#CLIMATE

[mapsontheweb]

People living in colder climates drink more alcohol than those living in warmer climates

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.2.16 Does anarchism require “perfect” people to work?

No. Anarchy is not a utopia, a “perfect” society. It will be a human society, with all the problems, hopes, and fears associated with human beings. Anarchists do not think that human beings need to be “perfect” for anarchy to work. They only need to be free. Thus Christie and Meltzer:

”[A] common fallacy [is] that revolutionary socialism [i.e. anarchism] is an ‘idealisation’ of the workers and [so] the mere recital of their present faults is a refutation of the class struggle … it seems morally unreasonable that a free society … could exist without moral or ethical perfection. But so far as the overthrow of [existing] society is concerned, we may ignore the fact of people’s shortcomings and prejudices, so long as they do not become institutionalised. One may view without concern the fact … that the workers might achieve control of their places of work long before they had acquired the social graces of the ‘intellectual’ or shed all the prejudices of the present society from family discipline to xenophobia. What does it matter, so long as they can run industry without masters? Prejudices wither in freedom and only flourish while the social climate is favourable to them … What we say is … that once life can continue without imposed authority from above, and imposed authority cannot survive the withdrawal of labour from its service, the prejudices of authoritarianism will disappear. There is no cure for them other than the free process of education.” [The Floodgates of Anarchy, pp. 36–7]

Obviously, though, we think that a free society will produce people who are more in tune with both their own and others individuality and needs, thus reducing individual conflict. Remaining disputes would be solved by reasonable methods, for example, the use of juries, mutual third parties, or community and workplace assemblies (see section I.5.8 for a discussion of how could be done for anti-social activities as well as disputes).

Like the “anarchism-is-against-human-nature” argument (see section A.2.15), opponents of anarchism usually assume “perfect” people — people who are not corrupted by power when placed in positions of authority, people who are strangely unaffected by the distorting effects of hierarchy, privilege, and so forth. However, anarchists make no such claims about human perfection. We simply recognise that vesting power in the hands of one person or an elite is never a good idea, as people are not perfect.

It should be noted that the idea that anarchism requires a “new” (perfect) man or woman is often raised by the opponents of anarchism to discredit it (and, usually, to justify the retention of hierarchical authority, particularly capitalist relations of production). After all, people are not perfect and are unlikely ever to be. As such, they pounce on every example of a government falling and the resulting chaos to dismiss anarchism as unrealistic. The media loves to proclaim a country to be falling into “anarchy” whenever there is a disruption in “law and order” and looting takes place.

Anarchists are not impressed by this argument. A moment’s reflection shows why, for the detractors make the basic mistake of assuming an anarchist society without anarchists! (A variation of such claims is raised by the right-wing “anarcho”-capitalists to discredit real anarchism. However, their “objection” discredits their own claim to be anarchists for they implicitly assume an anarchist society without anarchists!). Needless to say, an “anarchy” made up of people who still saw the need for authority, property and statism would soon become authoritarian (i.e. non-anarchist) again. This is because even if the government disappeared tomorrow, the same system would soon grow up again, because “the strength of the government rests not with itself, but with the people. A great tyrant may be a fool, and not a superman. His strength lies not in himself, but in the superstition of the people who think that it is right to obey him. So long as that superstition exists it is useless for some liberator to cut off the head of tyranny; the people will create another, for they have grown accustomed to rely on something outside themselves.” [George Barrett, Objections to Anarchism, p. 355]

Hence Alexander Berkman:

“Our social institutions are founded on certain ideas; as long as the latter are generally believed, the institutions built on them are safe. Government remains strong because people think political authority and legal compulsion necessary. Capitalism will continue as long as such an economic system is considered adequate and just. The weakening of the ideas which support the evil and oppressive present day conditions means the ultimate breakdown of government and capitalism.” [What is Anarchism?, p. xii]

In other words, anarchy needs anarchists in order to be created and survive. But these anarchists need not be perfect, just people who have freed themselves, by their own efforts, of the superstition that command-and-obedience relations and capitalist property rights are necessary. The implicit assumption in the idea that anarchy needs “perfect” people is that freedom will be given, not taken; hence the obvious conclusion follows that an anarchy requiring “perfect” people will fail. But this argument ignores the need for self-activity and self-liberation in order to create a free society. For anarchists, “history is nothing but a struggle between the rulers and the ruled, the oppressors and the oppressed.” [Peter Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 85] Ideas change through struggle and, consequently, in the struggle against oppression and exploitation, we not only change the world, we change ourselves at the same time. So it is the struggle for freedom which creates people capable of taking the responsibility for their own lives, communities and planet. People capable of living as equals in a free society, so making anarchy possible.

As such, the chaos which often results when a government disappears is not anarchy nor, in fact, a case against anarchism. It simple means that the necessary preconditions for creating an anarchist society do not exist. Anarchy would be the product of collective struggle at the heart of society, not the product of external shocks. Nor, we should note, do anarchists think that such a society will appear “overnight.” Rather, we see the creation of an anarchist system as a process, not an event. The ins-and-outs of how it would function will evolve over time in the light of experience and objective circumstances, not appear in a perfect form immediately (see section H.2.5 for a discussion of Marxist claims otherwise).

Therefore, anarchists do not conclude that “perfect” people are necessary anarchism to work because the anarchist is “no liberator with a divine mission to free humanity, but he is a part of that humanity struggling onwards towards liberty.” As such, ”[i]f, then, by some external means an Anarchist Revolution could be, so to speak, supplied ready-made and thrust upon the people, it is true that they would reject it and rebuild the old society. If, on the other hand, the people develop their ideas of freedom, and they themselves get rid of the last stronghold of tyranny — the government — then indeed the revolution will be permanently accomplished.” [George Barrett, Op. Cit., p. 355]

This is not to suggest that an anarchist society must wait until everyone is an anarchist. Far from it. It is highly unlikely, for example, that the rich and powerful will suddenly see the errors of their ways and voluntarily renounce their privileges. Faced with a large and growing anarchist movement, the ruling elite has always used repression to defend its position in society. The use of fascism in Spain (see section A.5.6) and Italy (see section A.5.5) show the depths the capitalist class can sink to. Anarchism will be created in the face of opposition by the ruling minorities and, consequently, will need to defend itself against attempts to recreate authority (see section H.2.1 for a refutation of Marxist claims anarchists reject the need to defend an anarchist society against counter-revolution).

Instead anarchists argue that we should focus our activity on convincing those subject to oppression and exploitation that they have the power to resist both and, ultimately, can end both by destroying the social institutions that cause them. As Malatesta argued, “we need the support of the masses to build a force of sufficient strength to achieve our specific task of radical change in the social organism by the direct action of the masses, we must get closer to them, accept them as they are, and from within their ranks seek to ‘push’ them forward as much as possible.” [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, pp. 155–6] This would create the conditions that make possible a rapid evolution towards anarchism as what was initially accepted by a minority “but increasingly finding popular expression, will make its way among the mass of the people” and “the minority will become the People, the great mass, and that mass rising up against property and the State, will march forward towards anarchist communism.” [Kropotkin, Words of a Rebel, p. 75] Hence the importance anarchists attach to spreading our ideas and arguing the case for anarchism. This creates conscious anarchists from those questioning the injustices of capitalism and the state.

This process is helped by the nature of hierarchical society and the resistance it naturally developed in those subject to it. Anarchist ideas develop spontaneously through struggle. As we discuss in section I.2.3, anarchistic organisations are often created as part of the resistance against oppression and exploitation which marks every hierarchical system and can., potentially, be the framework of a few society. As such, the creation of libertarian institutions is, therefore, always a possibility in any situation. A peoples’ experiences may push them towards anarchist conclusions, namely the awareness that the state exists to protect the wealthy and powerful few and to disempower the many. That while it is needed to maintain class and hierarchical society, it is not needed to organise society nor can it do so in a just and fair way for all. This is possible. However, without a conscious anarchist presence any libertarian tendencies are likely to be used, abused and finally destroyed by parties or religious groups seeking political power over the masses (the Russian Revolution is the most famous example of this process). It is for that reason anarchists organise to influence the struggle and spread our ideas (see section J.3 for details). For it is the case that only when anarchist ideas “acquire a predominating influence” and are “accepted by a sufficiently large section of the population” will we “have achieved anarchy, or taken a step towards anarchy.” For anarchy “cannot be imposed against the wishes of the people.” [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 159 and p. 163]

So, to conclude, the creation of an anarchist society is not dependent on people being perfect but it is dependent on a large majority being anarchists and wanting to reorganise society in a libertarian manner. This will not eliminate conflict between individuals nor create a fully formed anarchist humanity overnight but it will lay the ground for the gradual elimination of whatever prejudices and anti-social behaviour that remain after the struggle to change society has revolutionised those doing it.

[typhlonectes]

Breeding birds of high-elevation mixed-conifer forests have declined in national parks of the southwestern U.S. while lower-elevation species have increased, with responses to drought varying by habitat 

Harrison H Jones, Chris Ray, Matthew Johnson, Rodney Siegel

Abstract

Climate change is considered a major driver of recent avian population declines, particularly in the drought-stricken southwestern United States. Predicting how bird populations will respond requires understanding the climatic drivers influencing population density across the region’s diverse habitats. We modelled breeding-season densities of 50 bird species in relation to spring and summer drought and the timing of North American monsoon rainfall over a 12-year period (2007–2018) and across 4 habitats comprising an approximately 1,500 m elevational gradient. We estimated annual breeding-season population density in relation to climate in the previous year by fitting a Bayesian hierarchical N-mixture model to point-count data from each of 6 national parks on the Colorado Plateau. Specifically, we asked whether: (1) population trends were stable, increasing, or decreasing in the focal parks; (2) breeding densities were affected by drought or the timing of monsoon rains; and (3) climatic effects differed across habitat types and among species that molt on the breeding grounds, the nonbreeding grounds, or stopover to molt in the monsoon region of northwestern Mexico (molt migrants). Population trends varied with habitat. Species of high-elevation mixed-conifer forest declined over the study period, matching regional Breeding Bird Survey trends, likely in response to climate-related habitat loss and disturbance. By contrast, lower-elevation pinyon-juniper and grassland-shrubland species density generally increased. Effects of drought varied by habitat with elevation: mixed-conifer species responded positively to drought in the previous year, likely due to earlier snowmelt and breeding phenology, whereas pinyon-juniper species were unaffected, and grassland-shrubland species responded negatively, perhaps due to reduced nest survival. Later arrival of monsoon rains, a common prediction of climate models, had a positive effect on grassland bird densities, but a negative effect on molt-migrant densities. Late monsoon rains may result in a phenological mismatch between migration timing and the pulse of resources required to molt.

Read the paper here:

Breeding birds of high-elevation mixed-conifer forests have declined in national parks of the southwestern U.S. while lower-elevation species have increased, with responses to drought varying by habitat | Ornithological Applications | Oxford Academic (oup.com)

[msexcelfractal]

Teardrops on my Guitar is kind of a banger tbh

[phildumphy]

So it turns out that ChatGPT not only uses a ton shit of energy, but also a ton shit of water. This is according to a new study by a group of researchers from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington, Futurism reports.

Which sounds INSANE but also makes sense when you think of it. You know what happens to, for example, your computer when it’s doing a LOT of work and processing. You gotta cool those machines.

And what’s worrying about this is that water shortages are already an issue almost everywhere, and over this summer, and the next summers, will become more and more of a problem with the rising temperatures all over the world. So it’s important to have this in mind and share the info. Big part of how we ended up where we are with the climate crisis is that for a long time politicians KNEW about the science, but the large public didn’t have all the facts. We didn’t have access to it. KNOWING about things and sharing that info can be a real game-changer. Because then we know up to what point we, as individuals, can have effective actions in our daily lives and what we need to be asking our legislators for.

And with all the issues AI can pose, I think this is such an important argument to add to the conversation.

Edit: I previously accidentally typed Colorado instead of California. Thank you to the fellow user who noticed and signaled that!

[grickle14]

Helping the Earth.

[ecoamerica]

Last call: It's the final week to apply for the American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students! Apply by Friday, December 15, at midnight PT!

ANNOUNCING: American Climate Leadership Awards has a new category for high school students working towards local climate solutions! @ecoamerica is awarding $125K in cash prizes to student climate leaders. Apply by 12/15: https://ecoamerica.org/american-climate-leadership-awards-high-school-2024/

[nasa]

Confirmed: Summer 2023 Hottest in NASA’s Record

All three months of summer 2023 broke records. July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded, and the hottest July. June 2023 was the hottest June, and August 2023 was the hottest August.

NASA’s temperature record, GISTEMP, starts in 1880, when consistent, modern recordkeeping became possible. Our record uses millions of measurements of surface temperature from weather stations, ships and ocean buoys, and Antarctic research stations. Other agencies and organizations who keep similar global temperature records find the same pattern of long-term warming.

Global temperatures are rising from increased emissions of greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide and methane. Over the last 200 years, humans have raised atmospheric CO2 by nearly 50%, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.

Drivers of climate change, both natural and human-caused, leave distinct fingerprints. Through observations and modeling, NASA researchers confirm that the current warming is the result of human activities, particularly increased greenhouse gas emissions.

[apas-95]

.

[crionic-dubs]

[politijohn]

Source

“the young activists seized on language in the Montana state Constitution that guarantees residents ‘the right to a clean and healthful environment,’ and stipulates that the state and individuals are responsible for maintaining and improving the environment ‘for present and future generations.’”

[liberalsarecool]

Trust science, not corporate shills.

[dailyanarchistposts]

A.2.13 Are anarchists individualists or collectivists?

The short answer is: neither. This can be seen from the fact that liberal scholars denounce anarchists like Bakunin for being “collectivists” while Marxists attack Bakunin and anarchists in general for being “individualists.”

This is hardly surprising, as anarchists reject both ideologies as nonsense. Whether they like it or not, non-anarchist individualists and collectivists are two sides of the same capitalist coin. This can best shown be by considering modern capitalism, in which “individualist” and “collectivist” tendencies continually interact, often with the political and economic structure swinging from one pole to the other. Capitalist collectivism and individualism are both one-sided aspects of human existence, and like all manifestations of imbalance, deeply flawed.

For anarchists, the idea that individuals should sacrifice themselves for the “group” or “greater good” is nonsensical. Groups are made up of individuals, and if people think only of what’s best for the group, the group will be a lifeless shell. It is only the dynamics of human interaction within groups which give them life. “Groups” cannot think, only individuals can. This fact, ironically, leads authoritarian “collectivists” to a most particular kind of “individualism,” namely the “cult of the personality” and leader worship. This is to be expected, since such collectivism lumps individuals into abstract groups, denies their individuality, and ends up with the need for someone with enough individuality to make decisions — a problem that is “solved” by the leader principle. Stalinism and Nazism are excellent examples of this phenomenon.

Therefore, anarchists recognise that individuals are the basic unit of society and that only individuals have interests and feelings. This means they oppose “collectivism” and the glorification of the group. In anarchist theory the group exists only to aid and develop the individuals involved in them. This is why we place so much stress on groups structured in a libertarian manner — only a libertarian organisation allows the individuals within a group to fully express themselves, manage their own interests directly and to create social relationships which encourage individuality and individual freedom. So while society and the groups they join shapes the individual, the individual is the true basis of society. Hence Malatesta:

“Much has been said about the respective roles of individual initiative and social action in the life and progress of human societies … [E]verything is maintained and kept going in the human world thanks to individual initiative … The real being is man, the individual. Society or the collectivity — and the State or government which claims to represent it — if it is not a hollow abstraction, must be made up of individuals. And it is in the organism of every individual that all thoughts and human actions inevitably have their origin, and from being individual they become collective thoughts and acts when they are or become accepted by many individuals. Social action, therefore, is neither the negation nor the complement of individual initiatives, but is the resultant of initiatives, thoughts and actions of all individuals who make up society … [T]he question is not really changing the relationship between society and the individual … [I]t is a question of preventing some individuals from oppressing others; of giving all individuals the same rights and the same means of action; and of replacing the initiative to the few [which Malatesta defines as a key aspect of government/hierarchy], which inevitably results in the oppression of everyone else … “ [Anarchy, pp. 38–38]

These considerations do not mean that “individualism” finds favour with anarchists. As Emma Goldman pointed out, ”‘rugged individualism’… is only a masked attempt to repress and defeat the individual and his individuality. So-called Individualism is the social and economic laissez-faire: the exploitation of the masses by the [ruling] classes by means of legal trickery, spiritual debasement and systematic indoctrination of the servile spirit … That corrupt and perverse ‘individualism’ is the straitjacket of individuality .. [It] has inevitably resulted in the greatest modern slavery, the crassest class distinctions driving millions to the breadline. ‘Rugged individualism’ has meant all the ‘individualism’ for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking ‘supermen.’” [Red Emma Speaks, p. 112]

While groups cannot think, individuals cannot live or discuss by themselves. Groups and associations are an essential aspect of individual life. Indeed, as groups generate social relationships by their very nature, they help shape individuals. In other words, groups structured in an authoritarian way will have a negative impact on the freedom and individuality of those within them. However, due to the abstract nature of their “individualism,” capitalist individualists fail to see any difference between groups structured in a libertarian manner rather than in an authoritarian one — they are both “groups”. Because of their one-sided perspective on this issue, “individualists” ironically end up supporting some of the most “collectivist” institutions in existence — capitalist companies — and, moreover, always find a need for the state despite their frequent denunciations of it. These contradictions stem from capitalist individualism’s dependence on individual contracts in an unequal society, i.e. abstract individualism.

In contrast, anarchists stress social “individualism” (another, perhaps better, term for this concept could be “communal individuality”). Anarchism “insists that the centre of gravity in society is the individual — that he [sic] must think for himself, act freely, and live fully… . If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others… . [T]his has nothing in common with… ‘rugged individualism.’ Such predatory individualism is really flabby, not rugged. At the least danger to its safety, it runs to cover of the state and wails for protection… .Their ‘rugged individualism’ is simply one of the many pretences the ruling class makes to mask unbridled business and political extortion.” [Emma Goldman, Op. Cit., pp. 442–3]

Anarchism rejects the abstract individualism of capitalism, with its ideas of “absolute” freedom of the individual which is constrained by others. This theory ignores the social context in which freedom exists and grows. “The freedom we want,” Malatesta argued, “for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the weak; but it is a real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity.” [Anarchy, p. 43]

A society based on abstract individualism results in an inequality of power between the contracting individuals and so entails the need for an authority based on laws above them and organised coercion to enforce the contracts between them. This consequence is evident from capitalism and, most notably, in the “social contract” theory of how the state developed. In this theory it is assumed that individuals are “free” when they are isolated from each other, as they allegedly were originally in the “state of nature.” Once they join society, they supposedly create a “contract” and a state to administer it. However, besides being a fantasy with no basis in reality (human beings have always been social animals), this “theory” is actually a justification for the state’s having extensive powers over society; and this in turn is a justification of the capitalist system, which requires a strong state. It also mimics the results of the capitalist economic relations upon which this theory is built. Within capitalism, individuals “freely” contract together, but in practice the owner rules the worker for as long as the contract is in place. (See sections A.2.14 and B.4 for further details).

Thus anarchists reject capitalist “individualism” as being, to quote Kropotkin, “a narrow and selfish individualism” which, moreover, is “a foolish egoism which belittles the individual” and is “not individualism at all. It will not lead to what was established as a goal; that is the complete broad and most perfectly attainable development of individuality.” The hierarchy of capitalism results in “the impoverishment of individuality” rather than its development. To this anarchists contrast “the individuality which attains the greatest individual development possible through the highest communist sociability in what concerns both its primordial needs and its relationships with others in general.” [Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, p. 295, p. 296 and p. 297] For anarchists, our freedom is enriched by those around us when we work with them as equals and not as master and servant.

In practice, both individualism and collectivism lead to a denial of both individual liberty and group autonomy and dynamics. In addition, each implies the other, with collectivism leading to a particular form of individualism and individualism leading to a particular form of collectivism.

Collectivism, with its implicit suppression of the individual, ultimately impoverishes the community, as groups are only given life by the individuals who comprise them. Individualism, with its explicit suppression of community (i.e. the people with whom you live), ultimately impoverishes the individual, since individuals do not exist apart from society but can only exist within it. In addition, individualism ends up denying the “select few” the insights and abilities of the individuals who make up the rest of society, and so is a source of self-denial. This is Individualism’s fatal flaw (and contradiction), namely “the impossibility for the individual to attain a really full development in the conditions of oppression of the mass by the ‘beautiful aristocracies’. His [or her] development would remain uni-lateral.” [Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism, p. 293]

True liberty and community exist elsewhere.

[m-eowdy]

if you want, tell me where you live (can also just be the country/area) and the percentage! and if this is normal/average for this time of year, if you happen to know

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting the audiobook of The Lost Cause, my novel of environmental hope

Tonight (October 2), I'm in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The Lost Cause is my next novel. It's about the climate emergency. It's hopeful. Library Journal called it "a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak." As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

That's a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: "How is it that I have another book out in 2023?" Because this is my third book this year. Short answer: I write when I'm anxious, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. Nine!

Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.

The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves "the first generation in a century that doesn't fear the future."

I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff's edge and all the one-percent has to say is, "Well, it's too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don't worry, we'll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge":

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is total. The company's Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn't want it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

I wrote a whole-ass book about this and it came out less than a month ago; it's called The Internet Con and it lays out an audacious plan to halt the internet's enshittification and throw it into reverse:

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

The tldr is this: when an audiobook is wrapped in Amazon's DRM, only Amazon can legally remove it. That means that every book I sell you on Audible is a book you have to throw away if you ever break up with Amazon, and Amazon can use the fact that it's hold you hostage to screw me – and every other author – over.

As I said last time this came up:

Fuck that sideways.

With a brick.

My books are sold without DRM, so you can play them in any app and do anything copyright permits, and that means Amazon won't carry them, and that means my publishers don't want to pay to produce them, and that means I produce them myself, and then I make the (significant) costs back by selling them on Kickstarter.

And you know what? It works. Readers don't want DRM. I mean, duh. No one woke up this morning and said, "Dammit, why won't someone sell me a product that lets me do less with my books?" I sell boatloads" of books through these crowdfunding campaigns. I sold so many copies of my last book, *The Internet Con, that they sold out the initial print run in two weeks (don't worry, they held back stock for my upcoming events).

But beyond that, I think there's another reason my readers keep coming back, even though I wrote a genuinely stupid number of books while working through lockdown anxiety while the wildfires raged and ashes sifted down out of the sky and settled on my laptop as I lay in my backyard hammock, pounding my keyboard.

(I went through two keyboards during lockdown. Thankfully, I bought a user-serviceable laptop from Framework and fixed it myself both times, in a matter of minutes. No, no one pays me to mention this, but hot damn is it cool.)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

The reason readers come back to my books is that they're full of hope. In the same way that writing lets me feel like I'm not a passenger in life, but rather, someone with a say in my destination, the books that I write are full of practical ways and dramatic scenes in which other people seize the means of computation, the reins of power or their own destinies.

The protagonist of The Lost Cause is Brooks Palazzo, a high-school senior in Burbank whose parents were part of the original cohort of volunteers who kicked off the global transformation, and left him an orphan when they succumbed to one of the zoonotic plagues that arise every time another habitat is destroyed.

Brooks grew up knowing what his life would be: the work of repair and care, which millions of young people are doing. Relocating entire cities off endangered coastlines and floodplains, or out of fire-zones. Fighting floods and fires. Caring for tens of millions of refugees for whom the change came too late.

But with every revolution comes a counter-revolution. The losers of a just war don't dig holes, climb inside and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Two groups of reactionaries – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and seething white nationalist militias – have formed an alliance.

They've already gotten their champion into the White House. Next up: dismantling every cause for hope Brooks and his friends have, and bringing back the fear.

That's the setup for a novel about solidarity, care, library socialism, and snatching victory from defeat's jaws. Writing it help keep me sane during the lockdown, and when it came time to record the audiobook, I spent a lot of time thinking about who could read it. I've had some great narrators: Wil Wheaton, @neil-gaiman, Amber Benson, Bronson Pinchot, and more.

I record my audiobooks with Skyboat Media, a brilliant studio near my place in LA. Back in August, I spent a week in their recording booth – "The Tardis" – doing something I'd never tried before: I recorded a whole audiobook, with directorial supervision: The Internet Con:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992826/DEA0CE12/purchase

When it was done, the director – audiobook legend Gabrielle de Cuir – sat me down and said, "Look, I've never said this to an author before, but I think you should read The Lost Cause. I don't direct anyone anymore except for Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton, but I would direct you on this one."

I was immensely flattered – and very nervous. Reading The Internet Con was one thing – the book is built around the speeches I've been giving for 20 years and I knew I could sell those lines – but The Lost Cause is a novel, with a whole cast of characters. Could I do it?

Reader, I did it. I just listened to the proofs last week and:

It.

Came.

Out.

Great.

The Lost Cause goes on sale on November 14th, and I'll be selling this audiobook I made everywhere audiobooks are sold – except for the stores that require DRM, nonconsensually shackling readers and writers to their platforms. So you'll be able to get it on Libro.fm, downpour.com, even Google Play – but not Audible, Apple Books, or Audiobooks.com.

But in addition to those worthy retailers, I will be sending out thousands – and thousands! – of audiobook to my Kickstarter backers on the on-sale date, either as a folder of DRM-free MP3s, or as a download code for Libro.fm, to make things easy for people who don't want to have to figure out how to sideload an audiobook into a standalone app.

And, of course, the mobile duopoly have made this kind of sideloading exponentially harder over the past decade, though far be it from me to connect this with their policy of charging 30% commissions on everything sold through an app, a commission they don't receive if you get your files on the web and load 'em yourself:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

As with my previous Kickstarters, I'm also selling ebooks and hardcovers – signed or unsigned, and this time I've found a great partner to fulfill EU orders from within the EU, so backers won't have to pay VAT and customs charges. The wonderful Otherland – who have hosted me on my last two trips to Berlin – are going to manage that shipping for me:

https://www.otherland-berlin.de/en/home.html

Kim Stanley Robinson read the book and said, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this." That's just about the perfect quote, because the book is a ride. It's not just a kumbaya tale of a better world that is possible: it's a post-cyberpunk novel of high-tech guerrilla and meme warfare, climate tech and bad climate tech, wildcat prefab urban infill, and far-right militamen who adapt to a ban on assault-rifles by switching to super-soakers full of hydrochloric acid.

It's a book about struggle, hope in the darkness, and a way through this rotten moment. It's a book that dares to imagine that things might get worse but also better. This is a curious emotional melange, but it's one that I'm increasingly feeling these days.

Like, Amazon, that giant bully, whose blockade on DRM-free audiobooks cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through university (according to my agent)? The incredible Lina Khan brought a long-overdue antitrust case against Amazon while her rockstar DoJ counterpart, Jonathan Kanter, is dragging Google through the courts.

The EU is taking on Apple, and French cops are kicking down Nvidia's doors and grabbing their files, looking to build another antitrust case for monopolizing GPUs. The writers won their strike and Joe Biden walked the picket-line with the UAW, the first president in history to join striking workers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Solar is now our cheapest energy source, which is wild, because if we could only capture 0.4% of the solar energy that makes it through the atmosphere, we could give everyone alive the same energy budget as Canadians (who have American lifestyles but higher heating bills). As Deb Chachra writes in her forthcoming How Infrastructure Works (my review pending): we get a fresh supply of energy every time the sun rises and we only get new materials when a comet survives atmospheric entry, but we treat energy as scarce and throw away our materials after a single use:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We have shot past many of our planetary boundaries and there are waves of climate crises in our future, but they don't have to be climate disasters. That's up to us – it'll depend on whether we come together to save ourselves and each other, or tear ourselves apart.

The Lost Cause dares to imagine what it might be like if we do the former. We don't live in a post-enshittification world yet, but we could. With these indie audiobooks, I've found a way to treat the terminal enshittification of the Amazon monopoly as damage and route around it. I hope you'll back the Kickstarter, fight enshittification, inject some hope into your reading, and enjoy a kickass adventure novel in the process:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/02/the-lost-cause/#the-first-generation-that-doesnt-fear-the-future

[itscolossal]

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