Just Blowing Off Steam

What I am thinking about right now

I am sitting at the slick, Scandinavian-vibed, modernist East Village cafe where I come to write in the morning, surrounded by healthy, well-dressed, middle class people in their twenties and thirties, all working industriously on their laptops, or studying various subjects. The woman across from me takes notes, in a flower-patterned notebook, on The Allure of Japanese Contemporary Ceramics. Some of the regular customers work in finance, write software, do digital marketing, and so on. I am sure most are liberals.

The average rent for a Manhattan studio apartment is over $4,000. A cup of coffee at this cafe, with tax and tip, runs over $6. An Uber across town can cost $30 plus.

The baristas are thin, willowy NYU students who listen to Bob Dylan and The Silver Jews. They write surrealist poetry and make little zines compiling their own and their friend’s work. Charming bohemian throwbacks, they want to believe it is still 1961.

I sit here thinking about how our society is disintegrating into Fascism. Fascism generally means control of the public consciousness and, eventually, the humiliation and destruction (imprisonment, torture, execution) of those who refuse to submit to the regime. I am wondering how many years I have until I will need to escape the U.S. if I want to avoid that bad fate. Three? Five? Instead of Japanese ceramics and poetry, I think about concentration camps, sociopathic billionaires, and forced neural implants.

I feel the silly, pointless urge to jump on the table and shout at the well-dressed young cafe-dwellers: “Shouldn’t we be doing something together, right now, to stop this Fascist takeover? You guys are young. You have your whole lives ahead of you. Why are you acting like nothing is happening? Don’t you give a fuck about your future?” But everyone would quickly look away, turn their gaze back into their screens. They would wait awkwardly for the police to come and take me away.

Of course, I felt the same way for many years about the ecological emergency. As I wrote in How Soon Is Now, I actually tried this tactic at Burning Man: In 2005, I jumped up on the stage at the Center Cafe while high on LSD. It was the year the festival happened to coincide with Hurricane Katrina. I yelled, screamed, and then spent four days trying to build an insta-movement. My idea was that the Burning Man elite crowd would stay on site together. We would collaborate on designing a new model for society, addressing the existential threat of the ecological crisis by building a transparent social network supporting regenerative practices, mutual aid, and local participatory democracy. We would use artists and musicians as our marketing team. This was one of my many failed efforts.

It is hard to get an accurate picture of how fast temperatures will rise, as there are many variants and models. Getting an accurate picture of anything will become much more difficult in the next years, as the regime relentlessly attacks both science and the coherence of the public mind. Last year, we sailed past 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. As feedback loops within the climate system accelerate warming, we could see a 3 degrees Celsius rise within the next 15 - 20 years. What we just saw with the annihilation of Los Angeles and North Carolina is child’s play compared to what is coming in the next decade or two as temperatures spike. We will experience increasingly frequent, overwhelming disasters, as well as mega-droughts that break agricultural systems.

I know some extremely wealthy people and many who are successful and influential. I’ve been observing their psychology and their mindset for decades. Things are still good for them. They are slow to react. They have many distractions to occupy their time. There are ski resorts to visit, properties to buy, exotic safaris to go on. “Spiritual tourism” whisks them away to mystical sites or visionary medicine journeys. There is always a new adventure awaiting them.

Online, people continue to argue about Musk’s Nazi salute, which he repeated and obviously planned. I appreciate what this woman, the former girlfriend of a White Supremacist, had to say about it on TikTok.