It will worm it’s way into more and more everyday interactions and the bulk of society will accept it like they did cameras everywhere, smart appliances, the digital tracking device in their pocket, and screens in their cars instead of physical controls. Avoiding it will become a lifestyle choice that takes effort, and the secondary market for decades old digital/analog technology will continue to grow.

Quit Meta a few years back, never had Amazon, and haven’t had a computer in… fuck, almost 20yrs now! My phone is a compromise because it’s a work phone, personal phone is a landline (it’s fantastic, you can ignore it and people can’t assume you have it on you and are ignoring them). Still rocking cassettes, cds, dvds, and vhs, some old, some thrifted. When I do drive (which is infrequent) I drive a 40yo dumb car with a manual and windows you still have to crank down. I still use a typewriter. Some of this is deliberate anti-tech, some is just a fondness for vintage tech.

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40s. Pretty much the same as a lot of folks, grew tired of the Reddit bot-verse as well as kept getting banned for encouraging Shermination and posting pictures of Mussolini’s hanging corpse. Not incredibly tech savvy, but yeah, closing in on 30yrs of being on the internet. I still remember the first time I ever logged on. It was at a friend’s house, he went into a chatroom, someone sent us incest themed porn and asked if we want to roleplay a dirty Peter Pan and Wendy chat. Welcome to the internet!

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I started drinking at 13 but never much. It wasn’t until about 15 i finally got blackout drunk. My peer group drank hard in the late 90s and were the binge drinking bar crowd of the early 00s. I’ve lost a few friends to ODs combining booze and pills, accidents while drunk, escalation to heroin, and once had to be resuscitated when i drank so much i quit breathing. It wasn’t until my late 30s that i finally got sick of living like that and reigned in my drinking. Now i never drink at home and maybe go out one afternoon for happy hour and am home by 10 rather than closing out the bar every night.

Alcohol is a rough one because it’s not only an addictive substance, it has a strong social component. When you drink hard your social circle becomes others who drink hard, if you try and quit you have no friends. If you have a hard time making friends while sober but are more at ease with a little buzz, you’ll end up right back at a bar. I’ve been going to the same bar for over 20yrs and there’s regulars who were there before me still on the same barstools.

I graduated in 2000 and a buddy bought a domain to host a forum so our friend group could stay in touch before social media took off. We kinda fell off when MySpace, then FB got big, but now that we’ve all abandoned the latter it’s how we stay in touch.

Most of the big names in scifi/fantasy/action/comedy, so here’s the less common personal favs:

Lake Placid, Hellraiser III, Beastmaster 1 & 2, Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal 2000, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, SLC Punk, Disney’s Robin Hood, Dead Alive, Night of the Lepus, MST3K the Movie, Aquateen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theaters, The Ewok Adventures

Are you encountering these kinds of people when you organize in person in your community or in the vast sea of internet anonymity? If they’re in the real world and so obtuse that your group cannot find any common ground to build on and they’re a liability, show ‘em the door. If they’re online you can attempt a discussion but when it’s obvious from their trolling or lack of response, fuck ‘em. They’re not in it for real change and their only effort towards it is to cause dissension among those willing to put in the work. Eventually this will boil over and leaders will emerge, some might be libs, some anarchists, some socialists, some tankies. Their broad views might differ but the short term goal of confronting fascism will force cooperation and survival. The dipshit playing “more leftist than thou” in their basement will continue to do nothing and will continue to post contrarian content even if the world shifts in their favor because their sense of self depends on being unique in their dissension. There’s also a very real possibility the loudest voices have no dog in the fight because they’re not even what they present themselves to be.

The internet can connect and foster discussion, but not everyone here is worth connecting with or talking to.

Ignore the people trying to stir up dissent among the factions of the resistance. The ability to make edgelord extremist memes is either a luxury of the poster, ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to stoke division.

The left does struggle to put aside differences of opinion on what the ideal future looks like, how to achieve it, and which fires need to be dealt with first. Extreme purity tests are also strangling us. We shouldn’t abandon our values but we also shouldn’t march to extinction patting ourselves on the back saying “well at least I never compromised”. We’re not just damning ourselves, we’re damning our families, our communities, and future generations.

Americans still have one shot at changing course; midterms. There’s a sliver of hope that elections still matter. It won’t instantaneously undo the damage done, but it would be a step. If that’s taken from us, either through cheating, interference, or flat out ignored… welp, fuck it, the America we knew, its pros and cons, is gone. Then every leftist and lib is in the same boat and we’ll be forced to join or die.

In the real world we are talking. While I think protesting is a lost cause under this regime it is a great place to network. When shit hits the fan it’s going to be your community that you need to rely on. Mutual aid networks, food growing/sharing, first aid, gun safety, plans on how to care for the most vulnerable, all that kind of stuff is getting discussed. That kind of stuff ignores purity politics because it’s not political, it’s just the values of the people involved.

You’ve seen it yourself, even the most peaceable of people are contemplating what a worst case scenario might look like and recognizing that a fight might mean shoulder to shoulder with those we don’t 100% align with. The French Resistance didn’t have singular political goal, “fuck these fucking Nazis” was good enough.

Without others you’re just a lone gunman fighting for your own opinions and values, like Ted Kaczynski mailing bombs. Some were for his “cause”, some were for personal revenge. If you publish your manifesto ahead of time you’ll probably get caught, if you publish after and it turns out you’re a selfish nut-job there’s no movement (except for maybe a handful of other nut-jobs). Even if you do succeed, realistically your targets are easily replaceable cogs, not the clockmakers. And the clockmakers are a bureaucracy, even the masters are replaceable, the entire factory has to be torn down. Is it that difficult to understand why we’re not yet at the tipping point where people are ready to abandon their jobs, family and social stability, and possibly lives to fight in the streets? It currently risks everything and gains nothing. Some of it is keyboard warrior talk, but I’d wager there’s a steadily increasing populace slowly preparing themselves for drastic action, they just want it to have real purpose and hopefully achieve something if it’s going to potentially cost them everything.

One of my longest, best relationships was with a woman I met at a bar. We were both regulars, had seen each other before, but had never spoken. Turns out we were both out for a rebound one-night stand after each ending a long term relationship. Despite not looking for depth, we ended up talking the whole night, went home together, then got up and went out for breakfast and spent the whole next day together. We absolutely clicked and moved fast, and even thought we eventually split we are still friends.

Personal opinion from 30yrs of dating- spontaneous clicks happened more easily before internet dating, hook-up apps, or all the digital pre-screening. Right or wrong people make opinions about each other’s digital footprints, which are often only curated half-truths or their attempt to sell their idealize self image without their insecurities. Or, with Tinder, a lot of people aren’t looking for a click and are walls up about letting it happen; the terms of the relationship are short and clear. When the first impression is each other in the flesh you can (generally) get a better feel for who one another are.

I had an opportunity to buy a juvenile peacock. Why not? Learned a lot about caring for peacocks very quickly.

I was the secret.

My brother and I were adopted at birth by an abusive, hyper-religious Christian family. Both of us walked away and never looked back when we were old enough. I knew they moved out of state not too long after my brother left but never bothered to follow-up.

About 24yrs later I get a call from a young woman claiming to be my adopted sister. Turns out my parents moved to the Midwest, reinvented themselves as an older couple who’d never had kids and adopted a Korean girl through their church. She started to suspect in her teens that something wasn’t right because the two decades they raised my brother and I were full of gaps, stories they’d tell one time didn’t match the next time, but it wasn’t until she was a bit older she realized “holy shit, they completely covered up an entire family”. Also lied to her about the nature of her adoption (did that to my brother and I too) as well as learned nothing from their mistakes with us about how to care for a child. So now they have three kids that don’t talk to them and I have a sister that’s young enough to be my daughter that I never met until she was in college!

I’ve been lucky to see Bad Religion over a dozen times in the last 25yrs and they never let me down. They’ve been dropping hints on their socials that their touring years might be coming to a close though. But they’ve earned their retirement. Everything must cease.

Our distant ancestors had just as much capacity for learning as we do, they just used it in different ways because that was what the nature of their daily lives demanded. Where we can recognize dozens of brands by their logo alone, they recognized plants by their leaves, useful stones, and scat. Our accumulated knowledge we pass on doesn’t make any one of us any “smarter”. Some of us alive today are not rocket scientists but have the capacity to be, just as there were people thousands of years ago that had that capacity but not the thousands of years of science and engineering that was needed to build on to take that last step and achieve it.

Solitary living is a luxury made easier by the abundance of technology we have, going it alone in a Stone Age state would be very, very difficult, then and now. Folks who understand things like tool making, agriculture, medicinal plant identification, bushcraft, animal husbandry, hunting/fishing/trap making, and clothing making would have a leg up. Those who have all that and the ability to form small cooperative groups would stand an even greater chance of success. I’d also throw out that despite the rise of digital storage, we have a lot, a lot of printed material in the world. Even if we forget how to read, there’s pictures and illustrations. Kids aren’t raised in isolation, knowledge (even diluted knowledge) gets passed on, and we wouldn’t forget where we once were, and the ruins of civilization would be all around. You’d almost need some sort of sci-fi level disease to wipe all of our minds to get us back to true Stone Age levels of living and prevent us from understanding how scavenged tools could be used. We might forget how to forge steel but we’d keep scavenging it for blades rather than revert to stone.