kontext’s back

Been feeling up and down and unsteady in a foundational way lately but distinct from either the post-April 2020 crazy or classic bipolar stuff

But I keep connecting it to trends and I realized it’s my reverse pathetic fallacy returning, after like 2 years of putting in the clutch and peacing out, a little rough like jumping off a running treadmill and then jumping back on while it’s still going

For one it makes me realize that my connection to like, “American culture” and my physical neighborhood are of a kind, maybe that’s not that uncommon. And that maybe I should reevaluate NIMBY politics and white “there goes the neighborhood” post-segregation experiences in that light

For two, I may have been saying we’d already passed the tipping point, but I went clutch-in before the election. In my own city mobs roamed the streets and the mayor’s hamhanded #Resistance-fanning not only made it worse it left him politically constrained amidst a runoff with this smug professional glib shitlib problem glasses tweeter I had had my worried eye on for years

In the big important cities, a decade of troubling rumbles come to a head in something of a selective-college NCOs’ coup with the university students on-side

Like, you remember fluff at the New York Times over running a Tom Cotton editorial laying down the foundation that if unruly mobs take the streets of major cities and demand the suspension of the democratically legitimate force of law the government can suppress them with direct force, that apparently came from pressure from the technical staff

And like, “production staff of major newspaper use labor power to try to control editorial line” is well precedented! A lot of Warsaw Pact regimes bootstrapped that way, the LA Times had a guns-and-bombs war with its printing staff over this once. For it to happen at America’s major newspaper in support of challenges to government control of the streets was really a big deal!

The most irritating SJW I knew personally was like, a Drupal programmer who played pinball. And Drupal was apparently something for running web pages, except more than utility at some function “Drupal programming” seemed to be defined as a culture, a kind of tediously shitlib one, maybe in part because their employers seemed to regularly pay to fly them out to these conferences that weren’t even about programming, just shitlib stuff, and that was a foundation of the culture

And I heard at one point they all scorned and ran some guy off (from like, his career) for being a Gorean, and were rumbling about how they could use their ideological solidarity and upstream role in web hosting to control content using their webdev tools

And I mean Goreans lol, but if you weren’t paying attention in the 90s “we must use our technical knowledge of internet infrastructure to constrain human communication to facile mainstream morality while rigorously patrolling the subculture to keep out dorky SFF fetishes” was… pretty much the opposite of the promise of tech culture, to the point this was really kinda worrying.

And now I wake up and look out of my burrow again in November 2021 and that’s in the rearview mirror, on the national and civic levels alike, politics and media, the spirit is “2011 as if we hadn’t lost the spirit of 1995 (which was an embrace of 1969 but rejection of 1978)”.

Biden’s doing “What If Clinton But Also Maybe Turn Presidentialism Down A Notch And Let The Senate Be A Steering Force Of The Republic In Its Own Right”, there’s a tangible desire to go back to the 90s and a dawning realization that yes, that involves punching hippies, at least enough that you can ignore the rest.

For structural vulnerabilities well – not much has changed in public. It doesn’t usually, that’s what happens when capital wakes up, it works behind the scenes. I will say that from history this no longer looks like you’d expect from a narrative that ends with sleepwalking into disaster or ineffectually flailing, it looks like one you expect is going to have a crisis point in a few years that the insurgents are going to be completely unprepared for capital to be prepared for and fall on their faces after having exhausted themselves for maximum visibility

There’s that one CEO who was like “yeah, this company is for achieving our business purpose, if you want to leverage it for some shitlib stuff please find another” and a chunk of the staff left and the Medium huffers huffed but the company went on to sparkle at the metrics VCs love, adding to the question of why companies staff hufferchum in the first place

Substack is hardened two ways, one thing is they have a solid enough understanding with their VC that nothing Anil fucking Dash says could ever matter; the second is like everyone I mostly read free ones online but being e-mailed to subscribers means writing is shielded against any technical or political interference with webhosting, that archived copies survive any attack on or rejection from the platform and that it can be forwarded and shared with contacts discreetly for samizdat or paywall-gatecrashing purposes

It’s morning in America. And they’re playing The Tick on FOX. Spoon!