Stuck in a reactionary doom loop
Fascism, the slow motion flashmob
Like everyone reading this, I am thoroughly disappointed to see that the American people re-elected a dried apricot hell-creature to carry them into their empire collapse. I think that way too many of the conversations I’ve had — or muted on WhatsApp — so far this week have contained egregious amounts of over-simplified speculation about voter turnout (among other things), and have really demonstrated how people in technology politics have a flaccid understanding of fascism, and to this day continue to rub their chins and wonder a hairy piece of drain clog got so many people to vote for him.
I made the mistake of going to a panel discussion/election watch party on Tuesday evening — for whatever reason I thought I’d learn something. There was a lot of intellectual gymnastics and fetishistic analysis of Trump’s mannerisms, and pointing out that he’s popular because he managed to capture the imagination of the working class, which has been thuddingly obvious for eight years now.
To me all these conversations feel very insensitive to the reality on the ground: women are having abortion rights taken away, queer people are facing fresh levels of hostility and transphobia, and I don’t imagine this result is going to be great for Ukraine or the genocide in Palestine.
There’s also a lot of weird short-sighted confusion as to why and how he got in. How could the Dems have let this happen? How can THIS many people be THAT dumb? What was the point in the Taylor Swift endorsement anyway?? Etc etc. These are the same people who voted for Kamala not because she inspired them and they love her policies — but to make sure Trump didn’t win. So… can we not imagine that a bunch of people voted for Trump not because they like him, but so that Kamala wouldn’t win? The same voting tactic you’ve been using your whole life works both ways you know lol.
It’s never been clearer that the US is stuck in a reactionary doom loop of just switching back and forth between parties every few years, because people are voting against candidates they hate, rather than just voting for someone because they actually like them. We need to accept the fact that there are people in the US who’s desire to not have a woman of colour in power was so strong that they settled for a man who looks like a baseball glove and will most certainly make their lives worse. And in the UK, the only reason the uncustomised sim Keir Starmer won was because the tories had done such a bad job over the last decade and a half that there was literally no other option.
What I’m hoping is that now this has happened, we can actually start thinking meaningfully about radical systems change, rather than pontificating endlessly about which piss-poor watery incremental change we might want to write a white paper about next. I think there’s been way too much hand-wringing over why new technologies in general appear to be so low-quality and oppressive, and why decades-old online platforms are now part of the establishment when they were supposed to be innovative. The answer is pretty simple: they are being served to us by a powerful minority who are protecting their own interests. And it’s important to remember that the miles-long tendrils that bind our consumer products to their designers are very easily leveraged and exploited by fascist governments.
So, while everything feels really hopeless and impossible right now, I think we need to make sure we don’t just sit back and pray that they don’t deploy a biometric tracking system to tackle benefit ‘fraud’, or have Amazon run the postal service or something. I think one of the key failures of the left (if you can even call it that in the US) is the flat out refusal to paint a picture of something better. Like, yes, let’s stop privatisation from seeping in and dissolving public infrastructure — but beyond that let’s also actively strive to make things better? Surely we can imagine more than just staying an inch away from the edge of oblivion.