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Alyaza Birze (September 3, 2025)

in an attempt to balance out my non-fiction reading imbalance (currently, 78% of my reading is non-fiction) i've been working on my backlog of fiction books to read. this is easier said than done—i'm rather selective with my fiction reading—and today's entry, Femlandia seems worth singling out as a good example of what i don't care for in fiction. calling this novel consistently bad would potentially be an overstatement of the case, but i don't like it and i would not recommend you seek it out. in writing this post, i've actually bumped it down a half-star from where i initially had it, in fact.

the blurb for this novel—which i will quote verbatim below—might already tip my hand as to the sorts of criticisms that are going to be had for this novel:

Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice—either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.

Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born—and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.

this is because if you've spent any time learning about second-wave feminism, your takeaway from this blurb will probably be something like "'Femlandia' is going to be radical feminism taken to a logical extreme"—and you'd be correct, because that is exactly what it is. in the novel the eponymous Femlandia is essentially a rehashed-take on a lesbian separatist or radical feminist commune from the 1970s. unfortunately, the novel does not compellingly grapple with any of the innumerable purposes, problems, and political theories these communes produced.

the most obvious example of this comes when, upon arriving in Femlandia, our protagonist Miranda is forced to undergo what amounts to a gynecology exam (to prove she was "always a woman") to gain entry to the commune. i'm sure you can see where this is going, and it is played as follows:

I’m flummoxed. “You need a half-assed gynecological exam to satisfy yourself I’m a woman? Really?”

Kate frowns at me, creating lines in a forehead that was, until a moment ago, smooth as a newborn’s. “I need to satisfy myself that you were always a woman.”[...]

“Sounds pretty exclusionary to me,” I say.

Kate shrugs. “Let me ask you something. You see how we are here, right?” She waves one hand over her bare breasts. “How free do you think we would be if we started letting in male residents?”

“If they identify as women, though—”

I’m cut off before I can finish. “They can identify as a fucking hedgehog for all I care. I’m talking about what they are. Not what they think they are or what they want to be. It’s a slippery slope. You let in one, you have to let in all. There’s a reason your mother called this place Femlandia. Get used to it.”

at face the trans-exclusionary positioning the novel takes here—which is used in the story to, in effect, violate every woman upon entry to Femlandia—is fine, and in fact would be a potentially interesting as a plot device, or alternatively as a commentary on the consequences of idealizing and essentializing womanhood. the problem is the novel does not do either of these things—in fact, it barely lingers on this detail; it barely considers the social and political consequences of such an essentialist policy (one that, again, victimizes women analogously to how the world outside Femlandia does); and it barely even addresses this detail in any real way after bringing it up. instead, Miranda does just kind of get over it despite her initial protestation, and the fact that this radical feminist commune is trans-exclusionary is taken for granted from then on because there are, as far as i can tell, no trans characters in the book. this is unfortunate. moreover, it's not very good writing, and it's a missed opportunity that directly leads to the novel's biggest problem: instead of, say, trans people being the mechanism through which the consequences of this type of feminism and separatism (and where they become misandry and bigotry) are explored, we instead get a frankly unconvincing and comically villainous level of man-hatred as a substitute.

Miranda's mom Win, for example, spends virtually the entire novel talking about men as if she is Valerie Solanas. i would call this exaggeratory but she literally kills her husband for being an annoying manchild and frames it as a suicide, and then flees when Miranda threatens to call the cops on her for this. she is rather obviously a beyond-the-pale evil character and unto itself that would not be a problem, but this is done in such an extremely silly and over-the-top way that it just cannot be taken seriously. it does not help that chapter after chapter of her rationale is anvil-blunt nonsense like this (directed in this case at Miranda for not being sufficiently misandrist)—

“I’ve known women like you. Some people call you deniers; some people call you other names. No reason to get into a name-calling match, though, so let’s just say it like it is. You’re the kind of woman who thinks that because a pile of shit didn’t fall on you, there was no pile of shit. It didn’t exist, right? It didn’t come crashing down out of the sky like a dump-truck load of manure and fall on anyone else. You didn’t get groped by an uncle or a priest or your own goddamned father, so no one else got groped. You didn’t wake up one morning and discover dried jism on your panties, so no one else woke up that way. You weren’t beaten because supper was late or cold or not what your wonderful Mr. Right had a craving for that evening, so no other woman took a beating.”

—that is simply not a compelling or convincing caricature of a radical feminist, or any coherent political belief besides blind misandry. it would not be convincing even if Win were just a husband-murderer and Femlandia an unusually misandrist women's commune, because the logic she uses wouldn't even justify that level of action on her part. but not content to just be a husband-murderer, Win's Femlandia is upheld by a grotesque, poor-man's-Omelas system—that Win signed off on, to be clear—wherein they abuse male children and young adults as a subhuman breeder class, fit only for their semen and otherwise treated as feral livestock, to perpetuate Femlandia in the absence of male residents. there is literally no logic that could justify this (or the evil it represents) and Win hardly even tries to do so narratively, instead upholding it through brainwashing and coercion.

the effect of this is that it collapses what could be a nuanced (or at least reasonably complex) story into a one-dimensional one—Win is just a monstrous person with no redeeming qualities and no understandable belief system. she is a frankly sociopathic character whose actions in the narrative amount to taking vulnerable women under her wing, secluding them, playing upon their worst traumas, and making them into her loyal subjects. making her into a narrative manifestation of feminism with these traits is, needless to say, something that must be executed with care—care that is not really taken here and which, as a result, makes it concerningly easy to read this novel as explicitly anti-feminist. i might even go so far as to say that, because Win is so explicitly misandrist and man-hating—an avatar of what "excessive" feminism might look like—that an anti-feminist reading is the default reading you would come away with here.

a friend of mine put it like this while i liveblogged this on Discord: "thinking generously this story has a place but i don't think the author has thought about it beyond a gross caricature of the ideology." in a lot of ways this novel's narrative is, at least in what it's trying to say, not much better than a 336-page Virgin vs. Chad meme. i do not like it when a novel reads this way.

i particularly do not like it here, because there is a lot to genuinely critique about radical feminism (especially modern radical feminism), political separatism, trans exclusion, and all the other things this novel tries to touch on with at-best mixed results. the lengthy article "On Wimmins Land" by Sasha Archibald comes to my mind here, with its voluminous paragraphs about the triumphs, but also the troubles, of separatist feminist communal life and the political theories upholding it:

Establishing rules was a quagmire. How best to collectivize labor when some participants had mobility issues? How to share childcare when not all women wanted to care for young children, and not all mothers wanted to cede control? Drug-use was central to some women’s spiritual practices, but a drug bust would bring policemen to the land. Some thought it wise to have guns — commonplace in this part of Oregon — while others were adamantly opposed. Zealous efforts to achieve fairness tended to sharpen the perception of unfairness, and anarchist-minded land-dykes never entirely agreed that rules were necessary. [...] Cabbage Lane started a monthly Singles Week, during which the names of lovers-to-be were drawn out of a hat. Residents at WomanShare used Tarot to decide who would sleep in what bed on a given night, while others maintained ménages à trois. Communal masturbation was not uncommon, and loud lovemaking declared one’s right to pleasure. [...] Men were unequivocally banned from women’s lands, but the question of when exactly a boy becomes a man constituted one of separatism’s great quandaries. Some collectives allowed male children under eleven years old, some none at all, some one male child but no more, and some drew the line at breastfeeding — after weaning, male infants had to go. [...] Trans women were perceived through the distortions of cis-gendered bias, and commonly characterized as men who were using disguises to penetrate women’s attempts at privacy. Some factions espoused outright transphobic violence.

and i think a better novel would grapple with these sorts of things instead of constantly lingering on a character's belief that "[...]men were animals. She would have called them pigs but found no reason to insult a perfectly good pig with the comparison. Hyenas, maybe. Jackals. Anything wild that ran in a pack and looked out for itself first. But not anything that could be considered cute, edible, or useful." or that character's hatred of dresses because they reinforce patriarchy or—to reiterate—that character's Omelas-like system that uses male children as breeders.

so it goes in fiction. there is necessarily a great deal of shlock and slop out there and to be a part of this mass is not the worst crime. as i said to start out, though, skip this one. or if you find my descriptions compelling enough to explore for yourself—and also want to read a novel i consider a trainwreck—go check it out of a library i guess. maybe Dalcher's other books are worth financially supporting her for; this one is not.

Alyaza Birze (August 26, 2025)

last week's reading was Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis; this book is interesting primarily because it is Varoufakis' attempt to put to paper a unified theory of the economic system he thinks is currently replacing (or perhaps has already replaced) capitalism. this is the much-talked-about "technofeudalism," through which (to simplify) cloud capital¹ is used to create cloud proles ("waged workers driven to their physical limits by cloud-based algorithms") and cloud serfs ("persons unattached to any corporation (i.e. non-workers) [who] choose to labour long and often hard, for free, to reproduce cloud capital’s stock, e.g. with posts, videos, photos, reviews and lots of clicking that makes digital platforms more attractive to others.") who are forced to partake in the cloud fiefs that enrichen cloudalists.

now, i will say i am in agreement with Varoufakis and his description of a change in the economic system; technofeudalism is obviously real, manifested most prominently in the large-scale transition to a digital rentier economy, and it is innately linked to things like enshittification. i diverge from Varoufakis here though. i think he does not make an especially compelling case in attempting to distinguish technofeudalism as a wholly distinct economic system that has eaten capitalism from the inside-out. when, for example, he describes the form of Amazon at length—

Imagine the following scene straight out of the science-fiction storybook. You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first, everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out that all the shops, indeed every building, belong to a chap called Jeff. He may not own the factories that produce the stuff sold in his shops but he owns an algorithm that takes a cut for each sale and he gets to decide what can be sold and what cannot.

If that were all, the scene would evoke an old Western in which a lonesome cowboy rides into town to discover that a podgy strongman owns the saloon bar, the grocery store, the post office, the railway, the bank and, naturally, the sheriff. Except that isn’t all. Jeff owns more than the shops and the public buildings. He also owns the dirt you walk on, the bench you sit on, even the air you breathe. In fact, in this weird town everything you see (and don’t see) is regulated by Jeff’s algorithm: you and I may be walking next to each other, our eyes trained in the same direction, but the view provided to us by the algorithm is entirely bespoke, carefully curated according to Jeff’s priorities. Everyone navigating their way around amazon.com – except Jeff – is wandering in algorithmically constructed isolation.

This is no market town. It is not even some form of hyper-capitalist digital market. Even the ugliest of markets are meeting places where people can interact and exchange information reasonably freely. In fact, it’s even worse than a totally monopolised market – there, at least, the buyers can talk to each other, form associations, perhaps organise a consumer boycott to force the monopolist to reduce a price or to improve a quality. Not so in Jeff’s realm, where everything and everyone is intermediated not by the disinterested invisible hand of the market but by an algorithm that works for Jeff’s bottom line and dances exclusively to his tune.

—i personally find it hard to believe that what is described is a new economic system rather than the logical, morphological conclusion of an omnipresent capitalist monopoly/oligopoly. in other words, i think that technofeudalism is primarily describing an inevitable outcome of the hyper-consolidated capitalist economy that we currently live under, particularly as separation between our digital and physical existence blurs.

probably the easiest way to illustrate my contention is to ask yourself one question, which is: doesn't it just obviously make sense for a monopoly (or oligopoly) under capitalism to establish a rentier relationship with its consumers as the next incremental step in maximizing profits? the very nature of a monopoly (or oligopoly) is that there is no real freedom of choice; either you consume a commodity or product on the terms of the monopoly providing it or you do without it—effectively the ideal leverage needed to create a rentier relationship where one did not previously exist. to say that the modern economy is rife with leverage of this sort over consumers is also putting it lightly: avoiding the rentier monopolies and oligopolies is not a particularly serious option when they operate most of the internet's digital scaffolding, facilitate most of the internet's traffic, and mediate most of the internet's commerce. (even Varoufakis recognizes consumer withdrawal as an untenable option in most cases.)

this behavior does not seem new

my contention might prompt a question like why this did not occur previously—or at least did not occur unambiguously—in the prior history of capitalism. i cannot claim absolute knowledge on this subject, but the capability to do this seems like it would be a function of globalization and corporate consolidation more than anything. i suspect that pre-Information Age capitalists were prevented from such things because they generally lacked the kind of infrastructural omnipresence major corporations have today; they also had, in many cases, stronger regulatory and political headwinds to contend with; and in some cases they also simply had too many serious competitors to realistically implement the kinds of at-scale rentier economies which now permeate our daily lives.

it is also true, though, that in some pre-Information Age cases capitalists did still have one or more of these dynamics working in their favor—and they often demonstrated an orientation toward rentier relationships as such (just on a smaller scale versus today). company towns and company stores—although not exact matches to what is taking place here—were one such reasonably widespread example; these institutions, which persisted until the proliferation of the automobile and the decline of industrial paternalism, often gave corporations extremely direct and extractivist power over the lives and labor of their employees. at the larger scale, AT&T's long-held Bell System vertical monopoly also supports the belief that a rentier relationship is the next logical step for any sufficiently entrenched monopoly (or oligopoly). beyond the structure of the Bell System (which obliged its operating companies to pay a "license contract" of up to 2.5% of their gross annual revenues to AT&T, plus cash dividends, in exchange for AT&T's services), AT&T was alleged by the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House to have

forced competitors “engaged in the rendition of telephone service to acquire AT&T patent license under threat of (...) patent infringement suits,” or refused “to issue patent licenses except on condition” to be able to control the telephone manufacturer or by “refusing to authorize the manufacture (...) of telephones (...) under patents controlled by (...) the Bell System” or by “refusing to make available to the telegraphy industry the basic patents on the vacuum tube” that are essential for telegraphy to compete with telephone or by refusing to purchase equipment “under patents which are not controlled by Western or AT&T, which are known to be superior”

this was fairly straightforward attempt to make a rentier relationship out of AT&T business partners and consumers, if you ask me. (the behavior was also, as an aside, instrumental in justifying the 1956 consent decree that limited AT&T's monopoly to a maximum of 85% of the US telephone network, obliged it to divest its holdings in other countries, and made all of its patents royalty-free.)

where i think Varoufakis gets his wires crossed

if i had to guess what part of Varoufakis' analysis steers him toward a conclusion i don't agree with, it would be in making the following assertion:

[...]a commodity is a thing or service produced to be sold for profit. Search results are not produced to be sold. Alexa and Siri do not answer our questions for a fee. Like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, their purpose is entirely different: to capture and modify our attention.

Varoufakis uses this assertion to advance the conclusion that "[...]this power over our attention that allows them to collect cloud rent from the vassal capitalists who are in the old-fashioned business of selling their commodities. Ultimately, the cloudalist’s investment is aimed not at competing within a capitalist market but in getting us to exit capitalist markets altogether."

but i think this is—in several ways—a rather obvious misread. it is, for one, actually quite debatable whether search results—and data more generally—"are not produced to be sold;" but even if they aren't intended to, there is still exceptional market incentive to do so once that data has been collected, making any distinction an academic one. in the words of Richard Seymour, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered [...] We write to the machine, it collects and aggregates our desires and fantasies, segments them by market and demographic and sells them back to us as a commodity experience." that data has such undeniable value gives meaning to that oft-repeated axiom, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." that data becomes profit when commodified is also, arguably, the very thing which gives rise to the regime of surveillance capitalism we increasingly live under.

there are also no shortage of other commodities to be considered: attention, as even Varoufakis notes in another section of the book, is also a commodity (albeit an abstract one) in a capitalist economy; it has, needless to say, become a dominant dynamic in the digitally-mediated attention economy. algorithms also commodify our everyday lives, our self-image, our person. virtually anything and everything in the digital space is at risk, at any point, of being turned into a commodity—because the system we live in, although increasingly unrecognizable from traditional Marxist descriptions of the economy, is still an essentially capitalist system defined by production for profit.

i suppose you could say my belief here, then, is one described by Murray Bookchin. in Social Ecology and Communalism (2006), he wrote that—

Capitalism is unquestionably the most dynamic society ever to appear in history. By definition, to be sure, it always remains a system of commodity exchange in which objects that are made for sale and profit pervade and mediate most human relations. Yet capitalism is also a highly mutable system, continually advancing the brutal maxim that whatever enterprise does not grow at the expense of its rivals must die. Hence “growth” and perpetual change become the very laws of life of capitalist existence. This means that capitalism never remains permanently in only one form; it must always transform the institutions that arise from its basic social relations.

—and this is what i think Varoufakis has failed to take into account in some way. the capitalist system was always bound to change with the Information Age, because the Information Age begat a wholly new set of social relations and mediums to mediate them; likewise, the financial system has never been a stable one, always mutating into new things that trailblaze new assets for speculation and profit. neither change means that we have left capitalism, though, it just means that capitalism has taken a new form—really, it's no more than the basic interaction of base and superstructure.

we are still governed by capitalists who want wealth, and their corporations which exist to make objects for sale and profit. companies like Uber still angle, fundamentally, to give a return on investment. as argued (rather convincingly, in my view) by Palo Alto author Malcolm Harris, there is a surprisingly direct throughline between the archconservative, anti-New Deal economic ideology of Herbert Hoover and the modern sentiments of Silicon Valley capitalists and their technology today. says Harris at one point, "Even Silicon Valley’s liberals worship [Friedrich] Hayek"—Hayek being one of the cadre of capitalist thinkers promoted by the Hooverites in their war against liberalism and the social safety net. (Milton Friedman is another.) technofeudalism seems, to me, a noteworthy new development but fundamentally more of the same capitalist ideology.

notes

¹ defined by Varoufakis as

[...]the agglomeration of networked machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications’ hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks such as inciting billons of non-waged people (cloud serfs) to work for free (and often unconsciously) at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock; or helping us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc., so impressively in tune with our interests that we become predisposed to other goods sold on cloud fiefs or platforms (e.g. Amazon.com), which are running on exactly the same digital network that helps us switch off the lights while recommending to us books, films and holidays, etc.; or utilising AI and Big Data to command workers’ labour (cloud proles) on the factory floor while driving the energy networks, the robots, the trucks, the automated production lines and the 3D printers that bypass conventional manufacturing

Alyaza Birze (August 25, 2025)

earlier this month i read There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone; in the course of that reading, a section of Part Two stood out as demonstrating many of the worst, most ghoulish aspects of housing politics today. today we're going to focus on one of these aspects: the intentional murder of public housing.

i'm sure most of my audience doesn't need me to tell them that public housing was intentionally murdered; however, you might be unfamiliar with how this was done in practice. it was not just that public housing—over a number of presidential administrations—was racialized into housing suitable only for non-whites; that public housing was stigmatized as poverty-stricken, portrayed as crime-infested, described as full of drug-addicts and degenerates, and written off as “monstrous, depressing places,” in the words of Richard Nixon; or that public housing was defunded by a thousand, bipartisan cuts. it was that public housing, in many cases, was violently dismantled by capital in the service of profit—a neoliberal spin on the "slum clearance" of old. case in point, Atlanta, which Goldstone notes served as the model for contemporary dismembering of existing public housing stock:

[Beginning in 1994] Atlanta Housing Authority embarked on an ambitious campaign to dismantle the city’s public housing. Democratic mayor Bill Campbell appointed Renée Glover, a former Wall Street lawyer, to serve as the CEO of the agency. Under her leadership, AHA showed little interest in refurbishing Atlanta’s dilapidated projects, where a remarkable 13 percent of the city’s population (and 40 percent of schoolchildren) were living—a greater proportion than in any other American city. Rather, the agency rebranded itself as a “diversified real estate company” and took on the new mission of creating entire communities “from the ground up,” as Glover put it—which meant tearing down public housing complexes, giving eligible families vouchers, and enlisting private developers to build, own, and manage mixed-income communities where the projects had once stood.

But AHA’s innovations didn’t stop there. Inspired by efforts at the federal level to move people from “welfare to work,” AHA became the first housing authority in the country to impose a strict work requirement on its beneficiaries. These measures, declared an admiring column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had turned the city’s housing authority into a “conservative’s dream.” When Glover described her approach as revolutionary, she wasn’t exaggerating. The Atlanta Model, as it came to be known, was soon adopted as the blueprint for redevelopment in Chicago, Miami, and a number of other major cities.

the beauty of this mass-privatization for capital was the immense value and profit it provided to all of its participants—with the exception of actual tenants, who were left to flounder at the whims of the housing market and almost wholly cleansed from their long-time neighborhoods. particularly indicative of the fate of social housing tenants was what happened to the Techwood Homes project (once the pride of the Public Works Administration). despite "$1 billion of private investment that poured into the area" after its demolition in 1995—or rather, because of that $1 billion in private investment—the vast, vast majority of its tenants were displaced in favor of upscale tenants from which a much greater profit could be derived. again, quoting Goldstone,

In Atlanta, as in other booming cities where apartment vacancies were at an all-time low and rents in the private market were soaring, [Section 8] voucher holders suddenly found themselves competing for fewer and fewer eligible units. Many voucher-accepting landlords saw that they could extract greater profits from unassisted tenants.

to say nothing of the aforementioned stigmatization of public housing tenants (and low-income tenants generally), which wrought consequences far beyond the bounds of public housing projects like Techwood Homes. even though Section 8 was—in effect—a compromise with capital, capital-holders fought obliged participation in the program and, through the decades between the New Deal and present day, grew increasingly oppositional to the tenants reliant upon it for shelter. when Techwood Homes was demolished—along with every other public housing project in Atlanta—it reflected the belief that people dependant on Section 8 are not worthy of anything. there is no money to be made off of them; they are not responsible enough to deserve shelter, even from the government.

the result has been exactly what you would expect. even before the onerous requirements applied to voucher holders, many privately-operated apartments simply do not take Section 8 and render the value of holding a voucher moot. the "socioeconomic mobility" that is ostensibly offered by Section 8 is totally vaporous under market conditions, because a Section 8 tenant is invariably a unit operated at a relative loss for a landlord when the precious few vacant units to go around are a profiteer's dream. in the absence of public housing, there is no possibility here but a sort of social purification.

Alyaza Birze (July 14, 2025)

welcome back to birzeblog, where i think i'll attempt to adhere to a five-on, two-off week schedule of posting (unless i have too many good ideas i pre-write, in which case this will not happen; or unless i burn out, in which case i dunno we'll figure something out). today's source of ire comes from the New Democratic Party of Canada, and its Socialist Caucus.

see, the NDP Socialist Caucus is very strange because—even though the NDP was historically a democratic socialist party and still rides on its success as one—nowadays there are apparently just no normal socialists in Canada or something. i don't know what the fuck happened here, but at some point the rump of organized socialists within the party veered hard into nonsense campism that has them glowingly endorsing the writings of uninformed red-brown dipshits like Aaron Maté.¹ not surprisingly, this disposition has rendered what should be a healthy tendency within the NDP little more than a loose array of cranks nobody wants to work with, and left organized socialism basically homeless in Canada unless you want to try and make one of the Communist Party of Canada or Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist) good.

for a fleeting moment this year, though, i thought the Socialist Caucus had finally gotten over this in the specific context of nominating a candidate for the upcoming NDP leadership election. they picked Yves Engler, a seemingly-normal activist and author who explicitly identifies as a democratic socialist and—in his own words—

understands the necessity of structural transformation: affordable public housing, universal pharmacare, indigenous self-determination, closing tax havens used by the super-rich and fostering worker-owned cooperatives to further economic democracy. He also advocates for public ownership and democratic, workers’ control of critical sectors, including auto, banking, and public utilities, to ensure that public benefit, and not private profit, is central to Canada’s economy.

sounds good enough, right? unfortunately, my literal one week of optimism was quickly shattered by learning that he (1) maintains a Twitter account for no apparent reason and (2) he apparently spends a non-trivial amount of time arguing with people on Twitter about dumb nonsense. this is not an ideal quality of someone running for leadership of a major political party, made only worse when i discovered that one of his particular dumb things to argue over is the Rwandan genocide—and seemingly whether it actually was one, how many people were killed, and whether there was actually a double genocide.

if that all sounds nonsensical, yes, it is. and yet he wrote a whole blogpost about the subject in 2017, in which we can see the wheels of absolute nonsense turning. oh, how i yearn for a Socialist Caucus person who can be normal.

the many, many problems with being an idiot about the Rwandan genocide

to start out with: the Rwandan genocide is, in fact, a genocide—and it is potentially the most unambiguous and mechanical genocide since the Holocaust. there is no ambiguity here unless you're a fucking weirdo. even academics who believe in the lower bound of victims will unambiguously tell you it was a genocide, and we know very intimately about the pre-planning and agitation of that genocide by radical Hutu politicians and thought-leaders. go read We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch or—if you prefer accounts that are more academic and recent—The Order of Genocide by Scott Strauss and Media and Mass Atrocity edited by Allan Thompson. putting Rwandan genocide in scarequotes (as Engler does in this blogpost) and then arguing that there was no top-down plan or desire to exterminate Tutsis from Rwanda (as if there needed to even be such an explicit plan when the entire scaffolding for mass, popular violence had already been built before 1994—but especially in light of the evidence of Hutu ultranationalist weaponization of community and state power)² is chickenshit revisionism of the highest order and unserious.

the weird, concern-trollesque attitude about the number killed and the composition—as exemplified by this excerpt—is also really chickenshit:

While the exact figure is unknown and somewhat contested, Rwanda’s 1991 Census calculated 596,387 Tutsi. Initially sponsored by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the GenoDynamics project by the Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia Allan Stam and University of Michigan political science professor Christian Davenport put the number slightly lower at 500,000. Others claim the Hutu-government of the time sought to suppress Tutsi population statistics and estimate a few hundred thousand more Rwandan Tutsi. But, a significant number of Tutsi survived the hundred days of killing.

[...] the higher the death toll one cites for the genocidal violence the greater the number and percentage of Hutu victims. In the 2014 BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story Stam explains, “if a million people died in Rwanda in 1994 — and that’s certainly possible — there is no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi…Because there weren’t enough Tutsi in the country.” The idea there was as many, or even more, Hutu killed complicates the “long planned genocide” narrative pushed by the regime in Kigali and its Anglo-Saxon backers.

almost all of this is nonsense. about the only correct thing is that a significant number of Tutsi did survive the genocide; but what that means in practice is still consensus for a figure of approximately two-thirds of the Tutsi population—between 491,000 and 662,000 Tutsis—being exterminated in days between April 7 and July 19, 1994. this is an incredibly high rate of killing, and it seems rather hard to disagree with the notion that the rapid advance of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was the only thing that prevented the genocide from being even more substantial. it assuredly was not because, as Engler seems to want to believe, the genocide was a wholly spontaneous and complicated outburst of rage at the assassination of a president.

Engler predicating a lot of his position on taking exact numbers from a census conducted in Rwanda at face value—despite Rwanda being a country with (1) a long history, even prior to 1991, of ethnic violence and discrimination which would have incentivized distortion of figures and false-identification; and (2) an economy smaller than virtually every US state plus a GDP per capita of generously $4,500, meaning severe limitations to the rigor of such a census—also suggests he is frankly stupid or bad faith, and probably a mix of both. the United States spent approximately $14 billion on its last census and still appreciably undercounted or overcounted many of its figures. there is literally no reason to believe that there is precise rigor underpinning the 1991 Rwanda census and you'll be unsurprised to learn that virtually nobody who does serious study of Rwanda takes it the way his blogpost does. indeed, even the lower bound estimates of Rwandan genocide deaths such as those by Omar Shahabudin McDoom find it highly probable that Tutsis in Rwanda were undercounted. the work of Marijke Verpoorten—which, as an aside, attempts to work out the number of Hutu deaths too—has data which explicitly suggests at least one-fifth (21 percent!!) of Tutsi were undercounted in the 1991.

incidentally, Verpoorten's work also clearly indicates the pathetic basis—however generous you want to be to Hutu institutions or ungenerous you want to be to Tutsi ones—on which the "double genocide" theory implied by Engler currently rests, at least in the context of the Rwandan genocide itself.⁴ i think it would be uncontroversial to say that the Rwandan Patriotic Front engaged in large-scale war crimes and reprisal violence; but, Hutus were simply not victimized by genocidal mass killings when the RPF overthrew the incumbent government, and it's dumb to argue otherwise. despite their far greater numbers in Rwanda it's actually hard to even arrive at a comparable number of Hutu deaths to Tutsi ones. even an expanded time-period (comprising the entire decade of the 1990s)—and counting all Hutu fatalities without discriminating their immediate cause³—only allows Verpoorten to arrive at a "guestimate of 542,000, surrounded by a very large uncertainty interval." more selective numbers are substantially less generous to any potential "double genocide" theory; the Alison Des Forges (of Human Rights Watch) and Robert Gersony (of the United Nations) estimates that most academics defer to are 25,000 to 40,000 Hutu deaths by the RPF, while Davenport and Stam estimate closer to 80,000. i will grant a caveat that best estimates of Hutu deaths remain quite bad and elementary, so we cannot be quite as definitive as we can be with Tutsi deaths. but at the end of the day the evidence is extremely weak no matter how you currently slice it; as you would expect, almost no Rwandan genocide scholars i know of endorse the "double genocide" theory.

why even be a crank about this shit?

i truly do not know why someone would be a crank about this, given the lack of relevance Rwanda has to world affairs. nor do i have any idea what Engler means when he insists there's a Washington—London—Kigali axis of ideology beyond "generic neo-colonialism that causes Rwanda to have a large reliance on Western foreign aid"—a state of being that upon even cursory examination seems like can't possible be what he's talking about, since it would be stupid to rest an argument on this. to the extent that Kagame-era Rwanda shapes the discourse here, it's through attempting to enforce a domestic, hegemonic narrative of the genocide that can shape external perception. but this effort—or subsidizing Rwanda through foreign aid—hardly stops either the US or UK from being critical of the country and its authoritarianism. and official Rwandan government statistics and positions on the genocide are certainly not taken seriously by genocide scholars just because Rwanda is currently a darling child of the West and wants to enforce a specific idea of what the genocide was. (in fact these propaganda efforts have drawn much scholarly scrutiny in their own right.)

but also as a final point—and far from "Washington and London’s support for the RPF" as alleged by Engler—bungling the Rwandan genocide seems to be the common, shallow denominator in how most Western countries currently align with the country. so far as i can find, the United States and United Kingdom had little if any involvement in Rwanda prior to the genocide because this was not their African post-colony to care about and subjugate. UNAMIR, the UN mission intended to help carry out the Arusha Accords, was a total failure. and the French, of course, explicitly sided with the genocidaires (and only recently owned up to any level of complicity in the genocide) because Rwanda was in the francosphere.⁵ they very much did not want Kagame in power over Habyarimana! deference to Rwanda frankly seems to flow from perception of the genocide as the fuck up du jour of recent Western foreign policy, a catastrophe that Western leaders clearly knew was happening in gruesome detail from the beginning and yet did nothing about. in this respect, support for Rwanda through foreign and military aid should perhaps be understood more as a sort of "reparations" than anything else—but certainly not because the West really loves Paul Kagame or what have you (and to the extent it does, only because he's ostensibly rebuilt the country since the genocide).

at some point the NDP really should do something about this—or at the very least other socialists within the party, of which there are presumably many, should organize a socialist caucus that isn't being steered by people who die on really dumb hills like this. i'm not even saying you have to abandon all the campism—although i'll be honest that i have a generally low opinion of most campist takes too, and the Socialist Caucus has a lot of positions like that i haven't touched on here—but the stuff profiled here is just deeply embarrassing to be associated with. it doesn't even make sense!

notes

¹ i would simply not be a conspiracy theorist and obvious Assad defender who has literally gone to Syria to "observe" its fraudulent elections, personally.

² including but not limited to: the formation and arming of the ostensibly defensive (but later genocidal) Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi paramilitaries; the rapid expansion of the Rwandan Armed Forces; the growing ethnic violence against Tutsis in Rwanda and the neighboring mass-violence against Tutsis in Burundi following the assassination of that country's first Hutu president; the proliferation of anti-Tutsi propaganda documents (such as the Hutu Ten Commandments) and mass-media networks (such as Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the infamous "Radio Genocide"); the weaponization of Umuganda (community service/work) meetings; and so on.

³ in other words, including stuff like "killings done to Hutus by other Hutus, particularly during the course of the genocide." this would not be a one-for-one analogue to genocidal violence against Tutsis.

⁴ there is a somewhat compelling argument to be made that the massacres of Hutus during the First Congo War were genocidal in character, but luckily Engler is not making this argument.

⁵ as part of the broader Françafrique policy

Alyaza Birze (July 11, 2025)

today's blog post is disorganized and short, but is a thumbnail sketch of why i think confederal models are severely underrated online. the catalyst for this belief begins with this observation by Viktor Lofgren in his blog Marginalia:

If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible. Make that a design goal of the site. Pump those subscriber numbers up. What you’ll get is a place where everyone is a stranger, where being a jerk is the norm, where there is no sense of belonging, where civility and arguing in good faith is irrelevant because you’re not talking to someone, you’re performing in front of an audience to make the number next to your comment go up so you can briefly feel something that almost resembles belonging and shared values.

when we talk about communities online, what virtually all of us mean are shared, predictable, stable common spaces organized around commonalities. i don't think i need to tell you, reader, that infinite—and especially sudden—growth is completely anathema to this. to adapt a phrase, it effectively acts to dissolve the people and elect another. infinite growth can only rob a space of any sense of stability, and deny it the natural ability to incorporate and assimilate newcomers—this denial is what underpins the Eternal September phenomenon.

so, this would seem to imply out best energies are placed toward smaller communities which will not be subject to this (or at least are much less likely to fall victim to it). but many of us still find large-scale communities and platforms useful—it's social media so we generally want to be where people actually are at least some of the time. how do we square the circle here, then? this is where i think confederal models come in.

what i think we need, desperately, are groupings of communities with shared (and democratically deliberated) bounds, purpose, goals, and ideals. the sense of mass-connection in such a case would then be derived not from throwing the door open and blowing up any common purpose but from being able to interface with a larger network of people where and when you want to do that. Mastodon at its best take a very similar form to this idea, and federated services in general make this far more possible as we continue through the 2020s. (but Mastodon i should caveat is also full of places which are not like that, and institutionally it isn't particularly confederal except in the extremely nebulous sense of "everyone here is committing to decentralization.")

this is in large part the premise of Website League as it currently exists and, in particular, my minifesto for a democratic website confederation (draft) which currently serves as a lot of its ideological justification.

(hopefully, i'll be able to get around to a fuller explanation at some point in the near future. but i want to put the idea out there, and i don't think i ever put the minifesto in my RSS feed. consider it your homework for the week or something.)

Alyaza Birze (July 10, 2025)

i've noticed a plethora of new Cohost people on Bluesky in the past few days—not an interesting observation to most of you, i'm sure. what makes it interesting to me is that so many of these people swore off social media when Cohost announced its shutdown. but here they are, on social media again. this feels like a rather depressing coda to the website, and it makes me think.

did Cohost lose? i use that somewhat rhetorically here—a website can't lose, Cohost's ideals will probably always be represented here or there and by its userbase—but it does feel like most of the initial optimism of what would come after Cohost has faded away, replaced with nothing but resignation to consolidating where everyone else is. for some people there had been a sense that a Cohost blogosphere would rise from the ruins of the site and, at least initially, a lot of people did set up blogs or personal websites. there were other projects too; my particular lot has been cast in with the Website League and Auldnoir (a forum not intended to be a post-Cohost, but which had huge overlap with the site), while others set up the Fourth Place Forum

but less than a year later it doesn't seem like much of any of this is going anywhere. Website League is reasonably active for what it is, but entropy has clearly taken its course in momentum for the project; it's worse with Fourth Place Forum as far as i can tell. and the Cohost blogosphere is, frankly, moribund from my perspective and in my pretty sizable RSS feed. a lot of people have lapsed into complete dormancy, while even blogs that aren't often really post with any consistency.¹ most of the updates are made by about five blogs.

what we've all seemingly done is, as Jae described in "(a) cohost postmortem", consolidated back into the mostly-corporate places we already were—retreated into smaller communities on Discord or Tumblr and stuck outposts on Bluesky to signal that we still exist. this is very understandable—most of my social interactions with others are also on Discord (via OTAlt), so it's not like i'm in some holier than thou position to throw stones here—but it does also suggest that, collectively, we've given up on better things being possible online. if not by word, undoubtedly by deed. perhaps if Fukuyama had simply theorized that dissolution of Cohost was the fabled end of history rather than the dissolution of the Soviet Union he'd have a real argument. the Last Website seems a very capitalist-realist one these days, more a Twitter and less a Cohost.

the n+1th website reality—what a time. we're all in our own silos now, and naturally we're (unless you're fortunate enough to have a good Mastodon instance, i suppose) no closer to having any input over the form and function of those silos in practice. the creep of theocratic fascism and technofeudalism continue on the backend, the hegemony of the technolibertarians continues over the front. when Discord inevitably shits itself everybody will presumably be in for some rather painful adjustment having put our eggs in one basket. but we're already paying for consequences of the silo model besides a singular point of failure. "you are probably better served among friends," says Jae, and i agree with this, but the Group Chat form—as mediated through the silos we're all stuck in now—is not exactly conducive to large-scale reproduction. if Cohost was the public square where i could constantly interact with (and receive feedback from) many people of all stripes, what is now asked of me is structurally analogous to personally visiting dozens of homes every day for a social gathering. even if i had the energy to do that (i don't), i don't want to. neither do most people. most of my Cohost connections have withered as such.

anything meaningful that can be done to change course is a task that necessitates something higher-order than individual theory or action. i am exhausted. but i laid out my cards (for what that's worth) in minifesto for a democratic website confederation (draft)—because what else is there to do?—and i struggle to think what else i can say on the subject. i quoted Gramsci on the interregnum there because it implies some possibility of drastic change, but maybe i should quote Mike Davis on Gramsci instead. "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum," he observed before his death, "but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it." what next? what next?

notes

¹ admittedly, i have lapses of not blogging for a few months myself—it's been particularly hard to even think about restarting Cohost Union News in the site's shadow, because the prosociality is part of what made it feel useful to blog about union stuff.

Alyaza Birze (July 9, 2025)

my readership is likely aware of cataclysmic Central Texas flooding that took place over the 4th of July and in the days after the holiday. at drafting, there were at least 109 fatalities associated with this event. at publication, there are 119. i suspect there will be many more even after publication—the numbers have continued to climb for days now with no obvious plateau, and now they're reporting over 160 missing. it is the worst flooding disaster in the United States in 49 years. it is also an example of how there is no such thing as a natural disaster.

do not let people lie to you. do not let local officials gaslight; and do not let the climate-accelerationist federal government tell you sweet little nothings about how sometimes people just die in tragedies and nothing can be done about it. everyone knew something like this could and would happen here. this situation was completely predictable in every sense and at every level. there is no ambiguity here.

the Guadalupe River is one of the most flood-prone rivers in the United States and has a long history of murderous floods; it killed 10 people in 1987 and another 31 in 1998. the region it sits in is, likewise, literally nicknamed "Flash Flood Alley" and is geographically optimized for serious flash flooding events. flood events in this part of Texas are like hurricanes on the Gulf Coast: this is what the weather is like here—and local officials are extremely aware of this fact. one-time Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer¹ agitated for an outdoor siren system during his time in office, and Kerr County commissioners first debated creating one in 2016 and have continued every year since. inadequacies in the existing flood alert system were also publicly and privately acknowledged after floods in 2015, and then again, and again, and again. it's very clear that everyone knew—eventually—a major flood was going to strike Kerr County and cause havoc. it's also clear that they all knew the imperfect—or in some cases outright nonexistent—warning system would be a particularly serious problem for the region's many youth camps. almost all of these were built in high-risk flood zones (defined by FEMA as having a 1-in-100 annual chance of flooding) and have flooded at one time or another during their existence. (in fact, the fatalities from the 1987 flood were all associated with one such camp.)

the things they wish you were stupid enough to not understand

of course, being aware that a catastrophe could happen—and doing the bare minimum to stop it—still doesn't actually make you look very good when the catastrophe happens and it has a body count like this one. the past few days have been rife with ass-pulls like "Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming" that are obvious bullshit to deflect blame away from where it rests.

the fact of the matter is that local officials, for all their knowing that a catastrophe could happen, seem to have simply not cared enough to actually prepare themselves for such an emergency. now that catastrophe is here, and they look very bad. so they deflect. they blame the National Weather Service for not giving them an adequate forecast in advance or providing ample warning time of the flooding, even though the NWS did on both counts (and was actually remarkably on the ball all things considered). they treat the deaths as acts of God as it simultaneously comes out they refused to coordinate with the NWS in the moment, and retrospectively admit to things like "[not knowing] what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had". or they insist that warnings almost exclusively communicated through Facebook (relying internet access) and their CodeRed system (relying on cellphone signal) wash the blood from their hands, even though—if they had done their diligence—it was known that in places like Camp Mystic

the young campers [...] likely wouldn’t have seen [such warnings] since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions sent to parents.

it's nothing short of delusional to pretend the buck stops anywhere besides with Kerr County for what a clusterfuck this has been.

ecological murder-suicide

maybe we wouldn't be here if Kerr County actually spent some money. but the thing about proactive disaster mitigation is that it sometimes isn't cheap and Kerr County is extremely stingy. in 2016, even a $50,000 contract to "conduct an engineering study for a proposed high water detection system" drew pushback from one county commissioner who thought it was rather extravigant; when the county lost out on a grant of $1 million to implement a more refined warning system in 2018, the county could have picked up the tab (it has a budget of almost $70 million) but opted not to and has mostly dawdled ever since (even after receiving other potential sources of money to finance such a thing such as ARPA funds). spending millions of dollars, according to both former and current county officials, would have been deeply unpopular and/or required raising taxes—actions that county commissioners are afraid of doing and which, in any case, county residents would raise hell over. as judge Rob Kelly expressed to the New York Times:

[...]the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”

you may bristle at taking the word of county officials here given their ass-covering everywhere else, but i don't actually find this particular claim hard to believe. there are a lot of people who genuinely hate taxation and think being compelled to pay for something that will ensure they won't die is government overreach—and rural and exurban areas are particularly filled to the brim with people like that. in the case of Kerrvile you need only drive an hour south to the outskirts of San Antonio to find a suburban "liberty city" whose brilliant model of municipal funding is sales taxes and no property taxes.² there's also the fact that the Texas Legislature, earlier this year, quietly killed a bill that would have "established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure."³ the antipathy is deep for spending, or at least certain kinds of it that don't advance a hard-right political agenda.

so if we grant their honesty on this one count, which i am inclined to, what is happening should probably be understood not quite as a form of social murder and more as a combined murder-suicide, if you will. Kerr County and its elected officials are unambiguously cowards who should have done more, and are lying when they say they couldn't have done more, but they inevitably reflect the people who elected them. and the people who elected them were pretty clearly fine with—and may still be fine with, even after this event—an indeterminate number of people dying in service of keeping their tax bill down.

this is going to keep happening

at the end of the day what conservatives want you to believe is that your anger about this is placed at federal employees whose agencies are being defunded and destroyed with a thousand job cuts rather than county officials who thought spending money on evacuation sirens might dampen the county's beauty somehow. they want you to think that what happened here is natural, inevitable, and something we just have to plan around—but it fucking isn't. every part of this was preventable, if not necessarily every death.

Kerr County—or Texas—could have spent money on a comprehensive warning system; they did not for a variety of reasons. Kerr County could have made actual emergency plans and reviewed the procedures for getting people in the camps out of harm's way; it did not because its leadership doesn't seem to have cared enough. its leadership could have coordinated with the NWS, passed along warnings, and ordered evacuations when the severity of the situation became obvious early in the night; but none of this happened until it was far too late. the list is endless, and the commonality is that all of these are human—within our control to influence. Kerr County made a series of choices, fully human ones, that guaranteed many more people would die here than needed to.

similar human-controlled variables are making this possible at the macro-level too. while the consensus seems to be—if anything—that the NWS had more staff on call than it usually does at that time of night, that is in spite of what is being done to the agency as a whole. mass-death like this is an inevitable product of the systemic defunding and de-staffing it is currently being subject to under the Trump administration. Chris Gloninger summarizes what is happening here admirably, saying that:

The FY 2026 federal budget, championed by the Trump administration, proposes slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by nearly 30% and gutting its weather and climate research division by 74%. These cuts are already reshaping the agency: more than a thousand veteran NOAA employees have taken buyouts or been laid off this year, and thousands more cuts are looming. At a single farewell event in May, roughly 1,000 staff walked out the door – taking with them 27,000 years of combined experience. At the NWS alone, hundreds of meteorologists and technical specialists have been dismissed or pushed into early retirement. In total, NOAA has lost an estimated 27,000 years of forecasting expertise in under a year – a brain drain of knowledge that can’t be replaced by algorithms or fresh graduates overnight.

this is problematic if you want people to not die. our success in minimizing mass-casualty floods is in large part because we seriously fund and staff our federal weather service (although there's always been room for improvement on the second count). better infrastructure across the board—nationwide radar, ease of proliferating weather information, the development of highly detailed flood maps and flood datasets, etc—make it possible to identify where harm is likely and get people out before they can be harmed. all of that needs manpower and money, though, and that money is being deprived now in service of a fascist political agenda that denies climate change and devalues work like this as a whole.

our reliance on fossil fuels is another input that cannot be ignored. individual events are difficult to link causally to climate change—so i will not do that here—but catastrophic flooding events, and intense rain events more generally, are made demonstrably more likely by climate change. the mechanics of this are simple and rather intuitive, as Andrew Dessler describes:

Warmer air can hold more water vapor — about 7% more for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. Consequently, the air converging into a storm system in a warmer climate carries more water vapor. Since most of the water vapor entering the storm’s updraft will fall out as rain, everything else the same, more water in the air flowing into the storm will lead to more intense rainfall. That’s it. Not terribly complicated.

so even if we cannot say definitively that the Kerr County flood is a result of climate change, it is inevitable that more floods like this will happen if we continue warming the planet. the recourse here is the same as all things related to climate change: stop using fossil fuels. there is no other option.

if there's any summary i have for all of this it's the title. it's why i made it the title. there are no natural disasters—and this in particular was not a "natural disaster," but rather an entirely predictable outcome. this will happen again if we don't learn from it, and address the underlying things which made it such a disaster in the first place.

notes

¹ someone who, it should be noted, responded as a deputy to the 1987 flood on the Guadalupe River that killed 10 people.

² as an aside: that this city—Von Orny—has been a trainwreck that can't pay for basic services (and has still been facing a fiscal cliff pretty much since its creation) tends to be conveniently glossed over by libertarians.

³ one of the votes against in the House was, in a morbidly ironic case, Representative Wes Virdell (R, HD-52), whose district includes Kerr County. he now says he'd vote differently—i'm sure his constituents are thankful it has taken killing 109 and counting people to change his mind here.

the stereotype (and—i guess—reality) of Silicon Valley being hopelessly dependent on its residents making use of stimulants and drugs seems to date surprisingly far back; apparently, they've been up to this trick since one Myron Stolaroff decided it would be a cool idea to give the manufacturing elite of the time a series of really expensive LSD trips:

Wealthy enough by then to go at it alone, [Myron] Stolaroff left Ampex to found the International Foundation for Advanced Studies in Palo Alto, where he “augmented” the engineering elite with LSD. [...] During the first half of the 1960s, the foundation guided hundreds of subjects through personal LSD trips at $500 a pop (around $5,000 in 2022 money), and the reviews were raves. Palo Alto was the glowing center of the bourgeois acid scene, a vindication of drug pioneers such as Timothy Leary, who imagined a trickle-down liberation of the American mind[...]

(evidently, the time-honored tradition of giving your excuse to recreationally do drugs a very important sounding name is just as old!)

as it happens, people really like LSD and the experience it gives them. Stolaroff made a killing off of this idea, as far as i can tell; he also, admittedly, had the bonus of living in a time where this kind of psychonaut experimentation on people in the Silicon Valley millieu led to slightly more productive outcomes than Venmo for ISIS from his clients:

A team including Stolaroff’s deputies Harman and James Fadiman (of Engelbart’s augmentation center at SRI) published their preliminary findings a few years later, summarizing the experiences of professional men who took acid and tried to solve work problems. In addition to the LSD effects we now take for granted (a broadening of context, access to the subconscious, increased empathy), they reported slightly improved work performance across a number of categories. One engineer described the experience thusly: “I began to see an image of the circuit. The gates themselves were little silver cones linked together by lines. I watched this circuit flipping through its paces.” An architect found himself with a perfect design: “I drew the property lines.… Suddenly I saw the finished project. I did some quick calculations.… it would fit on the property and not only that.… it would meet the cost and income requirements.… it would park enough cars.… it met all the requirements.”

tragically, this period also coincided with regulations catching up to this new and interesting drug. the Food and Drug Administration being given power to regulate psychedelics, alongside a general push to criminalize psychedelics (in the case of California led by Ronald Reagan), meant you could no longer do essentially whatever you wanted with the stuff. or, at least, you had to get good at evading the law. thus Stolaroff and his contemporaries were forced to improvise a bit to continue fucking around:

The foundation was at the edge of a breakthrough—a planned visit from some high-placed federal officials—when the politics of LSD shifted, and in 1966 Stolaroff found his clinical research abruptly shut down. Luckily, Palo Alto contained plenty of other well-funded nooks and crannies. Harman got a placement at SRI, too, and he quietly resumed the acid experiments under the auspices of the Alternative Futures Project.

such is life.

it is actually pretty interesting what the Bay Area scene of drug counterculture got up to in the 1960s; people like Stolaroff were not necessarily on the vanguard of recreation with LSD, but as far as public perception went they were doing something very few people had before. (the primary analogue of the time would have probably been Aldous Huxley and his experience with mescaline—which he documented in the book The Doors of Perception—but even then that book seems to have been a mostly British and not American phenomenon.) their subsequent influence on culture was substantial—and on the whole probably a net benefit—even outside of their impact on Silicon Valley. i have heard good things about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey's much lauded novel and perhaps the classic artistic manifestation of Bay Area bohemianism at the time. (others might offer Bob Kaufman, another long-time drug aficionado, who was even more avant-garde—embracing impermanence in his art and taking a ten year vow of silence for example—and had the likely-fatal defect of being Black and countercultural in his time.)

but if nothing else, the Silicon Valley manufacturing class and its artistic bohemian types actually used LSD to achieve something less psychotic than "attempted mind control and brainwashing," which had been the primary purview of LSD experimentation before that point. see, the actual vanguard of psychonautical experiment in America (and one of the reasons LSD even became available for mass consumption, since the CIA demanded a ton of its manufacture) was literally MKUltra. you can't take two steps in America without stumbling into something unimaginably fucked up, so it's only natural that our initial innovations in what psychedelics can do to people were wrapped up in Cold War neurosis and vehement anti-communism, with a splash of violating human rights in there too.

as summarized in the book Quick Fixes, MKUltra was

placed under the aegis of the chemical division of the Technical Services Staff, the head of which, Sidney Gottlieb, was handpicked by Dulles for his “zeal and creative imagination.” Gottlieb was given free rein to crack the secrets of the human psyche, and thereby offer America a shortcut to global dominance. Drug experimentation was a crucial part of this work, and after a short time, Gottlieb became convinced that LSD was his miracle drug—perhaps because of his own extensive use of it. Through a variety of “subprojects,” whose heads were often unaware of the true source of their funding, Gottlieb “tested” LSD in scenarios that ranged from the merely criminal to the mind-bendingly macabre.

how this looked practically was—to be blunt—large-scale human experimentation on and abuse of unwilling patients in a manner that, in some cases, would have been indistinguishable from Nazi or Imperial Japanese experimentation on humans during World War II. under Gottlieb, medical practitioners such as Donald Ewen Cameron were given an immense amount of latitude, leading to nonsense like "psychic driving"—in which Cameron used, in a typical example, "administered electroconvulsive shocks [to a patient] that reached thirty to forty times the strength other psychiatrists used. After days of this treatment, the patient was moved to a solitary ward. There he or she was fed LSD and given only minimal amounts of food, water, and oxygen. Cameron fitted patients with helmets equipped with earphones, into which he piped phrases or messages like “My mother hates me,” repeated hundreds of thousands of times."

Kesey, it should be noted, was almost certainly introduced to the muse of LSD (and a plethora of other fun drugs to use recreationally) through MKUltra or at least an immediately adjacent program—he seems to have come away not particularly worse off for it himself, something that clearly cannot be said for many of his contemporaries. additional bloody details seem prudent to spare so as to not have this be a true downer of a blogpost, but if you're in the mood to be mad, Stephen Kinzer's Poisoner in Chief seems to be the magnum opus of Gottlieb's place in this barbarity (and how he parlayed it into a much broader career that included clandestine operations against Cuba and others).

Alyaza Birze (July 6, 2025)

the pre-cult-of-personality history of what is now the Revolutionary Communist Party—the party led by noted crank Bob Avakian—is a surprisingly fascinating one, with many twists and turns as it attempted to find its place in the broader left and solidify its position as the primary representative of Mao Zedong Thought in America. although a never particularly large group (best guesses are that it peaked between 900 and 1,100 members in November of 1977) it was likely the most significant Maoist group in American history and certainly among the most influential of the New Left groups in the 1970s. the FBI, at the very least, thought of it as a significant threat to domestic security; thanks to the tireless work of Aaron J. Leonard and Conor Gallagher in Heavy Radicals, we know that FBI informants had infiltrated the group almost from its origin in the Bay Area in 1968.

but the part of this group's history i want to talk about today is from their early period—approximately 1970, before the FBI had near-singularly honed in on them—because it is an interesting reflection how weird and dramatic the New Left could sometimes be, and the severe optimism (or perhaps, millenarian fatalism) certain leftists had at the time for how a revolution could be won.

first, some background: going into 1970, the Revolutionary Communist Party (still under the name Revolutionary Union at the time, which will be used henceforth) had anywhere from 400 to 600 members and was by all accounts growing rapidly. it had been extremely visible at the Richmond strike of 1969 (done by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union against Standard Oil of California, now Chevron), and had been particularly successful in recruiting membership from the Peace and Freedom movement. within the Peace and Freedom Party of California—the California appendage of the national party—Revolutionary Union came into control of at least two Bay Area locals. beyond its usual East Bay stomping grounds, it also had particular strength on the campus of Stanford University, where it was an integral member of the anti-war coalition and eventually took in most of the campus SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter. indicative of its broader growth was the fact that it also successfully absorbed another Stanford radical group, the Peninsula Red Guard, who had a substantially more militant outlook than SDS.

this growth served to conceal significant differences of ideological opinion which, in short order, would become the organization's first serious split and briefly but dramatically reverse its explosion of membership. this split was the "Franklin schism," a schism that—to modern leftists—will undoubtedly sound very fucking stupid as recounted here.

the basic ideological divide of the Franklin schism

there were two sides to the "Franklin schism," the first of which was advanced by the eponymous Franklin group (so named because it was stewarded by and centered on Bruce Franklin, who had also been an ideological figurehead for the Peninsula Red Guard), and the second of which was advanced by most of the leadership of Revolutionary Union at the time.

what the Franklin group argued

the Franklin group argued that "protracted urban war" was not only necessary, but already taking place within the United States. as if these were trivial acts, their document "The Military Strategy for the United States: Protracted Urban War (A Draft)" (henceforth the Franklin document) proclaimed variously that:

The revolutionary struggle in the U.S. will certainly be waged primarily in the cities. Unlike other peoples’ wars, which inspire and teach us, ours will be fought in the urban areas. [...]
An important counter-insurgency theorist for the enemy, Colonel Rex Applegate, argues that urban jungles are far more difficult terrain for their forces than any tropical rainforest or mountainous region. Jungles or even mountains are essentially two dimensional, and are subject to saturation bombing with napalm, phosphorous, and explosives. But cities like New York or Chicago, with their high-rise apartments and multi-layered underground systems, are three-dimensional jungles. Furthermore, rural guerillas can never be completely integrated with large masses of people, because the rural population itself is spread out in small villages and farms. The urban guerilla, on the other hand, swims in a real ocean of the people.

and furthermore, argued that

Decaying imperialism is vulnerable to material attack not only as an economic system but also as a physical entity. Its utility systems are delicate, overstretched, indefensible, and absolutely vital. [...] Although it would be adventurism to think that the empire could be quickly destroyed through an attack on its complex system of power, transportation, and communication, we should recognize that large areas can be instantly paralyzed by such simple acts as the blocking of freeways and bridges, the destruction of power stations, and the disruption of communications.¹

what were the occurrences that, in their view, hastened the need for taking up "protracted urban war"? this is unfortunately difficult to say because the argument is rather underdeveloped here, even within the fast-and-loose context of the Franklin document as a whole. the Franklin group was mostly content to say that "the ruling class faces utter chaos at home[...] Lashing out in its final throes, imperialism turns to genocide abroad and fascism at home." perhaps the most concrete thing proposed, analysis-wise, was that

Armed revolutionary acts, including the ambushing of dozens of pigs, all across the country seem to indicate that the Black nation is in a transition from the mass spontaneous uprisings of 1964-1968 to the first stages of organized guerilla warfare.

now, in one sense, it is true that the domestic situation between 1964 and 1970 was exceptionally chaotic and violent that was more amenable to open guerilla warfare than anything before or since. Elizabeth Hinton in America on Fire states that "between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars since have tended to overlook." anti-war activism had likewise risen from merely a handful of disorganized dissenters to, around the same time the document was written, a mass movement carrying out a then-unprecedented student strike against the Kent State murders. politically-motivated bombings and terrorism, finally, had became dramatically more common: in the span of a year and a half between the start of 1969 and mid-1970, an estimated 4,300 bombings were carried out in the United States, including almost 400 in New York City alone.² the sheer anger of the period—with segregation, with discrimination, with poverty, with the endless, bloody wars in Indochina, with the United States as an entity—was undoubtedly boiling over every day in a way that for some living through it presented a Russian Revolution-like opportunity.

but simultaneously, this anger was neither a base from which you could wage armed revolution nor was it even particularly popular. sympathy for anti-war politics, much less student unrest or explicitly revolutionary politics, was severely lacking among the general public. as recounted extensively in David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot:

After 1968, most Americans deemed Vietnam a mistake. By 1971, six in ten lamented the war. That same year, roughly two-thirds of the public condemned antiwar protests. [...] Ultimately, most doves didn’t even like the antiwar activists. Back in September 1968, after the [1968 Democratic Party] Chicago convention, two-thirds of those who wanted to deescalate the Vietnam War backed Mayor Daley’s use of police “to put down the demonstrators.” Seven in ten whites, and the plurality of blacks, saw “radical troublemakers” as the cause of student unrest, rather than “deeply felt” beliefs in the “injustices in society.” Even among whites who thought the Vietnam War was a “mistake,” two-thirds thought “most student unrest” was caused by “radical troublemakers” rather than a belief in societal “injustices.”

that armed revolution would have not worked in such an ideological environment goes without saying. of course, the situation was actually worse still: by 1970, law and order politics were on their way toward almost total cultural hegemony, spearheaded largely by the white working-class but gaining credibility with even portions of the burgeoning Black political class that segregation had once disenfranchised. the "Black silent majority" of working- and middle-class Blacks, as Michael Javen Fortner describes it, felt increasingly little sympathy or solidarity with residents of the urban ghettos from which urban rebellions sprung. "After tilting the discursive terrain in the direction of racial equality during the struggles of the civil rights movement," Fortner writes, "working- and middle-class African Americans tilted it in favor of punitive crime policies and against economic justice for the urban black poor." if there were ever a base from which revolution could be waged, it was fleeting at best within the Black population and probably gone by 1970.

two other things bear final mention here. firstly: Revolutionary Union—like most leftist organizations of the time—was overwhelmingly white but, even more than just being overwhelmingly white, explicitly discouraged Black membership (instead usually referring them to the Black Panthers in this period). thus, even beyond the ill-developed premises of the "protracted urban war" thesis—and without downplaying the extent they were persecuted themselves—the membership of Revolutionary Union was not generally of a character that would be immediately harmed if such an analysis actually bore fruit. secondly: the case is strong that the Franklin group was doing little more than tailing the Eldridge Cleaver wing of the Black Panthers and their agitation for armed revolution. according to Steve Hamilton, a longtime Revolutionary Union member who Leonard and Gallagher interviewed, the Franklin group was convinced that the Panthers would be the "vanguard of the American revolution" and were exceedingly hesitant to be critical of them or their analysis.

what the rest of Revolutionary Union argued

needless to say, the non-Franklin group membership of Revolutionary Union was unimpressed with the thesis of "protracted urban war," a thesis they felt was wrong in principle and harmful in practice. although it could not bring forth the contemporary evidence i can that armed insurrection would make a very stupid tactical decision, it was still very obvious at the time that armed insurrection would be a very stupid tactical decision.

no doubt underscoring how deep the antipathy for the Franklin document ran (not least because it was a federal agent's dream, and indeed the FBI attempted to use it to justify extensive surveillance of Revolutionary Union), the official response felt a need to place in all-caps the following (which i will reproduce):

ANY ATTEMPT TO IMPLEMENT [the Franklin group document] WOULD NOT ONLY LEAD US AWAY FROM OUR MOST PRESSING TASK AT THIS TIME – BUILDING A REAL BASE IN THE WORKING CLASS, PROMOTING AND DEVELOPING ITS REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP OF THE UNITED FRONT AGAINST IMPERIALISM – BUT WOULD ACTUALLY LEAD TO THE EARLY DESTRUCTION OF OUR ORGANIZATION. [sic]

criticism only became more withering from this initial statement. the response to the Franklin document essentially dismisses it in its entirely, from its assessment of class consciousness ("Yes, the U.S. workers today don’t like the rich bastards who run the country," the response observes at one point, "But they have very little consciousness of themselves as a class, the class that will remake the world in its image.) to whether the US is fascist ("It is clear from the fact that we can still use elections and Congress (or State legislatures) as a platform, that we can still legally organize trade unions, rank-and-file caucuses, anti-war demonstrations, etc, that we are not yet in a period of fascism."), and of course to its thesis that a "protracted urban war" is possible. special derision seems to be given here, worth quoting in full:

Once large numbers of police, national guard, or army divisions are called in, practice has shown that they do the annihilating-or at least the routing. Even if urban uprisings occurred simultaneously in several key urban centers, historical experience (for example, the Russian revolution) indicates that they can only succeed if at least a major section of the enemy army comes over to the side of the people. In any case, this would be an insurrection, not a guerilla war of annihilation, or attrition. If, under U.S. conditions, an urban war of attrition is not going to be fought by the method of annihilation, how is it going to be fought? [...] even if [the Franklin paper's revolutionary strategy] came to pass, how would it lead to the seizure of state power? Don’t excite us with the details of this glorious war and then neglect to tell us how we won! If this question sounds sarcastic – it is only because the scheme elaborated above is just that – a scheme, a concoction. It is not based on a scientific summing up of mass struggle in the U.S., but only the romantic dreams of the writers of this paper.

(the notion that "organized guerilla warfare" was being undertaken by Black people is also put through the woodchipper here, with the response paper effectively calling the description of spontaneous uprisings fetishistic and concluding that while "more and more pigs are getting killed by people in the Black community who just won’t put up with any more brutality and murder", such acts were "overwhelmingly the spontaneous acts of unorganized individuals.")

the Franklin document, the response concludes, "shows no understanding of the qualitative changes that will take place in the revolutionary movement as the crisis of U.S. Imperialism deepens and becomes more acute; as more and more workers are organized into struggle against U.S. Imperialism; as a new, genuine Communist party of the proletariat assumes its rightful place as the leader of the revolution." but, not content to merely call the document a bunch of bullshit, the response further derides the position of the Franklin group as adhering to the Weatherman line—that is, a tendency of politics whose theory of change was entirely centered on the "unemployed and petty-bourgeois youth" (specifically white youth) and on the methods of "terrorism and adventurism."

the Franklin schism happens

the back-and-forth between the Franklin document and the response was indicative of a broader period in which all hell seems to have broken loose within Revolutionary Union. unfortunately, reconstructing the chronology of this matter is quite difficult and not within my immediate capabilities. what are unambiguous though are the sides (Franklin on the one; and Avakian and most of Revolutionary Union leadership on the other) and the growing tensions within the organization even before the exchange.

conflict over the Franklin document seems to have begun by October 1970, when it was presented at a Central Committee meeting, as recounted in an FBI memo that Leonard and Gallagher quote in Heavy Radicals:

At the Revolutionary Union (RU) Central Committee meeting 10/10-11/70 H. Bruce Franklin presented to the approximately 75 participating delegates a paper entitled “Protracted Urban War.” This document urges immediate strategic application of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist concept of protracted guerrilla warfare in the cities. Franklin urged the building of a well-trained RU guerrilla organization which would start actual attacks on the establishment with the objective of awakening the masses and overcoming any hesitancy of the membership to engage in armed revolutionary struggle. According to informants present at the meeting, Franklin’s vanguard revolutionary thesis highlights a split within the RU with the majority supporting immediate guerrilla warfare.

following this meeting, polemics continued to be exchanged despite attempts at mediation, probably influenced by the fact that—unusually for such a sectarian dispute—both groups were quite large within the organization. Franklin's side was accused of supposed "Weathermanism" and of having conflicts of personality with Avakian that were being laundered as ideological. Avakian's side was accused of denying the necessity of armed struggle and of rejecting the national liberatory potential of Black and Chicano people, which it supposedly downplayed in favor of the industrial proletariat. inevitably, though, one side had to win out—and owing to the fact that it was mostly comprised of people in power, the winner was Avakian's side. at an indeterminate point (but likely at the end of 1970) Revolutionary Union took the "unusual" step of publicly expelling Bruce Franklin, his wife, Jane Franklin, and two additional members of the Franklin group Janet Weiss and Jeff Freed.

this action precipitated the actual split, which ultimately proved very large for a split with an obviously correct side (Avakian's) within an organization that also likely had no more than 600 members at the time. even the Revolutionary Union conservatively estimates that it lost approximately one-third of its membership (perhaps 150 people) to the Franklin group; the informants within it suspected closer to 200, which could have been up to half of the organization's strength. the exit was also not a clean one, with the Franklin group offering a withering, final volley in public that

RU leadership in some areas has consolidated a revisionist line in the organization. They do not support the Black Panther Party. They base themselves not on the needs of the most oppressed, but on the fully employed factory workers. They believe the U.S. is a “bourgeois democracy,” not a developing fascist state. They deny the national liberation struggles of Black and Chicano people, and back off from supporting them concretely. They believe white revolutionaries can wait for armed struggle. They put down the women’s movement, and don’t develop women’s leadership. They don’t see Marxism-Leninism as a living tool to serve the people, but as an abstract dogma.

the Venceremos side-show

ultimately most of these splitters ended up following Franklin into a smaller Chicano-led group called Venceremos, which had existed for several years previously and suddenly became quite a different (albeit still Chicano-oriented) organization. through Venceremos, Franklin and his allies finally had a channel through which to enact their theory of change—something they set about doing rather quickly with a variety of tactics. according to Leonard and Gallagher the newly-revitalized Venceremos

continued to publish the Free You newspaper, making it bi-lingual. They also published the San Jose newspaper, the Maverick. It operated Venceremos College and the People’s Medical Center, which were free alternatives to standing institutions. Along with this they “assumed recognized leadership” of a number of workers’ caucuses, community organizations, and the local Young Partisans, which they described as having “chapters on all the local community college campuses and in many high schools and junior highs.”

Venceremos was also heavily armed, presumably owing to Franklin's continued belief in the necessity of armed revolution. it apparently maintained "secret stashes of rifles, grenades, pipe bombs, and other explosives and they urged members to stay armed at all times --- advice that was apparently followed." this contrasted somewhat interestingly with the group's participation in local electoral politics: it ran Jean Hobson (in 1971) and Jeffrey Youdelman (in 1973) for Palo Alto City Council; Joan Dolly for Menlo Park City Council (in 1972); and Doug Garrett for Palo Alto School Board (in 1973). none were successful, although debatably it was an achievement to receive even the few hundred votes these candidates could while being openly associated with a group whose theory of change included violent revolution. when the group was not running in local elections, it also made a point of raising hell and brought "verbal aggressiveness never before seen in the city’s politics."

one consistent limiter to the efficacy of its tactics was that Venceremos, bluntly stated, tended to be an internal trainwreck of an organization. within months of the Franklin influx late in 1970, the group saw its own serious split in which it lost most of its Stanford-based membership to the “Intercommunal Survival Committee to Combat Fascism” (which Leonard and Gallagher call a Black Panther Party auxiliary). a more serious incident which ultimately blew up the organization was when several of its members ambushed and killed an unarmed prison guard to free prisoner (and fellow Venceremos member) Ronald Beaty in 1972. Beaty was later arrested with Jean Hobson, one of the ambushers and—in an effort to save his own skin—gave up the names of Hobson and three other accomplices. (Beaty and all four of the people he named were later sentenced to prison.) seeing a chance to destroy what it considered one of the most dangerous radical groups operating at the time, authorities then parlayed that into arrests of Franklin and most of Venceremos' leadership. only two of the eight charged apparently went on to be convicted, but the scrutiny was sufficient to force the group to disband in September 1973.

the Revolutionary Union glides on

on the Revolutionary Union side of things, the split was seriously damaging but ultimately not fatal; the group certainly was not led to the dead-end you might consider Venceremos to be. still, it seems likely that the organization did not recover in terms of membership for several years (the peak of 900 to 1,100 members having been attained in 1977, and Leonard and Gallagher estimating perhaps 2,000 or so people having churned through the organization over its life).

primarily, the split entrenched models of organization and attitudes that would initially benefit Revolutionary Union's growth, but later unravel it almost fatally in 1977/78—after which its relevance to the revolutionary movement also drastically waned and it primarily became Bob Avakian's political vehicle. as Leonard and Gallagher summarize at the end of Heavy Radicals chapter 4:

What was arrived at [after the Franklin schism] was a further closing the door on the 1960s mindset of questioning everything and challenging authority. In its place was the entrenchment of a quasi-religious apprehending of Marxism—though the RU was hardly the worst in this in the new communist movement—coupled with a hierarchal / authoritarian organizational model, albeit one that self-consciously rejected such a characterization. This did not happen immediately or at a single moment, but it was the path they went down.

The Franklin rift was also a touchstone of sorts on how to sum-up schismatic internal struggles. Here, they argued that it allowed “[r]apid progress theoretically, politically and organizationally.” While this was not without truth, it was also the case that quite a bit was lost it would seem, from their perspective—not the least of which were a good number of young revolutionaries taken down a path that would in one way or another lead to them no longer being part of a revolutionary movement, to say nothing of some garnering significant prison time. [...] There was also a problem with the RU’s misplaced minimizing of the damage done, and the ‘good riddance’ attitude they assumed as regards those in sharp disagreement. This would continue as a problem going forward.

what can be taken away from all of this? i'm not really sure—but i think it is indicative, if nothing else, of how the late 1960s and early 1970s were an optimistic but rudderless time for American socialism. which way would the movement go? nobody was certain, and in that uncertainty an abundance of views proliferated. many of those views were unchallenging and orthodox; many of them, including even the main Revolutionary Union line here, were not. and there was a lot of adventurism, some of which we still arguably live in the shadow of today.

notes

¹ it is interesting, as an aside, to interpret and compare this theory of change with modern far-right terrorism, which is almost universally accelerationist and so proposes and acts on similar impulses. perhaps the biggest difference is that that the Maoists of 1970s were not accelerationists, at least in the way the term is used with respect to far-right terrorists. we might term this a division of constructive versus destructive; that is, the Maoists of the Franklin group believed "accelerationist" tactics were only integral to the initial stage(s) of people's war—a seizure of state power by a dictatorship of the proletariat was still the ultimate goal, obliging its preservation. far-right terrorists, by contrast, usually believe existing state power must be destroyed (because it is hopelessly corrupted by any number of scapegoats) and a fascist system can only be rebuilt from the void of state power that results.

² these were usually minor bombings intended only to do property damage; some, however, were much more serious and far more potentially lethal. the bombing spree of the Melville collective (organized around future Attica prisoner and martyr Sam Melville) became particularly notorious and damaging in this timeframe. the Weathermen townhouse fiasco—in which three members of the Weather Underground blew themselves up and leveled their entire building in the process—also occurred in this period, and it had clearly been the intent of the would-be bombers to kill people.

Alyaza Birze (July 5, 2025)

i think almost everyone who follows me is aware of the illegal, horrific blockade on Cuba that has been imposed by the United States since approximately 1960; what you are probably less aware of though is how the blockade manifested in practice, the pressures it put Cuba under even before the fall of the Soviet Union, and what it was like at its worst during the 1990s. today's post will go into these details.

the situation before the embargo

Cuba has historically been extremely dependent on imports, some of which is a product of its geography and some of which is a product of ideology and capitalism. as summarized by Sinan Koont in Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba:

The tropical climate makes it difficult to cultivate temperate-zone crops, such as wheat and soybeans, which are common staples of human and animal diets. Grains for feeding cattle or baking white bread, which is now central to the Cuban diet, must all be imported. In addition, the historical legacy of colonial agriculture—which was based on the cultivation of one or two highly labor-intensive export crops, mainly sugar, using slaves imported from Africa (and later indentured workers from China)—led to the relative neglect of food crops. Not only was land used disproportionately for export crops, but this relative overemphasis extended to areas such as research and development, credit and services provision, and governmental fiscal support. All these factors made food security import-dependent and likely to evaporate, especially for slave or slave-descendant populations, during hard times for export industries.

as a consequence, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution "imports constituted a third of all food consumed in Cuba, and 70 percent of imported foodstuffs came from the United States," according to Adriana Premat. few attempts were made by the pre-Revolution government to mitigate this import dependence. it could nevertheless be said that Cuban food security was superficially decent as long as imports continued: Koont does note that Cubans in this period received approximately 2,500 calories per capita per day. belying these numbers, however, were the inequal distribution of wealth and land; the large-scale usage of seasonal employment (meaning rates of unemployment in the 30% range at any given time); widespread illiteracy and poverty; and a general lack of amenities, especially in non-urban areas. many of these inequalities were factors in the growth, and eventual success, of revolutionary sentiment.

the Cuban Revolution of course sought to rectify this squalid state of affairs, and in most areas its program was quite successful from the beginning. agrarian and urban land reforms had been largely carried out by 1963 (with compensation, although this did little to placate capitalist interests or quell American anti-Cuban sentiment), and health care and education became far more accessible to Cubans.¹ one area in which it was not successful however was diversifying Cuba's agricultural produce and minimizing its import dependence. efforts to move away from the island's sugarcane monoculture—which had characterized the pre-Revolution economy and was a major source of income—were hampered by poor planning, labor shortages, and reduction in export earnings that obliged the government to keep the monoculture in place.

the embargo during the Cold War

it is likely a renewed move away from sugarcane would have occurred if not for worsening relations with the United States; nevertheless, the failure to accomplish this ended up having significant downstream implications. prompted by Cuba's program of expropriation, and to a lesser extent by its declaration of socialist ideology in 1960, the United States gradually implemented sanctions—and then the full-on embargo that continues to this day—on Cuba. such punitive actions by the United States had severe effects, and foregrounded a number of uncomfortable points of weakness in the Cuban system that the revolutionary government could not trivially resolve.

the first of these was suddenly pushing the island's food supply into extreme precarity. with a substantial portion of the island's calories contingent upon importation, shortages became the norm by 1962. food rationing and the ration booklet (libreta)—for which Cuba is so infamous—was implemented as a consequence; this was, and to this day remains, the only way to ensure a baseline level of food security for all Cubans.

the second of these was how the embargo definitively pushed Cuba into the Soviet sphere of influence—and as a byproduct, locked Cuba into another relationship in which they became extremely import-dependent. while trade deals with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries allowed Cuba to attain high levels of food security (reaching 2,900 calories per capita per day by 1989), they also incentivized the continuation of the sugarcane monoculture and the adoption of a rigid, inflexible, export-oriented agricultural system. Cuba, writes Koont, "essentially became the provider of sugar and citrus fruits to COMECON [the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance]." in exchange, observe Rosset and Benjamin (1994), Cuba received

petroleum, industrial equipment and supplies, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, and foodstuffs — possibly as much as 57 percent of the total calories consumed by the population. [But t]he favorable terms of trade which Cuba obtained for sugar and its other exports made it cheaper for Cuba to export sugar and import foodstuffs than to produce sufficient food domestically.

thus it is only somewhat exaggeratory to say that the Cuban agricultural system during the Cold War came to imitate much of what had been overthrown in the first place—with the embargo in place, agricutural exports became one of the primary ways Cuba could pay for its much-needed imports. the consequences of such an agricultural system and its importance to ensuring Cuba could import goods were, of course, significant. arguably this relationship led to the disastrous 1970 sugar campaign, where much of the non-agricultural economy withered as the country's laborers attempted—and failed—to meet a sugar harvest quota of 10 million tons. another consequence was severe ecological harm, not dissimilar to what is seen on import-dependent capitalist island nations. "Nearly 80% of agricultural lands in Cuba, says Koont, "had been incorporated into the state sector and organized into gigantic farms under centralized government control" by 1975. the export-focus of these farms obliged them to care exclusively about yield, meaning Cuba

was using more fertilizers per hectare than the United States or any Latin American country: 202 kg/ha compared with 93 kg/ha in the United States and 56 kg/ha in Latin America. Its use of 22 tractors per 1,000 ha exceeded the averages for the Caribbean region (17), Latin America (11), and the entire world (19).

productivity decreases, nutrient deficiencies, and issues of erosion were eventually noted in up to 75% of cultivated areas—clearly a result of this extreme reliance on fertilizers and petroleum products, but which only additional fertilizer inputs were in a position to make up for.

the third point of weakness was Cuba's now-unique vulnerability to even minor shocks or disruptions of its imports and exports (which it should be noted did not ever fully cover the economic damage imposed by the embargo). this vulnerability did not go unnoticed or unexploited by the United States, which spent most of the Cold War attempting to reinstate capitalism in Cuba by any means necessary. the constant assassination attempts on Fidel Castro are only the most obvious manifestation of attempts to disrupt Cuba, of which there were many others such as Operation Mongoose and the proposed Operation Northwoods. not to be outdone by the government, though, there were also grassroots pressures against Cuba: from the 1960s to the 1980s Cuban exiles were among the most prolific terrorists in the United States, committing dozens of bombings against Cuba and agitating for regime change by the United States.

Cuba was also misfortunate or, in some cases, hubristic in a way that backfired. the country experienced a wide variety of setbacks throughout the Cold War and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. these included two major outbreaks of African swine fever virus in 1971 and 1980 that necessitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs; the introduction of blue mold disease which affected a quarter of Cuba's tobacco crop in 1979 and almost all of it in 1980, apparently necessitating the halting of the tobacco industry for almost two years; the introduction of sugarcane rust disease in 1979, to which Cuba's most common variety of sugarcane was especially vulnerable and which necessitated large-scale replanting; dengue fever epidemics in 1977 and 1981 that infected 4 million and 350,000 people respectively; and a major outbreak of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in 1981.

for rather understandable reasons, i should note that Cuba has called many of these events biological warfare or terrorism from United States. owing to the clandestine nature almost all such acts would involve—and the general context of United States desperation to restore capitalist rule—it is hard to rule this out completely. but the prevailing evidence is too weak on all counts for me to endorse any claim like this. Raymond A. Zilinskas is rather thorough in assessing, and dismissing, such claims in his paper "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence." medical researchers such as Trotta et al. also categorically dismiss any link between the CIA, Cuban rebels, and the introduction of African swine fever virus.

an allegation in this space that is not worth dismissing out of hand, though, comes from Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish is Red, in which a whistleblower the pair interviewed alleges that in 1969 and 1970,

Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert [...] overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over nonagricultural areas and left the cane fields arid (the downpours caused killer flash floods in some areas).

this may sound like the most outlandish of the claims—and there is no reason to believe cloud seeding itself was responsible for either the aridity or the downpours—but it is actually the most plausible claim based on available evidence. this allegation coincides with Operation Popeye, a military cloud-seeding project (based on research carried out at China Lake Naval Weapons Center) that the Air Force carried out over Vietnam in an attempt to extend the monsoon season. for approximately five years, the United States actually was, on most days, dumping two sorties of lead iodide and silver iodide into the atmosphere over Vietnam. it does not seem super implausible a more limited campaign of experimentation was being done to Cuba in this period.

the embargo after the Cold War

all of these points of weakness became far more severe as the Eastern Bloc began to liberalize and disintegrate. Gorbachev's ascension in 1985—and his subsequent termination of special deals with Cuba—arguably mark the start of an inevitable trend toward catastrophe that accelerated as the 1980s progressed. between 1986 and 1990 Cuba experienced significant financial contraction, something it attempted to fight and protest to COMECON without much success. although often dated to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in many respects the Special Period had already begun by 1989—by then it was clear that COMECON was totally dysfunctional, and most of the Eastern Bloc had de facto begun to cut Cuba loose. when the Soviet Union began to be delinquent on contracted imports in 1990, conservation efforts were already in place. the formal dissolution of the COMECON in August 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 were largely formalities for Cuban purposes.

the formalistic nature of these events was small comfort to Cubans, however. the socialist bloc of countries had previously received more than 80% of Cuba's trade—with these gone, and the embargo still in place, what can only be described as apocalyptic reductions in the availability of everything followed. Cuba lost half of its food imports; 60% of its pesticide imports; 77% of its fertilizer imports; and half of its needed petroleum. exports and imports declined generally by around 80%. Cuban gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by anywhere from 35% to 50% between 1989 and 1993, and the Cuban economy of 1993 had shrunk to 65% of its 1989 size. Cuban money became largely worthless, both because real wages fell by more than 50% and because the state became unable to offer consumer goods on which to actually spend said money. factories became inoperable between energy cuts and loss of raw material inputs, while agriculture collapsed so severely that it necessitated a break-up of state farms. car travel became prohibitive between shortages of gasoline and lack of car replacement parts and dropped by one-third from its already low level; public transportation, likewise, ground largely to a halt, rendering bicycles the only realistic way to travel for many. the state-subsidized ration stores, which Premat says "previously adequately covered basic food needs," were rendered unable to do so and soon provided only around half of established nutritional requirements—a dramatic loss of calories per capita followed. according to Koont, by 1994:

the daily per capita nutritional intake of the Cuban population had reached its nadir at levels well below the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] recommendations for a healthy diet (given in parentheses): 1,853 calories per day (2,400 calories recommended), 46 grams of protein (72 grams recommended), and 26 grams of fat (75 grams recommended).

the situation, in short, amounted to one of the most substantial reversals of peacetime quality of life ever observed.

that this situation did not quickly topple the government outright is a testimony to the deep support for socialism in Cuba; nevertheless, the United States saw blood in the water and attempted to deliver a crippling final blow through tightening the already punitive embargo. in 1992 the Torricelli Act banned exports of food and medicine to Cuba (excepting only humanitarian aid), and in 1996 the Helms-Burton Act made foreign corporations doing business in Cuba subjects of U.S. sanctions. under the latter bill in particular, according to Premat, U.S. companies were endowed with the power to "sue foreign companies that conduct business with Cuba involving property previously “confiscated” by the Cuban government from U.S. citizens." (unsurprisingly, this law violates international trade law.) both of these laws undoubtedly served to make the crisis worse and longer lasting.

things bottomed out roughly in 1994, by which point the Cuban government was obliged (after much citizen participation and debate through the workers’ parliaments) to enact a degree of liberalization. so summarizes Helen Yaffe in We Are Cuba!, the state legalized the US dollar, committed to a fiscal adjustment, committed to joint ventures with foreign capital, opened up further to tourism, began large-scale conversion of state farms into cooperatives, opened private farmers’ markets, and increased avenues for self-employment. these reforms (which were generally intended to be temporary and last only as long as the crisis did) were instrumental in halting—and reversing—the crisis. growth ultimately returned in the second half of the 1990s and, slowly but surely, things began stabilize back toward normality. although a number of them have continued in some form or another, many of these reforms were reversed or repealed by the mid-2000s as their necessity receded.

the effects of the economic crisis still echo through Cuba, unfortunately. in many respects it marks a permanent delineation of before and after—Cuba before the crisis was simply in a much better position than it is today, and even 35 years later this shows no signs of changing. as Yaffe says solemnly:

living standards had not recovered their 1990 level by the end of the decade, productive capacity, infrastructure and public services had been crippled, and the dual economy and price distortions had skewed incentives and entrenched inequalities. The economic contraction generated a social crisis. Cuts in food consumption, utility supplies, basic goods and transport led to malnutrition, emigration, inequality and illegality.

notes

¹ the change was quite remarkable. Agustin Lage Davila says that on the education front, the mass literacy campaigns of 1961 involved "more than 270,000 voluntary teachers" and led to 700,000 people being taught to read and write. on the healthcare front according to Don Fitz, by 1963 the revolutionary government had built "122 rural centers and forty-two rural hospitals, with 1,155 beds, 322 doctors, and 49 dentists." Koont says there had previously been just three general hospitals for all of rural Cuba.

Alyaza Birze (July 4, 2025)

long-time followers will know that i've read about Cuba quite a bit, and particularly their system of agriculture (on which i have a few thousand words of notes). after some time away from this subject, i'm back to reading two of the books on my lengthy to-read list: Sowing Change: The Making of Havana's Urban Agriculture by Adriana Premat and Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba by Sinan Koont. these have been pretty illuminating of some of the nuances i was not previously aware of and, more significantly, the fascinating heterogeneity of opinion from actual farmers within the Cuban system. today's post will go over a lot of this.

what is urban farming like?

first, here's a recap of what urban farming is like in Cuba, starting with a summary table by Cruz Hernández and Sánchez Medina (2001).

Production Sites	Land Tenure	Area Occupied	Main Objective
Fincas (farms)	Private/state	N/A	Commercialization
Organopónicos Populares (popular organoponic)	State	2000–5000 sq. meters	Commercialization
Huertos intensivos (intensive gardens)	State	1000–3000 sq. meters	Commercialization
Organopónicos de Alto Rendimiento (OAR) (high yield organoponic)	State	> 1 hectare	Commercialization
Autoconsumo estatal (factory/enterprise self-provisioning gardens)	State	> 1 hectare	Commercialization
Parcela (usufruct plots)	State	<1000 sq. meters	Household self-provisioning
“Productive” Patio	Private	<1000 sq. meters	Household self-provisioning

at-scale production of food in urban areas generally comes from the state-owned, commercially-operated organoponicos—these being described by Sinan Koont as "collections of roughly 30 meters by 1 meter rectangular walled constructions (canteros) containing raised beds of a mixture of soil and organic material." there are also huertas intensivas [intensive gardens] which are in essence ground-level organoponicos—they produce a smaller yield as a result. given what they exist to do, the social objective of the organoponicos and huertas intensivas—to serve a local community and provide it with food—probably does not surprise you.

at the smaller scale, Cuban urban agriculture now makes heavy usage of parcelas, which are previously-unused plots of land that have been converted to agricultural use. individually, Cuban citizens are also encouraged to plant patios, essentially home gardens. initially disfavored because of their small-scale, both parcelas and patios took on much greater prominence following the economic crisis of the 1990s, during which they were symbolic of Cuba's struggle to adapt and survive. today—while the situation is less acute, and centralization of state provisions is once again possible—they have grown increasingly symbolic of Cuban sustainability, and are integral to a major trend of urban greening in Cuba. (Havana in particular has seen greenspace go from 12 square meters per inhabitant to at least 23 square meters.)

parcelas operate as usufruct entities—the individual does not own the land but may indefinitely benefit from its production, according to Koont, "an acceptable level of agricultural production is maintained" on the plot. as a consequence parcelas are forbidden from being used for profiteering, such as "hiring labor to work [...] for one’s own benefit as if one were a terrateniente (powerful landowner) in prerevolutionary times." patios, meanwhile, are privately-owned and citizens are granted the right to sell or barter any surplus food from them. in general, both parcelas and patios are afforded autonomy within the law; unless illegal activity is taking place, their stewards cannot be compelled to do anything. they are free to sow, or operate, the plots in their manner of choosing with their products of choice.

geographically, parcelas often complement or occupy a wide array of land usages, including "[previous] demolition sites, playing fields, and even portions of public parks." patios by contrast are frequently planted in home patios (hence the name), alleyways, or on rooftops

the social objective of parcelas and patios can vary, although a generalization can be made that they exist to fortify the Cuban Revolution by creating a venue of communal responsibility through which social solidarity can be expressed. Adriana Premat notes that parcelas and patios frequently reflect the most immediate desires of their urban communities; this, she says, is because "general disconnection from the broader society is thought to be equally harmful [as unrestrained pursuit of profit] and in need of correction."

what are things like for producers?

unsurprisingly, many producers consider their stewardship rewarding—and yet incredibly demanding and difficult.

the benefits, it should go without saying, are many; Fernandez et. al note that urban farms have "...increased availability and access for the Cuban population to a diverse selection of fresh fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants. This has served to increase the dietary diversity in the population and to improve nutrition in a diet that is otherwise heavily comprised of meat, rice, beans, and root crops." the urban farms also provide widespread employment—up to 350,000 in direct employment by some estimates—and have facilitated significant growth in labor participation by women. beautification and community building has also resulted: urban farms have a prosocial effect both on their stewards and the communities their urban farms are in, particularly as they replace previously vacant or underdeveloped plots of land. some health clinics in Havana reportedly even use urban farming and gardening as a tool for managing depression and other mental health issues among clients, particularly elderly Cubans in need of company and support.

any form of farming is rough, however, particularly for smallholders. according to Premat, urban producers often use "terms such as mucho sacrificio (much sacrifice) and un trabajo esclavo (an enslaving job)" to describe their labor; many producers also feel a degree of alienation from their neighbors and suspicion they are being conspired against. this is not an unfounded fear: the relation of urban farms to state institutions is a complicated one, and producers often feel that their farms, and especially their neighborhoods, are "a sort of “public stage” where they [can] not afford to be totally open and [have] to manage their image." the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), whose function is to report on potentially "counterrevolutionary" or "ideologically subversive" activity, are a primary contributor to this feeling. arbitrary intervention by the government—often necessitating the disposal of products and changes from what producers feel is best for their situation—is another.

there are also the practical realities of Cuba's situation: due to shortages in goods and materials—most of which can be attributed to the embargo—large-scale improvements to patios, parcelas, or organoponicos and huertas intensivas are expensive and must often be limited in scope. wages are frequently insufficient to acquire necessary machinery, specialized tooling, or in some cases even mundane objects like ladders.

still, many producers take pride in their work, their place in the community, and often times their perceived contribution to the defense of Cuba and the stability of its revolution. it would perhaps be most accurate to say that producers—in spite of their complex relationship with state institutions and frequent complaints and worries about the government—see their work as deepening Cuba's socialism and democracy, even when this work brings them into conflict with the state.

urban farming "privatization"

one interesting trend that Premat documented, and which i'll make the final subject in this post, was a process of "privatization" by producers in which they enclose the parcelas they steward. she profiles one such "privatization" in the book that took in the municipality of El Cerro—this should give you a practical idea of what one looks like:

Sitting in the crowded bedroom-studio of his tiny three-room house in El Cerro, about six blocks from Roberto’s house, Pedro, a man in his late fifties, succinctly recounted how he and his neighbors had created four gardens on a demolition site adjoining their residences on Dawn Street. He recalled, “We took out all the garbage and sealed the façade of the building so that no one could dump garbage into the site.” This “sealing off” made the gardens both inaccessible and invisible from the street. In addition to the obvious practical reasons for this enclosure (preventing vandalism and theft, damage by animals, etc.), this action effectively excluded surrounding community members from a space that had previously been open to everyone.

now, i put privatization in quotes here because, legally, no actual change in status is taking place—indeed the state could technically intervene at any time, either through interpreting such actions as contrary to community/state interests or just through invented pretense. this is Cuba—the state does often intervene arbitrarily in this way. often, however, they simply leave producers alone. thus, de facto, when many Cuban producers enclose their parcelas like this, it transforms the plot from a parcela (state-owned and usufruct) to a patio (privately owned). indeed Premat observes that many Cuban producers see parcelas that they steward as extensions of themselves, or their properties, and they use them for other purposes accordingly:

Parcelas are often used by the caretakers and their families to store private household goods or for activities like hanging the laundry to dry. They also contain furniture, such as tables and chairs, used for private social gatherings and for playing domino games with friends. It is also not uncommon for parcelas to be decorated with personal touches that reflect the individual tastes, history, and identity of the caretaker.

undoubtedly this has interesting social and theoretical implications—especially for property and ownership under a socialist model—but i'm not the right person to parse them out. for now, consider it an interesting vignette of the complexities of everyday life in a socialist-aspiring country.

Alyaza Birze (July 3, 2025)

welcome back to Birzeblog, after a lengthy hiatus.

if you've followed my Bluesky over the past three months or so you've probably seen at least one of my posts about the discourse du jour in liberal spaces, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance. perhaps because Klein is framing it as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberalism (or perhaps because people just like drama and argumentation) this book and its prescriptions are among the latest in a post-2024 series of online liberal-leftist litmus tests. there's a truly fascinating amount of sectarianism over it between mainstream liberals and self-described "abundance" types (who usually seem to come from the ranks of online YIMBYism). from the left, meanwhile, the book has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism against basically every premise it advances—this has become especially acute after the truly bizarre WelcomeFest, in which a large number of pro-abundance thinkers got very mad about Bluesky and people criticizing them there. from all the controversy you might therefore assume this book is actually interesting in some way.

unfortunately it really is not. it is clunky and pretty uncompelling, and it's bizarre to me that it has the reputation it already does. to the extent that the book arrives at correct conclusions, that's usually because the conclusions are self-evident to its audience. but in every other way the book is boring or a mess, and sometimes both. its broader argumentation is effectively libertarian despite coming from two ostensible social liberals. in a number of places—even to someone like myself, who does not specialize in much of what the book is about—the book is demonstrably falsifiable or outright bizarre in its argumentation (and, again, sometimes both). finally and on the whole, the framework of "abundance" is muddled and not coherent, largely coming off as a wishlist of loose demands with no central ideological core. i think you'll see what i mean as we go forward here.

the stuff Abundance gets correct

let's start with a few areas in which i think Abundance is, for the most part, correct in its analysis. you'll forgive me for only briefly explaining my thinking:

onerous housing regulations: the existence of legitimately onerous regulations in the housing market is inarguable, and Abundance is correct to center this as a problem. from the issue of zoning (as M. Nolan Grey observes in Arbitrary Lines, "In a typical US city, at least three-quarters of the land zoned for residential uses will be zoned exclusively for single-family houses."), to parking minimums (parking spaces, according to Henry Grabar in Paved Paradise, often cost $30,000 or more per space and add hundreds of thousands to housing costs), to the design constraints created by multi-stair buildings (as lengthily recounted in Michael Eliason's Building for People), there are many things you could categorize as regulations which can be removed to ease the housing crisis and make new housing better for everyone.
bizarre planning and design requirements: likewise, the process of planning and designing housing in the United States is usually a bad one across the board. the process takes far too long generally and is too easy to concern troll; when planning meetings are required, these are almost invariably a terrible and unrepresentative feedback mechanism. who we let build housing is often ridiculous. San Francisco's ordinance favoring construction by “Micro-Local Business Enterprises” is perhaps the primordial example in how it defines small business ("less than $12 million in average annual gross revenue"), and in so doing it discourages the use of proven contractors while consolidating business into a select few contracting companies. there are also no shortage of nonsensical bodies with power over the process they should not have. the book names the Art Commission and the Mayor’s Office on Disability as two examples in San Francisco; undoubtedly, most cities have formal or informal analogues, or just allow aforementioned planning meetings to disrupt the process. all of these are things we could streamline, and housing construction would assuredly not be worse off if we did so.
weaponizing environmental protection laws: the weaponization of environmental protection laws (such as the infamous California Environmental Quality Act) is a constant issue that does need to be addressed in some form. (mercifully, in the time since i began drafting this, some of CEQA's worst excesses have finally been curbed!)
homeownership cannot be a speculative asset and attainable to everyone in our current capitalist economy: this should be apparent to literally anybody who can understand supply and demand. for housing to be a useful speculative asset it must be scarce; and indeed, housing currently appreciates in value largely because of scarcity. but this is incongruent with affordable housing (or really housing people at all). it's also bad that for many people, their net worth is partially or wholly tied to the valuation of their home.

all of this is well and good. something you might be picking up on, though, is a pattern of things that are obvious. remember: this is marketed as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberals more generally. everything i have just described has a correct side and an incorrect side, and there is effectively no controversy over which side is correct within the audience Klein and Thompson are targeting with this book. you will find very few people in the liberal-left hemisphere of politics who, for instance, actually believe the California Environmental Quality Act ought to apply to literally any development requiring government approval. every governor of California since Jerry Brown has railed against its undue expansion by a court for a reason. and leftism and liberalism aren't even really in tension on the fourth point, even if they disagree on almost everything else that follows from the statement.

somehow, though, Thompson and Klein cherrypick these problems into a full blown crisis to which the only supposed solution amounts to libertarian deregulation. the book jumps from "CEQA is bad and should be reformed" to "virtually all environmental regulations are onerous, and stand in the way of building housing" without seriously considering the psychotic downstream implications of the second statement.

what the hell are we doing here?

lest you think my characterization is exaggeratory, i offer the following vignette based on my initial experience reading the book. Abundance immediately gets to making the second argument in its introduction, saying

well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

later on—in a section recounting the environmental history of the United States—it elaborates on the argument, positing that

Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens and the environment. They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act. In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building. [emphasis mine]

rather definitive of the book's alignment, i think. but just to quiet any ambiguity, the book picks up again later still by taking the side of a report by J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, which concludes

the problem is really the profusion of different, overlapping policies and authorities. Beyond NEPA, Ruhl and Salman note the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

to say this is goofy is putting it mildly. we don't have time to go through all of these, but it's not even clear to me how most of these regulations actually serve as the primary obstacles to housing construction—and the book does not really elaborate besides gesturing at regulatory and environmental groups and their litigious tradition that ostensibly began with Ralph Nader. i do not find this particularly convincing, nor do many reviewers. it also skips over the fact that many of these regulations are demonstrably some of the most valuable ever passed. the Clean Air Act is almost singularly responsible for the reduction of air pollution in the United States, preventing as many as 370,000 premature deaths and saving an estimated $2 trillion per year. laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act both seem pretty important, and successful at preventing large-scale extinctions, in what is otherwise the ongoing Holocene extinction event, wherein extinction rates are far higher than the estimated background rate. and even the most ambiguously beneficial regulations such as the Clean Water Act still seem advisable to keep around. despite the general improvement of water quality in the United States, many bodies of water continue to exhibit concerning—and dangerous—levels of pollution.

of course, the text also seems unintentionally revealing as to why Klein and Thompson are so willing to potentially throw out entire swathes of valuable environmental regulation: they seem to dismiss, or be ignorant of, how bad things still are because those things are not as visible as they used to be. according to them:

Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today. [emphasis mine]

almost none of this is correct. earlier this year—and for the 25th year in a row—Los Angeles was recognized by the American Lung Association as one of America's worst polluted cities. pollution has come down drastically, yes, but even current levels are known to cause excess mortality in the thousands every year in Southern California. and even when pollution doesn't kill, it has serious health effects: we know that Southern California pollution levels cause "reduced lung function growth, increased school absences, asthma exacerbation, and new-onset asthma" in children, for example. to call the problem "passed" is flatly ridiculous. similarly, Beijing's pollution problem—although massively improved—remains far above WHO guidelines and has an even higher annual body count than Los Angeles. nor have reductions been accomplished because Beijing nebulously "got richer;" they have been accomplished through a massive and multifaceted Chinese government program to address the causes of, sources of, and contributors to pollution.

another illuminating passage of the book in this vein decries "special air filtration systems for developments near freeways" which it poses as admirable, but symptomatic of too-strict green building requirements that increase homelessness through increasing the cost of construction. while i'm sure this does make it harder to build inexpensive housing, it seems rather straightforwardly bad to argue that—simply because the alternative is potential homelessness—people in affordable housing should not receive protections from car fumes and pollutants. arguably, air filtration has become necessary independent of freeways (and away from them too): the growing wildfire smoke problem in California is likely responsible for tens of thousands of premature deaths in the past decade. it is not going to get better as the climate continues to warm. should we simply not build with this in mind because it will be more expensive? this is a conclusion the book all but asks you to make in its one-dimensional advocacy for more housing.

what others are saying about the book

other deficiencies are, unsurprisingly, evident throughout other portions of the text—and in even defining the bounds of who supports abundance or what it means as a policy orientation. how, for example, can an agenda with little through-line besides deregulation keep itself from being weaponized by right-wingers who use deregulation to exact harm? already, such a "co-optation" (if you can even call it that) is evident. Hannah Story Brown, for instance, observes that "Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act," yet is also doing so in a manner which advantages fossil-fuel interests. she adds that "Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.”"¹ the through-line of deregulation, too, is fraught. even writers more amenable to the abundance agenda such as Mike Konczal are rather hesitant to concur with the book's attempt to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to a disparate set of problems. Matt Bruenig, another of the writers more sympathetic to abundance, summarizes best that "bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling." and it seems debatable at best, at least if you ask Liberal Currents, that abundance is capable of helping the Democratic Party electorally in the way Klein and Thompson want to believe. "Very few voters," write Isaiah Glick, "are actually going to notice the changes that Klein and Thompson suggest in their book."

in the ideological department, to call the book generally confused—outside of deregulatory libertarianism—is probably still generous. Malcolm Harris, in a lengthy piece, lingers on a number of questions that seem prudent such as "[...]why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?" surely, in a book where the pair find time to pooh-pooh measures such as degrowth, advertisement reduction, or a shift away from meat and dairy consumption, there is space to linger on the defense budget—often maligned as the representation of government waste and inefficiency among the liberal-left hemisphere of politics? but they are conspicuously pretty silent here, and in many places where scrutiny of government waste and inefficiency is actually warranted. there's also the book's bizarre forays into non-liberal economics. when the book starts "cit[ing] Karl Marx in [its] argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards," Harris understandably poses this as self-evidently stupid—not least because it is an absurdist usage of Marx in a book that, for the record, seldom even mentions class (much less class conflict).

returning to Bruenig (who to reiterate is otherwise reasonably sympathetic to abundance) he calls the book's narrativizing and historiography rather weak and scattershot, saying "Sometimes the blame [for obstruction] is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader." hardly an ideal review of one of Abundance's central themes. Bruenig's specialty is economic policy, though, and it is apparent that he is even more critical of the book's willingness to confidently assert things like "American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark." America is almost uniquely unwilling to implement Nordic-style measures, Bruenig notes, opting (largely at the behest of liberals like Klein and Thompson!) for means-testing over universality.

and more generally, to close out, the book seems to be irritatingly fast and loose with its facts and focus despite the wonkishness of both its writers. there are people who credibly contest Klein and Thompson's understanding of telecommunications or his characterization of the process for deploying rural broadband funding, the nuances of which he seems to have either missed or intentionally ignored because they undercut his thesis; and there are people who observe the oddity of the pair's hyperfocus on a handful of major U.S. cities as engines of creation and productivity in what is ostensibly intended to be a sweeping agenda for America. there are people who dispute the Abundance narrative of housing, its tendency to avoid having to address the impact of the Great Recession, and its dancing around inconvenient facts, such as

the Golden State [having] built plenty of housing in the mid-aughts. In fact, at times in 2004 and 2005, California even permitted more new housing units than Texas did. Since zoning restrictions didn’t suddenly get tighter in the second half of the 2000s, this building boom scrambles the thesis that public land-use controls are the root cause of today’s housing crisis.

to say nothing of those who raise their eyebrows at abundance and its willingness to sideline the very workers needed to carry out such a sweeping program of construction; or those who rightly point that infrastructural bottlenecks—from housing, to power, to transportation, and beyond—are often more a product of capital, corporate consolidation, and monopoly than regulation that needs cutting. for all the problems Klein and Thompson assign to regulation, there is above all very little engagement with what comes after (which is often less clear-cut than they would perhaps like), or even a fleshing out the intermediary between what we have now and what abundance looks like tomorrow. this is a bad way to do things.

in sum, it's not a particularly good or interesting book. it would be nice to talk less of it.

notes

¹ one is inclined to think, as an aside, that abundance would be less easy to "co-opt" if Derek Thompson could avoid paling around with conservatives like noted freak and probable white supremacist Richard Hanania. the organizational ties of abundance groups—rife with Silicon Valley capitalists, effective altruists, techno-libertarians, and all sorts of bizarre and reactionary monied interests—also leave quite a lot to be desired.

please do not adjust your coyote

Alyaza Birze (March 11)

today's reading is Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900-1925 and i'll have a few things to say and chronicle from this book; however, here's a quick and interesting one that stands out: the incredible amount of hysteria that swept even quite homogeneous portions of the United States during and after World War I.

writing about the situation in Marion, Indiana, Errol Wayne Stevens highlights the unusual amount of worry about socialist revolution in the city—he notes the Chronicle's fear in particular, saying:

The Chronicle noted editorially that the Bolsheviks had been a small minority and had been able to seize power primarily because of the disorganization of Russia’s ruling elite. In order to avoid a similar situation in Marion, the Chronicle suggested that a vigilance committee of patriotic citizens should organize and equip a force of at least five hundred men to stand by in case of a possible insurrection: “We do not wish to pose as alarmists. We do feel, however, that we are living in a critical situation, and that there is a need of immediate action of a broad and comprehensive character to insure us against calamity. Under present conditions indifference and inaction are both cowardly and treasonable. We must get busy, and get busy at once.

what makes this fascinating is the nature of Marion in the first place. economically, Marion's importance had waned substantially by the outbreak of World War I. originally a beneficiary of the Indiana gas boom, the waning of this boom left the city mired in a devastating and localized recession throughout the late 1900s and 1910s. factories abandoned the city in substantial numbers, and the city population dropped by several thousand despite a large-scale annexation in 1902 that added nearly 3,000 residents. in terms of demographics, Marion was never a place strongly dependant on immigrant labor. indeed there was a near total absence of non-white or even foreign-born residents, particularly in comparison to other industrial Midwest cities. Stevens observes that in 1910, the census found "84 percent of the city’s residents had been born in the United States and that only 3 percent were of foreign birth. Slightly less than 8 percent of the population were second-generation Americans." the city was—in short—much closer to ethnically homogeneous than culturally diverse.

in the absence of usual sources of anti-socialist hysteria, Marion's case can probably be attributed to the presence of a localized and successful Socialist party which had been very oppositional to the patriotic line on World War I. beginning in 1900—and particularly after 1913—Marion became of the major centers of the Socialist Party of Indiana. Marion's local of the party took a particularly strongly anti-war line which, in 1914, charged that "our fellow citizens who uphold the capitalist party are guilty of murder in that they stand for the system making wholesale murder inevitable." in 1917 with the United States' entry looming, the local continued hold strongly anti-war positions—it sent a delegate to the Socialist Party of America's emergency national convention with instructions to categorically "vote against American entry into the European conflict."

despite this position, the party had been fairly successful in 1917: it elected two city councilors and, although losing to Republican Elkannah Hulley, 30.5% of the vote for mayor. but it seems this success was the impetus for the Chronicle's turn to redbaiting in 1918 and an ominous sign of developments to come. the following year in 1919, Marion was struck by a lengthy and intense labor dispute which reflected many of the anxieties . workers at the Rutenber Motor Company went on strike in August that year for "collective bargaining, [a] forty-eight-hour week, and an increase in wages averaging about 20 percent"; manufacturers subsequently attempted to crush the unions responsible for this organizing and a protracted period of unrest followed. strikebreakers were brought in and repeatedly assaulted. on one such occasion Mayor Hulley used the opportunity to denounce the strike at Rutenber, saying of the workers that "Everyone of you are I.W.W.’s, anarchists and everyone of you ought to be in the penitentiary. You are undesirable citizens." (ironically, this seems to have galvanized the IWW presence in Marion substantially; they had previously been nonexistent in the region.) later still, Hulley sanctified strikebreakers openly carrying firearms and—on several other occasions—allowed special police from the Illinois Glass Company (where a different strike was taking place) to operate in Marion, where they reportedly shot at least one Rutenber striker.

it is unclear from Stevens' account how the strike at Rutenber ended; however, in October 1919 feelings in the community apparently remained so intense that when a police officer assaulted a woman with a billy club, the community nearly lynched him and later burned him in effigy. the Chronicle charged that the incident was caused by IWW members and other radicals. (the paper later admitted only one person in the entire city had any involvement in the union.) antipathy toward socialism continued after this wave of labor unrest, however—in large part it defined the 1921 municipal elections, where both parties took aim at the growing Socialist vote. Republican Party members charged that socialists were morally degenerate and atheistic, and would separate from this scare business away and leave Marion permanently economically deprived. the Democratic Party, meanwhile, ran a vehemently anti-socialist and anti-communist campaign. their candidate for mayor, J. M. Wallace, decried socialists as treasonous for their position on World War I and argued that the recently-established Soviet Union was causing "starvation, sorrow, and suffering exist there as never before."

the extent to which this redbaiting campaign was effective is debatable, although support for direct impact is minimal; the Socialist for mayor, Harry Oatis, took a modestly improved 31% of the vote even though he came third in the election. the Socialist Party retained two city councilors after the municipal elections of 1921. within months of the elections, however, the party became effectively moribund. the primary causes were economic rebound and general dysfunction in the Socialist Party of Indiana; but, undoubtedly, vehement opposition from the major parties eventually took its toll on the party. the redbaiting and worries of Bolshevism also served as fertile ground for the Ku Klux Klan, which apparently recruited hundreds of members in Marion as the party disappeared from the scene. when, in November 1922, an estimated one-thousand Klan members paraded in Marion, it de facto marked a bookend for socialist political strength in the city.

Alyaza Birze (January 25)

Where the state in the early twentieth century appeared weak because of its lack of control of the metropolis (to which fascists responded by marching through the cities), the state in the early twenty-first century appears weak because it apparently does not control its borders (the actual massive accretion of border technologies notwithstanding). This is why migration politics, although not a major part of the state’s total activities, is so important for far-right movements which contest the power of the state[...]
—Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right

as immigration politics continue to spiral and the Trump administration begins to gear up for "large-scale" immigration raids in major US cities, it seems prudent to begin outlining something i call the "sundown agenda". in short, the sundown agenda is the overarching effort to de facto recriminalize being a visible minority. this effort largely models itself after the sundown town (and an oft-associated, infamous exhortation: 'Nigger, don't let the sun set on your head'), hence my name for it

like many portions of the contemporary right, this agenda takes an amorphous form that is both disorganized and centralized at the same time. the broader belief that certain kinds of people should neither be seen nor heard is centrally accepted across most of the right—in many respects it informs what the right does and why—but how this should be accomplished is scattershot. this is fortunate in many ways (a consensus on this subject can be intensely damaging: see the push against trans people for instance) but unfortunate in others (it is hard to fully grasp the scope of the problem, and in many cases fighting this agenda is fighting only one head).

illustrating the latter point, consider the apparent ICE raids against Diné (Navajo) citizens and the recent Trump administration argument for ending birthright citizenship that seemingly rest upon overturning American citizenship for natives too. it would be understandable to see these as completely unrelated events—but from my perspective, they both belie a fundamental axiom of the right-wing that groups like Native Americans are "apart from" the United States and can only become American through total assimilation. it is this system of beliefs that allows one to argue “The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is.” without shame; and it is that system which sees unlawful detention of Diné by ICE (forcing them to prove their citizenship and place in this country they were forced to join, rather than forcing ICE to demonstrate they are in some way undocumented immigrants) as acceptable.

state-level contributions to the sundown agenda

the apparent raids in Arizona and arguments by the Trump administration for banning birthright citizenship are obviously big problems; but just as alarming for many people are state-level contributions to this agenda. this post was actually inspired by one: Wyoming, which i have already detailed for its fossil fascists, is likely to pass a bill (HB 116) "invalidat[ing] driver licenses issued to unauthorized immigrants by other states" in the coming days. although dubiously constitutional and apparently ambiguous on legal penalties, what is not unambiguous is the bill making it de facto illegal for undocumented immigrants to drive alone in Wyoming (whether they are residents of the state or merely driving through). per the reporting of WyoFile:

Law enforcement chiefs interviewed by WyoFile said they weren’t entirely certain if undocumented immigrants driving with such licenses would be detained. In many cases, they said, offenders would be issued a ticket then — if someone else could take the wheel — travel on. But if not, they may end up stranded or, if there are other criminal charges, even jailed. “If you don’t have a driver’s license you can’t drive,” said Col. Tim Cameron, who directs the Wyoming Highway Patrol. “They would need an alternative method of transportation or another driver.”

even more concerning are other measures that Wyoming could potentially take up. HB 133, another bill introduced by a Wyoming Freedom Caucus member, would completely ban sanctuary policies (there are none in Wyoming) and defund polities which attempt to pass them. but it would also "charge government officials who don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities with a felony"—an incredibly punitive and almost certainly unconstitutional measure designed to silence elected officials with sympathies to undocumented immigrants. Wyoming is not the only state considering such a bill either: in Tennessee, where sanctuary policies are already banned, a new sweeping anti-immigration bill threatens to criminalize even voting for a sanctuary policy. under this bill, doing so would "become a Class E Felony and grounds for removal from office."

obviously, the harm of bills which make it illegal to vote the "wrong" way are immense, and they are yet another step toward democratic backsliding whether they pass or not. i will reiterate that they are also almost certainly unconstitutional—it seems inconceivable to me that any court could ever legitimize making it illegal to vote a certain way when you serve on a democratically elected body, at least not without precipitating a disastrous constitutional crisis. but the right is willing to test the legal system on this subject.

there are also the bills intended to stoke fear, and which you might call an unusual form of stochastic terrorism. in Mississippi, an immigrant bounty bill (modeled after a similar one in Missouri) has been making news; although likely unworkable for at least a dozen reasons and unlikely to be taken up, the bill certainly makes it feel like criminalization (even potentially at the hands of a private actor) could happen anywhere.

what you can do about it

all of this is fightable—most of it should be legally inactionable, and will presumably be challenged on that basis. but it's important to get organized and be organized against this reaction; on the legislative, legal, and labor side there should be proactive efforts to ensure that undocumented immigrants are shielded through sanctuary policies, and consistent resistance against any policies that would jeopardize this status. undocumented immigrants should be made aware of their rights in advance (see Arise Chicago's toolkit for immigrant workers and Immigrant Legal Resource Center: Red Cards as just two resources) and given resources to lean on if they are detained (NNIRR's hotlines for example). if you can, you should join a broad organization like DSA or volunteer your skillset to an organization which will have it. in short: there's a lot you can do right now, but you must be the person who chooses to do it.

Alyaza Birze (January 19)

Today’s [proletarian] reactionaries are increasingly ethno-nationalist and, rather than acknowledge the fires they see with their own eyes, will instead dial up the violence.

Since they are both conservative, the bourgeois capitalist denialist ISA and the proletarian reactionaries ally on the right. For example, when the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party movement after the election of Obama, they took advantage of anti-Black racism to astroturf an apparatus conducive to deregulation. In what Ernesto Laclau called a “chain of equivalences,” deregulation stitched itself to ethno-nationalism.
—Tad DeLay, Future of Denial

i promise i'm not always bad news; unfortunately many of the things i take an interest in will be significantly affected by the change in administration, and there's a lot i want to say about that. one of those things is climate change: already it has become obvious that the second-Trump-term backlash to climate change mitigation is going to be significantly stronger than anything we experienced in his first term.

i don't say this particularly lightly. you may remember my essay "Just How Bad The Antifa Wildfire Panic Got In Rural Oregon in 2020" which recounted some of the collective psychosis that gripped the American right during 2020 (a psychosis which has largely been memoryholed). things have been bad in this space for years now, and it is evident that what Tad DeLay characterizes as the "proletarian reactionary" response to climate change has developed into a fever that will not recede easily. but the highly-visible Oregon roadblocks of 2020 were in many ways just the first great culmination of climate change, widespread anti-government paranoia, and the Obama-era and Trump-era revitalization of the far-right. the militia movement has been aggrieved and preparing for domestic crisis since Waco, and was given second wind by Obama's presidency. Oath Keeper "community preparedness teams" appeared in Ferguson during the 2014-15 civil rights protests there and deployed themselves in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico during the disastrous 2018 hurricane season. given the confluence of absolute fucking disasters that occurred in 2020, it is not particularly surprising that 2020 was a landmark year for climate reactionaries.

what might be surprising though is how the stories of the proletarian reactionary militia groups have continued at an alarming pace. it is likely you are familiar with Kyle Rittenhouse (who fashioned himself as something of a militia teenager) and the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer because those are not climate related and are conventionally ideological for militia groups. but you probably are not familiar with the Oath Keepers trying to render disaster aid during tornado outbreaks in 2021; or the Echo Company militia feeding people and attempting to recruit among those displaced from the 2022 Oak Fire; or the efforts by the Oath Keepers and their sympathizers, after January 6th, to reinvent themselves (or at least complicate their image) as a sort of accessory to FEMA and disaster management. this is new behavior, and behavior that has allowed militia groups to become an increasingly normalized feature of disasters. these groups now launder political reaction through the rhetoric of private community service,¹ a pivot that is handsomely paying off. some states like Idaho have outright repealed their prohibition on such militia groups. but even places like Nassau County, New York—effectively suburban New York City—are finding this manifestation of reactionary politics quite appealing. in March of last year, Prism reported on Nassau County's Republicans, and their effort to organize the county's own disaster militia.

militia groups are only one half of the backlash, though—and the second is actually the part i'm particularly worried about.

the proletarian reactionary as a surrogate for the bourgeois capitalist

the other half of the backlash consists of proletarian reactionaries in state legislatures acting out the interests of DeLay's "bourgeois capitalists" (as opposed to those capitalists taking initiative themselves). perhaps because it is being led by proletarians and not by fossil fuel executives, this reaction seems uninterested in the usual deregulatory schemes and is instead prepared to settle fossil fuel hegemony by force and state mandate.

Oklahoma: ground zero of fossil fascism

ground zero for this phenomenon is Oklahoma, as helpfully described by Heatmap's Jael Holtzman. although stereotypically associated with coal and gas, the state now produces nearly half of its energy from renewable energy. this green energy revolution has been so inarguably great for Oklahoma that even its terrible Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, frequently flexes the state's renewable energy credibility and thinks the free market should decide its energy mix—an implicitly pro-renewable position cloaked in conservative rhetoric. to this point, Oklahoma has actually been a remarkable success story for renewables and how they can thrive in a very conservative state. under the surface, however, an extremely grim revolution is brewing: one that seeks the ban of all green energy in the state.

to be clear, Oklahoma is not the only place where backlash to renewables is occurring. around 15% of US counties have restrictions or outright bans on such developments, most of which have been passed in the last 15 years. it is effectively impossible to build wind turbines in several states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Connecticut; solar bans have not yet been taken up by an entire state but are a growing problem in the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic areas.

but what distinguishes Oklahoma's experience is the character of the backlash to renewables and the totality of the demand. when you look at Tennesseee and Vermont's functional bans, for example, these rested on concerns like property values and noise pollution—classic NIMBYism, in other words. Tennessee's governor at the time, Bill Haslam, explicitly opposed a total ban on wind projects in the state; certainly Vermont, one of America's most liberal states, has no hang-ups about green energy. in Oklahoma the character of the backlash is explicitly fossil fascist—that is, motivated by reverence for oil and gas and ideologically opposed to any alternative which threatens these. to the extent that NIMBY-like concerns do exist, they are recognized only insofar as they advance this fossil fascism.

Jim Shaw, a newly-elected politician who successfully primaried the chair of the Appropriations and Budget Committee in part by running on a statewide wind moratorium, makes this fossil fascism quite explicit. Shaw believes that a "taxpayer-subsidized 'green energy' agenda" is a "huge land grab is destroying our agriculture and ranching communities, our overall way of life and working to eradicate the oil and gas industry." in an interview with Breitbart, he explicitly argues that green energy would be the death of Oklahoma. there is no hiding behind aesthetics, or noise, or setbacks—and a significant of his contemporaries are clearly in the same headspace. on January 9th, he appeared with numerous other legislators, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and Education Secretary Ryan Walters at a "Stop the Green" rally demanding Governor Stitt pass an "Executive Order to stop the wind turbines, solar, and other “green” energy agendas from destroying Oklahoma!" this desired Executive Order is unlikely happen for reasons already stated—Stitt is effectively pro-renewable—but in many ways it is also a diversion. from my perspective the real point of the rally was to demonstrate how widely fossil fascism has penetrated in Oklahoma, and to scare other legislator into compliance.

the organization behind the rally, the Freedom Brigades, seems to confirm this assumption; in an interview with Holtzman, its founder Charity Linch stated "I don’t believe that [pro-renewable Republicanism is] going to continue in Oklahoma. If [other Republicans] haven’t figured it out yet, they will very soon." indeed the Freedom Brigades have quickly become a vanguard against green energy projects in Oklahoma—and that they have the Attorney General on their side is not trivial. (Drummond, it should be noted, has fought extensively to instate a law that would prevent Oklahoma from investing in companies that boycott or divest from the oil and gas industry; he is also now running for governor in 2026.) this is to say nothing of Freedom Brigades' several elected officials, of which Jim Shaw is just one. Representatives Tim Turner and Neil Hays (both attendees of the organization's January 9th rally) are just as oppositional as Shaw is to green energy, and now they have a body count to show for it. just days ago they killed a wind farm project in their region, apparently with the backing of House Speaker Kyle Hilbert no less. Turner's words at the rally—“It’s time to let the outsiders know, we will protect our quality of life in Oklahoma. Time to get back to oil and gas—drill baby drill!”—seem disturbingly close to a promise for what is to come in parts of America whose economies are heavily reliant on fossil fuel revenue: compliance by force.

Wyoming: the farcical conclusion

and the logical conclusion of this "what is to come" is not something we must idly speculate about either. Wyoming, another state heavily reliant on fossil fuels, once saw its politics moderated by an interesting sort of old-guard frontier libertarianism. its current governor, Mark Gordon, comes from this wing of the party and is comparatively moderate.² but in the Trump era the state as a whole has simply careened to the right behind an ascendant, far-right Freedom Caucus. their vicious efforts in the 2022 elections saw them gain an ally in Secretary of State Chuck Gray, and in the 2024 elections the Caucus took a majority in the state House of Representatives and scalped numerous leaders of the legislature. that majority is now seeking to completely reshape an already conservative state.

given its significance to the state, the fossil fuel industry is not exempt from that reshaping—and in this area the Wyoming Freedom Caucus can best be described as accelerationist. nowhere is this more evident than with the ‘Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again’ proposal, a just-introduced bill by Freedom Caucus ally Cheri Steinmetz and Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus John Bear that earnestly argues "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is a beneficial substance" and would make it unlawful to enact any sort of carbon reduction measures in Wyoming. to say this is an expression of fossil fascism and a move to benefit the bourgeois capitalists is obvious. Steinmetz is blatantly laundering fossil fuel corporation talking points when she speaks of carbon mitigation measures bearing "high economic costs and questionable environmental benefits, and clearly negative effects on our people and our industries." she's even doing so when she speaks of people "vilifying this essential gas"—points that come from the George C. Marshall Institute and its successor in the CO₂ Coalition, at least one of which has been funded by Exxon Mobil and both of which are allies of the American Petroleum Institute.

but that's to be expected. really it is the penetration of these extreme beliefs which is remarkable, just as in Oklahoma. in ordinary circumstances this bill could be written off as posturing or attention seeking—but, in Wyoming's legislature, its only impediment is whether the Freedom Caucus will take it up or not. in my mind that is a very real question. multiple Freedom Caucus members such as Representatives Christopher Knapp and Scott Heiner—who have argued Wyoming should maximize fossil fuel production and minimize any carbon sequestration—seem to agree with Steinmetz. and when Steinmetz brought the CO₂ Coalition to the legislature last year, multiple Senators attended. fossil fascism has many takers in Wyoming.

if there's any good news, it's that Mark Gordon would probably veto this bill if it reached his desk. it would certainly be easy to justify: even constrained to its own internal logic the bill would be a disaster for Wyoming and the independence the Freedom Caucus claims to want. but Gordon will be termed out in 2026,³ and it seems very unlikely that his successor will be comparatively moderate like he is. will the interests of fossil fuel companies in Wyoming be lessened by then? will the Freedom Caucus in Wyoming be lesser in influence by then? the chances of a fossil fascist state government in Wyoming seem alarmingly plausible before the end of the decade. and mind you, i have not touched on the other canards of fossil fascism. racism and immigration fearmongering are just one constant—the hardliners in Wyoming want to bring the boot down on "illegals" and the indigenous. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is already promising to "DEPORT illegal immigrants" as Governor and has called on Donald Trump to immediately begin rounding up anyone with a deportation order. a genuinely fossil fascist government, even with the constrained powers of a U.S. state, would be capable of enacting a great deal of localized harm—particularly if it began to deputize and normalize the militia groups who have become increasingly common in disaster areas.

a more optimistic conclusion

fortunately, the nationwide context remains much better. it's hard to make of what a second Trump administration will do for militia groups, but much of America's existing climate progress and green infrastructure will be hard to dismantle. even in the worst case scenario right now, the reaction is also limited in geographical extent. most states are still making state-level progress on climate change because it's good business and creates good, high-paying jobs. almost $100 billion in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act are effectively future-proofed (and Republicans are divided on the tax credits it passed, making it much harder to repeal those). believe it or not, federal initiatives like the Climate Corps are also surprisingly insulated from the next few years because they didn’t employ people directly (an issue-turned-benefit, you could say). markets, of course, still quite like renewable energy over most fossil fuels and are not likely to change their minds because wind turbines make certain Republicans mad. finally, America is just one country even if it is a very large contributor to climate change. it would take monumental backsliding here to offset everyone else's progress—and, at least right now, it is an open question whether American backsliding will be more than a selective and regionalized phenomenon. is the creep of fossil fascism bad? yes, and it is very worrying—if not for everyone, at least for the people likely to be affected by it. but i'm ultimately not a doomer here and, at least right now, you shouldn't be either.

footnotes

¹ of course, these groups are still quite explicit in terms of who they seek to marginalize and who they identify as the enemy. you need look no further than the things they get up to on the side—unlawfully operated militia training facilities in Vermont, voter intimidation in Arizona, confrontations with civil rights protesters, and efforts to police the US-Mexico border extrajudicially among others.

² to the point where he has faced censured for being too moderate; in general, Gordon has a bad relationship with much of his party and a very bad relationship with the Freedom Caucus of his state.

³ with the caveat that he may challenge Wyoming's term limits in court.

or: an unintentional Cohost requiem

Alyaza Birze (January 12)

The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private [corporate tech] platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. [...] Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible. So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization, even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique.
—Doppelganger, chapter 2

i'm in the middle of reading Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, and in the second chapter of the book she makes a point about corporate social media (and corporate technology more generally) and how it has enclosed the internet. far from the libertine, do-what-you-want spirit that once characterized the internet—or even the promise of freedom of expression and mass social connection that was effectively the selling point of early social media—we now live in an almost totally enclosed, enshittified internet experience. our social relations online are almost fully privatized and monetized by megacorporations, and the resultant data we inevitably give these corporations is trivially bought, sold, and analyzed by anybody who wants to do that. it is quite bad, and leads to many subsequent bad consequences.

one consequence is, as Klein observes, a mass homogenization—something that likely has an already existing name but which i personally call the caricature problem. i'd like to take some time to sketch this problem out, how Cohost avoided this problem and why it was so enjoyable, and what we'll be losing now that it's gone.

the caricature problem

in short, the caricature problem is this: the internet is so enclosed and so algorithmically captured that it punishes expressing the totalities and complexities of ourselves. to stand out we must exaggerate or flatten ourselves—become caricatures of who we are—into digestible, predictable personalities for consumption. we must in effect become marketable brands. as Klein notes, this is not incongruent with individual quirkiness or uniqueness: actually, those qualities frequently become a manifestation of this problem. even when we would prefer not to, we frequently become pigeonholed into acting out the qualities which other people perceive as defining us. gimmick or single-issue accounts "breaking character" and receiving backlash can be thought of as an example of this—but virtually all of us are subject to this pressure at some point or another, and in one way or another. often times we (preemptively) reduce ourselves like this without even realizing it.

how does this problem come about?

as described, this probably feels like an inevitability. of course social media run by Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and a cadre of other cretins with psychotic technolibertarian beliefs would render us all caricatures in this way. these are people with a very specific, very inhuman idea of what social relations should look like. but the problem is created by something more fundamental: that we mediate nearly all of our online social relations through private actors at all. the enclosure of the internet provides corporations with such a wealth of data that it is trivial for them—both individually and at scale—to manipulate every aspect of how people interact and in what ways they do so. and of course they have every market incentive to do so (to say nothing of other—frequently political—incentives).

the most prominent and omnipresent manifestation of this is algorithms, without question: how you experience social media today is overwhelmingly determined by mechanical processes that are hidden or obfuscated from you as much as possible. a good social media algorithm is invisible, and yet in its essence reflects the amount of data you (and everyone else) put into it. needless to say, we put an unfathomable amount of data into these private actors—the things we post, who we talk to, the things we like and interact with, and so on—and all but hand them the capacity to "objectify and quantify social life in numerical form," as Richard Seymour puts it in The Twittering Machine. but it should be no surprise that to "quantify social life" in this way produces perverse incentives—rounded personalities are punished, caricatures are rewarded; substantive exchanges with complexities are buried, simple narratives encouraged; and personalities become hostages to their algorithmically-served-up audiences.

this is bad, but perhaps it would be easier to stomach if the ability to "quantify social life" was not simultaneously being sold back to users in the form of metrics, which are actually even more omnipresent. social media is simply awash in numbers: likes, dislikes, reshares, comments, quoted posts, views, follower counts, post numbers, and a frankly endless number of other meaningless units. and this is to say nothing of dashboards that track profile statistics, link clickthroughs, and other business-oriented number values that have little meaning but are usually accessible to literally anyone.¹ it is simply trivial to become a caricature because you are given the ability—in painstaking detail—to know exactly what people want from you, exactly what they don't, and what might make people care or be more social with you the next time you post. this is obviously a recipe for disaster. unless you're explicitly looking for it, who sincerely wants to be on the wrong side of an issue, or the bad end of a ratio, or become the main character of the day and have thousands of people gawking at you for sport? and conversely who doesn't like being reassured they're correct, or having 10,000 people listen to what they say (even if it means compromising on their personality)?

many other factors besides algorithms and metrics inform all of this, of course, but they alone demonstrate the point sufficiently in my view. (they also have unique relevance to Cohost and why the website largely avoided these issues.)

Cohost and its lack of the caricature problem

now, i cannot give you any sense of what should be done about this at the systemic level besides "fundamentally overthrow the existing political, social, and economic system we live in, since replication of this issue is good for business"—and obviously that's a bit of a non-answer. but i do think there are alternatives to this that can exist even within a capitalist framework. Cohost demonstrates this quite well.

ask virtually any Cohost user and they will tell you that Cohost was an incredibly freeing experience for them—a space where they felt the ability to be themselves instead of a living commodity. frequently, users of the site talk about being "deprogrammed" and "detoxed" from the corrosive influence of Twitter and Mastodon metrics, which had previously governed how and what they posted about; others talk about how Cohost finally allowed their art to coexist alongside their other interests. Nicky Flowers writes of the site that "i didn't have to be Nicky Flowers™️, Internet Person Trying To Appear Professional Enough To Hire. no number-go-up, no clout. i was simply nicky." and still another common feeling is that Cohost had a sort of egalitarianism among posters where, because you could only infer influence, even "big accounts" were approachable and able to be socialized with on equal terms.

all of these experiences—and others like them—were clearly and in large part facilitated by Cohost's explicit design choices. from the beginning Cohost committed to no algorithms (instead opting for a chronological timeline and a Tumblr-style tagging system) and a near total absence of metrics (the only numbers was a private-facing notification number, which could be turned off). these were highly-touted selling points for the website, they were substantial talking points in word-of-mouth, and they were extremely well-liked choices by people who used the website actively.² even among skeptics the initial shock and discomfort from the metric choice in particular consistently tended to wear off with time. many of the theoretical problems one might conjure from their absence also simply did not happen in practice.³ "lack of engagement" for example was a reason many artists on Twitter were skeptical of the site's lack of metrics. far from this dampening visible enthusiasm for creative projects though, Cohost had a bustling art scene—especially among writers and musicians, whose mediums of choice mesh poorly with contemporary social media. although anecdotal, it also seems well established that Cohost users were quite generous and had an unusually high click-through rate for artist projects.

i will refrain from drawing strong, sweeping conclusions here due to self-selection bias, but i would argue that Cohost demonstrates quite compellingly that metrics—and algorithms—are completely unnecessary components of a full social media experience. we do not have to be turned into caricatures. it is also entirely possible—even with a small team—to build a functional, modern, well-liked social media platform without either of these. this of course begs the question of why companies don't do this more.

what we will lose with Cohost

i don't need to tell you that the answer is capital. it always is. whether they acknowledge it or not, websites make an explicit, ideological choice to encourage this phenomenon. as Richard Seymour says, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered," and yet it is simultaneously easy to induce users to make more of it. you can see a sort of vicious cycle: data is produced by engagement so you juice engagement with algorithms that reflect user inputs. you provide metrics that quantify a user's social life back to them so they know what algorithms and people following them want. those users produce more data. rinse and repeat, the users are—in the most dehumanizing sense possible—the product. Cohost's model eschewed this, so it's an obvious nonstarter for most people in the social media business today. for most social media companies an explicit part of the path to profitability includes selling out their users (usually in multiple ways!) to venture capital firms.

but this illustrates what we will lose without Cohost: an actually existing example of a better world that is possible; a sort of socialism-in-one-website if you want to be tongue-in-cheek about it. it's not as if Cohost ever threatened the existing capitalist hegemony in social media or anything, but you might still analogize its loss to, say, Cuba, or Rojava, or the Zapatistas suddenly collapsing tomorrow. Cohost was—more or less—a genuinely socialist, cooperatively-owned social media company, a beacon of light in an appalling industry. it really sucks to see a radical experiment like this fail, and it's not obvious that another experiment like it will occur given what needed to align to make Cohost happen in the first place. the market is also a harsh mistress: that Cohost lived its values; demonstrated social media might be able to exist without making users a product to be bought and sold; and allowed its users to be real, fully fledged people means devastatingly little. as far as most people are concerned what Cohost stood for is not a viable product because it failed, and the discussion ends there.

but i don't want to say everything is completely dour, even though the probability of another Cohost-like website is obviously low. strictly speaking many Fediverse communities are also examples of this model, and so someone will continue to keep the lights on (just at a much, much smaller scale) where markets almost assuredly won't. in my view the model is also clearly sound, even at Cohost's scale, with better planning and better budgeting. if someone ever scrounges up the money and coordination to make it real, i don't see anything actually stopping a Cohost-like website in principle. maybe a "successful Cohost" in the future will succeed because it learns from its predecessor—becoming the 1917 to Cohost's 1905. i don't know.

if nothing else, though, i hope that the principles of Cohost (there is value in being in the same place as everyone; metrics are ruining our lives; human curation is good and social media algorithms have been a disaster; etc.) continue to inform the immediate future of radical social media. i would like to look back upon this as a "dress rehearsal" to a tech future that does not completely suck ass

footnotes

¹ at one point—and perhaps still, although i have not checked—Twitter provided every user with a dashboard of all of their posts, the amount of interactions they received, the best performing tweet over a given timeframe, and dozens of other measures from which it would be trivial to determine what you should and should not post.

² by far the most consistent critics of either of these choices were users who did not even register for the site, at least in my experience.

³ a lengthy aside i'd just like to put on record somewhere: to the extent that there were actual points of friction introduced by these design choices, these tended to be more inconveniences than legitimate issues with continued usage of Cohost. should tagging or following cool people that interact with your posts have been such a load-bearing aspect of discovery on Cohost? perhaps not, but i would not describe this as an actual issue—this feels too weighty for what was more an inconvenience than anything. many of the issues were closer to future-proofing than anything else. deprioritizing metrics can, for example, be a legitimate impediment to identifying where abuse is actually coming from. on Cohost this could have eventually become a serious issue since it was possible to sort of "quote retweet" a post, and none of these notified the person whose post was being "quote retweeted". but to my knowledge this was never a substantial vector for harassment; certainly Cohost was never lacking in harassment or harassers who could have done this. in any case, i think i would rather grapple with the complexity of squaring that circle than put up with Twitter metrics because it's slightly easier to trace who is imploring their 100,000 followers to harass you.

or: climate change, insurance markets, and how fucked we are

Alyaza Birze (January 11)

back on Cohost i briefly talked a few times about the insurance market and how completely fucked it is; however, this deserves a more lengthy consideration in light of the disastrous wildfires this week in California. to put it shortly: consider this a likely shot across the bow for what to expect as climate change gets worse; events like wildfires, floods, and hurricanes get more frequent and damaging; and insurers get squeezed on the properties they protect.

a brief overview of a complete disaster

i'm sure i don't need to extensively recap the sheer devastation in California, but: this was and is literally the worst fire event in Los Angeles history. i think there is a decent-to-good chance that ultimately the Palisades Fire (in Pacific Palisades and Malibu) and the Eaton Fire (in Pasadena and Altadena) become the second and third most destructive fires in California history—they will definitely clock in no worse than third and fourth on that list. both have destroyed an estimated 5,000 or structures, and it is likely that they impacted over 10,000 structures each, so don't be surprised if structure loss numbers are revised up again. as of writing, there are at least 11 fatalities—that would be miraculous if it held given the circumstances.

needless to say, this event will go down in history as a measuring stick for what is possible in Los Angeles' future. my suspicion is that this term it is probably going to rewrite how to think about the wildland-urban interface and just how far that actually extends into a city. from the Eaton Fire, for instance, several buildings have burned in Altadena and Pasadena that (in my estimation) are as far as two miles away from the foothills. only the winds relenting and the ability of aircraft to operate seems to have actually prevented the fire from burning all the way to the 210. spot fires were also observed up to three miles ahead of the fire—effectively making any possibility of firebreaks an academic one. it is quite clear that we are extremely unprepared for the future intensity and worst case scenario for wildfires! but, perhaps worse still, we have not even begun to seriously consider whether many of the areas that burned (or could burn) will need to be written off.

the broad strokes of California and its insurance crisis

one reality is that many parts of California are—or should be—uninsurable. companies like State Farm (currently the largest home insurer in California) and Allstate have increasingly reflected this, leaving the state and cancelling many existing policies they do hold. according to AP, in the past two years 7 of the 12 largest insurance companies by market share in California have restricted policies they write or left the state entirely. the uninsurability of many parts of California has also been reflected in the state's increasingly desperate efforts to intervene in the insurance market. beginning this year California will incentivize insurers to not leave by "requir[ing] home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas [...] In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers." but in all probability—and even supposing this plan works, which is debatable given this week's events—this will necessitate massive premium costs (and spikes) for many people, reflecting their high-risk situation.¹ this is not ideal in a state which already has the worst housing crisis in America.

more realistically the situation will get significantly worse regardless of what California does. this is for a number of reasons, some of which are complicated and some of which are simple. one complicated reason is that for a long time California's insurance industry has been severely constrained by 1988's Proposition 103. Prop 103 is a well-meaning Ralph Nader-led policy that "requires the “prior approval” of the state’s insurance regulator before insurance companies can implement property and casualty rates, including homeowner’s insurance" and makes it so that "property and casualty insurance companies cannot take all the losses associated with one event [...] and then simply put them onto next year’s rates." while this is obviously beneficial for homeowners and has saved them literally billions of dollars in premium hikes, these rules have also subsidized an unbelievable amount of high-risk development that is now coming home to roost. until last month, they prevented insurers from factoring climate change into their premiums; more generally, insurers have not been allowed to price policies according to current or future risk. this was not a good idea and it has also come home to roost. in many cases the only available remedy for insurers if they think they're overexposed to risk is to aggressively cancel policies, as State Farm has done.

but cancelling policies—in many cases—obviously fucks over policyholders because it is a nuclear option. indeed, Pacific Palisades had many State Farm policyholders whose policies were not renewed in March of last year, leaving them scrambling for coverage; as a result many of those households have flocked to California's insurer of last resort, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan. although intended to be temporary and providing only basic (and narrow, and expensive) coverage, FAIR is an increasingly load-bearing program in fire-prone areas. there are now more than 452,000 FAIR policies—double the number that existed in 2020—and the number continues to grow rapidly. this is both because FAIR cannot deny any person who "has made a diligent but unsuccessful effort to buy home insurance" and because it provides generous coverage of up to $3 million. consequently though, its exposure is massive. in Pacific Palisades alone that exposure is around $6 billion by some accounts. and the FAIR program is also likely insolvent, or close to it. according to Susan Crawford:

As of last June, the FAIR Plan, which may not deny fire insurance to anyone, no matter how risky their property, had a surplus of just $385 million available to pay claims. As of last March, the Plan had about $700 million in cash on hand (in addition to the surplus). It had about $5 billion in reinsurance, after a deductible of about $900 million (as long as that deductible is met by a single event).

as it currently exists the program is not well-placed to resist a massive wildfire shock—much of that $6 billion in exposure in Pacific Palisades has clearly gone up in flames (plus an unknown amount of exposure in Pasadena and Altadena). Crawford also notes that "the Plan's requests for premium increases to match its risks have been taking 18 months to two years to be approved (after substantial slashing) by the California Department of Insurance." given that total insured losses could be as high as $20 billion (with total economic losses in the $50 billion range), there is good reason to assume the program is not in a strong position to immediately cover its losses. it is entirely conceivable—perhaps even likely—that some sort of emergency funding, emergency rate increases, or in the worst case scenario a bailout will be necessary for people to eventually see payouts—to say nothing of the forthcoming teethpulling needed to get those payouts. (FAIR denies all of this and expects to be able to pay out, for what that's worth.)²

and of course there are also a lot of people who are either uninsured or self-insured because of the widespread policy cancellations. those people are generally going to be extremely wealthy or extremely fucked, and sometimes both. i don't think we need to linger particularly on this camp; the wealthy will take their money and go or rebuild (perhaps at onerous cost), the less fortunate will become a part of California's growing homeless population.

counterintuitive outcomes and their problems

disasters often make for complicated and counterintuitive outcomes. strangely, the middle-class and less fortunate in places like Pacific Palisades (at least if they still have insurance) are among the most likely to rebuild. this is because insurance policies are often small relative to current property values in California—another symptom of the state's ongoing housing crisis—making it so that only the state's poorest are able to recoup their losses in full. Jake Bittle, in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, observed this phenomenon in the aftermath of the Tubbs Fire, which burned over 5,600 structures in 2017:

The Tubbs fire revealed that the insurance equilibrium in [California] relied on flawed math. The home prices in a housing-scarce city like Santa Rosa could get up into the millions, but most fire policies provided only a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coverage, insuring only a portion of a structure’s value. This made sense to an extent, since electrical fires and other small blazes might only damage part of a home rather than level it altogether, but it was also a financial decision on the part of the insurance companies. The companies knew that wildfires were still possible, and they didn’t want to be liable for rebuilding an entire neighborhood’s worth of mansions, so they offered only enough coverage to satisfy lenders and homeowners. Thus, in the aftermath of the Tubbs Fire, many victims like José Guzman found that their insurance policies were not sufficient to cover the cost of rebuilding the homes they had lost, and one’s insurance policy set a ceiling on the value of one’s future home. It didn’t matter if a victim rebuilt their home on the same lot or bought a new home somewhere else. Unless she had extra savings to make up the difference, she could only get what her insurance payout would buy.

Strange as it might seem, this dynamic gave the middle-class homeowners in Coffey Park a distinct advantage over the wealthy homeowners in Fountaingrove when it came time to rebuild. Because the houses in Coffey Park were more modest than those in Fountaingrove, there was a smaller gap between the average insurance policy and the average home value, so most victims could afford to build new houses that were similar to the ones they had lost.[...]

now, to the untrained eye this may seem like a very good thing. ideally you would want families to be restored in whole, but the system is still preventing middle-class and lower-income families from being wiped out and rendered totally insolvent just because their houses burned. their neighborhoods and communities can also still be rebuilt where they used to be—something like Paradise, California, where an entire community was wiped out and scattered, need not happen here.

the problem, though, is the combination of California's housing crisis and these low insurance payouts mean the best option—or only option—for most lower-income families is to rebuild where they are. any other option necessitates significant loss or outright bankruptcy. but by rebuilding where they are, many families simultaneously become locked into living in fire-prone areas that will burn again—and therefore into holding properties that should be uninsurable (and eventually will be no matter what). many Californians, in other words, are now stuck with a bag they can only offload at prohibitive cost. Coffey Park is just one at-scale example. it was rebuilt in large part because it was the only place many policyholders could afford, and it was rebuilt in such a way that in the lifetime of these policyholders it will probably burn again. says Jake Bittle:

[The Tran family] insurance policy gave them only enough money to build a Coffey Park–caliber house, and there was only one Coffey Park. Moving back was a difficult decision, but it was also, in many respects, an easy one. Most other residents I interviewed had the same ambivalent journey as the Trans did: they liked the neighborhood, and they liked the idea of moving back, but they also knew they didn’t have much of a choice. Unless a victim wanted to downsize or move far afield, they had a significant financial incentive to stay put. [...] insurers didn’t have any control over fire-safety standards for the rebuilt homes, so the new version of Coffey Park turned out to be just as vulnerable to wildfires as the old one. Since the neighborhood was outside the wildland-urban interface, protected by the freeway, it was exempt from the stricter building codes that the city of Santa Rosa adopted after the fire. The new homes were still spaced just a few feet apart and separated by wooden fences, and many of the new yards were planted with flammable mulch. The new home builders also declined to pay for fire-prevention upgrades like hardened concrete walls and fireproof windows. It might be a long time before another fire skips over the freeway, but when it did, the insurance companies would again get stuck with a massive bill. (emphasis mine)

the same, unfortunately, will probably be true in Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena. the wealthy, at least, can generally cut their losses (even if it means returning to a middle class lifestyle—and many of the wealthy in Pacific Palisades certainly will not even have to do that) despite the insurance crisis. they have the ability to move and to turn their properties over, or to rebuild at their own risk. many middle-class people have no such flexibility, and that flexibility is only getting worse.

buying time against the inevitable

one of the truths we are not prepared for in this era of climate change is that many parts of California; the Mountain West; the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts; and entire sections of states like Florida and Louisiana will—purely for economic reasons, not even factoring in other considerations—have to eventually be ceded to nature or left to fend for themselves. everything will be done to resist this (especially if this will be felt most by homeowners), but it will happen eventually.

if you believe that is exaggeratory, it really is not. to continue the example being used throughout this piece: consider that FAIR alone has exposure of over $430 billion from its 452,000 and growing policies (essentially a million per policy)—and there are still literally millions of people for whom FAIR is likely to become the only option sooner rather than later. much of this is and will be concentrated in fire-prone areas that, in one or a series of bad years (like 2017 and 2018), could go up in flames and immediately render the program incapable of paying out without a significant bailout of some kind, most likely from the federal government. in many ways the bet California is making amounts to "if something truly catastrophic happens, the federal government will step in and make it go away." this is a bad bet to make for a lot of reasons (one of those reasons, incidentally, is the particularly grim "wrong person wins a presidential election and just hates California").

as you may be able to infer, though, California is hardly the only state assuming their own policies or the federal government can, against market forces, prop up state insurance markets forever. Hamilton Nolan, in a piece last year called The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won't Have, lays out some of the absurdity of what is happening, saying: "[...]what we are really dealing with is sort of the paper fiction of insurance—just enough to keep the real estate market pumping and stave off immediate exodus, with the implicit knowledge that in the worst case scenario [...] states will run to the federal government for a bailout, and then keep on doing the same thing."

the state of Florida in particular—California's Wario, you might say—is speedrunning this same problem as over a dozen of its insurers have bolted and the constant threat of hurricanes has turned the insurer of last resort Citizens into a massive and growing liability. for five years now the state has been locked in an interminable battle with its own insurance market, forcing hundreds of thousands of people off of Citizens and onto private insurance every year in a desperate bid to artificially float the market and to simultaneously reduce its own liabilities. and yet every year, Citizens gains new policyholders. no amount of clearing the rolls can save parts of Florida from being uninsurable outside of everyone subsidizing high-risk areas, so that is what happens. it is pretty unambiguous that Florida expects someone else to pay for its mistakes, too: CNN quotes Mark Friedlander, an industry trade group guy, as saying "Citizens is allowed by state regulations to implement a premium surcharge to its policyholders and other Florida consumers to ensure all claims are paid." even if you aren't a Citizens policyholder, if you are a resident of the state of Florida one day you will be paying for someone else's property being lost.

or, at least, you will be under the generous assumption that money can even be recouped from Florida citizens at all. the state has seen premium increases averaging nearly $1,300 a year—by far the most in the country—and presumably many Florida rateholders are not super interested in subsidizing someone else's problems on top of that. but more pressingly: literally hundreds of billions of dollars are tied up in cities like Miami, and many of those assets are completely fucked (and, incidentally, covered by Citizens!) in the not-too-distant future between warming oceans, stronger hurricanes, saltwater intrusion, and rising seas. it is rather improbable that all of this will be paid for by the state of Florida and its citizens.

learning to let go

one other forthcoming reckoning—and something that informs the shape of the expectation that the federal government step in to keep everyone solvent after a natural disaster—will be with the 30-year mortgage and the nature of homeownership. Polly Mosendz and Eric Roston, writing for Bloomberg Green and touching on some of the aforementioned problems that lock people into disaster-prone areas, observe that:

Homeowners in Florida and California have already been trying to reconcile their mortgage duration and dwindling insurance options with neighborhoods that may not live to see 30 years. In a nation where long-term loans are the gateway to homeownership for most families, climate change is rewriting the basic assumptions about risk. The lending industry relies on insurance to absorb some of the risk of mortgages failing. And the insurance industry is largely predicated on the idea that if a home is damaged or destroyed, a comparable structure should be rebuilt on the same spot. This model will have trouble accommodating land changed beyond recognition, no longer able to host a dwelling.

for many homeowners, huge portions of their wealth are tied to that homeownership—something that is increasingly hard-won and pricey, especially in places like California. but it is increasingly unreasonable to assume that a home which exists now should continue to exist indefinitely, uninsured or insured. consider—even if we were somehow able to freeze global warming at 1.2C—what a home in Los Angeles or Miami might deal with between now and 2055. even in ideal circumstances there are still tens or hundreds of thousands of homes that will be effectively worthless by 2055 due to their risk profile and potential for burning. since we cannot freeze global warming, of course, climate change is set to make this much worse in every way possible. many homes that have been built, simply put, should not be there.

there is not a particularly good way to remedy this—and because any policy would necessarily involve hardship and grief for potentially millions of homeowner there is certainly no way to remedy this which is acceptable in the current Overton window. whether people are prepared for it or not, though, something will happen. insurance is one of the only industries taking climate change seriously, and the numbers are already very, very bad! basically every other aspect of property ownership, meanwhile, is not equipped for the world we live in now, and the world we'll be living in soon. one of the great political issues of the next thirty years—whether this is implicit or explict—will be who sets the terms for forthcoming mass displacements, and how those terms are implemented. will it be homeowners, who have a mess of interests? will it be politicians, who demand insurers continue to subsidize high-risk areas until it's too late? will it be insurers, who one day simply declare whole swathes of America uninsurable? personally—and although this would obviously need to be among the costliest programs in US history—i would hope for some sort of managed buyback and relocation scheme that attempts to get people out of dangerous homes and into more stable, satisfactory ones. their former properties would then be rewilded but i find it disturbingly plausible that the future will just be a horrible combination of interests with minimal benefits—a system which fucks over everyone while supporting almost nobody.

as one person on Bluesky grimly noted:

Americans have somehow settled on demanding a mixed economy that features none of the benefits of free market capitalism or command socialism, but all of the liabilities of both.

footnotes

¹ this idea, in my opinion, also just sounds unbelievably bad:

The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they’d need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara’s office said.

² an issue with taking the word of FAIR here is that the insurance crisis, in its most distilled essence, is "insurers not wanting to tell homeowners sweet lies about how insurable their properties are, and people and politicians wanting to make them tell those sweet lies anyways." FAIR—by virtue of being a state-administered insurer of last resort (that also literally cannot reject most people)—is under even more pressure to tell those sweet lies, and to thus be fast and loose with its solvency (at least in public).

Alyaza Birze (January 2)

in today's edition of birzeblog i'd like to recap all of the books i read in 2024—i did not really do this on Cohost and i have been quite inconsistent in my blogging so far, so you all have missed a lot. in total i read 60 books. that was well over my goal of 40, so in 2025, i'll be upping my reading goal to 50. that's about one book a week—i think i can manage pretty well, assuming nothing bad happens. anyways, let's not waste too much time. this is a long post even confined to my brief blurbs on each book.

January

Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest (Sandi Doughton): an interesting look into the inevitable, next Pacific Northwest earthquake; there's quite a lot going on geologically in the Seattle metropolitan area and personally i found this book to be a pretty good introduction to it all. probably a worthwhile book if you're a paranoid Seattleite.
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar): the first of several urbanist and urban planning books that will make this list—and one i actually have to reread in 2025 because i forgot to mark it up on my first reading. this is an excellent book as an introduction to how badly we've fucked up American cities with parking, and what can be done to fix that. i would consider this one of the canonical must-reads for urban reformists.
Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (M. Nolan Gray): the second of the urbanist books (and another i need to mark up), Arbitrary Lines is to zoning what Paved Paradise is to parking. i don't think you'll agree with literally everything M. Nolan Gray suggests here—he is against zoning entirely, and i do think there are at least some cases where a system of zoning is warranted—but after reading this i do think you will concur that substantial zoning reform is necessary as a baseline. one fun fact i learned from this book: zoning as we know it in America is only about 100 years old, and it was initially a controversial practice that was constitutionally challenged (obviously, it was held as constitutional) and required government incentivization to become widespread.
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Jason Hickel): an interesting, introductory book to degrowth. i am not a degrowther—and found most of this book's argumentation unconvincing and at times revisionist of history—but many of the basic ideas of degrowth are not particularly objectionable and i would like to see those become commonplace in society. as we'll get into further down the list, i think Cuba provides a model for a lot of what degrowthers have in mind.
Aurora (David Koepp): the first fiction entry on this list, Aurora is a delightful post-apocalyptic book that contrasts two siblings—a wealthy prepper and an ordinary sister—and how their lives change when an extremely powerful geomagnetic storm destroys the power grid. i don't want to give very much away here because so much of the book rides on character development, but i found it enthralling enough to read it in just one day.
The Great Transition (Nick Fuller Googins): a frankly beautiful fiction book with a beautiful, interesting, climate-change informed setting. it's admittedly a small category but in terms of climate-influenced speculative fiction i consider this one of the best books of the category. consider this a wholehearted endorsement.
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien): i talked about this one on Cohost extensively as moderately disappointing because of my frame of reference. from my post on the matter:
if you have a world where 40% of people are now non-cis and body modification is so normalized that it can be done without actual surgery, it just strikes me as almost conservative that people would still find it remarkable to be trans—certainly enough so for it to be a social category worth distinguishing from being cis in the vast majority of cases. that's how this tends to go in furry spaces, where basically everyone is already non-cis and often times extremely transgender. ditto with queer identities and to a lesser extent sexuality. perhaps we would go full abolitionist with these descriptors if given a chance to start over in a revolution of this sort. or perhaps the inverse of what i describe is true: a kaleidoscope of new identities would form, and be given legitimized social meaning in a world where the gender binary has been completely broken. either seems more plausible, and more interesting. i would also consider it rather conservative that, in such an advanced society (where augmentation of reality is possible through body modification and AI is considered sentient) there would be no serious grappling with transhumanism or the possibility of identifying as non-human at all—or how that might relate to gender expression and society as a whole. i don't even mean therianthropy here necessarily, although if we're being serious therians would probably be the vanguard of questioning humanity and its imposition.

February

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (Janette Sadik-Khan): a very insightful book by New York City's former transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who you—from pedestrianizing Times Square to the massive expansion of bike lanes in the city—could say kickstarted NYC's ongoing revolution in transportation infrastructure. this book goes over not only the benefits of all of this new infrastructure and the deprioritization of cars generally, but also how that was won and what it took to build the support for it. a welcome addition to any bookshelf, in my view.
Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (Arnold August): if you don't mind a fairly uncritical treatment of Cuba, Cuba and Its Neighbors is one of the most insightful books on the system of government there. this book gave me a newfound appreciation for their system of government in specific and the extent to which i believe it can be credibly called democratic. for maximal effect i of course would recommend supplementing this book with People's Power by Peter Roman, which will appear downlist.
Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future (Ashley Dawson): i don't actually have all that much to say about this book, which i found fine (if inevitably dating because it is now an eight year old book on climate change); i think i mostly just don't like Ashley Dawson's political prescriptions, which at times in this book come off as underinformed and bordering on NIMBY.
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (John P. Clark and Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater): although the systems described herein were abolished by the Zapatistas in 2023 and have subsequently been reorganized and decentralized further, this book remains an invaluable asset to anyone seeking to understand the Zapatista governance and decisionmaking process, and the revolutionary culture of EZLN-held Chiapas. genuinely one of the most insightful and inspiring books i've ever read, with ideas and models that i hope can one day will be emulated everywhere and not merely in a few pockets of the world. if you are an anarchist: read this book.
People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government (Peter Roman): this book is a more balanced and critical examination of the Cuban system than Arnold August's, and it also fills in details and influences on the Cuban system that August's book does not. if you have to choose between the two, i'd recommend this one. but i think both are useful books to learn from in their own ways, and as i said i would encourage you to read both and synthesize your own conclusions from them.
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Lionel Shriver): easily the most wonkish fiction book i've ever read, i am definitely in the audience of ten or so for this one. steer clear of this one if you have no interest in a narrative which basically teaches you fiscal policy along the way—and it must sound very weird for me to say that if you have never heard of this book—but i found it a very unique book and quite enjoyable on that basis. it feels like a book that exists because someone was willing to entertain someone's passion project, and literature desperately needs more of that.

March

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin): i don't know that you need me to sell you on this one. it's Ursula K. Le Guin, this is one of her classics, if you only read a few books from her this should be one of them. it's arguably better than The Dispossessed.
The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis (Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros): truthfully, i don't remember all that much from this one—possibly because i didn't mark it up, possibly because i didn't mesh with its particular style. but if you find this blurb interesting, pick this one up at your next opportunity:
Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now. Weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” for each place, this work considers both the serious consequences if we continue to pursue business as usual, and what we can do—from government policies to grassroots activism—to write a different, more hopeful story.
Social Ecology and Communalism (Murray Bookchin): a very influential text for me, and a good and digestible introduction to the extensive thought of Murray Bookchin. also highly recommend as an introductory text to the anarchist-oriented side of left-wing politics, since much of Bookchin's theory was influenced by anarchist thought. (fun aside: optimistically this year i'll be going through all of Bookchin's major works, since i haven't done that yet.)
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer): a must read for anyone, but especially for the leftist-minded. politically, i think your praxis is incomplete if it cannot accomodate this book. (incidentally: i have observed both on Cohost and in my notes that this book synthesizes well with social ecology and Bookchin's writings generally; one day i hope to make a full-fledged essay out of those notes.)
Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Chaia Heller): this theoretical text from Chaia Heller is joined at the hip to social ecology; Heller is a student of Bookchin and takes after him extensively. however, you don't need to be a social ecologist to find this a very interesting book, and i think this is a solid one for challenging and refining how you feel about the natural world. just one observation from Heller, for example, worth your time:
More and more, the ‘nature’ we know is a romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’ marketing researchers believe we would be likely to buy. The less we know about rural life, for instance, the more we desire it. Ideas of ‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic ‘wilderness’ and ‘country living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable quality of life. So many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but hope to find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.

April

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Janet Biehl): the definitive account of Murray Bookchin's life, and how his ideology changed throughout the years. accept no substitutes—Biehl was a close friend and confidante, and so knows her stuff.
Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias (Kevin Cook): truthfully, i could not tell you the difference between this one and...
Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage (Jeff Guinn): ...this one. i am partial to Guinn's book over Cook's, but both are worthwhile volumes about the Branch Davidians and the fateful Waco siege for which they are so infamously known. this is also a good set of books for contextualizing the backlash and aftermath to Waco, which in many respects are the immediate cause of the American militia movement and fodder for anti-government objection generally. Alex Jones in particular got his "start" being a Waco conspiracist, and for a long time that was his bread and butter.
I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (A.M. Gittlitz): a frankly delightful book on the obscure but often-memed Posadist ideology, an extremely unorthodox variant of Trotskyism named for its leading figure J. Posadas. Posadas, it turns out, was a very interesting guy who was rather influential (and bounced around a lot) in Argentine Trotskyism—and for most of his life, he was not particularly eclectic. most of the political positions for which he has become notorious came late in life, and during periods of infighting in his niche of Trotskyism. his children are also fascinating—one of them loves Donald Trump, apparently.
When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich): if you have ever wanted to learn about the dark world of consulting and the unimaginable power it—and McKinsey in particular—has over the world then this is the book for you. the sheer amount of wrong McKinsey has been a part of is unbelievable. we should annihilate this company and all companies like it.
Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (David Neiwert): an important book in peeling back all of the connections of the modern American far-right; there are so many figures who play off of and influence each other, and this book does an admirable job of weaving them into any sort of coherent narrative.

May

The Making of the President, 1960 (Theodore H. White): the first of a classic series of political books; i have yet to read the other ones, but hopefully that will occur this year.
A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings (William H. Reid): there's not much to say about this one. it's a niche topic but seems to be the definitive book if you're interested in an account of the Aurora mass shooting back in 2012.
Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (John Staples Shockley): this book is a bit dated (having released in 1974), but it is the first comprehensive account of the development of La Raza Unida Party, and its control of Crystal City through 1974. if you're a third-party advocate looking for history, this is a fascinating book if you can get your hands on it. it is of course best supplemented by subsequent work, some of which i have read and will appear in the next month on this list.
Crossroads: My Story of Tragedy and Resilience as a Humboldt Bronco (Kaleb Dahlgren): not much to say about this one. for the other non-Canadians: see also the Humboldt Broncos bus crash Wikipedia page

June

Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (Armando Navarro): this book builds on Shockley's Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town and is what i'd consider the definitive account of the La Raza Unida period of Crystal City. meticulous in its detail and an invaluable read for any person interested in this fascinating piece of Chicano history.
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (David P. Chandler): a thorough examination of the infamous S-21 prison of Democratic Kampuchea; lots of details from this one that stand out, such as the extreme gender imbalance in prisoners (very few women were murdered in S-21) and the disparity in treatment of prisoners (although nearly all prisoners were executed, high-ranking prisoners were treated notably better so they could be coerced into lengthy confessions). also interesting how much supporting staff was necessitated for a prison that "only" held 1,500 prisoners at any given time and processed around 15,000 people across several years. Chandler figures something like 300 in total.
Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark (Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe): not worth your time, really.
Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Jeffrey H. Jackson): this is as much an interesting study of the society and politics of Paris in 1910 as it is a study of its most calamitous flood; if you signed up for a narrative about the Seine, this book will also give you a crash course in the class dynamics and and social order of the period. i think that's neat, and somewhat enlightening. YMMV.

July

The Workingmen's Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Philip Sheldon Foner): if you've ever wondered what the first Marxist party in the United States was like and its history, Foner has you covered here. it was surprisingly successful given its status as a sort of Frankenstein-party between two competing and effectively mutually exclusive ideologies (Marxism and Lassalleanism), and quite a few significant figures in left-wing history were involved in the party. also, fun fact: because it ultimately reformed itself into the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), if you count the SLP as still existing we're at most one generation removed from WPUS right now.

August

Commune Or Nothing!: Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Chris Gilbert): Venezuela's communal project is another fascinating ongoing left-wing experiment, and Chris Gilbert does an excellent job in this book sketching out its nuances, its difficulties, its relation to the state, and the inevitable communal conflicts with the state. even if you are oppositional to the Venezuelan state, i think the communal project is a beacon of light and worth learning about as a potential model.
Killed by a Traffic Engineer (Wes Marshall): a shocking amount of traffic engineering is pseudoscientific, and this book systematically dismantles that pseudoscience in straightforward and easy to read detail. thank to its many short, to-the-point chapters, this is also a very easy book to pick up and put down. i highly recommend it as both an indispensable resource for many of the problems with trafic engineering (and how to make things better), and as catharsis that things are actually wrong.
Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk): just a broadly excellent book for any disability advocate or person interested in intersectionality; also an incredible source of information on the Black Panther Party and its work in this space, which i was unaware of before this point.
Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Helmut Gruber): Vienna and its housing is often upheld in socialist spaces as an example of what is possible with a committed socialist movement even in a hostile capitalist country, and this book goes to great lengths and detail in describing the unique circumstances that made Red Vienna possible. it doesn't hold back on criticism and shortcomings of the Viennese experiment either, and in this respect i think it's quite a valuable book on this historical period and what might be possible today. it also goes into the extensive efforts of the Austrian SDAP to create a working-class culture out of Vienna's proletarians, to mixed but truly interesting results. one additional fun fact from this book: the SDAP experimented with state-built single-family housing but found it far too expensive to build at scale relative to apartments—thus, the communal social housing that so characterizes Vienna became the norm:
Between 1919 and 1934 the municipality built 63,924 new domiciles in Vienna, 58,667 of which were in apartment dwellings and 5,257 in one-family houses. In practical terms this meant that every tenth dwelling was a new creation of the public authorities and that almost 200,000 Viennese were fortunate enough to reside in them. [...] After 1924 the municipality took over the building of one-family housing communities, but soon abandoned such efforts on the grounds that they were too costly in comparison to superblock apartment buildings.
Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures (Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro): an absolutely fascinating book on how past and present socialist states have related to the environment. this book introduced me to Cuba and its frankly awe-inspiring efforts to protect the environment, and its revolutionary efforts to create a sustainable agricultural system in the absence of large amounts of oil and chemical fertilizers (due to the ongoing blockade). while Cuba continues to have many problems—and it can be argued that its environmental successes are largely in spite of its desires, not because of them—i think Cuba is a model for a better future. particularly if you're a degrowther, you should look to Cuba and what it's doing and learn from it.
Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (Grist): it's a good anthology, you should read it and make a day for it. the last piece is truly excellent.
The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger): i found this novel to be pretty entertaining; it is exceedingly politically unsubtle, however, and your mileage might vary on that one.

September

Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement (Jeff Ordower): if you're a labor organizer or a climate organizer, or both, this seems like a pretty good book to have on your shelf. i learned some nifty stuff from this one, like the origin of the term just transition (coined by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) leader Tony Mazzocchi); there are also some really cool under-the-radar initiatives this book profiles, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworkers’ union based in Washington.
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (John Vaillant): a gripping account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 intermixed with broader story threads about the nature of Canada as a country, Fort McMurray as a symptom of settler-colonial society, climate change as a phenomenon, and the oil industry that created Fort McMurray and its complicity in these aforementioned threads. somehow this book is both sweeping and narrow in scope, and manages to be good at both—it is probably a top five book of the 60 i read, and i would consider it obligatory reading especially if you are Canadian.
Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Tad Delay): this is a frankly devastating entry into this list on all counts, and is not for those inclined to doom about things. but i find it an important reality check and a good addition to the canon of climate-related books. Delay covers a wide range of subjects here with care, and makes a number of interesting points i did not consider before reading this book. you might find this to be one, for example—is it actually a market failure to end the world?:
Accessible fossil fuel reserves are worth a couple of hundred trillion dollars. Total fossil fuel resources are worth $2.4 quadrillion. Incentives point in the wrong direction. Climate change isn’t a “market failure.” It’s a market success. [...] We will probably burn through most of our fossil fuel reserves. Capitalism will incentivize renewables inasmuch as they are profitable, not because the legal and political superstructure meets its unserious goals to stop the progress of this storm. In the meantime, the vulnerable suffer. Who has agency to switch algorithms? By the end of this book, you will need to decide whether even the revolutionary’s desire for agency is denial.

October

102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Kevin Flynn, Jim Dwyer): there is not much to be said about this one—i will observe for the record however that Rudy Giuliani is a fucking moron, and it is unbelievable how badly New York City's agencies work(ed) with each other.
Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (Brandon Keim): probably the most interesting and heartening book i read this year. this book will give you a lot of new perspective on animal intelligence and, if it's even possible, where we might draw a line that distinguishes humanity from all other things. for example: i wrote a bit about this book earlier this year in relation to voting, because it is not an inherently human concept. several animal species (bison, African wild dogs, and honeybees to name a few) make decisions through a voting process that can be clearly observed and explained.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin): this book should probably be mandatory reading for literally anyone trying to get a computer science degree. so many of my experiences and concerns about technology and especially the internet are reflected by this book, and i am very much hoping to get to Ruha Benjamin's other work this year because this made me an instant fan.
[...]the hypervisibility of Black celebrities, athletes, and politicians can mask the widespread disenfranchisement of Black communities through de facto segregation and the punishment apparatus. How can a society filled with millions of people cheering for LeBron, singing along to Beyoncé, tuning in to Oprah, and pining for the presidency of Obama be … racist? But alas, “Black faces in high places” is not an aberration but a key feature of a society structured by White supremacy.
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Timothy Snyder): this book became topical down the stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign and, unfortunately, looks only to be more salient in its aftermath. i am very much not a fan of Snyder's other work and his apparent tendency to treat the Soviets as a comparable political evil to Nazi Germany, but there is probably a place for this book on your shelf. for the most part, i think this book also offers reasonable advice. for example: "When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading." is a good way to put a good piece of advice. you should make an effort to broaden your horizons, challenge your worldview, refine what you believe, and investigate the things on which you intend to speak. this is a big reason i read so many books on so many subjects.
Tyranny of the Minority (Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky): a timely book by Ziblatt and Levitsky, authors of another book i quite like that was ominously called How Democracies Die and was quite pessimistic about the future of the United States. this book continues that trend by exploring the issue of minoritarianism in democracies, and how things are uniquely bad in the United States thanks to our aging Constitution. they do provide some prescriptions for how we might make things better, though, so it's not all doom and gloom. also has a lot of fun details about how our system came to suck so badly—and how many of the systems that are so defended today by conservatives are compromises and not reflective of what the Founding Fathers really "wanted".
Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis (Alice Bell): as indicated by the title this is a book which is a rather detailed history of climate change; but simultaneously—and what makes this book a particularly interesting pick-up—is its lengthy discussion of the social and technological developments that have accompanied and facilitated climate change. kind of the perfect book if you're the sort of person who wants to go down rabbit holes on the subject.

November

I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs, Meegan Lee Ochs, and David Cohen): Phil Ochs is mostly known for his musical talent, but he did do a lot of writing in his spare time. this is the first (and only?) book to collect most of that writing; it ranges from his amateur journalism in high school and college to his album liner notes and private poetry. overall quite a niche book, but if you're a real Ochs-head like i am this is a fairly indispensable addition to the bookshelf.
Coyote Settles the South (John Lane): a delightful little book by someone whose encounter with a coyote inspired them to travel the landscape of the American South and get a sense for how this unfamiliar creature is being received. this book includes one chapter on noted coyote celebrity Scooter, if you need an additional selling point.
Abolish Rent (Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal): one of the best and most important books of the year in my view, and a book that makes an incredibly compelling case for the eventual abolition of rent. i wrote at some length about how i think this book should inform the left and its broader political strategy—in short, it underscores the importance of organizing tenant unions and winning new rights for renters. and given that homelessness increased by 18% in 2024, this book is likely to be even more salient this year.

December

The Deluge (Stephen Markley): an epic novel (clocking in at nearly 900 pages) of politics, climate change, and eco-terrorism that i can only really compare to The Mandibles in how i feel about it. i continue to think about it over a month after beginning my reading, which is unusual for a fiction book. i would frankly not recommend this book if you're angsty about climate change and our current political situation; it is in many respects photorealistic and disturbingly plausible in its speculation of what the future holds. needless to say i can only hope that our real-world future is not the future that this book entails.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Andreas Malm): even if you disagree with its political conclusions, i would probably read this book. Andreas Malm looks to be one of the influential thinkers in the climate philosophy space and it's easy to see why—this is a rather hard to argue with dismantling of the nonviolent status quo that prevails in environmentalism (see also Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State).
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Antony Loewenstein): this book seems pretty straightforward to pitch to you: your government (local, state, or federal) probably uses some sort of military or surveillance technology that was developed in Israel, and probably used on Palestinians. it's good business for Israeli companies to have a permanent, live warzone in which these kinds of hardware can be tested, and it's even better business to export that hardware to both sympathetic and unsympathetic governments for use on their civilian populations. consider this book a peek behind the curtain of what might await you at your next protest.
Nuclear War : A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen): perhaps contrived, but chilling in a way few books can be. nuclear proliferation is a nightmare and in an ideal world everyone would swiftly dismantle their nuclear stockpiles.
Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky): i have very little to say of this book except that it is magisterial, and you can see why the STALKER series takes after it.
Thinking with Type (Ellen Lupton): i am skeptical you need my opinion on a book about typography, but i do endorse this one. the latest edition has a lot of neat additions.
Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Angie Schmitt): when you read this book, you'll really get a sense for why it is that U.S. cities (and to a lesser extent Canadian ones) are so bad at accomplishing Vision Zero. pedestrian (and alternative transit) infrastructure is a combination of nonexistent and disastrous, and pedestrians are mostly treated as a second class of citizens. luckily, this book isn't all doomerism. it rovides a lot of hope and optimism for how cities can fix their infrastructure—after all, some of the best cities for pedestrians in Europe today were previously some of the most car-brained—and how cities in the U.S. have begun to take up some of the changes to built infrastructure commonplace in European cities.
Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It (Daniel Knowles): finally, and rounding out the year, is Daniel Knowles' treatise on the harm done by cars and the necessity of a world far less reliant on it for transportation. this book should be in one sense cathartic, and in another sense infuriating—certainly in some ways it's quite a depressing book (such as in its descriptors of the developing world adopting car-centric urban infrastructure) but in others it is very hopeful (in explaining the many common-sense and easy changes we can make to incentivize alternative transportation and make things safer for pedestrians). and, for the road, one point in his conclusion that bears repeating:
If we did not need [cars] as much, we could have a lot more left over to spend on whatever we want. And not needing as many cars is not some lofty, unrealistic goal. It is frankly bonkers to think that every family spending $5,000 to $10,000 a year on their own individual vehicle is the most efficient way of getting people around. We do not have to be so reliant on gasoline, cooking the planet to be able to live decent lifestyles. The important thing is not moving metal, it is moving people.

Alyaza Birze (January 1)

welcome to 2025. i came down with a rather nasty sinus infection approximately a month ago, which derailed what had previously been plans to talk about a large number of subjects. instead, to start the year you'll get to hear me talk about being painfully ill in a way that precluded serious work on anything and which generally ruins your month. don't worry, we'll eventually get back to some of the stuff i intended to talk about last month on this blog.

don't get sick: or, how it feels to be sick for literally an entire month

i don't generally get sick in the way most people seem to—my pandemic sickness of "choice" was getting the flu randomly. i have never knowingly had COVID, and the closest thing to sickness i usually experience is seasonal allergies. unfortunately, i also seem to develop sinus infections rather easily—and after dodging serious illness for the duration of the year, being stricken by an infection finally happened to me at the beginning of this month.

if you've never had a sinus infection: i do not recommend getting one. after a day of stuffy nose and sleeping weirdly, i woke up one morning at approximately 4am to feelings of being unable to breathe; i had approximately ten seconds between this and standing over our bathroom sink, painfully coughing up what is best described as a mixture of brown-red bile with the consistency of non-fresh caramel. if this sounds deeply unpleasant: yes, it is. it does not get better from here.

the subsequent six or seven days were spent in what i can only call a stupor; approximately 23 hours of these days were spent in various states of lucidity and (hard to catch) sleep. to not choke in my sleep or drown in a frankly unimaginable amount of mucus, i was obliged to sit upright at basically all times (not so bad) and sleep upright (horrible). this completely ruined my sleep schedule, which i am still recovering from. eating was non-pleasurable, but more importantly something i barely did at all—i think on at least two of the days in question i just drank water and juice and the bulk of my calories were from cough drops. at one point i coughed in a way that hurt so badly i thought i might have broken a rib or damaged a lung. this did not happen, luckily, but it's not ideal to feel that way.

the weeks to follow have been better: a number of hot showers and copious coughing has cleared up the worst of it, and for the past while i've been coughing up white stuff. unfortunately, i have been unable to cough up the remainder. as a result i have what feels in essence like a throat infection (even though it's not one), and protracted bouts of coughing can still be quite painful and lead to a sort of vomiting. this is not ideal, and i would also not recommend this.

what i'm reading (1/50)

i started this year off by finishing the fascinating book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Katja Hoyer); if you're looking for a good account of East Germany's existence and what life was like for many people there this is a book to pick up. the relationship between the country and the Soviet Union is a particularly curious facet: i came away from this one feeling like much of the "blame" for the country's demise can be given to the Soviets. despite Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker taking strongly after the Soviet line, the Soviets were frequently distant or outright cold to the East German state. even from the beginning, the Soviets seem to have been dubiously interested in a partitioned Germany and were eager to push for reunification; when this became impossible, the Soviets consistently held East Germany to the standards of a disposable client state. regardless of its own desires or needs, the expectation was that East Germany would consistently and unquestioningly follow Soviet policy. thus, even the reform-minded Gorbachev was apparently oppositional to Honecker's efforts to establish a less antagonistic relationship with West Germany—at least without the Soviets being in charge of it.

the distance in relations was perhaps exemplified most heavily by economics between the two countries; Hoyer notes a particular moment in 1981 where relations essentially broke down after the Soviet Union refused to guarantee oil supplies to East Germany, which had by then become extremely dependent on the Soviet supply:

[Erich] Honecker found [Leonid] Brezhnev’s inability to engage with his concerns extremely frustrating. Brezhnev mechanically recited his brief: the Soviet Union needed to look after its own economic affairs for the foreseeable future and the GDR would no longer be able to rely on Soviet credit. Worse still, he could not guarantee that the supply of oil would remain stable. This was a huge blow to Honecker. His country had banked on the annual delivery of 19 million tonnes of oil contractually agreed with the Soviet Union.

[...]Energy consumption in the GDR had also begun to lean on imports from Soviet Russia. In 1960, coal still accounted for 97 per cent of domestic energy use; by 1980, oil had taken over 17.3 per cent and gas 9.1 per cent.3 As oil is five times as effective as brown coal in terms of energy production, the economy was shifting towards the deliveries from the Soviet Union while investment in domestic brown coal had begun to slump. The oil crises of the 1970s had made this an increasingly expensive undertaking – by 1980, the GDR was paying the equivalent of $15 a barrel of crude oil compared to $2–$3 in 19724 – and as a result local brown coal once again had to be sourced in higher quantities. Nonetheless, crude oil from the Soviet Union could still be turned into hard cash in the GDR’s refineries. Their oil-based products were sold to many non-socialist countries on the world market, including West Germany. So successful was this that, among the non-producing nations, East Germany had become one of the biggest exporters of fossil fuels. By the time Honecker received the worrying news from Brezhnev under the palm trees of Crimea, oil-based products accounted for 28 per cent of its exports to non-socialist states.

despite these difficulties (and the 1981 situation bringing the state perilously close to immediate economic collapse, which was averted only through prompt new trade relations with Bavaria, of all places), East Germany was able to consistently deliver a high standard of living. Hoyer notes that by the end of the 1970s:

Rents were so heavily subsidized that GDR citizens did not have to worry about affordability once they had found a suitable flat. From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 per cent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 per cent. While this focus on newly built housing meant that older buildings were left to decay in town centres up and down the country, which made for very unsightly impressions on foreign observers, the prefab blocks came with central heating, insulation, bathrooms and plenty of space. Honecker was also able to oversee rapid progress in supplying the population with consumer goods. By 1975, more than a quarter of households had a car, compared to only 15 per cent in 1970, and the figure would rise to 38 per cent by the end of the decade. By 1980, almost every household had a fridge, a TV and a washing machine.

East Germany also had a remarkable amount of gender parity; from 1981 onwards, more than 90% of women were employed and the country had the highest rate of female employment in the world. half of all university students were women, a remarkable accomplishment given the pre-Cold War state of higher education. for the most part—and although their representation lagged within the Socialist Unity Party itself relative to the rest of East German society—women were financially autonomous and politically independent, and their concerns were well represented in politics. women were even integrating into the military by the late 1980s—something that was constitutionally illegal in West Germany (and led to virtually all of these women becoming unemployed after reunification). in many respects it is remarkable the state was so stable given its inability to be self-sufficient and its troubled relationship with the Soviets. i'll definitely have more to say about this in subsequent blog posts, especially since i have other books about East Germany to eventually read.

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Femlandia (Christina Dalcher) is kind of a bad novel
is technofeudalism really killing capitalism, or is it just capitalism?
brief thoughts on public housing and how it did not die, but was killed
where does the NDP Socialist Caucus find these weirdos?
we should discuss confederal models for communities more
did Cohost lose?
there is no such thing as a natural disaster
they've always been up to some bullshit in California, huh?
a strange moment in the Maoist millieu
putting the embargo on Cuba into perspective
the curiosity and quaintness of urban farming in Cuba
Abundance is not a very good book
whoops, let's backfill some posts i've made on my website but not here
the hysteria of 1918-1922 America, as illustrated by Marion, Indiana
the "sundown agenda"
the growth of climate reaction
Cohost and the "caricature problem"
the forthcoming future of decent portions of America
what i read in 2024
mediations on getting sick + East Germany musings

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internet gryphon / auindiña grēven

Recent posts

this behavior does not seem new

where i think Varoufakis gets his wires crossed

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the many, many problems with being an idiot about the Rwandan genocide

why even be a crank about this shit?

notes

notes

the things they wish you were stupid enough to not understand

ecological murder-suicide

this is going to keep happening

notes

the basic ideological divide of the Franklin schism

what the Franklin group argued

what the rest of Revolutionary Union argued

the Franklin schism happens

the Venceremos side-show

the Revolutionary Union glides on

notes

the situation before the embargo

the embargo during the Cold War

the embargo after the Cold War

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what is urban farming like?

what are things like for producers?

urban farming "privatization"

the stuff Abundance gets correct

what the hell are we doing here?

what others are saying about the book

notes

state-level contributions to the sundown agenda

what you can do about it

the proletarian reactionary as a surrogate for the bourgeois capitalist

Oklahoma: ground zero of fossil fascism

Wyoming: the farcical conclusion

a more optimistic conclusion

footnotes

or: an unintentional Cohost requiem

the caricature problem

how does this problem come about?

Cohost and its lack of the caricature problem

what we will lose with Cohost

footnotes

or: climate change, insurance markets, and how fucked we are

a brief overview of a complete disaster

the broad strokes of California and its insurance crisis

counterintuitive outcomes and their problems

buying time against the inevitable

learning to let go

footnotes

January

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December

don't get sick: or, how it feels to be sick for literally an entire month

what i'm reading (1/50)

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