The neoliberal world order as we know it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. But celebrations of its downfall are muted by the bleak reality of the world that is rising to take its place. Every day, our screens are flooded with images of war, genocide, and AI slop. And we all know we’re living in dark times.

So, what does this mean for us, and how do we move forward?

https://sub.media/the-time-of-monsters/

(Reposted this because I forgot to add the image in the last post)

We live in uncertain times. Stay safe guys.

Heres a list of beginner friendly security guides

Hate to burst your bubble, but I imagine that was said about the American revolution, the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, the English civil war, the Russian revolution(s), ...

No matter what happens, someone is going to consolidate power in the aftermath. We can hope that it's benevolent for a time.

Which is not to say there shouldn't be a revolution. The scales need a lot of balancing. But they always need some balancing; it's matter of whether there's the political and physical will of the people to do it.

I think we are entering an era of surveillance capitalism. States require oil to defend their territories. As oil is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, they will require some other way to hold onto power.

States require oil to defend against other states. Their own populations can be kept in check by economics, where the people (generally speaking) have just enough to get by. People like that don't engage in revolution. They're primarily concerned with keeping their noses above the water line.

A population with balanced wealth has the freedom to think about more than survival. A population without enough to survive on has nothing left to lose. Maintaining that economic knife's edge is how states control their populations.

Ben Gvir deserves a spot in there. Front and center.

Yeah but Jeet Heer already has an awesome podcast by the name of "The Time Of Monsters".

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-time-of-monsters-with-jeet-heer/id1623865442

I, too, prefer just vaguely gesturing at history to deep analysis of why things broke the way they did and how they might be otherwise. It's very comforting to assume the past will be the future–so I will!

Surveillance capitalism is also how states (and other entities) control the population in contemporary times.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

Real talk: do you understand the difference between cyclical time and linear* time?