artefictual

[artefictual]

Your Attitude is Insufficient

"We have seen war. We don't want war. But if you want war with the United States of America there is one thing I can promise you so help me God. Someone else will raise your sons and daughters."

If you oppose the current state of events, that is the mindset you are up against. This is not propaganda, this is not a rallying cry, this is not a slogan chanted at a protest. This is the soul-deep conviction of the types who would call themselves American Patriots, because they believe it is a fight for their children's future, and they know what that means.

If you are not armed, armored, and trained, you are not fit for a conflict with the American Individualist. If you truly believe that someone is coming for you, you need to stop fucking around and waiting for somebody else to put up a defense, because you are facing a mentality honed in the American people since the dawn of the nation: an understanding that their agency in the world is defended only so far as any one individual is capable of holding it.

If you want to win, your only option is to be better at it than them.

[artefictual]

Hope for the Scared and Confused

I grew up in Appalachia outside a liberal arts college. My mother was a bartender and self-proclaimed anarchist with multiple degrees who worked heavily with the local Democratic organizations, and my father was a case worker for children with disabilities and families in destitute coal towns. The tried to teach me to be curious, to be kind, and to be stubborn, and by all accounts and against my own recommendation, the people who know me say they succeeded.

I have also steadily been driven out of left-wing spaces for over a decade for trying to, in good faith and with great care, discuss all the things that have led to where we are now. I had accounts on Reddit and Twitter that got banned or blasted with hate so widely that they became unusable, all while actively organizing more than nearly anyone I met even while at protests. I have also been categorically correct on nearly every single concern I caught flak for asking about.

I was concerned, nine years ago, about the direction things were going, so I started to get to work on a long-term plan to build a community. It started with a house; a cheap, shitty place we could fix up, live together, gather resources, and figure out how we could change the world. A launch pad to set the stage to go from broke college kids to a community, with lofty political aspirations down the road to make a tangible difference. I factored everything, figured the legal structure to both guarantee shared ownership and liability protections, scouted locations, ran the numbers on materials and equipment rentals, put together an order of operations on repairs and taught myself the basics, talked to everybody I knew with skills to get help. I was even ready to personally do the majority of the work and provide most of the funding.

My friends, for as doom-and-gloom as they were about The State of Things, and as much as they talked about self-reliance, organizing locally, communal living, and making a difference, had endless reasons why it wouldn't work. I invalidated every one, it wasn't hard, I'd done the legwork after all. It was a solid, feasible plan, I just needed people to commit to it with me. But nobody else was willing to believe. It ended when, exasperated (and paraphrasing but only barely), I asked, "Is your comfort really more important to you than a solid chance at a different future?" To which the answer was, "yes." They just didn't *want* to.

In retrospect, that was really the start of my journey. I had an interesting few years as the result of some significant personal distress. I did drugs, hopped jobs, slept around, self-destruction is a blast while you're in the thick of it. What occurred isn't directly relevant, but the healing was. Trauma breaks you, shatters, dims, crystalizes. And to heal from it, you have to take yourself apart, look at all the parts, and gently put them back together again.

There were two realizations I made which I consider most responsible for making me the person I am today. First; what happens to you, is up to you. I was sitting on my porch, high off my ass, scrolling through social media coverage of the George Floyd riots, and I saw an Anarchist propaganda poster that said, "We are the ones we waited for." It just stuck. It's us. Not in a general sense, 'The People' will save themselves, but *you* personally. We are the ones responsible for our future. Whatever we do as a collective, it starts with the individual.

And secondly; Money is power. This one doesn't have a come-to-God moment. I was raised poor, we didn't talk about money except in a derogatory, accusatory way. The evils it's used for, the awful things people do for it. These things are true, but it's not the money's fault. My understanding of what Money *is* started with a book my mother gave me by David Graeber, called Debt: The First 5000 Years, which is an exploration of the history of debt and credit as collected by an anthropologist. Then Gamestop happened, which was incredibly educational. In trying to understand what was actually happening, I learned about the modern day mechanical truths behind the movement of money, because like what the FUCK was the stock market.

A dollar is a battery. A piece of paper that stores an amount of energy. You get it for expending energy, and you give it to someone else in exchange for theirs, because that's what Labor is: mechanical motion. This is not derogatory, I'm speaking to it as a physics phenomenon. Currency has nothing to do with Government. They may issue a currency to give themselves validity by unifying the people who use it, but people have been using tokens for exchange for as long as they've been trading. Fun fact: did you know that when the Soviets sat down and tried to devise an economic system run by and for the people, they accidentally re-engineered Capitalism and then scrapped it to do a planned economy instead?

I came out of four years of psychedelically-assisted debauchery understanding that my future was in my hands, and if I didn't want to be poor, miserable, and under the boot, I had to make money. So I set about doing it. I studied Labor in general. What jobs were people doing? What did they pay? How much time did they have to spend to get there and what did it cost to support them once they were working? I wanted the fastest, most efficient way out from under the poverty line, and the answer was driving a truck. So I signed up with a megacarrier. Did you know that several large trucking companies offer paid training? Full room and board, and they'll even comp or arrange your travel. Schneider only wanted a nine month commitment, and two of those months are the training program.

I got it, got working, and was making more money in a week than I'd previously made in a month. So I bailed on the contract for a job that paid better, and taught me more. A union job even. I learned a lot, primarily that unions are no longer useful tools in the current economic climate (but that's a different story). Then I bailed on them too. I'd been talking to a friend, and we discovered that the highest GDP per capita in the US outside New York and California, was North Dakota. It seemed very strange at first, I couldn't even recall having read anything about the state before. What the hell is in North Dakota? It's oil. There's oil in North Dakota, and no cops.

North Dakota was an eye opener. Wherever you live, whatever you've seen or jobs you've worked, you do not understand what it's like. Half the state is a factory floor, divided into grids. Endless gently rolling hills of grass, cows, and pump jacks. The crushed volcanic glass they grind up for rig roads is lightly radioactive. There's a gas byproduct of drilling that, if it escapes containment, can kill you instantly in a way that lets life insurance policies say it was just a heart attack. Every truck is overweight, over-length, over-hours, and beat to absolute hell. I stood on a flatbed in wind chill below the Antarctic mean and cooked in 110 degree summers. The Department of Transportation is less than a stern suggestion grinding out under a patrolman's hat, it's a sign saying, "Please behave, but you know don't worry about it." It's a lawless, toxic, beautiful wasteland, and it pays $35 an hour minimum for as long as you can stay awake with time and a half over 40 hours, because there's an eternal hiring shortage.

The point of all this is to say, I've traveled the full gamut of difficult, under-appreciated, and typically under-paid jobs on both sides of the political spectrum. I've worked in kitchens and warehouses, farms and oilfields. I've met The Proletariat, and made friends with them, because they are my coworkers and we need to get along. I've walked out of my room after extolling the virtues of universal public school nutrition programs and then had a coworker in a brand new F350 diesel with a Punisher skull on the back show me his new AK-47, and had a great day.

Everybody has a piece of the puzzle, everybody has *some* things right, and anybody who claims otherwise and offers a simple solution is an ideologue who hasn't done their research or wants to fuck you over, probably both. It's hard to be convincing if you aren't a true believer.

With this perspective, and with a decade of carefully holding my tongue because I wasn't *certain* I was correct, I now bring a premonition. I am not certain, one cannot know the future. But I feel a great and terrible truth in my visions. The gate is opening for the Golden Path, and the horrors along the way.

Decades of controlled opposition between political parties in the United States is coming to an end. The Government has grown too distant from its subjects, and a correction is upon us. There is no one to blame, there is no one responsible. It is the inscrutable movements of trillions of parts performing their inevitable work; a complex adaptive system acting in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. If we take it to be true that history is written by the victors, then the only problem with the Third Reich was that they didn't win. For if they had, they would not be known as genocidal war criminals capable of incomprehensible brutality, they would simply be the greatest power on the continent. Another player on the global stage.

The United States of America is no longer signaling a descent into autocracy, it may have arrived. The natural end-game of the greatest war economy is the greatest war. This is a simple equation, quite understandable. Expansion requires resources, of which space, time, fuel, everything is a finite and expendable entity. Germany was just one in a long line of empires that worked to do what was natural; consolidate. But they didn't have enough in the bank to pull it off. They may have, if the US hadn't gotten involved, but we did. Re-balanced the equation, and the rest is history.

The United States may not have that problem. We are mechanically, logistically capable of executing a... consolidation.

I have complex feelings about this. I try to take a long-view of humanity with an eye towards systems. Betting on anything at the micro level gets dicey, but zoom out, and you can make some solid guesses at macro. I know this cycle of life, the things we do as a species, the way we behave at scale as a collective organism. I find myself bracing for the monstrous realities we may live to see if we take the path to Planet America. But I do not know if I can say it should not happen. It is an eventuality. Someone is always willing to play for all the marbles. Why not us? Why not now? It's never been so possible.

But this is not about existential ethics. This is about us, now.

You need to be ready. Not 'you' as in 'all ya'll.' You, the one reading this right now, need to prepare. You are the one you're waiting for. You need to toughen up. You need to adapt. You need to get out of your head and take your life into your own hands. You need to be doing research, and I don't mean that bullshit advice about how to use antacid to help with pepper spray, or how to meal prep with your friends to help the homeless. I mean you need to be learning how to handle a firearm and stitch a wound, and you have to think about what it actually means to do it, because if you aren't ready when the time comes someone could die. You are out of time. You can no longer afford to spend the majority of your free time and energy gently tending a future that is not coming.

You need to be learning from the preppers and competitive shooters, because I promise you the Socialist Rifle Association is nice but their advice is not as good. You need to be internalizing the Truth that things are going to get worse.

And you need to pray that I am wrong, but I haven't been yet.

May we have the world that we deserve.