Good afternoon, beloved -
The worst thing has happened, since I last wrote to you. It wasn't, of course, that a Harris Administration would have achieved justice, or protected the vulnerable from those who meant them violence, or restored the climate to the contours of a safe operating space, because none of those things were ever once in the sheaf of possibilities available to us. But you know I think of voting as harm reduction, and now every task before us will be made so very much harder.
You'll have already seen the righteous calls to rise and fight now. To contest the victors in every moment and at every opportunity — to throw your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels of the apparatus now being assembled to crush the things we believe in, to physically stand in the way of the deportation flights, and monkeywrench the construction of the camps. I've seen, too, the insistence that failing to do so, personally, yourself, immediately and on every occasion, is an inscription of privilege, an abrogation of solidarity and a refusal of our obligation to care for one another.
So I understand that what I have to say now won't go down easy. Some of you might even find it repellent, and I get that too. But it's this: we now need to understand that we are in this struggle for the long haul. That the Tao is not with us. That we will be forced to marshal our resources and to choose our battles wisely, lest we deplete ourselves fruitlessly in trying to rise to each and every outrage and provocation. And — this is the part I imagine will really stick in a few craws — that it is perfectly honorable in this moment to choose a course of lying low, if that's available to you.
This is a very delicate thing I'm suggesting. I was raised to believe that Silence equaled Death, and Action equaled Life. I still believe that. I was raised to believe that passivity in the face of injustice is the same thing as complicity, and I still believe that. I was raised to believe that the whole point of whatever privilege one may enjoy in life is to build spaces of shelter for those more exposed to the machineries of cruelty — and I hope it's obvious that I believe that more fervently than ever, whatever risk to one's own person may be involved. So I want to be very clear that I am not advocating for the kind of internal exile I find repulsive, where people move to achieve psychic self-preservation by simply blotting out what's happening to others, and retreating into the contours of whatever cozy fantasy they manage to erect around them.
What I am saying is that there's a word for frontal resistance from a position of (numerical, tactical and material) weakness, and that word is "suicide."
I want people to understand the sheer magnitude of the forces now arrayed against the hopes we cherish. It isn't merely the grand alignment of authoritarian superstates now clearly in the offing. It isn't even simply that the power of those states is undergirded and extended by the richest men on the planet, and all the techne and other resources their money can buy. It's that the capture and diversion of state power (and public wealth) by those men will allow them to pursue projects at a scale even they have never before attempted, of a particular eugenicist, notionally "longtermist" and utterly posthuman flavor, and that there is no force on Earth left capable of standing in their way (other than perhaps, their own overreach, mutual suspicion, ego and foolishness).
But equally, I want people to understand that this moment, like every moment, contains the seeds of its own reversal. The Tao will turn, as it always does. All our efforts now — and, so far as I can presently see, for the rest of our natural lives — need to be consecrated to hastening the day that it does so. So yes: fight the power where and as you can, but only where it makes sense to do so. Otherwise? Conserve your strength. Guard it, nurture it, cultivate it. If you truly want to shed an umbra of care that's capable of sheltering others, you're going to need it.
§ Right now, most of us are understandably reeling from all of the immediate and obvious harms that will result from this election. But there are also sorrows so far down the list that they presently feel like abstractions, which are nevertheless real and need to be grieved. To offer just one example: my feeling is that needy, emotionally stunted manchild Elon Musk will very shortly be in a position to divert some significant percentage of the budget of the United States toward subsidy of the only thing he truly cares about, his Mars program. It will happen. And where NASA, playing out the last threads of the seriousness in such matters it inherits from the Carl Sagan generation, would likely have gone to some length to avoid contaminating whatever Martian ecosystem may exist, Elon’s program will observe no such hesitancy. Elon doesn't do precautionary principles — not with your body, not with the environments SpaceX presently operates in, not even where an entire planet and its unique and irreplaceable multibillion-year history are concerned. The idea that Mars is not ours to colonize, or to do with what we will, is literally inconceivable to him. It will be 1492 all over again, with about as much care for whatever may currently live there. We will have learned precisely nothing from our blood-drenched history, and will now attempt an entirely literal settler colonialism at planetary scale.
Musk's program will fail, of course, because it will prove impossible to colonize Mars, or really for any Earthly life to long endure or prosper outside the cradle of its birth. But not before we irretrievably, irreversibly, permanently spoil another world. And what is worse is that this spoilation will be purchased at enormous material and human cost, for, to paraphrase Eisenhower, every Starship that is launched, every hab module and rover landed signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed, etc. At just the moment we will desperately need the resources bound up in the making of those things, they will be squandered on one man's utterly infantile, profoundly misdirected ambition — an ambition, as I say, not merely destined to end in futility, but in the destruction of something we haven't even tried to understand and which escapes any conceivable register of value.
This is what I mean when I argue that we haven't really even begun to tally all the consequences of this election. It wasn't, in the end, a choice between Kamala Harris and her opponent. It was a choice between two worldlines, two probability manifolds. We're now decisively committed to one of those two courses of events, and will have no other choice than to see it through.
§ I've just finished reading Absolution, the final installment of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X cycle, which, as it rushed headlong toward its end/ing, reminded me of nothing so much as Dhalgren/as “The Nine Billion Names of God”/as the Young Marble Giants song “Final Day”/as The Thing/as the last few pages of Blood Music, and left me feeling scraped raw and holy, in something approaching awe; listening to BIG|BRAVE's 2024 album A Chaos of Flowers (very Vandermeerian title, that) and the new Eros/Rosa Anschütz jawn Your Truth is a Lie; and watching, for my sins, The Turin Horse, again.
If you should happen to be in or around London next Monday evening the 18th of November, as well, please do join me and Dubravka Sekulić for a Lifehouse talk at the London School of Architecture right here in Dalston (Beechwood Rd, London E8 3DY).
That's about it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 134 of Sunday, 10 November 2024, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊