How We Keep It All Together
On Literate Machine, and the struggle to think with care through worldly despair
Last week I had a massive editing project come down to the wire because I’d been sick the week before, in a month when I really didn’t have time on my schedule to be sick.
Day and night, I was consumed by catch-up on the darned thing, but I kept telling myself that there was a kind of “good fortune” in being spared the need to put together a piece about all the awful news happening in the periphery: the long, messy run of SCOTUS decisions (still unfolding today), the massive failure of a presidential debate on everyone’s minds and feeds, the despairing nature of a recent wave of protests in Kenya, a failed coup in Bolivia, reports of unravelling settler cruelty in the West Bank and horrific sexual abuse and maltreatment of Palestinians in detention (all under the usual deranged eliminationist rhetoric by far-right extremists), the rising tensions between Israel and Hezbollah amid warnings issued by the US and Iran, the looming triumph of the far right in French elections, and more terrible news out of Sudan about sweeping famine and ethnic cleansing un-spooling from civil war.
There I was, working on a deep structural edit for a novel to meet my client’s deadline, and the world was falling apart in ways I could hardly begin to string together.
(Not that I didn’t try this weekend. There’s a 3,000-word screed I need to reform into something coherent for this Thursday instead. Working on it.)
When I finished the project for my client, I tried to catch up on other work as well: a book review for an excellent academic analysis of film from a cosmic perspective; a Patreon post boasting recordings of the next two chapters of my own novel tackling war propaganda, the rise of nationalism, and misguided histories of civilization.
But it was difficult to have the heart for any of it. Even when doing work I once cared about, all I could think about was the grinding moral failures of our age.
It’s not just the fact that the world is filled with so much cruelty, but also that so many people spend their time trying to rationalize it, or to carve out space to defend “their” side from criticism within it. Instead of simply being able to say “yes, this is all very difficult”, we’ve weaponized ourselves as foot soldiers in a number of tribalist wars.
In other words:
It’s hard to imagine that “a lack of better info” is the reason for the state we’re in.
And that makes it difficult to know what the point even is, sometimes, of trying to communicate the extent to which humanity is hurting, and hurting itself.
We can get information about the crashing failures of our world, if we want it.
If people care, they will already know that our commitment to extraction-based economies and the everyday comforts they produce is accelerating climate change in ways already proving ruinous especially for regions that have the least fault in producing greenhouse gas emissions. They will already know that the latest tech-hype cycles are just adding one more set of industries to the list we need to mitigate or take down if we’re to have any chance at all of capping the overall environmental impact.
If people care, they will already know that the rise of far-right thinking, of populist and authoritarian rule writ large, comes down to an everyday rise in small-c conservative risk-aversion brought on by socioeconomic pressures (i.e., housing costs, overwhelmed job markets, inflationary pressures and their impact on household debt) and global stressors stemming from rising temperatures and their impact on human migration patterns. They will know that we are predisposed by biology under pressure to act and think increasingly as tribalists under such social pressures—and all while thinking that, actually, we’re responding coherently to threats from X cultural invasion.
If people care, they will already know how reprehensible is the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, and for the families of victims of October 7 used as pawns from Day 1 by Netanyahu’s far-right government and other warmongers in the region. They will know that our societies have lost any top-down moral authority whatsoever in the scramble simply to keep that situation from spiralling into all-out regional war and/or from negatively affecting the results of the US’s November election.
No matter how many efforts at broader global consensus and sets of stabilizing rules and organizations need to be brought down, reducing us to the absolute worst of nationalist politics in the very era when we need a more holistic view of our species’ survival to defend against the impacts of climate change… it doesn’t matter anymore.
Tribalism already reigns supreme.
And so, many everyday folks have turned to damage control, forever sifting through the news solely to share whatever information best serves their “side” and drowning out any data that might cause problems for the narrative. I see a lot of people who think they’re good people, who’ve done nothing but make themselves PR agents doing “crowd control” for their in-groups over the last months. I see a lot of people who don’t care what happens to other people, so long as they can pretend it won’t affect their corner of the world, or so long as they can try to save their “own”.
And this is as true for tech and climate change news as it is for foreign policy.
We don’t need to worry about “disinformation”, exactly.
We need to worry about the simple fact that, once we’re reduced to tribalists, we don’t care what’s true or not anymore. All we care about is what we can spin for our own.
So. As you can tell, I came out of my client project and weekend of failed attempts at catch-up in other frivolous realms of written labour… in a decidedly cheery mood.
But then I listened to the latest careful, holistic work of Eric Rosenfield, whose Literate Machine has long been doing the kind of steady creative labour necessary not just for greater media literacy, but also for cultivating the social mindsets necessary for the work of patient, productive thinking about our world.
My endorsement of his project is not the same as endorsement of everything he says (though I do agree with most), but what I especially love is the fact that Rosenfield has committed to “thinking slow” about big background facets of our world. Using mainstream media as a framing device (i.e., the narrative vocabulary that underpins how most of us onboard and process broader cultural ideas), he writes long essays and crafts soothingly recorded video accompaniments on big problems with our paradigm.
His latest piece, “How Capitalism Becomes Feudalism (Severance and Technofuedalism”, might not be saying anything entirely new on the surface (at least, if you’ve been following a wealth of tech and labour news for years), but it’s the how of his project—the way he dedicates himself to laying out a vocabulary and path to more holistic thinking about our culture for everyday readers and listeners—that I most admire. This isn’t work that presents itself as the be-all and end-all of his latest chosen theme. Rather, it’s a launching pad for more intricate discussion (e.g., into how feudalism might not be the most accurate term for what we’re moving through, because feudalism actually had some perks with respect to economic stability) that reminds us of the importance of embodying the changes we want to see in the world.
I don’t feel very patient right now, but my impatience won’t help a bit. It doesn’t give me more agency to fix the world’s problems—but it does make me angrier with my fellow human beings, and with myself, for not being able to get “unstuck” any faster.
I might be frustrated by how much frivolous labour exists in my most economically productive fields, while all around me the world makes abundantly clear that it is committed to cruelty and waste on a global scale; that it is not anywhere near ready to take seriously the needs of climate change reform; and that it is supported in these last gasps of “the old disposition” by a great many everyday tribalists eagerly engaging in disinformation campaigns to preserve the last vestiges of flawed ideas of economic meritocracy, techno-optimism as salvation, and righteous nationalist enterprise.
(Okay, I am definitely frustrated by all of the above.)
But when I’m ready to flip my lid, it is the painstaking work of other people pushing for change—whether on the field of the world’s many agonizing humanitarian and environmental nightmares, or from whatever platforms they have available to them (like Eric Rosenfield of Literate Machine)—that brings me back to earth again.
We are indeed failing as moral entities—individually, culturally, institutionally—in response to our world’s greatest transgressions. And we are frittering away our brief, precious moments as witnesses to the greater cosmos in the process.
But the path to repair doesn’t lie in expecting a snap of our fingers to fix everything.
(If we could shout away our gross collective incompetence, we would have by now!)
No—
Reform lies in the daily, tedious task of retraining ourselves and each other to think and speak and act with greater care and deliberation: firmly, against unconscionable acts of moral equivocation all around us; but also steadily—so that we don’t burn out in the process, from despair whenever we see how deeply lies the current against us.
None of us gets out of this alive.
The world was filled with terrible things before we were born, and it will be filled with terrible things after we are gone.
But it’s a little easier to manage the grinding stupidity of our particular era, when we take turns reminding one another how to breathe better in the sea of such moral decay.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Fascinating essay, though I should warn your highly active subconscious that if "how we keep it all together" is by reminding ourselves to "breath better in the sea of decay," the image is that of shipwrecked castaways holding onto to exploded jetsam in the vast, unbroken sea with no sign of rescue in sight.
Or is that an AI megayacht coming to rescue us? With decarbonization sodas and Party On hats?
We are all just floating and hanging on here, so anything anybody else wants to say to lighten the mood as they clutch their piece, feel free.
Thank you so much for this, Maggie. It's always hard. It's something I wish I'd talked about more in the How Capitalism Will End video; the reason that the early Marxist conviction that capitalism's "inevitable" collapse was right around the corner and would lead to the workers seizing the means of production was so seductive is the same reason why Christian fundamentalist's conviction that the rapture is right around the corner is so seductive: because it's simple and it means you can be sure that everything's going to turn out all right not only in the end but very soon and forever. And the reality is that it's not easy, and it's not sure. Every day is a struggle to try and make things a little bit better. I am not sure how to fix everything, nobody is, but we do the best we can with what we have and try to show how the system could be reformed to the benefit of the many rather than the few. So keep on, you're doing good things and you should keep doing them.