thing, lived reality says another, and policymakers know it. This is where exhaustion becomes political. When wages lag productivity decade after decade - when workers produce more and receive less - the system requires people to internalize the gap. That missing pay doesn’t vanish. As Desmond argues, it is captured upward, extracted by those who benefit from scarcity.

Instead of regulating corporations, we’re told to download meditation apps. Instead of raising wages, teachers are offered mindfulness seminars. Instead of shortening workweeks, we’re sold “resilience.” Self-care thus becomes the pressure valve. Not to heal people, but to keep them functional enough to return to work tomorrow.

Burnout, then, is not an accident or a side effect. It is labor discipline by other means. A population too tired to organize, too stressed to plan and too busy surviving to ask why the gains of the economy never seem to reach them. Exhaustion isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

IV. Breaking Even in a Rigged Economy

The disappearance of the middle class didn’t happen because millions of people suddenly forgot how to budget. It happened because the material foundations of a livable life were methodically stripped away.

Since the late 1970s, productivity has surged (upwards of nearly 90 percent) while wages crawled forward by roughly a third. That missing share didn’t vanish into thin air. It was captured. Extracted upward through profits, executive compensation, rents, fees and financialization. At the same time, the pillars that once stabilized ordinary life were hollowed out. Housing stopped being shelter and became an asset class. Healthcare became a billing labyrinth. Childcare turned into a second mortgage. Education shifted from a public investment into lifelong debt.

This wasn’t a cultural shift. It was a political one. In the postwar decades, these were treated, however imperfectly, as collective goods. By the 1980s, they were increasingly redefined as individual responsibilities to be purchased, optimized or endured. When those systems failed, the response wasn’t repair. It was moralization. Tighten your belt. Adjust expectations. Practice gratitude.

This is why “self-care” rhetoric explodes precisely when collective care collapses. When the social contract is dismantled, exhaustion is reframed as a personal failing, and survival itself is quietly downgraded into success.

V. New Year, Same Precarity: What Kind of Future Does This Economy Allow?

Breaking even is not a personal failure. It is a political outcome. An economy that forces millions of people to plan month to month is not malfunctioning; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. When wages lag productivity, when housing and healthcare are priced as speculative assets, when layoffs arrive on schedule and leaders insist everything is fine, precarity becomes a tool. It disciplines workers. It narrows imagination. It keeps people too exhausted to demand more than survival.

That is why the system keeps telling us to be resilient instead of secure. To practice mindfulness instead of solidarity. To optimize our habits instead of questioning why a full-time job no longer guarantees a livable life. Self-care fills the void left by dismantled collective care, and then we’re told to be grateful for the void.

So the real questions aren’t about budgeting better or lowering expectations. They are structural, and they are uncomfortable:

What kind of society tells its people that breaking even is success?
Who benefits when stability becomes a luxury good?
Why does an economy that can generate enormous wealth insist that dignity is unrealistic?
And what would change if we stopped asking how to survive this system, and instead started asking why we tolerate it at all?

Because a healthy economy doesn’t produce desperate workers. It produces citizens who can plan, imagine and refuse to settle for less than a life that actually works.

References

Cameron, H. (2025, December 23). Mass layoffs taking place next month. Newsweek. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/mass-layoffs-taking-place-next-month/ar-AA1STn8b?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=694b38d74a4b457c9128a237d90edb14&ei=6

Cameron, H. (2025b, December 10). Trump’s “A+++++” review of economy clashes with Americans’ perceptions. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/trump-a-plus-review-economy-clashes-with-americans-perceptions-11186280

Green, M. (2025, December 6). Is $140,000 the new poverty line for Americans? VICE. https://www.vice.com/en/article/is-140000-the-new-poverty-line-for-americans/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOlJdNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF5bW1xREJWV3BCOUo0R0c0c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHn0-cNdrq0m_LRcsvvsToCAyqSpIy14Z9tytTOWWO8Li9nBmVByAFV0gC5uo_aem_tP4IlUhzJTOvcQfGRKwJ1A

Green, M. W. (2025, November 25). Why do Americans feel poor? Because they are. The Free Press.

The Free Press

The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty

For my whole career in finance, I have distrusted the obvious. And yet, for many years there was one number I assumed was an actuarial fact: the U.S. poverty line. Yes, I saw Americans feeling poorer every year, despite economic growth and low unemployment. But ultimately, I trusted the official statistics. Until I saw a simple statement buried in a research paper…

4 months ago · 456 likes · 489 comments · Michael W. Green

Kaplan, J., & Hoff, M. (2026, January 2). The K-shaped economy of the rich doing fine and everyone else struggling is back — and it could mean a rocky 2026. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/wages-consumer-spending-low-high-earners-show-k-shaped-divide-2026-1

Roytburg, E. (2025, December 9). ‘Fodder for a recession’: Top economist Mark Zandi warns about so many Americans ‘already living on the financial edge’ in a K-shaped economy | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/recession-fodder-k-shaped-economy-close-to-jobs-recession-layoffs-mark-zandi/

Whitaker, C. (2025, December 25). Breaking even is now the “American dream” for hourly workers. The Daily Overview. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/breaking-even-is-now-the-american-dream-for-hourly-workers/ar-AA1T1cWi?ocid=BingNewsSerp

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Affordability Lie

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 05:01:05 GMT

This essay is part of the Theory for the Streets series that brings big ideas about power, work, and everyday life down to earth. Each piece takes concepts that usually live in classrooms or think tanks and translates them into something you can feel — how systems shape our choices, how power hides in plain sight, and how understanding it all can help us push back.

I. “Affordability” Is Everywhere — Anxiety Is Rising

Everyone is talking about affordability. Groceries, rent, gas, child care, insurance, etc. The numbers keep climbing, and the message we’re given is simple: things just cost more now. Tighten your belt. Budget better. Make different choices. But that explanation doesn’t quite match how it feels.

Plenty of people are working full-time, sometimes more than full-time, and still watching their bank accounts hover near zero. Paydays come and go with barely a ripple. A raise arrives and vanishes into higher rent or a bigger grocery bill. You’re not splurging. You’re surviving.

What’s striking isn’t just how expensive life has become. It’s how fragile it feels. According to recent surveys, a growing share of Americans expect their financial situation to be worse a year from now. Not because they’re reckless. Because they can see the math.

Most conversations about affordability fixate on prices, as if the problem is purely external. Inflation. Supply chains. Greedy corporations. All of that matters. But it leaves out the other half of the equation: what people are paid.

Affordability isn’t only about what things cost. It’s about what your labor is worth in a system built to keep that value low.

II. The Mistake Everyone Keeps Making

When politicians talk about affordability, they almost always point in the same direction. Prices are too high. Rents are out of control. Groceries cost more than they used to. Something, somewhere, needs to be brought down.

But that framing quietly skips over the other half of the equation. Affordability is not just about what things cost. It’s about what you earn. And for most working people, wages have been deliberately held down for decades.

This isn’t an accident. It’s a design choice. Since the late 1970s, workers have gotten better at their jobs. Technology improved. Productivity rose. We produce far more in an hour of work than our parents or grandparents ever did. But paychecks didn’t rise alongside that output. The gains went elsewhere. Upward. Out of reach.

In plain terms, workers are creating more value than ever, and receiving a smaller share of it back.

Mainstream debates treat wages as if they’re personal. Your raise reflects your effort. Your paycheck reflects your worth. If you’re struggling, the implication is that you need to negotiate better, reskill faster and, increasingly, hustle harder.

Prices, meanwhile, are treated as political. Inflation is debated on cable news. Corporate price-gouging becomes a scandal. Supply chains are analyzed. Interest rates are adjusted.

This split is backwards. Wages are not a natural force. They are shaped by policy, power, and bargaining strength. They rise when workers have leverage and fall when that leverage is crushed. As economist Heidi Shierholz puts it, “True affordability comes when working people earn enough to cover the costs of living with dignity and security.” That dignity doesn’t come from cheaper crumbs. It comes from a bigger slice of what workers already produce.

III. How the Wage Squeeze Actually Works

Let’s strip this down to its moving parts.

Most people are told affordability is about prices rising too fast. Rent goes up. Groceries spike. Health care eats another chunk of the paycheck. That story is familiar, but it is also incomplete.

What’s been quietly happening underneath is just as important: wages have been held down on purpose. For decades, productivity kept rising while paychecks stalled. Workers produced more value every hour, but that value didn’t flow back to them. It flowed upward, to executives, shareholders and balance sheets that look healthy precisely because households don’t.

This is why minimum wage increases matter, even when they’re modest. When states raise the floor, they’re not creating luxury. They’re pushing back, slightly, against a system designed to extract more work for less pay. The fact that so many states have had to step in tells you how badly the federal floor has failed.

Meanwhile, surveys show the result on the ground. Nearly half of Americans can’t cover three months of expenses. A growing share expect to be worse off next year, not better. That isn’t pessimism. It’s pattern recognition.

When wages lag and costs climb, people don’t just feel squeezed. They become permanently precarious: one illness, one layoff or one rent hike away from total collapse.

IV. The Language That Keeps Us Stuck

Notice how carefully this crisis is named. We’re told there’s an affordability problem. Or a cost-of-living squeeze. Or a season of economic uncertainty. Each phrase sounds technical. Temporary. Almost weather-like. Prices went up. Conditions changed. No one, apparently, decided anything.

But this language does important work. By focusing attention on prices, it quietly erases wages. It treats your paycheck as a fixed fact of nature rather than the result of power, policy, and struggle. You’re encouraged to ask why groceries cost more, but not why your labor hasn’t been paid more for decades.

Marx had a sharper theory for this: surplus value. He argued that under capitalism, the value workers create is systematically taken from them, then disguised. That theft doesn’t look like a mugging. It looks like a paycheck that never quite keeps up. A raise that lags behind rent. A promotion that adds responsibility but not security.

Modern euphemisms like ghost growth or labor shortages play the same role. They soften what is, at bottom, a transfer of wealth upward. Workers produce more. Owners keep more. The gap gets renamed.

When language hides the mechanism, it also hides the solution. If affordability sounds like a pricing glitch, we wait for it to fix itself. If it’s really about wages, bargaining power and who controls the surplus, then it becomes something people can organize around now, and work to change.

V. What Affordability Really Demands

What all of this points to is something many people already feel in their bones: this crisis isn’t accidental, and it isn’t temporary. It’s structural. When wages are held down while productivity rises, when costs climb faster than paychecks, when whole regions need food banks and side hustles just to get by, that isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system doing what it was built to do.

Affordability debates often treat workers as passive consumers waiting for prices to fall. But workers are producers first. Nothing in the economy exists without our labor. When wages are suppressed, dignity is suppressed with them. And when people are forced to live paycheck to paycheck, always anxious about the next rent increase or medical bill, that anxiety becomes a form of control.

The good news is that this story has never been one-sided. Every gain working people have ever made came from collective pressure, not from waiting patiently for the market to behave. Wage floors, unions, social protections, shorter working hours - none of these were gifts. They were fought for.

The affordability crisis isn’t asking us to tighten our belts. It’s asking us to ask better questions. Not just ‘Why is everything so expensive?’ but ‘Who decides what our work is worth, and why?’

References

Cohn, E. (2025, August 18). 2025 Worker-Led State policy victories show how states can—and Must—Do more to hold the line against escalating federal attacks on workers’ rights | Portside. Portside. https://portside.org/2025-08-18/2025-worker-led-state-policy-victories-show-how-states-can-and-must-do-more-hold-line

Lawrence, M., & Bivens, J. (2021, May 13). Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/wage-suppression-inequality/

Parker, K., & Lin, L. (2025, May 7). Growing share of U.S. adults say their personal finances will be worse a year from now. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/07/growing-share-of-us-adults-say-their-personal-finances-will-be-worse-a-year-from-now/

Shierholz, H. (2025, November 29). Everyone is talking about affordability — and making the same mistake. MS Now. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ms.now/opinion/inflation-affordability-prices-wages-jobs&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1766762173922801&usg=AOvVaw2pm-Jc3ZuQ2shj2n57Bmj8

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

The Most Expensive Time of the Year

Chris Fletcher — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:33:54 GMT

This piece is part of “The Big Squeeze,” a series examining how capital extracts value from every aspect of daily life — from subscription traps to housing crises, revealing how systematic wealth transfer is disguised as innovation and convenience.

I. What Would Christmas Cost Without the Credit Card?

Every December, the same quiet pressure returns: Be generous. Be festive. Be normal.

Most people aren’t trying to keep up with the Joneses. They’re trying to keep up with expectations, to show care, to create memories and to make a hard year feel a little lighter for the people they love. In a country where so much of life already feels precarious, Christmas becomes one of the few moments where we’re told it’s okay to pause and be generous.

The problem is that generosity has been outsourced to the marketplace.

Americans now spend close to a trillion dollars during the holiday season, and a significant share of that spending is financed with debt. Not because people are reckless, but because wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living, and because our culture quietly equates love with buying power.

For many families, Christmas isn’t indulgence. It’s triage. A careful balancing act between rent, groceries, credit cards and the hope of giving their kids something to hold onto.

If the season feels heavier than it used to, that’s not a personal failure. It’s what happens when an economy built on extraction asks people to prove care with money they don’t have.

II. When Celebration Becomes an Obligation

No one sits down in January and decides, “This year I’d like to feel financially panicked by December.” And yet, year after year, that’s exactly where many people end up.

Holiday spending doesn’t just “happen.” It’s orchestrated. Months of advertising, countdowns, limited-time offers, and emotional cues train us to experience buying as participation, as proof that we showed up, that we did Christmas correctly. Even restraint is marketed back to us, neatly packaged and for sale.

The message is subtle but relentless: if you love people, you’ll spend. If you don’t spend, you’re opting out - out of joy, out of belonging or out of the season itself.

What makes this especially cruel is the timing. December arrives after a year of rising rents, higher grocery bills, costlier utilities, medical debt and stagnant paychecks. Families are already stretched thin when the economy turns generosity into a performance with a price tag.

Groups like Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping understand this well. Their street theater isn’t about scolding consumers. It’s about breaking the spell: using humor and spectacle to expose how absurd it is that celebration has been reduced to a transaction.

The pressure isn’t coming from within us. It’s coming from an economy that depends on constant spending, even (and especially) when people can least afford it.

And Christmas, for all its warmth, has become one of its most reliable tools.

III. An Economy That Needs Us to Keep Buying

The strange thing about all this isn’t that Americans spend so much during the holidays. It’s that the economy needs them to.

By December, the pressure is no longer just cultural - it’s structural. Retailers, advertisers, credit card companies and logistics giants all depend on a massive end-of-year surge to make the numbers work. Holiday shopping isn’t a bonus; it’s a pillar. When spending slows, panic sets in, not about human well-being, but about quarterly earnings and growth targets.

That’s why every year feels louder. Earlier sales. Bigger discounts. More urgency. The system has to extract more, faster, from households already carrying debt and anxiety. Even “record-breaking” holiday sales often coexist with record levels of financial stress. Those two facts are not in tension. They are connected.

What gets lost in the celebration is that this kind of consumption isn’t about abundance. It’s about compensation. Buying often fills gaps created elsewhere, like by long work hours, or by distance, by exhaustion and by the quiet knowledge that time and security are in short supply.

This is why restraint alone never fixes the problem. You can skip a purchase, reuse decorations, or set a budget (and those choices certainly matter) but they don’t change the underlying reality.

We’re living inside an economy that confuses motion with health, spending with care, and growth with joy. And once a year, it asks us to prove our belonging by keeping the whole machine running.

IV. The Church of Stop Shopping

Every December, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping show up where the pressure is thickest: malls, big-box stores, glowing retail cathedrals. Dressed like a preacher, backed by a full gospel choir, he shouts and sings against overconsumption, not with spreadsheets or scolding, but with spectacle. It’s easy to laugh at first. That’s part of the point.

The performances are exaggerated, joyful, disruptive. They borrow the language of religion and turn it sideways, exposing how shopping has taken on the rituals once reserved for faith: confession (“I couldn’t help myself”), absolution (“It was on sale”), and salvation (“They’ll love this”). By making it absurd, the Church of Stop Shopping makes it visible.

What they’re really interrupting isn’t buying, but normalcy. The idea that this is just how things are. That maxed-out credit cards, stressed parents, and frantic December schedules are personal failures rather than predictable outcomes of a system built on constant growth.

The humor matters. Laughter opens a crack where guilt usually sits. Instead of blaming shoppers, the performances aim at the machinery around them: the ads, the music, the artificial urgency and the way desire is engineered and recycled year after year.

It’s not about purity or withdrawal. It’s about asking, in the middle of the noise, a forbidden question: What if we didn’t have to do this to prove we care? That question lingers long after the choir leaves the store.

V. What Would Care Look Like Without a Price Tag?

The problem isn’t that Americans shop too much at Christmas. It’s that we live in an economy that asks us to prove care, joy and belonging by spending money we often don’t have.

Most people feel this contradiction intuitively. The stress. The quiet panic behind “just one more gift.” The sense that love has somehow been outsourced to receipts and shipping confirmations. None of this comes from greed. It comes from wanting to show up for the people we love in a system that monetizes that impulse at every turn.

An economy built on endless growth can’t afford for us to pause. So it turns holidays into pressure valves. Buy now. Buy enough. Buy before it’s too late. And when the bills come due in January, the system shrugs - that part is private, individual, your responsibility.

But what if care didn’t require consumption? What if generosity wasn’t measured by price? What if belonging didn’t hinge on keeping the retail machine humming at full speed?

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re already being answered in small ways, like in shared meals, in hand-me-down traditions, in mutual aid and in time spent rather than money exchanged. In moments when people quietly refuse the script.

The Church of Stop Shopping isn’t really asking us to stop buying things. It’s asking us to imagine something bigger: a society where meeting human needs comes before extracting profit, and where love isn’t something you have to put on a credit card.

That may sound radical. But so is the idea that this is the best we can do. And in a season built around hope (however you understand it), that feels like a very good place to start.

References

Collins, S. (2024, November 2). The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious

Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance.

WebOnlyReviewsLJ, 149(11), 1.

Cooper, T. (2008). Carnivalesque as Comic Corrective: The Rhetorical Project of

Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. Conference Papers -- National

Communication Association, 1.

Counselor, C. (2025, December 19). How much do Americans spend on Christmas? Capital

Counselor. https://capitalcounselor.com/blog/christmas-spending-statistics/

Sandlin, J. A. (2010). Learning to Survive the “Shopocalypse”: Reverend Billy’s

Anti-Consumption “Pedagogy of the Unknown.” Critical Studies in Education, 51(3),

295–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2010.508809

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Are We Doing This Again?

Chris Fletcher — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:55:46 GMT

This piece is part of “Signal/Noise,” rapid responses to breaking events — cutting through media static to find the patterns and power structures beneath the headlines.

I. The Feeling We Know Too Well

There is a particular feeling that often settles in before a war begins. It isn’t panic. It isn’t certainty. It’s something quieter and more disorienting….a kind of low-grade unreality, a sense that something enormous is moving just out of view.

I recognize this feeling because I’ve stood inside it before. On a bitter February morning in 2003, during my second year at Hampshire College, I rode a bus to New York City with classmates to join the global protests against the looming invasion of Iraq. The streets were packed, the air sharp, helicopters circling overhead. Hundreds of thousands of us filled Manhattan — students, veterans, families, clergy — all insisting, loudly and collectively, that this war was a mistake before it began. We (and the millions of other protestors gathered in cities around the world that day) were right. And we were ignored.

That same feeling is back. Each week brings another headline that should stop us cold: boats bombed in international waters, civilians killed without names or evidence, aircraft carriers repositioned and language about “terrorists” expanding to swallow entire countries. The pace is relentless, but the tone is strangely flat. No emergency sessions of Congress. No national reckoning. Just a steady normalization of the unthinkable.

What’s happening with Venezuela is often described as escalation. That’s accurate, but definitely incomplete. This isn’t a sudden lurch toward war. It’s a careful drift, engineered through repetition. A strike here. A threat there. A legal justification floated, then quietly abandoned. Each move small enough to feel deniable. Together, unmistakable.

Many people sense that something is wrong but can’t quite name it. The story doesn’t cohere. The reasons shift. The stakes feel both enormous and oddly distant. That confusion isn’t accidental. It’s how wars are made palatable in advance, by making them feel abstract, inevitable, already underway. The danger isn’t just what is being done. It’s how quickly we are being trained to accept it.

II. War Without a Vote

What makes this moment especially dangerous is not just the violence itself, but how little process stands between the president and the trigger. After all, there has been no authorization for the use of military force, and not even any serious congressional debate. And really no substantial public accounting of evidence. Instead, we are told (after the fact) that people killed at sea were “narcoterrorists,” that entire operations are defensive by definition and that secrecy itself is proof of necessity.

This is war without a vote. But the Constitution is unambiguous on this point: Congress declares war. Presidents execute it. That line has been blurred for decades, eroded by emergencies real and manufactured alike. The War on Terror did a good deal of the damage, habituating Americans to the idea that lethal force could be deployed anywhere, indefinitely, on the basis of classified claims and elastic definitions of threat. And what we are seeing now builds directly on that precedent. Just label a criminal network a “terrorist organization.” Redefine drug trafficking as armed conflict. Declare entire regions “hostile environments.” Once that logic is accepted, the machinery runs on its own. Legal review becomes a formality. Oversight becomes optional. Death becomes…administrative.

What’s striking is how little resistance this has provoked. Polling shows most Americans don’t see Venezuela as a serious national security threat. And yet, lethal strikes continue, justified by numbers that don’t add up and scenarios that don’t withstand scrutiny. The gap between public skepticism and governmental action is wide…and widening.

That gap is not accidental. It is the product of executive power untethered from democratic constraint. When war no longer requires persuasion, it no longer requires consent. It becomes something that simply happens, to people elsewhere, in our name, without our say. And once that becomes normal, the threshold for violence collapses.

III. Empire’s Backyard

None of this is new to the Caribbean or Latin America. What’s new is how openly it’s being revived, and how many Americans have forgotten the script.

From the Monroe Doctrine onward, the region has been treated less as a collection of sovereign societies than as a managed zone: unstable by default, dangerous if left unattended and perpetually in need of supervision. The language shifts, but the logic does not.

Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary made that logic explicit. The United States, he declared, would act as an “international police power,” intervening whenever instability threatened American interests. What followed was not order but occupation: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba and Panama. Military rule, customs supervision, debt control, political engineering—always framed as temporary, always experienced as permanent.

Puerto Rico stands as a particularly stark example. Seized in 1898, governed without consent, its independence movement crushed through surveillance, imprisonment and assassination. The message was unmistakable: sovereignty in the Caribbean would exist only on Washington’s terms.

Venezuela fits squarely within this lineage. Not because its government is virtuous—it isn’t—but because it insists on control over its own resources. Oil. Territory. Political direction. That insistence has made it intolerable.

This is where the war moves beyond bombs. CITGO, majority-owned by Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA, was once a crucial artery connecting Venezuelan oil to global markets. Through sanctions, legal maneuvers, and the fiction of an “interim government,” that artery has been seized and slowly drained. Assets frozen. Dividends diverted. A strategic national resource auctioned off at a fraction of its value—money that would otherwise fund food, medicine, infrastructure and wages. This is not collateral damage. It is policy.

Economic warfare precedes military force because it softens resistance. It hollows out daily life. It produces shortages that can later be blamed on incompetence or corruption. When sanctions fail to deliver regime change, escalation follows. Naval blockades become “counter-narcotics.” Air patrols become “deterrence.” Bombs become “stability.”

Meanwhile, everyday people (the campesinos, the dockworkers, the factory hands) are rendered invisible. Reduced to abstractions. Or worse, reframed as obstacles.

Empire does not announce itself. It normalizes itself. It repeats familiar moves until repetition feels like inevitability. And once again, the Caribbean is treated as the proving ground. Not because it is chaotic - but because it has always been close enough to control, and distant enough to ignore.

IV. From Pressure to Posture

This is no longer abstract. It is no longer rhetorical. And it is no longer confined to press releases and cable-news speculation. Pentagon sources now privately acknowledge that the current naval concentration in the Caribbean is the largest since the U.S. invasions of Grenada and Panama—interventions remembered not as policing actions, but as regime change carried out under thin legal cover. Thousands of U.S. personnel, including Marines and naval aviators, are operating within hours of Venezuelan territory. Joint exercises grow more aggressive by the week. The choreography is familiar. The destination less so.

What began as economic strangulation has hardened into military posture. Venezuela’s collapse did not happen in a vacuum. It unfolded through a brutal convergence of sanctions, oil dependency, and deliberate isolation. The country sits atop the largest proven oil reserves on Earth, yet much of that oil is costly to extract, technologically demanding and now functionally inaccessible. Production has cratered. Infrastructure has decayed. Between 2013 and 2025, the economy shrank by roughly three-quarters—one of the worst peacetime collapses in modern history.

Sanctions didn’t merely pressure elites; they hollowed out society. Currency redenominations. Black-market exchange rates. Pipelines rupturing daily. Refineries running at a fraction of capacity. A population forced to improvise survival while being told this is the price of “democracy.”

Then came criminalization. Recently this year, Washington designated Venezuela’s entire military apparatus a terrorist organization—an unprecedented move that collapses the distinction between state and cartel, soldier and criminal. Once that line is erased, almost anything becomes permissible. Blockades can masquerade as counter-narcotics. Airstrikes can be framed as law enforcement. Invasion can be rehearsed as contingency planning.

Add the presence of Russian advisers, Cuban security forces, and Iranian technicians, and the script shifts again—from hemispheric discipline to great-power rivalry. Venezuela is no longer just a problem to be managed, but a signal to be sent.

And the danger isn’t just the weapons. It’s the tempo. Each escalation accelerates the next. Each move shrinks the space for diplomacy. One misread radar ping. One “defensive” strike. One incident at sea. This is how wars stop feeling hypothetical, right up until they aren’t.

V. Say the Word: Blockade

Now, tonight, there is no ambiguity left. A “total and complete blockade” is not pressure. It is not sanctions. It is not law enforcement. A blockade is an act of war - full stop. Every international lawyer knows this. Every naval officer knows this. Every historian knows this.

And Trump didn’t just threaten one. He claimed ownership. “Our oil. Our land. Our assets.” Not influence. Not access. Ownership. This is nineteenth-century imperial language spoken out loud in the twenty-first century, broadcast casually on social media like a rage-text to the world. No congressional authorization. No international mandate. No pretense of legality. Just entitlement backed by ships and missiles.

The administration has spent months insisting this is about drugs. But drug interdiction does not require armadas. It does not require blockades. It does not require F-35s, carrier strike groups, or amphibious assault capabilities. It does not require killing survivors clinging to wreckage at sea.

What it requires is intelligence cooperation and coast guards—not siege warfare.

A blockade targets civilians first. Oil is Venezuela’s economic lifeline. Cut it off, and hospitals lose power. Food imports stall. Public wages evaporate. This is collective punishment by design, dressed up as morality. Economic warfare meant to make daily life unlivable until a government collapses—or a population breaks.

And notice what Trump didn’t say. He didn’t talk about democracy. He didn’t mention elections, corruption, or human rights. He talked about oil. Assets. Possession. Tribute. This is not an accidental escalation. It is the logical endpoint of years of sanctions, seizures, and criminalization. When economic strangulation fails, force waits in reserve. When the target still stands, the language shifts from pressure to plunder.

The most chilling part isn’t the threat itself. It’s how normal it’s becoming to hear it.

VI. Not in Our Name

Let’s stop pretending this is hypothetical. A blockade has been declared. Warships are in position. Oil tankers are being seized. Civilians are already dead. The language has shifted from implication to command: total and complete. In international law, a blockade is not pressure. It is not sanctions-plus. It is an act of war.

And the justification has finally slipped. This is no longer just about drugs, or migration, or “stability.” The president has said the quiet part out loud, via Truth Social: Venezuela’s oil, land, and assets are being claimed as ours. Not negotiated. Not regulated. Returned. Immediately. This is nineteenth-century imperial logic, delivered via social media, enforced with twenty-first-century firepower.

What follows a blockade is not surgical. It is starvation. It is medicine that doesn’t arrive. It is electricity that fails. It is ports that go quiet and black markets that explode. It is always working people who absorb the shock first - dockworkers, nurses, pensioners, sailors ordered forward, civilians told to brace. The elderly militia members training with unloaded rifles in Caracas will not decide this conflict. Neither will the U.S. sailors steaming south under orders they didn’t write. But they will pay for it.

We are told this is about stopping chaos. In reality, it is chaos being applied as policy. Economic strangulation backed by overwhelming force, justified by moral language and executed without democratic consent. Congress has not debated this. The public has not chosen it. It is war by executive momentum, normalized by distance and distraction.

And there is a deeper danger here. What is rehearsed abroad does not stay abroad. A government that grows comfortable blockading another country’s economy, criminalizing an entire military, and treating civilian casualties as collateral noise is practicing a form of power that does not recognize clear borders. As Arellano warned, this is the logic of a president who dreams of treating enemies—including cities—like drug boats. This is how empire forgets where its borders end, until the warships are aimed inward.

But despair is not a politics. Attention is. Action begins with accountability. That means demanding public hearings on the blockade and the killings already carried out in its name. It means amplifying Caribbean and Venezuelan voices instead of laundering policy through Pentagon briefings. It means defending independent journalism against the fog of patriotic inevitability. It means refusing spectator politics—outrage without consequence, doomscrolling without organization. Above all, it means insisting on a simple, unfashionable truth: working people do not deserve to be bombed, starved or blockaded for refusing to surrender their country’s resources.

History is not confused about this pattern. It is only us who keep forgetting. And forgetting, right now, is a luxury we no longer have.

References

Bacon, P. (2025, November 25). Um . . . Is Donald Trump Seriously Going to Start a War with Venezuela? The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/203612/trump-start-war-venezuela

Damon, A. (2025, December 14). Trump says US will start ground attacks “soon” as US surges military assets near Venezuela. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/12/15/vexd-d15.html

El-Fekki, A. (2025, December 12). US-Venezuela tensions: 3 Signs of looming war. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/us-venezuela-tensions-3-signs-of-looming-war-11201094

Keating, J. (2025, December 9). There is a real chance of a US-Venezuela war — so why does it feel fake? Vox. https://www.vox.com/politics/471639/venezuela-war-unreality

Kolster, N. (2025, September 27). As US-Venezuela tensions rise, Maduro trains civilians for “undeclared war.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y5q173053o

Lobo, R. (2025, December 8). El despojo de Citgo: La agresión económica continúa de EE.UU contra el pueblo venezolano. PSUV. http://www.psuv.org.ve/temas/noticias/despojo-citgo-agresion-economica-continua-ee-uu-contra-pueblo-venezolano/

Lubin, R. (2025, December 17). Trump calls for ‘total and complete blockade’ of sanctioned oil tankers from Venezuela in escalation of tensions. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-venezuela-oil-truth-social-post-b2885914.html

Schogol, J., & Lawrence, D. F. (2025, November 19). What 3 former SOUTHCOM commanders say troops should know about Venezuela. Task & Purpose. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-military-operations-venezuela/

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

What Won Anyway?

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 05:02:06 GMT

I. Setting the Stage: What Did “Winning” Even Look Like in 2025?

By almost any surface measure, 2025 looked like a bad year for working people. A grinding authoritarian drift. Courts hostile to labor. Capital more consolidated, more algorithmic and more insulated than ever. And to punctuate it all, the longest government shutdown in U.S. history - a 43-day demonstration of how casually workers’ lives can be used as leverage in elite political games.

In moments like this, it’s easy to conclude that labor lost (or at least stalled). There was no single general strike wave that shut the country down. No sweeping pro-worker legislation that reset the balance of power. No dramatic turning point that made exploitation suddenly impossible. For anyone watching headlines instead of shop floors, the year felt defined more by damage control than victory.

But that reaction misunderstands what power looked like in 2025. No, this wasn’t a year of cinematic triumphs. But it was a year of competence. Of workers organizing in industries long written off as impossible, including banking, subcontracted entertainment, tech-adjacent manufacturing, grocery chains, hospitals and federal agencies. Of first contracts secured. Of shutdowns endured collectively rather than individually. Of strikes authorized, injunctions won, pensions defended, rehire protections established and organizing campaigns sustained under open threat.

The question worth asking isn’t whether labor “won big.” It’s whether workers learned how to fight and survive under conditions designed to break them. In that sense, 2025 wasn’t empty. It was instructive.

II. What Was Really Being Fought Over

Beneath the surface diversity of these fights (involving everyone from dockworkers and nurses to bank tellers, writers and federal employees) the conflict was remarkably consistent.

Workers weren’t just asking for “more.” They were pushing back against a system that increasingly treats human labor as a flexible cost to be squeezed, paused, outsourced or even switched off entirely. Whether it was warehouse injury rates, unsafe nurse staffing, contingent contracts in media or federal workers ordered to labor without pay during a shutdown, the underlying message from above was the same: your needs are secondary to the machine.

This is how exploitation works in mature capitalism. Not as a singular villain, but as a structure that extracts time, energy and stability while insulating those at the top from risk. Workers absorb volatility. Corporations pocket predictability.

Union drives and contract fights in 2025 exposed that arrangement by forcing a simple confrontation: labor only functions if workers consent to participate. When that consent is withdrawn, whether through a strike, a work slowdown, a mass authorization vote or even a lawsuit, the system subsequently falters.

What I feel made 2025 notable wasn’t just the number of campaigns, but their clarity. Workers increasingly understood that power doesn’t come from appealing to fairness or corporate goodwill. It comes from organization, coordination and collective leverage. From acting not as isolated employees, but as a social force.

That shift in consciousness matters. Because once workers see themselves as producers of value, and not merely as recipients of benevolence, then the terms of struggle fundamentally change.

III. The Architecture of Precarity

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that exploitation has gotten more designed. It’s no longer just about long hours or low pay. It’s about building systems where insecurity is the default setting.

Across industries, employers relied on the same architecture. Short-term contracts that reset just before benefits kick in. Staffing algorithms that keep workplaces permanently understaffed. Job “flexibility” that really means unpredictable schedules and disposable workers. Layers of subcontractors and corporate shells that make accountability hard to locate and even harder to enforce.

The government shutdown revealed this logic in a particularly brutal way. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers were deemed “essential” enough to keep working, but not essential enough to be paid on time. The message was unmistakable: continuity of the system mattered more than the lives of the people running it.

Private employers operate on the same principle. Airlines run skeleton crews. Hospitals rely on constant overtime. Warehouses treat injury as churn. Media companies normalize freelance labor without rehire guarantees. Each model shifts risk downward, forcing workers to absorb instability so profits remain smooth at the top.

What unions disrupted in 2025 wasn’t just a paycheck imbalance. They exposed the scaffolding itself, the way precarity is manufactured and enforced. By demanding staffing minimums, rehire protections, guaranteed hours, COLA clauses, and strike-ready contracts workers weren’t asking for luxury. They were demanding insulation from a system designed to keep them permanently off balance.

IV. The Battle Over What Gets Called “Reasonable”

Every labor fight is also a fight over language. Not in some abstract media-theory way, but in the everyday terms that decide what sounds “extreme,” what sounds “practical” and what gets treated as inevitable.

In 2025, bosses and politicians leaned hard on a familiar vocabulary. Shutdowns were framed as “fiscal discipline.” Wage stagnation as “economic reality.” Union demands as “disruptive.” Child labor rollbacks as “flexibility.” Precarious work as “opportunity.” The goal was never persuasion, it was normalization. Make exploitation sound like physics. What workers and their allies did (sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly) was refuse that framing.

When federal employees said it was unacceptable to be ordered to work without pay, they weren’t making a partisan argument. They were redefining what “essential” actually means. When nurses centered safe staffing as patient care, not just labor conditions, they collapsed the false divide between worker and public good. When states moved to ban captive-audience meetings or extend unemployment benefits to striking workers, they rejected the idea that neutrality means subordination.

Even defensive fights mattered here. Blocking child labor expansions. Holding the line on collective bargaining bans. Preventing the erosion of basic protections. These weren’t presented as radical departures, they were framed as common sense, basic dignity and democratic accountability.

That reframing is power. Because once the public starts asking why inflation is treated as unavoidable but poverty wages are treated as policy, the debate shifts. The terms get reset. And suddenly, it’s no longer workers who sound unreasonable - it’s the system that demands endless sacrifice, quietly and without consent.

V. The Numbers Behind the Momentum

Strip away the rhetoric and the pattern becomes visible in the numbers.

Unions won close to 80% of representation elections in 2025. Tens of thousands of workers organized, not just in logistics and manufacturing, but also in banking, healthcare, entertainment, grocery and public employment. First contracts delivered wage increases ranging from the high single digits to nearly 40% over multi-year agreements. Inflation protections returned. Pension plans were defended. Health benefits were preserved where they were under direct attack. And none of this crashed the economy.

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, however, 670,000 federal workers were furloughed, 730,000 worked without pay, and at least 60,000 private-sector jobs vanished in the ripple effects. The economy lost $11 billion in permanent output, while members of Congress continued collecting full paychecks. The lesson was brutal but clarifying: workers already subsidize the system with their insecurity.

Against that backdrop, labor’s gains were modest - and that’s precisely the point. These contracts didn’t bankrupt corporations. They barely dented annual profits. What they did was redistribute risk and confidence downward, where it actually changes lives.

When wage increases, job protections, and inflation safeguards are collectively owned and collectively defended, their impact multiplies. They become standards. Reference points. Proof.

Public approval of unions remained near historic highs throughout the year, and not as destiny, but as terrain. Workers used that terrain deliberately and without illusion. Hope didn’t come from fantasy economic transformation. It came from workers learning how to take back a small, durable share of the wealth they already create.

VI. Where It All Points — History, Continuity, and What Comes Next

If 2025 felt chaotic, that’s because labor history usually is. Looking back a century, the CIO didn’t announce itself with a clean victory; it emerged through uneven shop-floor fights, partial wins and brutal repression before reshaping American industry. Public-sector unionization arrived only after waves of illegal strikes and protracted court battles. After President Reagan fired 13,000 federal air traffic controllers, outlawed their union (PATCO), and signaled that strikes would be met with state power in 1981, labor didn’t disappear - it rebuilt defensively, learning how to survive hostile terrain before learning how to advance again. Even the Fight for $15 took a decade to move from ridicule to normalization, not through sudden triumph but through relentless repetition.

The pattern is consistent: labor does not move in straight lines. It accumulates skills. It stores memory. It relearns how to act together. And that’s what made 2025 significant - not because it delivered a climax, and not because it avoided defeat, but because workers fought without illusions and without surrender. They organized knowing contracts would be hard to win. They struck knowing the state might intervene. They defended gains knowing the next round would come.

And when the social fabric was stress-tested during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the difference between strong and weak worker institutions became undeniable. Where unions were embedded, communities weathered the shock better. Where they weren’t, the damage deepened. Not accidentally, but structurally.

This aligns with what decades of data now confirm: unions don’t just raise wages. They stabilize communities, protect democratic participation, and slow the extraction of wealth and power upward. They are not charity. They are infrastructure.

So what won in 2025? Not everything. Not even close. But something essential did: the habit of collective action. The shared understanding that gains come from organization, not just outrage - and that even modest victories matter when they are defended together.

History doesn’t reward hope alone. But it has always responded to workers who refuse to fight alone.

References

Cohn, E., & Sherer, J. (2025, August 18). 2025 Worker-Led State policy victories show how states can—and Must—Do more to hold the line against escalating federal attacks on workers’ rights | Portside. Portside. https://portside.org/2025-08-18/2025-worker-led-state-policy-victories-show-how-states-can-and-must-do-more-hold-line

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., Shierholz, H., & Wething, H. (2025, August 20). Unions aren’t just good for workers—they also benefit communities and democracy. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-arent-just-good-for-workers-they-also-benefit-communities-and-democracy/

Quinnell, K., & Roberts, S. (2025, July 10). Worker Wins: Our Union is Strong. aflcio.org. https://aflcio.org/2025/7/10/worker-wins-our-union-strong

Rosenberg, J. (2025, January 1). What can we anticipate from the labor movement in 2025? On the Line.

On the Line

What can we anticipate from the labor movement in 2025?

The major labor struggles in 2024 should give us reason for optimism that the labor movement is trending in the right direction – from new auto organizing by the UAW in the South to ILA dockworkers shutting down East Coast ports to protect their jobs from automation, from hotel workers in major tourist cities striking for and winning major raises to gra…

a year ago · 10 likes · On the Line and Jeff Rosenberg

Recent organizing wins show power in every sector | Union Label and Service Trades Department, AFL-CIO. (2025, November 19). https://unionlabel.org/2025/11/19/recent-organizing-wins-show-power-in-every-sector/

Zahn, M., & Singh, N. (2025, November 13). Government shutdown impact: By the numbers. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/government-shutdown-impact-numbers/story?id=127484037

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Why We Refuse to Name What’s Happening

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:23:59 GMT

I. If This Were Somewhere Else, We’d Know What to Call It

Imagine, for a moment, that the following were happening in another country: Courts issue rulings that the executive branch openly ignores. Armed federal agents operate domestically with expanding powers, detaining people without clear charges or due process. Media organizations face economic pressure and legal threats for publishing unfavorable coverage. Political opponents are labeled enemies, traitors or existential threats to the nation itself, and not by fringe actors, but by the actual head of state.

Now ask the obvious question: If this were happening somewhere else, what would the headlines say? They wouldn’t lead with euphemisms. They wouldn’t call it “polarization” or “controversy” or “institutional strain.” They wouldn’t speak delicately about competing narratives or both sides. They would say the word Americans seem uniquely hesitant to use about ourselves. They would call it authoritarianism.

That hesitation matters more than we like to admit. Because the danger right now isn’t that people don’t feel something is wrong. They do. You can hear it in the anxiety, the quiet fear and the way conversations keep circling the same unease without ever quite landing. The problem is that we keep being told (explicitly and implicitly) that naming what’s happening would be irresponsible. Alarmist. Divisive. Unhelpful. Unprofessional.

We are encouraged to trust the process even as the process is hollowed out. To focus on norms while those norms are openly violated. To take comfort in the fact that the machinery of government still exists, that elections still happen, that courts still issue opinions, as if the presence of familiar forms guarantees democratic substance.

But history doesn’t work that way. Authoritarian systems rarely arrive announcing themselves. They emerge gradually, through normalization, legalism and language that softens reality until it becomes difficult to grasp what’s been lost. The institutions remain. The names remain. What changes is how power actually operates - and who is protected by it.

This is why language matters. Not as a branding exercise, but as a survival one. If we can’t describe the terrain accurately, we can’t orient ourselves within it, let alone resist what’s unfolding. What I’m basically trying to say is that authoritarianism advances fastest when it’s trapped behind polite language.

II. Authoritarianism Doesn’t Look Like Collapse — It Looks Like Control

One of the most comforting myths about authoritarianism is that it announces itself through chaos. That it feels unmistakably like breakdown. That things fall apart so visibly, so dramatically, that no one could mistake what’s happening.

But that isn’t how strongman rule usually works.

Authoritarian systems don’t abolish order. They impose a different one. What looks like disorder from the outside is often something else entirely: selective enforcement, quiet consolidation and the steady tightening of hierarchy. The appearance of confusion masks the fact that power is becoming more concentrated, more personalized and way less accountable.

This is where many Americans get stuck. We look around and see familiar institutions still standing. Laws are still on the books. Elections still occur. Courts still issue rulings. Congress still meets (barely). News still gets published. From a distance, the scaffolding of democracy remains intact.

And so we assume that whatever else is happening, it can’t be authoritarian. Not yet. But authoritarianism doesn’t require eliminating institutions. It requires bending them. Laws don’t disappear; they’re enforced unevenly. Courts still rule, but their decisions are ignored when they threaten power and amplified when they serve it. Elections continue, but the costs of opposing the ruling faction quietly rise. Media outlets remain legal, yet face financial pressure, lawsuits and intimidation that shape what gets said and what doesn’t.

What changes isn’t the presence of rules. It’s who the rules apply to.

Some people experience the law as rigid and punishing. Others experience it as flexible, forgiving or entirely irrelevant. Accountability moves downward. Protection moves upward. Over time, this undemocratic unevenness stops feeling exceptional and starts feeling normal.

This is why authoritarianism can coexist with daily routines. Schools still open. Bills still get paid. Work still happens. Life goes on…just with a growing awareness, often unspoken, of where the lines are and who you shouldn’t cross. That’s not collapse. It’s consolidation. The system isn’t breaking down. It’s deciding who it’s for.

III. How You Know the Slide Is Real

One reason authoritarianism is so hard to confront is that people expect a single unmistakable moment, like a coup, or a declaration or tanks rolling through city streets. But countries don’t usually lose the rule of law all at once. They lose it piece by piece, in ways that feel administrative, legal and even boring.

People who’ve lived and worked in weakening democracies tend to notice the signs earlier, not because they’re more cynical, but because they’ve seen the pattern before. It begins when the law stops protecting speech and starts disciplining it. Not through outright bans, but through investigations, licensing threats, financial pressure and the quiet message that criticizing power comes with consequences. Media outlets don’t vanish; they become more cautious. Activists don’t disappear; they burn out, lawyer up or scale back. Free speech technically exists, but exercising it becomes risky in ways it wasn’t before.

Then the courts change, not all at once, and not everywhere. Judges still hear cases. Rulings still get issued. But loyalty starts to matter more than independence. Decisions that favor those in power are enforced swiftly; decisions that constrain them are delayed, ignored, or punished. Over time, people stop expecting the courts to protect them and start seeing them as another arm of the political order.

Corruption follows naturally. When those at the top no longer fear consequences, self-dealing becomes normal. Contracts flow to friends and donors. Pardons reward loyalty. Laws are applied as weapons or shields, depending on who you are. None of this feels shocking once it’s established. It feels like how things are done.

Meanwhile, enforcement becomes arbitrary and frightening. Police and federal agents operate with widening discretion and narrowing oversight. Complaints go nowhere. Violations pile up without accountability. The message is unmistakable: resistance will be costly, and appeals to fairness will not save you.

And beneath all of it, fear spreads. Not the loud kind, not constant panic - but a low, ambient fear that settles into everyday life. Fear of drawing attention. Fear of saying the wrong thing at work. Fear of being misinterpreted online. Fear of what happens if power decides you’re a problem. Even those inside the system feel it, because they know how quickly protection can turn into persecution.

This is the point many people misunderstand. Authoritarianism doesn’t require universal terror. It requires enough uncertainty that people begin to police themselves. When this pattern emerges - pressured media, captured courts, normalized corruption, arbitrary enforcement and a culture of fear - it no longer makes sense to describe what’s happening as mere dysfunction. It has a name. And the longer we avoid it, the harder it becomes to reverse.

IV. When Naming the Law Becomes the Crime

One of the clearest signs that a system is tilting toward authoritarianism is not the abuse of power itself, but the reaction to anyone who names it. For example, just last week, a group of Democratic lawmakers (several of them military veterans) released a short video reminding service members of something that is not controversial, radical or new: under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, troops are obligated to refuse illegal orders. That principle exists precisely because history is filled with atrocities committed by people who claimed they were “just following orders.”

The response from the president was immediate and chilling. He accused the lawmakers of “seditious behavior,” called them traitors, demanded their arrest and suggested (without ambiguity) that such behavior was punishable by death.

This is worth sitting with. No one in the video called for rebellion. No one urged troops to disobey lawful authority. They cited existing law and constitutional oaths. Yet the act of reminding the military that the law places limits on executive power was recast as an existential threat to the nation. This is not confusion. It is strategy. Authoritarian systems invert reality by redefining legality itself. Loyalty becomes lawful. Dissent becomes criminal. Defending the Constitution is reframed as undermining the state. The crime is no longer disobedience, it’s refusing to suspend your judgment on command.

Equally telling was the reaction from institutional gatekeepers. The House Speaker didn’t challenge the substance of the threat. He deferred to prosecutors. Senior administration officials compared the video to enemy propaganda. The question was no longer whether the president was wrong, but whether the law could be stretched enough to make his anger actionable.

This is how the linguistic terrain shifts. Words like “sedition,” “terrorism,” and “enemy” are not deployed accidentally. They are designed to collapse legal distinctions, to move the debate from right and wrong to loyalty and punishment. Once that shift takes hold, the specific facts matter less than the allegiance being demanded. And when even stating what the law says is treated as a provocation, the message to everyone else is clear: silence is safer than accuracy.

This is why language matters so much at this stage. Not because words are everything, but because they set the boundaries of what people believe they are allowed to see, say and resist. When power insists that naming the law is treason, it’s telling you exactly how fragile its authority really is. And how far it’s willing to go to protect it.

V. This Isn’t Abstract — It’s Material

Authoritarian drift doesn’t just show up in rhetoric. It shows up in budgets, enforcement priorities and who gets protected when resources are scarce. Just look at where money flows. For example, Department of Homeland Security funding has exploded, even as housing, healthcare and social programs strain under the weight of everyday need. Immigration enforcement agencies operate with near-impunity, while courts issue rulings they cannot enforce. The message isn’t subtle: coercion is fully funded, while care is conditional.

Look also at who pays. Blue states send tens of billions more to Washington each year than they receive back, essentially subsidizing a federal system that increasingly works against their residents while amplifying the political power of states with far less democratic representation. That imbalance isn’t accidental. It helps lock in a system where economic contribution and political voice are deliberately disconnected.

And look at what’s withheld. Public investment that could stabilize housing, healthcare and wages is treated as unrealistic or radical, while emergency powers, surveillance authorities and militarized enforcement expand without hesitation. This is the political economy of authoritarianism. When people are made precarious, order starts to look appealing. When systems fail to meet basic needs, “security” becomes the substitute promise.

Control thrives where solidarity is starved. That’s not dysfunction. It’s design.

VI. The Window Is Still Open — But Not for Long

The most dangerous lie we tell ourselves is that there will be a clean moment, later, when the threat becomes undeniable and action finally feels justified. History doesn’t work that way. Authoritarian systems rarely announce their arrival. They consolidate in the pauses between outrage, in the spaces where people wait for permission that never comes.

What we are living through now is not the beginning of something unfamiliar. It is the decisive middle. The phase where elections still happen, courts still speak and dissent still exists, but on an increasingly tilted field. This stage can be reversed. Once it hardens though, that reversal may take generations.

The difference matters. It tells us that normal politics is no longer enough, but that resistance is still possible. It tells us that the cost of inaction is rising faster than the cost of confrontation. And it tells us that waiting for institutions to save themselves is a gamble we are unlikely to win. This is because democracy doesn’t survive on autopilot. It survives when people remember that it was never a gift from above, but something ordinary people built, defended and expanded under pressure.

The window hasn’t closed. But it is narrowing. And what happens next depends on whether we are willing to name what’s happening — and act accordingly.

References

Armitage, C. (2025, November 2). 67% of Democrats want more aggressive action: Can they deliver? The Existentialist Republic.

The Existentialist Republic

67% of Democrats Want More Aggressive Action: Can They Deliver?

B.L.U.F: Blue state governors and legislatures have the tools right now. When 67 percent of your own party voters report frustration and 41 percent specifically want harder pushback, that is not a warning to moderate. That is permission to act aggressively using every legal authority available. The federal system is not coming to help. State governments…

5 months ago · 654 likes · 76 comments · Christopher Armitage

Armitage, C. (2025, October 24). Between democracy and dictatorship: Where we are and how long we have. The Existentialist Republic.

The Existentialist Republic

Between Democracy and Dictatorship: Where We Are and How Long We Have

There won’t be a day when we wake up and the Wikipedia page suddenly says “The US is a Fascist Christian Ethnostate.” That’s not how authoritarian takeover works for people living through it. When did it happen? Some say Jan 6. Others point to Trump’s subsequent lack of consequences, or his “revenge tour” victory. …

5 months ago · 653 likes · 172 comments · Christopher Armitage

Bowman, H. (2025, October 29). How will you know that America has become a dictatorship? After 20 years living in one, I can tell you. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/is-america-a-dictatorship-king-trump.html

DeVega, C. (2025, November 13). Donald Trump’s path to authoritarian rule is wide open. Salon.com. https://www.salon.com/2025/11/13/donald-trumps-path-to-authoritarian-rule-is-wide-open/

Feinberg, A., & Garcia, E. (2025, November 20). Trump demands arrest of Dems who told troops to refuse illegal orders. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-arrest-democrats-troops-illegal-orders-b2869176.html

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris

Why Self-Care Can't Cure Capitalism

Chris Fletcher — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:42:45 GMT

I. The Mirage of “Fix Yourself” in a Breaking Economy

Everywhere you look, self-care is offered like a panacea: light a calming candle, take a deep breath, drink more water, write something in a gratitude journal or download another mindfulness app. It’s marketed as “resilience,” but in practice it functions as a pressure valve for a system that keeps tightening the screws. When the world feels unlivable, the culture tells you to become more flexible. More adaptable. More self-regulated. More endlessly repairable. Anything, really, except less exploited.

But the math doesn’t lie. And people can feel math in their bones. Sixty-four percent of American workers now live paycheck to paycheck, according to ADP’s latest survey - up from 46% just two years ago. That’s not a mindset problem; that’s a widespread structural failure. “We’re getting nowhere,” one millennial told CNN after describing how his wage gains were swallowed whole by rising costs. He didn’t need a gratitude journal. He needed an economy that didn’t punish him for existing.

Mainstream wellness culture frames burnout as a personal misalignment or a failure of discipline. But what do you call it when people are doing everything right and still sinking? When the typical household must spend $1,043 more every month just to buy what they bought in 2021? When 24% of households spend over 95% of their income on necessities alone? You can’t deep-breathe your way out of that kind of arithmetic.

Self-care was supposed to help us feel human again. Instead, it’s become a coping mechanism for inhuman conditions. We’re told to soothe ourselves through an affordability crisis, meditate through wage stagnation, and stretch through the slow implosion of the middle class. Anyone who cracks under that pressure is told they haven’t been taking good enough care of themselves.

But the truth is simpler - and far more damning: People aren’t breaking down because they’re weak. They’re breaking down because the system is working exactly as designed.

II. A K-Shaped Economy, or Why “Harder Work” Isn’t the Problem

The economy isn’t “struggling.” It’s splitting. And most people can feel the tear long before they can name its shape. Economists call it the K-shaped recovery - the kind where one line shoots upward for the wealthy while the other plunges for everyone else. But the term doesn’t quite capture the lived reality, the sense of watching prosperity accelerate in the lane next to you while your own lane sinks into potholes and gravel. It feels less like a letter of the alphabet and more like a split in the floor beneath your feet.

The numbers make the divide unmistakable. As Newsweek reported, wage growth for the lowest-earning Americans has slowed to its weakest pace in years, while higher-income households continue to surge ahead. The Atlanta Fed’s data shows wage growth “sharply slowing for the lowest-earning quartile,” even as the wealthy ride the tailwinds of stock market gains and asset appreciation. One economist called it “an increasingly K-shaped U.S. economy,” a polite academic way of saying: the rich are accelerating, and the rest are stalling out.

And yet, while this split widens, political leaders insist the problem isn’t the economy - it’s our perception of it. Inflation was “a con job,” we’re told. Groceries are “down,” we’re told. The system is fine, we’re told. We just aren’t appreciating it correctly. The result is a kind of civic cognitive dissonance, a collective bewilderment that comes from being blamed for noticing what is plainly happening in our own lives.

As CNN’s analysis put it, Americans “don’t take kindly to politicians who refuse to see voters’ lived experiences - especially when they’re smacked in the face with high prices on every supermarket trip.” Exactly. Reality is not a branding problem. Reality is what people can’t afford anymore.

III. The Cruelest Gaslighting: Exhaustion as an Economic Strategy

Burnout is the great American misunderstanding. We treat it like a mental health quirk, a personal failing, a sign that you haven’t hydrated enough or mastered the right breathing technique. But exhaustion in this economy isn’t an accident - it’s policy. It’s strategy. It’s how a system running on overwork and underpay keeps itself upright.

Listen to the way politicians talk about the economy and you can see the strategy in real time. When the president insists “we have no inflation,” while grocery bills keep climbing, it’s not just a lie - it’s a message: your suffering is not real. As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell put it plainly, “Consumers are not interested in that story. Their prices are higher.” That line alone is a quiet indictment of the political class, a reminder that statistical optimism doesn’t put food in anyone’s cart.

But this pattern isn’t new. Biden did it when he told people the economy was “on fire” while they felt it burning them alive. Trump is doing it now, denying the cost of living crisis even as families spend $208 more per month just to tread water - over $1,000 more than in early 2021. Both administrations committed the same sin: insisting that if people simply felt differently, the pain would go away.

Matthew Desmond’s argument lands here like a hammer: poverty persists because the wealthy benefit from it. The same is true of burnout. Exhausted workers are more compliant. Overwhelmed people have fewer options. A population stretched thin is easier to discipline.

And this is where “self-care” slides neatly into the script. Instead of regulating corporations, we tell workers to do yoga. Instead of raising wages, we hand teachers a mindfulness app. Instead of confronting the structural violence of low pay and high costs, we urge everyone to “set better boundaries” - as if the real problem is insufficient journaling.

Burnout isn’t a personal crisis. It’s a political outcome. A feature, not a glitch. A system working exactly as designed.

IV. When the Middle Class Vanishes: What We’ve Lost, and Who Took It

For all the talk about budgeting apps, side hustles, and “learning to live within your means,” the truth is brutally simple: the pillars that once made a middle-class life possible have been sawed off one by one. This isn’t about individual choices. It’s about political decisions that turned collective goods into private luxuries.

Housing, once the anchor of postwar stability, is now a speculative asset class. The median single-family home has nearly tripled in price since 2012, soaring from $164,000 to $466,000. The cost of raising a child has blown past $400,000, more than doubling since 2000. Wages, meanwhile, have crawled forward at a fraction of that pace. As Investopedia notes, wages have risen only 2.1x over the same period - the math speaks for itself.

Zoom out further and the structural picture sharpens. Since 1979, economic productivity has grown 87%, but typical workers’ pay has grown only 32%. That missing 55 percentage points didn’t evaporate - it was siphoned upward into profits, executive compensation and shareholder payouts. The EPI pay-productivity gap isn’t an economic anomaly; it’s the blueprint of upward redistribution.

Other foundations eroded too. Charles Hugh Smith points out that in the mid-1980s, healthcare was actually affordable and accessible and public infrastructure still functioned without collapsing under deferred maintenance. He describes today’s landscape bluntly: “Private wealth has soared… while the bottom 60% are experiencing decay and decline,” and “housing is no longer affordable for the bottom 80% of the populace.”

This is what’s been stolen: the material basis of a livable life. And it’s no coincidence that the rise of “self-care culture” tracks neatly with this dismantling. When society abandons collective care - housing, healthcare, wages, infrastructure, time - the market rushes in to sell coping mechanisms. The more unbearable everyday life becomes, the more profitable the wellness industry becomes.

You’re not failing to budget properly. You’re living in an economy where the things that once made life stable have been converted into revenue streams for someone else.

V. What Real Care Would Look Like

The wellness industry wants you to believe that resilience comes from within - that if you could just find the right morning routine, the right affirmations or the right breathwork protocol, you’d be able to withstand anything. But that’s not how resilience actually works.

Real resilience isn’t built in isolation. It’s built in community, in security, in the knowledge that your basic needs won’t collapse beneath you. It comes from material conditions, not mental exercises.

You want to know what actually produces resilient people? Living wages that don’t require three jobs to afford rent. Affordable housing that doesn’t swallow 50% or more of your paycheck. Universal healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you for getting sick. Paid time off that’s actually enough to recover from exhaustion, not just delay it. Shorter workweeks that give people time to be human beings instead of production units. Public infrastructure that functions without crumbling. Democratic workplaces where workers have a say in the conditions of their labor.

These aren’t luxuries. They’re the foundations of a livable life. And every society that has built them - from the Nordic countries to postwar America at its most functional - has discovered the same truth: when you take care of people structurally, you don’t need to sell them survival strategies individually.

But we’ve gone the opposite direction. We’ve dismantled collective care and replaced it with an entire economy of coping mechanisms. The meditation app industry is worth billions. The self-help market keeps expanding. Wellness retreats, productivity coaches, biohacking supplements - all of it thriving precisely because the baseline conditions of life have become so unlivable that people will pay anything for relief.

This is the con: Capitalism creates the crisis, then sells you the cure. It guts your wages, inflates your costs, extracts your time and monetizes your exhaustion. Then it hands you a jade roller and a journal prompt and tells you the problem is your failure to practice adequate self-care.

No amount of self-care can fix an economy that runs on self-sacrifice. And the people selling you resilience know this. They know that meditation won’t pay your rent. They know gratitude won’t lower grocery prices. They know breathwork won’t give you back the 20 hours a week you lose to unpaid emotional labor and administrative friction. But as long as you’re focused on fixing yourself, you’re not focused on changing the system.

That’s the real function of self-care culture under late capitalism: it privatizes systemic failure. It turns political problems into personal responsibilities. It makes you believe that if you’re still struggling, you must not be trying hard enough - when the truth is that you’re struggling because you’re being systematically drained.

So the real question isn’t how we can take better care of ourselves. It’s how much longer we’ll pretend that this is a life anyone should have to survive.

Because survival isn’t the benchmark. It never should have been. The benchmark is flourishing - the ability to rest without guilt, to plan beyond next month and to feel secure enough to imagine a future instead of just bracing for the next crisis.

And that kind of life isn’t built one wellness routine at a time. It’s built collectively, structurally, through the hard work of demanding, and building, a society that actually takes care of people. Real care isn’t a product you can buy. It’s a world we have to fight for.

References

Cameron, H. (2025, November 20). Number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck surges. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/number-americans-living-paycheck-paycheck-surges-11079125

Egan, M. (2025, November 13). ‘Things are pretty crappy.’ 1 in 4 US households are living paycheck to paycheck. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/13/economy/job-prices-debt-economy

Fowler, J. (2025, November 24). Late-Stage capitalism. The Humanity Archive. https://substack.com/home/post/p-179779508

Goldman, D. (2025, November 4). Trump denies inflation is hurting Americans. It’s the same mistake that haunted Biden. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/04/business/trump-biden-economy-inflation

Lowrey, A. (2023, May 14). The war on poverty is over. rich people won. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/poverty-in-america-book-matthew-desmond-interview/674058/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Smith, C. H. (2025, November 18). What we’ve lost. Charles Hugh Smith’s Substack. https://substack.com/inbox/post/179301034

The Productivity–Pay Gap. (2025, September 3). Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Young, G. (2025, September 21). When almost nobody can afford kids, marriage, or a new Car—Has the ‘Middle class’ just disappeared? Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/when-almost-nobody-can-afford-kids-marriage-or-a-new-car-has-the-middle-class-just-disappeared-11813600

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Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and another opportunity to resist it.

Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris