This piece is part of “Workers Rising,” an ongoing series about the people whose work keeps everything running. The flight attendants and warehouse pickers, the dispatchers and gate agents, the mechanics and teachers and nurses and ground crews. Each installment follows the work: who does it, who depends on it, who pays when something breaks, and what the people inside the work see that the headlines miss. These aren’t just labor stories. They’re the foundation the rest of the economy stands on.

I. The Last Flight

There were supposed to be sixteen minutes between my Spirit flight landing in Fort Lauderdale and my rescheduled connection pushing back for Tampa. I made it with six.

This was November 29, 2025, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I’d spent the week-long school break in St. Croix with my family, and I was trying to get back to Ocala on a $200 budget itinerary because that’s what teachers fly. The departure board at Henry E. Rohlsen Airport showed my 4:36 PM flight delayed, then delayed again, then delayed to 7:51, and I sat at the gate doing the math on whether I’d make my connection while the gate agent kept her face neutral and answered the same questions twenty times an hour (eventually, she was thankfully able to get me on a later connecting flight, the last one out that day).

We finally pushed back at 7:13. As we taxied to the runway, the flight attendant got on the intercom and said the delay had been caused by an Airbus software update that affected six thousand flights worldwide. Six thousand flights. One vendor decision halfway around the world, and a Spirit jet sat on the tarmac in the Caribbean for four hours while a flight attendant explained to a planeload of strangers what her employer hadn’t.

I made the Tampa connection because the gates were thankfully only three apart. I drove home to Ocala past midnight with the windows down and classic rock loud enough to keep me awake. I remember thinking that the airline was held together with duct tape and optimism.

Five months later, it was gone. At 3:00 AM Eastern on Saturday, May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines ceased all operations. The night before, in the company’s operations center in Orlando, a dispatcher named Wes Egan (who had worked at Spirit for twenty-three years) sent a message through the cockpit alert system to one of the carrier’s pilots, who had been asking what was happening. The message, in all caps (because that’s how dispatch messages are formatted), read: UNOFFICIALLY WE STOP FLYING AT 0300 EST ON 05/02. GODSPEED MY FRIEND.

Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs that night. Software engineers. DOT compliance specialists. Flight attendants. Senior maintenance planners. Heavy maintenance project managers. Pilots, mechanics, dispatchers, ground crews. They got three and a half hours’ notice from their supervisors and an email from the CEO. The airline they had built was killed by a war they didn’t vote for, a merger they couldn’t save, and a government that found money for everything except them.

This is their story.

II. Death By A Thousand Structural Failures

To understand what killed Spirit Airlines, it’s worth stepping back to see how the carrier sat at the intersection of five distinct pressure points: financial, mechanical, regulatory, geopolitical and political. None of them alone would have necessarily done it, but all five together left no room to breathe.

The financial pressure started first. Spirit hadn’t turned an annual profit since 2019. Six straight years of losses, and the workers kept showing up, flying the routes, fixing the engines, staffing the gates, and dispatching the flights. The mechanical pressure came next. Pratt & Whitney engine defects grounded a significant portion of Spirit’s fleet, parking planes the mechanics couldn’t fix because the problem wasn’t theirs to fix. The senior maintenance planners scheduled inspections on aircraft that weren’t allowed to fly. The regulatory pressure followed in January 2024, when the Department of Justice blocked Spirit’s $3.8 billion merger with JetBlue on antitrust grounds. The merger would have retained Spirit’s 15,000 workers and added 10,000 more by 2026, according to projections the two airlines filed at the time. Twenty-five thousand projected aviation jobs evaporated when a federal judge sided with the DOJ. Spirit filed for Chapter 11 protection that year, and again in August 2025. Despite this, the flight attendants kept smiling at boarding.

Then came the geopolitical pressure. In late February 2026, the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and spiked jet fuel costs by 70%. Spirit absorbed over $100 million in fuel costs in two months. It simply couldn’t keep up. And the political pressure was the last one. Spirit sought a $500 million federal bailout. Late on Friday, May 1, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called CEO Dave Davis to tell him the bondholders had rejected the deal. There was no remaining way out. And the workers got the news at 3 AM.

III. The Architecture Was Visible from a Long Way Off

Walt Handelsman, The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, 2024. Spirit had just filed its first Chapter 11.

Editorial cartoonists were drawing Spirit’s death two years before it died. The architecture wasn’t hiding. Anyone paying attention could see what was coming. Spirit wasn’t the first carrier to be removed from the American sky, and it won’t be the last.

Every year I show my high school Economics students an infographic from USA Today when we cover oligopolies and game theory. It tracks the airline industry from the 1970s through the early 2010s, and it looks like this:

Ten carriers enter the chart on the left. Four exit on the right. Pan Am and Eastern collapsed in 1991. TWA was absorbed by American in 2001. Northwest disappeared into Delta in 2009. Continental into United in 2010. US Airways into American in 2011. The names that built American commercial aviation are gone, and the workers who built their careers at those carriers are scattered across the survivors or out of the industry entirely.

Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, named the result in 2022: “We basically have a four-firm oligopoly. Having this fringe of smaller carriers breathing down their necks is really the only thing left that keeps the Big Four on their toes.” Four firms (American, Delta, United and Southwest) controlling roughly 80% of domestic capacity. Spirit was part of that fringe.

As I help my students see in this same lesson, in a four-firm oligopoly the surviving carriers don’t have to collude formally. They just have to recognize that everyone makes more money when nobody starts a price war. Brandon Oglenski, an airline analyst at Barclays, said the quiet part out loud the Monday after Spirit’s collapse: industry pricing will “benefit significantly for nearly all airlines given the removal of excess point-to-point capacity.” Translated: a Spirit-sized hole in the market means the survivors can raise fares.

JetBlue moved within hours. It announced new flights from Fort Lauderdale to Cali, Barranquilla, Santo Domingo, Santiago de los Caballeros, and Ponce, the Caribbean routes that Spirit had served. The merger would have integrated Spirit’s workers. The collapse let JetBlue absorb the routes without them.

And while the workers who flew those routes were filing for unemployment, Spirit was asking the bankruptcy court to approve millions in retention bonuses for the executives staying on to manage the wind-down. The lawsuit recently filed by six laid-off workers alleges that Spirit had told employees as recently as April 16 to “ignore the rumors” about the airline’s collapse. Sixteen days before the lights went out, the workers were being told to stay optimistic. The bondholders were already counting.

IV. The Cannibalization

Within two weeks of Spirit’s collapse, more than ninety of its aircraft had been flown to airports around the country and parked, many of them at Phoenix Goodyear Airport, where the dry Arizona climate slows down the deterioration of planes nobody is flying. Of those ninety aircraft, more than sixty were leased. Spirit didn’t actually own most of the airline it operated. The yellow paint was Spirit’s. The planes belonged to finance companies, and the finance companies were already lining them up for their next lease.

The repossession was handled by a company called Nomadic Aviation Group, whose managing partner told NPR that some of the abandoned Spirit aircraft were “already probably in the pipeline to be leased again.” Other planes would have their engines pulled and transplanted into different aircraft. Each engine is worth between fifteen and twenty million dollars. A two-engine A320 is sitting on thirty to forty million dollars of resaleable hardware. The metal continues. The labor, however, is severed from it.

It all reminds me of a scene in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street where Charlie Sheen’s character realizes what his mentor’s deal actually means for Bluestar Airlines, the fictional carrier his father has worked for his entire adult life. In a smoky, wood-paneled office, a dozen executives seated around a gigantic table talk over each other about how to rapidly liquidate it. “...build condos where the hangars are,” “...lay the airplanes off to [the next buyer],” “...and I’ve got the Texas boys drooling at my kneecaps for the rest.” And then the line that lands the whole scene: “The beauty of this deal is the overfunded pension. Gekko makes seventy-five million dollars there. Fifty million buys them the minimum annuities for six thousand employees, and he walks away with the rest…not bad for a month’s work.”

Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox in Wall Street (1987), realizing that the deal his father warned him about is about to liquidate Bluestar Airlines and the 6,000 workers who made it fly.

Stone made that film thirty-nine years ago, but the cannibalization that he dramatized as moral horror has since become routine operating procedure. Spirit had seventeen thousand employees, not six thousand. The engines are worth more than the pensions. And the boardroom is now spread across thirty airports, twelve leasing companies and a half-dozen repo contractors.

Incredibly, even some of the pilots flying Spirit’s planes to Arizona are actually former Spirit pilots. Nomadic hired them as 1099 contractors. The same workers who held airline jobs with health insurance and retirement benefits two weeks ago are now gig workers flying their former employer’s planes to a graveyard in the desert. Their labor has been recategorized into a worse version of itself. They are being paid to ferry their own funeral.

And this is not just contained to Spirit. For example, Lufthansa has cancelled twenty thousand flights through October. AirAsia X has raised fares forty percent and cut capacity by ten. Air New Zealand has cancelled eleven hundred flights. More than thirteen thousand flights were cancelled across Europe in May alone. American Airlines is projecting four billion dollars in additional fuel costs this year. Delta reported a two-billion-dollar fuel cost spike in the second quarter alone.

Neil Sorahan, CFO of Ryanair, told CNBC the Monday after Spirit’s collapse that he expects “some of the weaker carriers who were already struggling before the war possibly go to the wall in the winter.” Spirit is not the last airline that will be cannibalized. It is the first.

Ryanair, meanwhile, hedged eighty percent of its fuel at sixty-seven dollars a barrel before the war began. Jet fuel is currently trading at one hundred sixty-three. Ryanair reported a 2.6 billion-dollar profit for 2026, a forty percent increase year over year. Same war, same fuel, same architecture, but opposite outcome. So you basically have it where the country that started the war is the country whose airlines are dying from it. And the workers who didn’t vote for it are the ones flying their own planes to the desert.

V. Take Your Uniform Off

Seventeen thousand workers lost their jobs at 3 AM on May 2. Three thousand pilots (represented by the Air Line Pilots Association), fifty-five hundred flight attendants (organized with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA), and fifty-five hundred ground crew, mechanics and maintenance workers (who belonged to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers). Plus three thousand contractors and indirect workers whose paychecks also ended when the gates closed.

Because Spirit liquidated rather than furloughed, the seniority those workers had spent careers building was destroyed in a single night. A flight attendant with twenty-seven years at Spirit doesn’t get hired by Delta as a twenty-seven-year veteran; she gets hired as a new hire. And as any teacher who has ever left a school to go work in another district or state knows, the skills survive, but the place in line does not.

Last December, Spirit pilots had agreed to cut their hourly wages by 8% in order to meet the airline’s financing requirements. Additionally, flight attendants gave back per diem rates and accepted reductions in their minimum credit hours. The workers took the pay cut because they wanted to believe the airline could be saved. The bondholders were already drafting the recovery they would later reject.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said the workers had “invested their hearts and souls into this airline,” and that their lives were now “hanging in the balance.” She has asked the federal government for a six-month, $600 weekly supplement to state unemployment, plus healthcare coverage through the end of 2026. However, the same administration that found $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon and started the war that doubled jet fuel prices has so far offered neither.

The architecture made every decision that killed Spirit, and the architecture is still making them. The DOJ blocked the merger. The bondholders rejected the bailout. The lessors reclaimed their planes. The repo contractors are now hiring Spirit’s former pilots to ferry their own planes to the desert. And the same president whose Commerce Secretary made the final phone call to Spirit’s CEO is currently demolishing the East Wing to build his ballroom, with bunkers and data centers beneath it.

Yeneshia Thomas was at home in Central Florida when she got the email at 12:30 AM. A forty-two-year-old flight attendant. She had been furloughed in December and called back in March. She took a pay cut to come back. “I had hopes that we were going to make it,” she told Business Insider. “Because they called us back.”

A few hours later, Spirit sent another email telling employees they were no longer permitted to wear their uniforms. One of Thomas’s colleagues hadn’t read it yet. She showed up at the airport in her Spirit uniform, the same one she had worn for years to work she had been proud to do. A TSA agent (just another worker, doing his job) looked at her and said the only thing he was authorized to say: “Take your uniform off.”

That is the architecture. That is what it has always been. And that is what it will keep being until the workers it depends on refuse to absorb its consequences any longer.

References

Bujor, M. (2026, May 7). Spirit Airlines Company shutdown: 17,000 jobs gone overnight. AirMag.aero. https://aeronauticsmagazine.com/news/spirit-airlines-is-gone-what-happens-next-to-the-17000-workers-left-behind

Chokshi, N. (2022, February 7). “Frontier and Spirit Airlines Plan to Merge.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/business/frontier-spirit-airlines-merger.html

Edmonds, L. (2026, May 4). Inside the chaotic morning Spirit workers learned they were out of a job: “Take your uniform off.” Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/spirit-airlines-collapse-employees-jobs-workers-flight-attendant-2026-5

Josephs, L. (2026, May 5). “Godspeed my friend”: Inside the final hours of Spirit Airlines. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/02/spirit-airlines-shutdown-inside-the-final-hours.html?&qsearchterm=spirit

Josephs, L. (2026, May 4). How Spirit Airlines’ demise will benefit rivals — and raise airfares even more. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/spirit-airlines-flights-rivals.html?&qsearchterm=spirit

Jordan, W. A. (1988). Problems Stemming from Airline Mergers and Acquisitions. Transportation Journal (American Society of Transportation & Logistics Inc), 27(4), 9–30.

Lyons, D. (2026, May 14). Ex-Spirit workers sue, saying airline failed to give proper layoff notices, owes back pay and benefits. Sun Sentinel. https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/05/13/ex-spirit-workers-sue-saying-airline-failed-to-give-proper-layoff-notices-owes-back-pay-and-benefits/

Payne, R. (2026, May 16). More than 90 Spirit Airlines aircraft with $20M parts were abandoned at airports — here’s why retrieving and selling them is a challenge. AOL.com. https://www.aol.com/finance/more-90-spirit-airlines-aircraft-154500863.html

Siskos, D., Maravas, A., & Karatzas, J. (2025). Pan-Caribbean Airlines: Unlocking Regional Aviation Potential. Collegiate Aviation Review International, 43(2), 1–21.

Syme, P. (2026, May 18). More airlines could follow Spirit into bankruptcy due to the Iran war fuel crisis, Ryanair exec says. AOL.com. https://www.aol.com/articles/more-airlines-could-spirit-bankruptcy-112021000.html

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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 most important thing is naming what you see, and naming who paid for it.

Next week, we’ll examine another piece of the machinery — and what it tells us about how the rest of it works.

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

~ Chris

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 and 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 Pantry

There are five months of freeze-dried food neatly stacked in durable totes along the closet wall in my office (I couldn’t pass up a recent buy 3, get 2 free deal from 4patriots.com), and every time I reach over them for a shirt or tie I have the same argument with myself: this is either the most rational thing I’ve done in some time or a sign that I’ve lost my grip entirely. I am, after all, a high school social studies teacher in Florida who writes weekly structural analysis about systems of power, and I’ve been comparison-shopping freeze-dried beef stroganoff on Amazon at midnight while watching the price of diesel climb to levels not seen since 2005. I monitor gas prices the way I used to monitor weather before hurricane season. I do the math at the pump every time I fill up, and the math, as we all know, has changed significantly: $2.81 in January, $4.55 today, up more than a dollar fifty since the war began in late February. I drive a car in a city with no meaningful public transit, and every fill-up is now a small act of accounting.

I have been doing this since March, since the Strait of Hormuz closed and the architecture I spent the spring writing about stopped being something I analyzed from a distance and became something I could feel in my own kitchen. The same chokepoint I traced across five centuries in an earlier piece is now showing up in the price of eggs, in the cost of a bag of dog food, in the calculations I run every week about whether to stay in Florida or drive to Maine for the summer. The structural analysis isn’t abstract anymore. It’s in my pantry. And the pantry is getting fuller because the world is getting more fragile, and I am no longer sure those are separate observations.

II. What Diesel Moves

The International Energy Agency has called the Hormuz closure the largest oil supply disruption on record. Larger than the 1973 Arab embargo. Larger than the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Larger than the disruptions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Roughly 600 million barrels of oil have been removed from global supply since late February, and the loss is not just a price problem. It is becoming an availability problem, and the difference between those two things is the difference between expensive groceries and empty shelves.

Seventy percent of all food in the United States moves by truck. Every truck runs on diesel. Every tractor in every field runs on diesel. Every refrigerated trailer keeping food cold on the highway runs on diesel. Diesel inventories are currently at their lowest levels since 2005 and falling, eleven percent below the five-year average according to the most recent EIA data. When diesel becomes scarce, trucks slow down. When trucks slow down, the food doesn’t get picked up from farms, doesn’t reach processing plants, and doesn’t arrive at your grocery store. That isn’t inflation. Inflation is when prices go up. This is when there is nothing to put on the shelf at any price. And it’s already happening at the margins. For example, in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, shrimp boats that burn up to 500 gallons of diesel a day are sitting idle at the dock because the math no longer works. As the town’s mayor put it this week, “a lot of these guys are just not going out until diesel fuel comes down. You can’t go work for the fuel.” When the boats don’t go out, there’s nothing to bring in, nothing to process, nothing to pack, just nobody working. Every dollar a fisherman generates creates roughly six dollars in the broader economy. When that dollar disappears, the community hollows out behind it.

But the dependency runs deeper than fuel. A third of the world’s fertilizers normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and planting seasons in parts of Africa and Asia are ending within weeks. The graphite in every lithium-ion battery, from your phone to an electric vehicle, is made from needle coke, a byproduct of oil refining, baked in furnaces at over 3,000 degrees for weeks at a time. The sulfuric acid used to leach copper ore in Chile comes from sulfur produced by refining Persian Gulf crude. As the Substack writer known as the Honest Sorcerer observed earlier this year, “we still cannot make ‘renewables’ with ‘renewables,’ let alone maintain the six continent supply chain necessary to continue with civilization as it is.” It reminds me of an early episode of the excellent drama series Landman, where Billy Bob Thornton’s character lectures the young company lawyer and asks her if she has any idea how much diesel it takes to mix the concrete, make the steel, haul the components, and assemble a single wind turbine with a 450-foot crane. The data says he was not exaggerating.

The crisis is not energy alone. It is material. It is agricultural. It is everything.

III. The Lag

Here is the fact that should unsettle every assumption about a quick resolution. If the Strait of Hormuz opened completely and permanently this afternoon, the first drop of new Persian Gulf gasoline would not reach an American gas pump until late August at the earliest. A tanker takes roughly forty days to cross from the Gulf to the U.S. coast. Refining takes weeks. Pipeline and truck distribution to 150,000 gas stations takes another ten to fourteen days. That is twelve to sixteen weeks from strait to pump, and it assumes everything goes perfectly, which it will not. Shipping lanes need mine clearance. Insurance companies will maintain war-risk premiums for months. Production that was shut in takes months to restart, and some damaged facilities, including Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex, which lost an estimated seventeen percent of its capacity, may need up to five years to repair.

Jeff Currie, senior advisor at the Carlyle Group, put it plainly on Bloomberg Television last week: “It’s baked in, full stop. It’s going to take so long to get all this restarted that those inventories will continue to draw.” Even the head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the situation: “Just as we had never before seen the strait close, we’ve never seen it reopen.”

And the lag clock has not even started. As of today, the ceasefire is on what President Trump himself called “life support.” Iran is demanding war reparations and sovereignty over the strait. The diplomatic positions are hardening, not converging. On May 3, a tanker called the New Corolla docked at Long Beach, California, carrying Iraqi crude that was loaded four days before the war began. It was the last Middle East oil shipment to reach American shores. The buffer of tankers that were already at sea when the conflict started is now exhausted.

There is no more coming. And the clock to recovery has not begun.

IV. What I Don’t Know

I don’t know if store shelves will be empty by mid-July. I don’t know if the worst-case scenarios materialize on schedule. I don’t know if diplomatic breakthroughs, emergency rationing, strategic reserve releases, or demand destruction will buy enough time to prevent the cascade the analysts are warning about. I am a high school teacher, not an energy analyst, and I want to be precise about the limits of what I can claim.

What I do know is that the structural vulnerability is real, the dependencies are documented, the inventories are falling, and the gap between what the data shows and what the government is communicating is wide enough to drive a very large, very empty tanker through. The chief economist at Rystad Energy told Fortune that we are “still kind of sleepwalking into this approaching disaster.” That is not a fringe voice. It is one of the world’s most respected energy research firms.

The people writing with absolute certainty that civilization collapses in eight weeks are not doing analysis. They are doing prophecy. But the people insisting everything will be fine are not doing analysis either. They’re arguably doing denial. The honest position, I suspect, is somewhere between those poles, and it is deeply uncomfortable to stand there. The data is serious. The architecture that produced this vulnerability is the same architecture I have been tracing all year. And none of us, not the analysts, not the prophets, not the president with his gas tax proposal, knows exactly how this plays out.

V. Where It All Points

Whether or not the worst case arrives this summer, the structural lesson is already clear. A civilization that routes its fuel supply through a 21-mile strait, moves it on a fuel with no short-term substitute, and funds a $1.5 trillion military budget while cutting $73 billion from everything else has built fragility into its foundation. That fragility was not an accident. It was an architecture, and it was designed.

Means and Meaning has spent this spring tracing that architecture across domains. A chokepoint that has shaped empires for five centuries. A war budget that shows up in your grocery bill. A college that taught people to see systems and couldn’t survive in a system that doesn’t value seeing. What the #vanlife movement says about America’s housing crisis. These are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different registers, about a civilization that has optimized for extraction and efficiency while quietly eliminating every buffer, every reserve and every margin of safety that might have absorbed a shock like the one now arriving.

I am still stacking freeze-dried food in my office closet. I am still doing the math at the pump. I am still having that argument with myself every morning about whether this is wisdom or anxiety, and I am still not sure the answer matters, because the vulnerability is real either way. The inventories are falling whether I’m being rational or paranoid. The diesel is running low whether I call it preparation or panic.

The point was never prediction. The point is that structural vulnerabilities do not disappear because the immediate crisis passes. They wait. And the question this country has never been willing to honestly ask, the question the architecture was designed to make unthinkable, is whether we will rebuild the systems that feed us and fuel us and shelter us around something more resilient than a single 21-mile strait, or whether we will simply wait for the next shock, and the next one after that, until there is nothing left to cushion the fall.

References

Afp. (2026, May 11). Tens of millions risk hunger as Hormuz standoff blocks fertiliser, UN official says. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/tens-of-millions-risk-hunger-as-hormuz-standoff-blocks-fertiliser-un-official-says/articleshow/131016481.cms

Martin, J. (2026, April 14). Two wars. one you can see. one you can’t. Jay’s Letter.

Jay’s Letter

Two Wars. One You Can See. One You Can't

Two Wars…

Read more

a month ago · 333 likes · 83 comments · Jay Martin

McCreesh, S. (2026, May 11). Trump proposes suspending the federal gas tax until prices fall. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/us/politics/trump-gas-tax.html?smid=url-share

Newbury, S. J. (2025, November 25). The thermodynamic blind spot: Why “Peak Oil” failed, and why we are finally at the singularity. The Ultimate Avatar of Balance.

The Ultimate Avatar of Balance

The Thermodynamic Blind Spot: Why 'Peak Oil' Failed, and Why We Are Finally at the Singularity

If you mention ‘Peak Oil’ today in polite company—or even among serious economists—you are immediately filed away in the same cabinet as Y2K survivalists and Mayan Calendar enthusiasts…

Read more

6 months ago · 337 likes · 91 comments · Steven J. Newbury

Pathak, R. (2026, March 24). Is the World Heading for an Energy Lockdown in 2026? Oil Prices, Blackouts, and What’s Really Coming. International Business Times UK. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/global-energy-lockdown-2026-crisis-impact-1787852

Science Insights Team. (2026, March 29). Is there an energy crisis? What’s really happening now. ScienceInsights. https://scienceinsights.org/is-there-an-energy-crisis-whats-really-happening-now/

Shryock, M. A. (2026, May 9). EIGHT WEEKS TO EMPTY SHELVES. SIXTY DAYS TO FAMINE. Mark A. Shryock.

Mark A. Shryock

EIGHT WEEKS TO EMPTY SHELVES. SIXTY DAYS TO FAMINE.

by Mark A. Shryock…

Read more

14 days ago · 2708 likes · 525 comments · Mark A. Shryock

Shukla, P. (2026, April 20). 600 million barrels gone, gas +47%, jet fuel +100%: is the global energy crisis 2026 from US– Iran war abo. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/600-million-barrels-gone-gas-47-jet-fuel-100-is-the-global-energy-crisis-2026-from-us-iran-war-about-to-trigger-inflation-shock-and-global-recession/articleshow/130398244.cms#google_vignette

Snapp, E. (2026, May 11). Rising fuel costs force shrimp boats to stay docked in Bayou La Batre. (2026, May 11). WEAR2. https://mynbc15.com/news/local/rising-fuel-costs-force-shrimp-boats-to-stay-docked-in-bayou-la-batre

Sorcerer, H. (2026, February 15). China: The end of an economic miracle. The Honest Sorcerer.

The Honest Sorcerer

China: The End of an Economic Miracle

China is no longer the economic miracle it used to be. Although still growing, something is fundamentally wrong with their model, which has much more in common with western capitalist economies than what most people are comfortable to admit. As opposed to what the mainstream media tries to sell the western public these…

Read more

3 months ago · 190 likes · 61 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

Sorcerer, H. (2026, April 10). There is no “Next economy.” The Honest Sorcerer.

The Honest Sorcerer

There Is No "Next Economy"

The largest energy crisis in human history has exposed the extractive, wholly unsustainable nature of the Western / Chinese industrial ecosystem. Mining used to happen in poor global south countries using cheap oil, while metallization and part manufacturing was increasingly done in China, using cheap…

Read more

a month ago · 562 likes · 132 comments · The Honest Sorcerer

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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

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. The Model in the Bunker

There is a scene in Downfall, a compelling 2004 German film about Hitler’s final days, that stopped me cold when I finally watched it one day this past week after work. It is April 1945. Berlin is being bombed to rubble. Soviet artillery shakes the walls of the Führerbunker. And Adolf Hitler is standing over a detailed architectural model of “Welthauptstadt Germania,” Albert Speer’s fantasy redesign of Berlin as the eternal capital of the thousand-year Reich. Grand boulevards. Triumphal arches. A domed hall that would hold 180,000 people.

Hitler tells Speer the Allied bombing will actually help the construction by clearing the old buildings. He praises their shared vision of a “treasure house for arts and culture” that would “last the millennia.” When an aide urges him to flee Berlin, Hitler refuses. He says he’d feel like a “lama priest spinning an empty prayer-wheel.” He must force an outcome in Berlin, or face his downfall. Speer’s response: “I’ll be on stage when the curtain falls.”

A man staring at a model of a city he will never build, in a bunker beneath a city that is being destroyed, convinced that the architecture proves his permanence even as the ceiling shakes. The denial is total. The model is the last thing the mind holds onto when reality has become unacceptable.

I watched that scene and thought immediately of the President of the United States. Last October, Donald Trump began tearing down sections of the White House to build a massive ballroom, with underground bunkers and data centers beneath it. During an ongoing affordability crisis, and also now a new, unpopular war that is bleeding a billion dollars a day. With oil at $114. With majority support for impeachment. With mounting evidence of cognitive decline so visible that even Fox News hosts are asking questions.

The model in the bunker is not a personality quirk. It is a pattern. It recurs across civilizations. And it always signals the same thing.

II. Look on My Works

The pattern is quite old. Ramesses carved himself into cliff faces. The pharaohs built pyramids to outrun death. Louis XIV built Versailles to make the French aristocracy orbit him like planets around a sun. But Versailles consumed so much of France’s wealth that it helped create the conditions for the revolution that eventually destroyed the monarchy. The monument ate the kingdom. But the history teacher in me can’t help but notice that the pattern accelerates in the 20th century, when the monuments get bigger and the regimes get shorter.

Nicolae Ceaușescu demolished a quarter of Bucharest’s historic center to build the Palace of the Parliament, the largest administrative building in the world. Twenty thousand workers around the clock. Forty thousand people displaced. The building was completed after his execution by firing squad. It outlived the regime by decades. Today Romania charges tourists admission to visit it.

Saddam Hussein built dozens of enormous palaces while UN sanctions starved his population. I remember watching during the Iraq War, my second year at Hampshire, as US forces occupied those palaces and used the marble halls as military bases. The monuments that were supposed to project his permanence became the occupier’s furniture. His statue in Baghdad was pulled down on live television. In Basra, a giant poster of Saddam had its mouth shot out.

And the pattern kept repeating. Ferdinand Marcos carved into a Philippine mountainside, later blown up with dynamite. Mobutu’s face printed on every banknote in Zaire, later carved out by the citizens who’d been forced to carry them. Assad statues across Syria reduced to rubble after the 2024 revolution. Daniel arap Moi’s fist sculpture bursting through Mount Kenya, his face on every coin and even a national holiday named after himself.

Richburg’s observation here is telling: “Leaders come and eventually go, and many of their garish tributes to themselves end up on history’s junk pile, or become lasting monuments to their ridiculousness.” The grandeur is always inversely proportional to the stability. You could say that the bigger the statue, the closer the fall.

III. The Ballroom, the Arch, and the Golden Statue

Last October, with his approval ratings steadily dropping, the President of the United States began demolishing the East Wing of the White House in order to eventually build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom with underground bunkers and data centers beneath it. He also bulldozed the Rose Garden, and gilded the interiors. And then he turned his attention to the National Mall, where he proposed a 250-foot triumphal arch, taller than the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol building, modeled after Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe but bigger, because of course bigger. He wants it to be the biggest arch in the world. A 60-foot gilt bronze Lady Liberty perched on top like a hood ornament on history’s most expensive car.

The Commission of Fine Arts, stacked with his loyalists, received nearly 1,000 public comments on the project. One hundred percent were negative, but they voted to move forward anyway. The commission chairman explained: “This is personal for the president.” A Vietnam veterans’ group actually filed a legal challenge because the arch would block the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. So we basically have the president inserting himself, architecturally, between Lincoln and the war dead. Between the nation’s ideals and the nation’s sacrifices.

And the arch is just the centerpiece. Let’s not forget the Kennedy Center, renamed. The Institute of Peace, renamed. Palm Beach airport, renamed. A proposed new class of guided-missile destroyers, named after himself. His signature will soon be stamped on US paper currency. Trump RX. Trump Gold Card visas (although, apparently, only a single one issued so far). Cabinet members wearing shoes he gives them like offerings to a man who has confused the presidency with a shoe store loyalty program.

Art historian Erin Thompson put it precisely: “The aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not.”

The gold statue at his golf resort, nicknamed “Don Colossus,” was widely compared to North Korean propaganda statuary. The comparison is apt not because Trump runs a hermit kingdom, but because the psychological function is identical: the oversized, gilded likeness performing power for an audience that is required to witness it. Leaders who are building real power don’t need gold statues. Leaders who are losing it build nothing else.

Left: the 15-foot ‘Don Colossus’ statue before gilding. Right: Statue in Pyongyang.

IV. The Architecture of Denial

Guy Debord wrote that the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images. The arch, the statue, the ballroom, the gilded interiors, the renamed buildings: these are images of power substituting for the exercise of actual governance. When you can’t build consensus, you build a ballroom. When you can’t win a war, you build a victory arch. When the approval ratings collapse and the economy buckles and the impeachment polling crosses 50%, you stamp your name on the currency and hand your Cabinet members matching shoes and call it leadership.

Gramsci would also recognize this instantly. When hegemony fails, when consent can no longer be manufactured through legitimacy, the ruler turns to spectacle to perform the authority he can no longer command. The gold statue is what you build when you can’t build a coalition.

But there’s a darker layer here too. Beneath the ballroom: bunkers. Data centers. Survival infrastructure. The spectacle is on the surface. The contingency plan is underneath. That combination, grandiosity above and escape routes below, is the architecture of a regime that knows, on some level it will never publicly admit, that the curtain is falling.

Hitler had the model and the bunker. Trump has the ballroom and the bunker. The parallel isn’t rhetorical. It’s architectural.

V. The Curtain Falls

Four days ago, the President of the United States posted a photo of himself beside Mount Rushmore on Truth Social, grinning, as if the granite were already making room. I sincerely hope he doesn’t take the next step and commission his own likeness on that mountain, but with this president, hoping feels like a weak verb. And it’s worth remembering what Mount Rushmore already is before we worry about what it might become. The Lakota called that granite formation Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, Six Grandfathers Mountain, a sacred place of prayer for the Native peoples of the Great Plains. It was carved into stolen land, in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, by a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum who had documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Rushmore isn’t the exception to the pattern of monumental erasure. It is the template.

Speer said he’d be on stage when the curtain falls. He wasn’t on stage. He was at Nuremberg, on trial. The model was ash. The thousand-year Reich lasted twelve years. Ceaușescu’s palace was finished after his firing squad. Saddam’s palaces became the occupier’s furniture. Marcos was blown off his own mountainside. Mobutu’s face was carved out of the money by the people who’d been forced to carry it.

The arch may not be built. The ballroom may not be finished. The gold statue may one day be removed, or defaced, or displayed in a museum with a plaque explaining what it was and what it cost and who paid for it while their schools crumbled and their grocery bills doubled and their sons and daughters came home from the Gulf in flag-draped coffins.

The question is not whether the monuments will outlast the regime. They almost never do. The question is how much of the country gets demolished in the construction.

References

Chapman, M. (2026, March 23). Trump gets stark history lesson over monument obsession from expert. Raw Story. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-monuments-2676580103/

Klein, B. (2026, April 16). Trump’s arch gets overwhelmingly negative public feedback but appears poised to move forward. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/16/politics/trump-arch-feedback-commission

Sonnenfeld, J., & Tian, S. (2026, April 13). The futility of Trump’s grandiose personal branding of public assets, from ballrooms and bills to ships and planes | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2026/04/13/trumps-personal-branding-obsession-history-leadership/

Reveal. (2025, December 10). Trump’s gilded White House makeover is all about power. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/trump-white-house-statues-monuments-east-wing-ballroom/

Richburg, K. (2026, March 24). Only a certain type of leader wants his face everywhere. Mercury. https://themercury.co.za/ios/opinion/2026-03-24-only-a-certain-type-of-leader-wants-his-face-everywhere/

Scott, O. (2026, April 29). Trump’s 15-foot gold statue of himself at his Florida golf course compared to North Korea’s Dear Leader. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-north-korea-gold-statue-b2966982.html

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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

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. Introductory Section Setting the Stage

One of the most revealing things about any political era is which words get transformed into weapons. The process is always the same: take a term that describes something ordinary or even admirable, drain it of its original meaning, and reload it as a threat. In the 1950s, the word was “communist.” In the 2020s, the word is “woke.” Both function the same way: a label broad enough to encompass any form of critical thinking, vague enough to be applied to anyone, and threatening enough to make institutions police themselves before power has to lift a finger. This is the mechanism, and it has not changed in seventy years.

Joseph McCarthy did not need to investigate every teacher, professor, screenwriter, journalist, union organizer or government employee in America. He just needed enough of them to hear about the investigations that many of the rest stopped saying anything actually worth investigating. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo understood this perfectly. In 2021, he stated his strategy openly: “We have successfully frozen their brand, ‘critical race theory,’ into the public conversation... We will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” McCarthy built the template. Rufo followed the blueprint. The vocabulary changed. The architecture didn’t.

The real damage is never the hearing, the ban, or the firing (although they certainly can have severe life-long impact). The real damage is the professor who avoids the topic before anyone investigates it. The journalist who softens the story before anyone complains. The government employee who scrubs the language from the report before anyone reviews it. The teacher who stops assigning the book before anyone bans it. The chilling effect is the system’s most efficient product, because it turns its targets into its own enforcers.

II. The Loyalty Oath

The machinery of McCarthyism was pretty straightforward. Loyalty oaths for teachers and government employees, basically sign or lose your job. The Hollywood blacklist, where careers got destroyed not by evidence of wrongdoing but by association, accusation, and refusal to name names. The HUAC hearings: spectacles of public humiliation designed less to uncover actual threats than to demonstrate what happened to people who thought the wrong things out loud. As historian Clay Risen documented in book Red Scare, the anti-communist hysteria was not a spontaneous eruption of patriotic vigilance. It was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, a political weapon aimed at the movements that threatened the existing economic and racial order.

But the real damage was never in the hearing room. It was in the hallway, the faculty lounge, the writers’ room, the editorial meeting where someone decided not to say what they were thinking because the cost of being wrong was too high.

And the targets were not random. C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian historian and radical intellectual whose The Black Jacobins remains one of the most important works of revolutionary history ever written, was deported from the United States in 1953 under the McCarran-Walter Act. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born journalist and organizer, was imprisoned and then deported. Caribbean radicals were among the first silenced because their analysis did something the Red Scare could not tolerate: it connected American racism to global imperialism. The people who could see the structure most clearly were the first ones expelled from the country that most needed them to stay.

III. The New Vocabulary

“Communist” became “woke.” “Un-American activities” became “CRT” and “DEI.” Loyalty oaths became “govern yourselves accordingly.”

The legislative machinery arrived fast. Between 2021 and 2022, nearly 200 anti-CRT bills were introduced across 41 state legislatures. Sixteen were signed into law in 15 states, targeting how teachers are permitted to discuss race, racism, and discrimination in their own classrooms. As researchers Filimon and Ivanescu documented in Policy Studies, these laws operate through a three-part structure that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who lived through the 1950s: define a set of prohibited concepts (kept deliberately vague), create mechanisms to detect violations, and establish penalties for transgressors. Define, prohibite, punish. The loyalty oath, updated for the twenty-first century.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2023 in Orlando, Florida (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Governor DeSantis seized New College of Florida and transformed it into a conservative institution. A state legislator in Kansas signed a law prohibiting what is calls “DEI-CRT.” Florida’s HB7 instructed the State Board of Education to develop a curriculum called “Stories of Inspiration,” replacing structural analysis with patriotism by legislative mandate. And last September, Florida’s Commissioner of Education issued a memorandum reminding every educator in the state that our First Amendment rights “do not extend without limit” into our professional duties. The memo was forwarded from superintendents to principals to every teacher’s inbox, including mine. It closed with three words: “Govern yourselves accordingly.” I wrote about what that felt like last week. The mechanism works. I know because I felt it working on me, and I am someone who studies and teaches about these systems for a living.

IV. What the Panic Protects

Here is the structural question History Rhymes exists to ask: what is the panic for?

McCarthyism did not emerge because communists were about to overthrow America. It emerged because labor organizing, civil rights activism, and anti-colonial solidarity were threatening the economic and racial order. The “communist” label was applied to anyone who challenged that order. The “woke” label functions identically: it is applied to anyone who names systemic racism, questions economic hierarchy, or teaches history that makes the current arrangement look designed rather than natural. As such, the panic does not protect the country from a threat. It protects the architecture from being seen.

Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have documented this. Thomas, Bancel, and Blanchard traced how academics in France who scrutinize colonial history and structural racism are labeled “Islamo-Leftists,” the same mechanism operating in a different national vocabulary. Dini and Pesce, writing in RSA Journal, named the function with precision: the term “woke” operates “to buttress high status groups against threats to their position, stymie the consciousness-raising effects of online discourse, and reduce universities to producers of uncritical neoliberal subjects.” From this perspective, the defense of tradition, free enterprise, and national pride enlisted against critical scholarship are “ancillary to what is essentially a circling of the wagons of those who benefit from the structure of American society as it stands.”

The wagons are indeed circling. The question is what they are protecting.

V. Where It All Points

McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate in 1954, and the panic eventually receded, not because America chose free thought but because the political utility of the hysteria expired and the man behind it became more of a liability than an asset. But the careers that had been destroyed stayed destroyed. The movements that had been disrupted did not simply reassemble. The intellectual traditions that had been broken, the ones carried by people like C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones before they were expelled from the country, took a generation to rebuild. The panic faded, but the damage settled into the soil of American institutions like a slow poison, shaping what was sayable and what was fundable and what was thinkable for decades after the last hearing ended.

The current panic has not faded. Books are still being pulled from shelves. Curricula are still being rewritten to replace structural analysis with inspiration. “Govern yourselves accordingly” is still sitting in teachers’ inboxes across the state of Florida. And earlier this month, the institution that taught me to see the structure behind these very patterns announced that it is closing its doors forever, not because of a book ban but because of the slower, quieter machinery of financial starvation in a country that has decided critical thinking is a luxury it can no longer afford.

The Red Scare did not end because the country learned its lesson, and nothing about this moment suggests we are any closer to learning it now. The vocabulary changes, the mechanism never does, and history, as it always has, rhymes. The only question worth asking is whether we will recognize the pattern while there are still institutions and teachers and traditions of thought left to protect, or whether we will do what America has done before and wait until the damage is done to ask how we let it happen again.

References

Avlon, J. (2023, April 26). Opinion: The welcome pushback against campus wokeness — coming from colleges themselves. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/opinions/harvard-stanford-cornell-woke-right-avlon/

Dini, R., & Pesce, E. (2024). “That’s What All This Wokeism Is About”: Books Erased, Printed Word Censorship, and US National Identity. RSA Journal: Rivista Di Studi Nord-Americana, 35, 9–46. https://doi.org/10.13135/1592-4467/10777

Filimon, L.-M., & Ivănescu, M. (2024). Bans, sanctions, and dog-whistles: a review of anti-critical race theory initiatives adopted in the United States since 2020. Policy Studies, 45(2), 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2023.2214088

Marie, A., & Petersen, M. B. (2023). Speech Repression and Outrage from Orthodox Activists as Attempts at Facilitating Mobilization and Gaining Status among Allies. Psychological Inquiry, 34(3), 192–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2023.2274401

Risen, C. (2026). Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Simon & Schuster.

Thomas, D., Bancel, N., & Blanchard, P. (2023). Decolonial Theory or the Invention of a Common Enemy. Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, 27(2), 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2185413

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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

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 and 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. Learning to See

On August 29th, 2001, after my mom and two younger brothers drove away and the car disappeared from sight, I took my first few steps back toward the Merrill A dorm and something happened that I didn’t plan. I raised both arms over my head with clenched fists and took the biggest conscious inhale and exhale of my life. It was completely spontaneous, purely physical, a body responding to a freedom it had never felt before. Everything I had been working toward, all the challenges of high school, and the raging fire of a mind desperate to break out, released in one simple gesture. I was nineteen years old, standing in a parking lot in western Massachusetts, and I was free.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I sat in my single room on the second floor overlooking the quad, and tried to put into words what had just happened to my life. At the top of a page in a spiral-bound notebook (which would become my on and off again first year journal), underlined, I wrote three words: “Holy Fucking Shit.” Centered beneath them: “A Dream Come True.” And in the upper right corner: “1st day - biggest freedom high ever!”

Hampshire College, for anyone who hasn’t encountered it, requires some explanation. Founded in 1970 as a deliberate experiment in higher education, it had no grades, no majors and no core classes/traditional distribution requirements. Students designed their own education through a system of three Divisions: first, a series of exploratory projects across disciplines, then a self-designed concentration built around your own questions, and finally a year-long independent thesis. The whole “choose your own adventure” system was built on the premise that the most important thing a college can teach you is how to ask the right questions, and then pursue them with intense rigor and independence. The student body when I arrived was around 1,300. My graduating class would be about 350. It was small enough to know faces everywhere, intellectually intense enough that dining hall conversations turned into two-hour debates about postcolonial theory, and absurd enough that community bikes painted yellow and welded together in purposefully ridiculous configurations were scattered around campus for anyone to ride.

At every other school I had attended growing up, I had been the unusual one. At Hampshire, for the first time in my life, I was normal. But the invisibility I felt wasn’t loneliness, it was belonging. I had found my bee people, and the relief was overwhelming.

Hampshire’s faculty were also unlike any I’ve encountered before or since. Laurie Nisonoff, a feminist Marxist economist who became my Div II advisor, had the kind of mind that could see injustice at any scale. In her U.S. Labor History course, she would present some appalling episode of American history and turn to the class and exclaim: “We’re NOT making this up!” Frederick Weaver, who chaired my Div III thesis, could name the theoretical tradition behind whatever concrete problem I was fumbling toward. I would pitch some idea about St. Croix’s economy and he would listen carefully and say, “Well, now you’re touching upon Marx’s labor theory of value,” and I would think: wait…what? But working with Weaver taught me something I’ve carried into every classroom since: the value of grounding abstract theory in real, specific, local problems. Margaret Cerullo’s Contemporary Social and Political Theory cracked open my entire intellectual framework through Nietzsche, Foucault, Arendt, and Asad. Falguni Sheth, who served on my Div II committee, introduced me to Critical Race Theory and taught me to see how racial divisions function as strategies of political management. And Vivek Bhandari, whose course on Gandhi’s Critique of Modernity systematically dismantled everything I thought I knew about progress and the West, gave me one of the most powerful classroom experiences of my life. The morning that the horrifying Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs broke, Bhandari came into class visibly fuming but helped us connect what we were seeing to colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism in real time. In the previous session, we had watched a documentary with footage of the first President Bush declaring that “the laws of the jungle will not stand.” The line from that declaration to those photographs was unbroken, and our professor gave us the tools to trace it. That is what Hampshire education could do at its best: the world breaks into the classroom, and your professors help you understand it.

The academic moment that probably meant the most to me wasn’t my thesis defense and ringing the bell (although that was of course truly special). It was actually the afternoon my Div II was passed, a year earlier. I walked out of Nisonoff’s office after she and my other committee member, Falguni Sheth, had gone through my entire portfolio, every class, every paper, every evaluation, and summarized my intellectual arc in a way that even I couldn’t have articulated. It was incredibly validating in a way that went beyond any grade, because Hampshire doesn’t give grades. It was two brilliant women telling me that the journey I had taken through their institution, from Asian philosophy and consciousness studies to Caribbean political economy, made sense, that it cohered, that it added up to something. I walked back to Mod 26 clutching my fat Div II binder under my arm and felt probably the smartest I’d ever felt in my life up to that point.

What I really learned at Hampshire was how to see. How to see systems behind events. How to see colonialism not as history but as ongoing condition. How to see economics not as abstract models but as the distribution of power and suffering and possibility. I learned to see my own home island, St. Croix, not as the paradise of the tourism brochures or the “tropical ghetto” of the colonial imagination, but as a real place with real people navigating structures designed to benefit someone else.

On Tuesday morning, April 14th, 2026, an email arrived at 9:05 AM. The Board of Trustees had voted to permanently close Hampshire College following the Fall 2026 semester. I read the words on my phone between classes, and then I read them again, and then I sat with them for a long time. I spent the rest of the day reading Facebook posts in the alumni group page and messaging former classmates, people I hadn’t spoken to in years, people who didn’t need me to explain what we had just lost because they had lost it too.

Ken Burns, one of Hampshire’s most famous graduates, called it “an incalculable loss, the reverberations of which will be felt in ways none of us can imagine.” Professor CJ Gill, who taught at Hampshire for more than twenty years, told reporters she was feeling grief and was stunned. A first-year student named Liam Hennessy, who had been at Hampshire for less than a year, said something that stopped me: “This is kind of a swan song for liberal institutions.”

He was more right than he knew.

II. What Killed Hampshire

“How did you go bankrupt?” one character asks another in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. “Two ways,” his friend answers. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

That is how colleges die.

Hampshire had been in financial trouble since at least 2019, when the administration announced it would not admit a full incoming class and began seeking a merger partner. What happened next is one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American higher education. Students staged a 75-day sit-in at the president’s office, the longest occupation of a college president’s office in American history. Faculty revived their AAUP chapter to protect positions. Alumni mobilized from across the country. The president and several trustees resigned. The community didn’t just protest the decision. They used the education Hampshire gave them to challenge the institution that gave it to them, and they won. Hampshire stayed independent. A new president launched a $60 million fundraising campaign. The curriculum was redesigned around global challenges. Enrollment recovered from a low of just 13 admitted students in 2019 to classes of 200 to 300. As recently as January 2025, Forbes cited Hampshire as a model for how small liberal arts colleges could survive.

Fifteen months later, it’s gone. Last fall, Hampshire enrolled 168 new students against a target of 300, missing its goal by nearly half. A $21 million bond couldn’t be refinanced. The New England Commission of Higher Education placed the college on “show cause” status. A land sale meant to shore up finances fell through when a developer walked away over permitting and environmental concerns. By the time the Board voted to close, Hampshire was caught in a spiral familiar to anyone who has watched these institutions die: a college trying to sell land to pay bonds to satisfy accreditors to stay open long enough to enroll enough students to generate enough tuition to service the debt. Past a certain point, the spiral becomes irreversible.

I want to be honest about something here. Hampshire’s internal challenges were certainly real. The financial model was always fragile: a small endowment, deep dependence on tuition revenue, and an identity so beloved that it made institutional evolution agonizingly difficult. But the external forces bearing down on Hampshire would probably have crushed the college even with perfect adaptation. The community did everything right. They organized, they gave, they reinvented and they fought for seven years. Hampshire even took in roughly three dozen students fleeing New College of Florida after Governor DeSantis’s political takeover in 2023, offering them matching tuition so they could continue their liberal arts education at the same cost they’d been paying at a public school in Florida. A financially struggling institution absorbing students at a loss because it was the right thing to do. That is who Hampshire was. And it still wasn’t enough.

This is because Hampshire is not an isolated case. It is one data point in a wave of closures sweeping through American higher education. Since March 2020, at least 64 nonprofit colleges have closed, affecting nearly 46,000 students. Since 1996, more than 1,670 have shut their doors. And according to Huron Consulting, nearly a quarter of the country’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year institutions may be forced to close or merge over the next decade. Three credit rating agencies issued unfavorable outlooks for 2026. Hampshire isn’t the end of this wave. It’s near the beginning.

The casualties are everywhere. Marlboro College in Vermont, my mother’s alma mater, closed in 2020. Goddard College, a fellow experimental institution in Vermont, gone. Birmingham Southern College in Alabama, where a student facing transfer to a less accepting school told a professor, “I guess I’ll go back in the closet.” Cabrini University in Pennsylvania, where fewer than half of displaced students successfully transferred. Wells College in New York. Iowa Wesleyan in Iowa. Northland College in Wisconsin. Martin University, Indiana’s only predominantly Black institution, quietly shut down at the end of 2025 with almost no national attention. The closures are not distributed equally. The institutions serving the most distinctive educational missions and the most marginalized communities often die the quietest deaths.

The structural forces behind these closures are well documented. The number of American 18-year-olds is projected to fall 13 percent between 2026 and 2041. The share of high school graduates enrolling in college immediately after graduation has dropped from 70 percent to 62 percent in the last decade. Confidence in higher education has collapsed, falling from 57 percent to 36 percent in just ten years according to Gallup. Nearly a third of Americans now say college is too expensive, and a quarter say students aren’t being taught what they need to succeed, where “succeed” means earn. Meanwhile, the financial model of small private colleges has become almost impossibly fragile: institutions that close have median operating margins of just 3 percent, with tuition accounting for 86 percent of revenue. The average private nonprofit discount rate hit a record 51 percent in 2022, meaning these colleges are giving away more than half their sticker price in financial aid just to fill seats. The market isn’t just shrinking, it’s sorting, and what it sorts against is exactly the kind of education that Hampshire provided.

William “Wolfie” Krebs arrived at Hampshire in 2022 uncertain whether he even wanted to attend college. Four years later, he’s headed to a PhD program in mathematics. He fell in love with math in a whole different way, he told Inside Higher Ed. When asked about the closure, he said something that has stayed with me: “I hope it’s not seen as a failure, because it wasn’t.”

He’s right. Even the people closing the college said so. In their announcement, the Board wrote that they remain “unwavering in our belief that the experience a Hampshire College education provides is exactly what the world needs.” The education worked. The financial model broke. Those are different verdicts, and the country that can’t tell the difference between them is the country that keeps losing institutions like Hampshire.

III. The Architecture of Defunding

Hampshire was a private college, and I want to be upfront about that. My analytical frame in this publication usually focuses on public institutions and public funding, and on the ways government policy shapes the conditions ordinary people have to navigate. Hampshire didn’t receive state funding. It lived and died on tuition and donations. But the forces that killed it are not private forces. They are the same structural pressures dismantling public education across this country, and the distinction between public and private matters far less than the shared condition: a society that has decided, through its budgets and its policies and its cultural assumptions, that education’s purpose is job training, and that anything beyond job training is a luxury the country can’t afford.

That assumption has become so deeply embedded that it no longer feels like an assumption at all. It just feels like common sense. College should prepare you for a career. A degree should lead to a job. Education is an investment, and investments should generate returns. By this logic, an institution that teaches you to think rather than to earn looks like a bad investment. Hampshire’s entire existence was a rejection of that premise, and the premise won.

One Hampshire alum, Elizabeth Patterson, noticed something in the days after the announcement. Reading through post after post from fellow alumni, she observed that people weren’t saying “I wouldn’t have the career I have without Hampshire” or “I wouldn’t have gone into my field.” They kept reaching for the same words Ken Burns used. “I keep seeing ‘I wouldn’t be who I am,’” she wrote. “Not ‘what I do,’ or ‘how I do it.’ Who I Am. Maybe that’s why it’s hitting us all so hard. Because when something changes who you are on this kind of cellular level and then it goes away, there’s an odd kind of fear mixed in with the grief and the loss.” An education measured by return on investment asks what you do with it. Hampshire’s alumni, in their grief, keep answering a different question entirely. That difference is the whole argument.

You can see it in the numbers. Vocational community college enrollment increased 16 percent in a single year between 2022 and 2023. A growing number of major employers have dropped degree requirements for entry-level positions. The cultural signal is clear and consistent: thinking is a luxury, and earning is the point. And as that signal strengthens, the institutions that exist to cultivate thinking rather than credential earning lose students and revenue and, eventually, the ability to keep their doors open.

But this isn’t just a market story. It’s a political one. In 2023, when Governor DeSantis seized New College of Florida and transformed it into a conservative institution, Hampshire offered refuge to those students. Three years later, the refuge itself is gone. Last September, Florida’s Commissioner of Education issued a memorandum to every school district superintendent in the state, reminding educators that their First Amendment rights “do not extend without limit” into their professional duties and warning that the Commissioner’s office would investigate and potentially discipline any educator whose public speech was deemed to undermine trust or reduce their effectiveness. The memo was forwarded down the chain of command, from superintendents to principals to every teacher’s inbox, including mine. It closed with three words: “Govern yourselves accordingly.” Book bans have also swept through school districts across the country. And a state legislator in Kansas signed a law prohibiting what it calls “DEI-CRT” in general education. The pattern isn’t subtle. Institutions that produce critical, independent thinkers are under pressure not just from declining enrollment and financial fragility, but also from a political establishment that has identified critical thinking itself as a threat. This is a two-front war, and institutions like Hampshire were caught between market forces that couldn’t sustain them and political forces that didn’t want to.

And behind all of it is the question of priorities. Last year, the United States allocated $1.5 trillion for defense spending while cutting $73 billion from nondefense discretionary programs. The Forest Service has been gutted. Twenty-two million families lost SNAP benefits. Palantir received $61.8 million to install surveillance infrastructure inside the Department of Education. The country found unlimited resources for weapons systems and data collection but couldn’t sustain the institutions that produce citizens capable of questioning what those weapons and that data are for.

The pattern holds at every level. Penn State’s Board of Trustees voted to close seven commonwealth campuses serving 3,200 students due to enrollment and financial pressures. That same year, the university invested $700 million in a stadium renovation at the flagship campus and paid a $9 million coaching buyout. The money exists. It has always existed. The question has never been whether we can afford to educate people. The question is whether we want to, and our budgets have answered clearly.

Laura De Veau, a visiting professor at Boston College who served as an administrator at Mount Ida College when it closed in 2018, looked at Hampshire’s situation and concluded that the college had “pulled many of the levers they needed to, but the clock ran out.” She’s right. But clocks don’t run out on their own. Someone sets them. Someone decides how much time an institution gets, how much support and how much oxygen. Hampshire ran out of time because the country that built it decided, through a thousand budget lines and policy choices and cultural signals, that what Hampshire did wasn’t worth the cost of keeping it alive.

The cruelest irony is that the capacity Hampshire cultivated, to question assumptions and to trace the architecture of power, is exactly the capacity a country needs most when it is making choices this destructive. We are defunding the very institutions that produce the people equipped to explain why the defunding is a catastrophe. And we are doing it in the name of common sense.

IV. What Could Survive

Four days before Hampshire announced its closure, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed a supplemental budget making her Free Community College program permanent. Same week. Opposite directions. Same country.

Since 2022, more than 23,000 Maine high school graduates have enrolled tuition-free at the state’s seven community colleges, pursuing associate degrees and workforce credentials without taking on debt. The program, which had bipartisan support from former governors of both parties, is now written into the state’s baseline budget, no longer dependent on annual reauthorization or political goodwill. The same budget includes phased increases to minimum teacher salaries: $45,000 in 2027, $47,500 in 2028, $50,000 by 2029. Maine is doing two things at once that most of the country has refused to do at all: making education accessible to students and making teaching sustainable as a profession.

I was born in Brunswick, Maine, and I taught at Maine Connections Academy during the 2022-2023 school year, the first year of the free college program. My colleagues and I actively promoted it to our seniors. Some of them took advantage of it. I watched the principle work.

But none of this should be mistaken for a replacement. Community college cannot replicate Hampshire. Nothing can. The self-designed concentration, the detailed, narrative evaluations, the intellectual culture of a 1,300-student experimental campus, professors who could take the morning’s breaking news and trace it back through centuries of imperial history, students who staged a historic sit-in to save their school (and also, when I was there, a student walkout on October 10, 2001 to protest the start of the bombing in Afghanistan), that is gone, and pretending otherwise dishonors what was lost. You don’t replace a place that taught people how to see by offering them two years of free tuition. Those are different things, and both of them matter.

What Maine proves is something more modest and more important: that investing in education is a choice. Not a market inevitability. Not a line item that can only shrink. A choice. The same country that found $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon and $700 million for a football stadium can fund community colleges and pay its teachers a living wage if it decides those things are worth doing. Maine decided that they were. The question is whether the rest of the country will follow Maine’s worthwhile example or continue following its budgets toward a future in which the institutions that teach people to think are luxuries we’ve decided we can’t afford, while the institutions that teach people to obey are the only ones left standing.

V. Where It All Points

In the days after the closure announcement, my social media feeds filled with something that felt like a collective evaluation. Hampshire alumni don’t process loss the way other people do. We process it the way Hampshire taught us to: we reflect, we analyze, we tell the story of the experience, and we methodically lay out what we learned. It is, as one alumna wrote, what we were trained to do. For every class we wrote self-evaluations. For every concentration we wrote self-assessments. And now, for the closing of the institution itself, we are writing one more.

McKinley Melton, a professor who taught at Hampshire from 2007 to 2012, posted something particularly thoughtful. He wrote about the privilege of teaching what he called “bad” students. Students who didn’t adhere to deadlines because time was a construct. Who rarely acquiesced to authority because what is hierarchy. Who questioned everything, sometimes googling in real time. Hampshire students, he wrote, were “bad” at being students because they had no desire to be what so many believed good students should be. They weren’t interested in collecting a degree as if it were simply a document to propel them toward a higher income. And yet, he wrote, they were “some of the most intellectually hungry (far beyond curious), rigorously self-challenging, beautifully independent-minded, and thoughtful students” he had ever worked alongside. They believed in the school’s motto and in James Baldwin’s declaration that it is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. “To be clear,” he concluded, “this is not just the closing of a college. It’s the shuttering of a distinctive institution in the landscape of Higher Education. We are all the poorer for its absence.”

Another alum, Kristen Harbeson, wrote what amounted to a final self-evaluation of her thirty-four years in what Hampshire calls Div IV, the practicum, the part of your education that never ends. She described arriving at Hampshire as someone who, from the moment of her birth, didn’t belong anywhere but in her family. And then finding, for the first time, people who accepted her for her whole, oddball self without preamble or trial period. She recalled a philosophy professor whose evaluation she still carries with her three decades later: “Kristen’s work is always good, and occasionally excellent. When she realizes the kind of sustained effort it takes to be excellent, her work will be consistently excellent.” That evaluation, she wrote, might as well be tattooed on her heart. No grade could have done that. No letter on a transcript could have reached that deep.

“The closure of Hampshire hits so many of us so hard,” she wrote, “because it demonstrates, once again, that there is no place for us. The society that we live in is not one that can support, tolerate, or allow the cultivation of rebellious, relentless, unconventional, intellectual inquiry.” She’s right. And the data confirms it. Fewer than half of students whose college closes successfully transfer to another institution. The rest simply don’t finish. When Hampshire closes at the end of this year, some students will complete their degrees. Some will transfer to Amherst or Smith or UMass, the very institutions whose presidents founded Hampshire as an experiment in 1965. Some will stop altogether. Each unfinished education is a capacity to see that never fully develops. That is the cost, and it is incalculable in the precise sense that Ken Burns meant when he used that word.

Burns said something else that has stayed with me: “Hampshire’s ethos and probing way of seeing the world doesn’t disappear when a campus goes quiet. The thousands of lives transformed by this miraculous, improbable place will carry its revolutionarily generative spirit forward for generations to come.” He’s right too. And he’s not enough. Yes, the seeing survives in the people Hampshire produced. But the institution that generated the seeing is gone, and nothing guarantees that capacity gets reproduced without it. Burns can carry Hampshire’s legacy forward. So can I. So can all fellow alumni writing evaluations on Facebook this week. But who produces the next generation of people who learn to see?

Robert Coles, who taught at Hampshire for twenty years and whose Prison Literature course I took during spring semester of my first year (those class discussions definitely often continued later in our dorm rooms!), posted something this past week that I also keep returning to. “Hampshire might be closing,” he wrote, “but the spirit of Hampshire remains open. It is not the institution (buildings, classrooms, physical location, national ranking, etc.) that matters in a college; what matters, ultimately, are the PEOPLE who are/were involved—working with a shared philosophy or vision.”

He’s describing something I’ve watched happen all week. In every Facebook post, every group text, every phone call between classmates who haven’t spoken in years, the shared philosophy is still operating. We are still evaluating, still analyzing, still tracing systems, still refusing to accept the surface explanation when the structural one is right there underneath it. The institution taught us how to do that, and then the institution closed, and we are still doing it, a true testament to what Hampshire built.

As I write this, there are alumni working around the clock to find a path forward, exploring models from cooperatives to continuing education communities. I hope they succeed. But whatever emerges from those efforts, it won’t be the Hampshire that made us who we are. That Hampshire is the one this piece is for.

Non Satis Scire. To know is not enough.

What Hampshire gave me wasn’t a fixed body of knowledge. It was a way of thinking that hasn’t stopped evolving since I left, one that turns every classroom I teach in, every article I write, and every system I encounter into something that can be understood, questioned and named. But thinking and knowing alone didn’t save Hampshire. Seeing the structural forces clearly doesn’t make them stop operating. The motto cuts both ways: knowing is not enough to change the world, and knowing is not enough to save the institutions that teach us how to know. Frantz Fanon, whose work I first encountered through Hampshire’s classrooms, put it even more directly: ‘What matters is not to know the world but to change it.’ But changing it starts with seeing it clearly. And if the capacity to see that Hampshire cultivated in its students is going to survive the closure of the institution that produced it, then it falls to us, every oddball alumn and every professor who believed we were worth the sustained effort, to carry it forward. Not just as memory, but as practice.

The buildings will close. The seeing doesn’t have to. But it will, eventually, if we don’t build and fund the institutions that produce it. Whether we do that, whether we invest in the places that teach people to see the architecture or allow them to disappear one by one until the only institutions left are the ones that teach people not to look, is not just an educational policy question. It is a deeper moral question about what kind of country we want to live in.

Hampshire taught me to see. I’m still seeing. And if you’ve read this far, so are you.

References

Casey, M., & Willingham, L. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College to close after fall semester amid financial struggles | AP News. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/hampshire-college-closing-ken-burns-d2cc7834ead91f6220d1b17b980453b7

Frenier, A. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College announces closure effective this fall. New England Public Media. https://www.nepm.org/regional-news/2026-04-14/hampshire-college-announces-closure-effective-this-fall?utm_term=nprnews&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwY2xjawRLrQ5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeeCpEDoeM2IIuN1upuJR25ADNd5l83jq3shJSlgKkFfvDlDEeuRtc5T5nPqU_aem_SXO6kO1nycleMyQOlVi7Kg

Kelchen, R., Ritter, D., & Webber, D. (2026, April 9). Colleges Are Closing. Who Might Be Next? Education Next. https://www.educationnext.org/colleges-are-closing-who-might-be-next-how-machine-learning-fill-data-gaps-forecast-future/

Moody, J. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College announces closure. Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-health/2026/04/14/hampshire-college-announces-closure

Moody, J. (2025, December 18). The colleges that couldn’t survive 2025. Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/mergers-collaboration/2025/12/18/colleges-couldnt-survive-2025

Penprase, B. (2025, January 29). Saving and reviving liberal arts colleges. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanpenprase/2025/01/29/saving-and-reviving-liberal-arts-colleges/

Reider, J. (2026, April 14). No margin, no mission. Docnotes. https://docnotes.net/2026/04/14/no-margin-no-mission/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRLsTxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFpSW9MdVR1WkxTd3Vwc1VOc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHumAQBag_gIKsS4hQPCK9Azcykm-YSVFwciw7QefjEFepYzoha4JnJ5Ru6hf_aem_Bgd0R9uLRYidlciw7pQ9jA

Schooley, M., & Parseghian, A. (2026, April 14). Hampshire College closing in Amherst, Massachusetts. Graduate Ken Burns calls it “incalculable loss.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/hampshire-college-closing-amherst-massachusetts/?fbclid=IwY2xjawRLsL1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFjeWM1d1dGTGs3clJGM2Z2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHreuBzVdmzccEBX9oClZ7cMy0QsyjrHPSzvrocwOzbZkhiTZ86wLU4pV_9Zo_aem_3g0Sk8Bc0HPir8GyUXThZg

Williams, A. (2024, October 29). When Colleges close: The devastating effects of liberal arts college shutdowns. The Politic. https://thepolitic.org/when-colleges-close-the-devastating-effects-of-liberal-arts-college-shutdowns/

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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, as 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

The Big Squeeze is an ongoing series about the economic pressure that shapes daily life in America. Each installment follows the money: who extracts it, who hoards it, who goes without it, and how the system that produces all of this was designed. These aren’t market fluctuations. They’re policy choices. And you’re paying for every one of them.

I. The Smoke

On April 7, a 29-year-old warehouse worker in Ontario, California named Chamel Abdulkarim set fire to the 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark distribution center where he worked. He filmed himself doing it. He posted the video to Instagram. And in the footage, while the paper products he’d spent his shifts stocking went up in flames, he said: “If you’re not going to pay us enough to live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this.”

The fire caused $500 million in damage. In texts afterward, he wrote: “All you had to do was pay us enough to live. Didn’t see the shareholders picking up a shift.”

He compared himself to Luigi Mangione, who shot a health insurance CEO. Abdulkarim burned a warehouse full of goods he couldn’t afford on the wages he earned stocking them. Two men, two acts of destruction, and the same five words at the center of both: pay us enough to live. The system is producing people who would rather destroy the infrastructure of their own exploitation than continue to operate inside it quietly. That’s not a crime story. That’s a diagnostic.

Abdulkarim was paying close to $6 a gallon for gas in California just to get to work. He belongs to a workforce where a third of all workers earn less than $42,000 a year. He filed his taxes in a country that just proposed $1.5 trillion for its next war budget and $73 billion less for everything else. The smoke from that warehouse is a signal. And if you’re paying attention to what’s fueling it, the fire started long before he struck the lighter.

II. The War Tax

The March inflation report landed like a grenade. Consumer prices jumped 0.9% in a single month, triple the pace from February, pushing the annual rate to 3.3%, its highest in two years. The culprit wasn’t mysterious. Gasoline prices surged 21.2% in one month, the largest single-month increase since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the number in 1967. That’s not a spike. That’s a record. The national average crossed $4 a gallon for the first time in four years. In California, where Abdulkarim was filling his tank to drive to the warehouse he’d burn down, the average hit $5.92.

The war in Iran did this. The Strait of Hormuz, those twenty-one miles of water I traced across five centuries of empire two weeks ago, is now producing the number on your gas station sign. And gasoline accounted for nearly three-quarters of the entire inflation increase. Three-quarters. One commodity, one chokepoint, one war you never voted for.

But gas doesn’t stay at the pump. It rides the supply chain into everything. Trucking costs climb, and groceries climb with them. Fertilizer spikes, and food production follows. Food prices rose 2.7% year-over-year. Ground beef that cost $2.20 a pound in 2009, when the minimum wage was last set at $7.25, now costs $8.34. Seventeen years, no raise, and the beef nearly quadrupled.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, put it plainly: “Inflation pressures were already building before the war and are now intensifying.” The tariffs were already squeezing, but the war against Iran has really turned the vise.

III. Where Your Money Goes

On April 3, the White House released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The number: $1.5 trillion for defense. A 42% increase. The highest level of military spending in a single fiscal year since World War II. Defense now consumes 63 cents of every discretionary dollar the federal government spends. Everything else, every school, every hospital, every road, every research lab, every meal program, splits the remaining 37 cents. To help pay for it, the administration proposed $73 billion in cuts to nondefense spending. Five billion from the National Institutes of Health. $768 million from refugee resettlement. $356 million from the agency that prepares the country for public health emergencies. The Forest Service, responsible for 193 million acres of national forest, ordered dismantled and relocated to Utah, the state currently suing to seize 18.5 million acres of public land, right before what’s projected to be a devastating wildfire season. Twenty-two million families lost SNAP benefits. And the $1.5 trillion isn’t even the ceiling. A supplemental war spending package, estimated between $80 and $100 billion for Iran alone, is coming separately. The supplemental exceeds the savings from the cuts. The “fiscal responsibility” is theater. At an Easter luncheon, the president said the quiet part into a microphone: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re fighting wars.” He said it three times. He told the states to pay for it instead. But here’s what that looks like: New York City, under a mayor who ran as a democratic socialist, is now cutting up to $800 million from public schools and abandoning homeless assistance to close a $5.4 billion gap. The money the president told the states to find doesn’t exist. It’s in the Pentagon budget.

IV. The Architecture

This isn’t one bad budget. This is the architecture of American fiscal priorities, exposed by a war that made the scaffolding visible.

The United States government does believe in public spending. It believes in it passionately, urgently, and without limit, as long as the spending builds weapons. Military Keynesianism is the quiet consensus that has organized the federal budget for decades: the government will spend enormous sums to stimulate the economy, but only through defense contractors, only through munitions pipelines, only through systems designed to kill. Lockheed Martin gets cost-plus contracts. Your kid’s school gets a funding formula and a prayer.

The reconciliation process made the machinery plain. The administration used a partisan budget tool requiring zero Democratic votes to pass the largest military expenditure since 1945. In its own budget documents, the Office of Management and Budget described the strategy as “decoupling funding for Republican priorities from Democrat waste.” They said it out loud. Every social program, every piece of domestic infrastructure, every dollar spent on people instead of ordnance, is apparently just “waste.”

Meanwhile, the wealth moved where it always moves. Billionaire net worth surged 120% between 2017 and 2025. The top 1% now holds 50.2% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. Over 50 million workers, a third of the labor force, earn $20 an hour or less. The squeeze has a direction. Wealth flows up. Costs flow down. The warehouse worker stocking shelves he can’t afford to shop from and the teacher stocking freeze-dried food in his pantry are living inside the same structure. One struck a match. The other is planning for what comes next.

V. Where It All Points

Today you file your taxes (if you haven’t already done so earlier this spring). Every dollar you send to Washington enters a budget that allocates $1.5 trillion for war and $73 billion less for you. A government that found unlimited money for Tomahawk missiles at $1.7 million apiece, for Patriot interceptors at $4 million each fired in pairs at $20,000 drones, and for a golden dome in outer space, looked at daycare and said: we can’t afford that.

The war tax isn’t a metaphor. It’s on every receipt. Gas at $4, at $5.92 in California, surging at a rate never recorded in the history of the measurement. Groceries climbing because the fuel that trucks them to the shelf climbed first. Beef at $8.34 a pound while the minimum wage sits frozen at the same $7.25 it’s been since the year Obama was inaugurated. The inflation you feel every week at the pump and the checkout is a direct product of a war fought in a strait twenty-one miles wide, funded by a budget that treats your school, your hospital, your forests, and your food assistance as line items to be sacrificed.

The squeeze is not an accident. It is the system performing exactly as designed: public wealth extracted, converted to military contracts, and funneled upward to the same class whose net worth doubled while yours eroded. Sixty-three cents of every discretionary dollar to defense. Thirty-seven cents for everything that keeps you alive. And a supplemental war bill, still growing, that will cost more than all the cuts combined.

Chamel Abdulkarim lit a match in a warehouse in Ontario, California. Millions more are doing the math quietly tonight at kitchen tables, in gas station parking lots, and in the aisles of grocery stores where the prices changed again this week. The pressure is building. Something has to give.

So here’s the question you should be asking yourself today, tax day, as you sign the return: who is your tax dollar fighting for, and is it you?

References

Crosse, J. (2026, April 11). Fuel shock sends inflation soaring while the oligarchy grows richer. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/11/byxk-a11.html

Curry, B. (2026, April 10). First inflation report since Iran war stuns Wall Street as conflict sends shockwaves through the economy. . . and you’re paying the price. Mail Online. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-15722081/march-cpi-inflation-report-iran-war-stuns-sall-street.html

Daniels, S. (2026, April 10). Unpacking the $1.5 Trillion FY 2027 Defense Budget Topline, Center for Strategic International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-15-trillion-fy-2027-defense-budget-topline

Pattiz, J. (2026, April 2). BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. The Wildlife News. https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2026/04/02/breaking-trump-administration-orders-dismantling-of-the-u-s-forest-service/

Shapiro, E. (2026, April 10). Man facing federal charges for allegedly setting massive fire that destroyed warehouse: DOJ. ABC News. https://abcnews.com/US/man-facing-federal-charges-allegedly-setting-massive-fire/story?id=131920421

Watson, K., & Navarro, A. (2026, April 3). Trump’s 2027 budget asks Congress for $1.5 trillion in defense spending, with 10% cuts elsewhere. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-releases-proposal-blueprint-2027-budget/

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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

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

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2 months 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

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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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

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…

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5 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 …

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3 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…

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3 months 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…

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4 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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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

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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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

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. 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…

Read more

3 months 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…

Read more

3 months 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…

Read more

3 months 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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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

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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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

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. 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…

Read more

3 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.

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…

Read more

3 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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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

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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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

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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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

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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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

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.

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 …

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4 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

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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

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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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

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. 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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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

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…

Read more

6 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

____________________________________________________________________________

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