Nick AustinMar 27
𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬

One day you wake up and missiles are falling on Tehran. A girl's school is obliterated and explained away as an 'AI hallucination'. The men who ordered it read GPT-tinged speeches, and none of it feels real because the last time you saw these people, they were podcasters and cable news hosts. Another strongman wins an election – the headlines call it a shock win. All you feel is deja vu. Your body knows better.

You reach for your allies and find dust. You were so sure we were stronger, together. But the organisations that promised they would prevent this either no longer exist, or are unrecognisable. And you may ask yourself, "how did I get here?"

You are not alone. Today, we publish 𝓣𝓱𝓮 𝓖𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓿𝓮𝓻𝓰𝓮𝓷𝓬𝓮 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓘𝓽𝓼 𝓓𝓲𝓼𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓼, a culmination of half a decade of work that helps to understand why this happened, why the people who seized power are who they are, and why their grip on power is far more brittle than it looks.

It might seem tempting to look for answers that neatly explain everything. There are many reasons why, but here we propose two. This is angry and ambitious, but I'm optimistic, and you should be too. Moments like these come once in a lifetime.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/the-great-convergence-and-its-discontents/

Mar 27 at 10:04amWeb
Show threadEarthshineMar 27

@shibacomputer "By 2025, civil society’s polite society had accumulated a perfect record of strategic surprise in the face of entirely visible trends."

yup.

Show threadcoldclimateMar 30
@shibacomputer there was an Adam Curtis documentary, maybe a decade ago, shown in the UK as part of Screen Wipez that feels like it foretold so much of this.
Show threadbook_dragonMar 31

@shibacomputer This is the kind of blood-on-the-walls essay I needed right now. "How and why the US-led institutional apparatus collapsed the way it did, who are the surplus elites who supplied the final push, and what opportunities exist to build a new kind of post-institution in its place."

Brittle funding structures. Aspirational elites and counter-elites. Boom-extract-enforce. Mr. Choppy.

And the fallen angels who may be the future.

#USpol

Show threadLichMar 31
@shibacomputer Fantastic read.
Show thread𝔰𝔥𝔦𝔟𝔠𝔬Mar 31
@lich_silvae thank you for reading. Where did it resonate the most for you?
Show threadLichMar 31

@shibacomputer The discussion of COVID-19 and the impact it had. I was an essential worker at a rehabilitation and mental health hospital at the time and watching the system break down so quickly with lack of PPE, direction, funding, and housing for our unhoused patients should have been more of an indicator of the cascade the pandemic has had on other industries and economies.

The stories from other essential workers at the time from the wonderful people who fed me because they couldn't afford to close their restaurant so they handed takeout out of a house window in a false wall they had temporarily built in the lobby, to the woman who practically lived out of her office to keep a laundromat open so people could wash their clothes.

They voted Trump because they wanted more financial relief from stimulus checks and got this instead. Hitler did the same thing after the Spanish Flu and WWI and the Germans got him.

People know how to care for each other. Capitalism erodes it to its very core because at its base greed and maintaining the haves and have nots is what makes you successful within that system. Bigtory is a feature, not a bug.