Recently the Department of Defense, led by our Christian Soldier Pete Hegseth (he/him), had the John Lewis class replenishment vessel, USNS Harvey Milk, stripped of its name in favor of a yet to be determined moniker, that according to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell (he/him) is “reflective of the Commander in Chief's priorities, our nation's history, and the warrior ethos.”

Let us set aside for a moment that the so-called Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump (or TACO, “Trump Always Chickens Out”, for short), was a draft dodger, and has on numerous occasions ridiculed veterans of foreign wars, calling them suckers and losers, and focus instead on two things. One, how naming the USNS Harvey Milk possibly violates some basic tenet of our nation's history, and two, whether or not a gay or LGBTQ+ person can embody the warrior ethos as it is stated on numerous DoD platforms and by our military institutions.

Harvey Milk, for those of you who might not know, was a civil rights activist, a Naval veteran who served during the Korean War, and was a city supervisor in San Francisco, California. His activism began in the 1970s and was controversial at the time for supporting the rights of gay and lesbian community members like himself, and pushing city legislation that banned employment and housing discrimination based on sexual orientation. His tenacious pursuit of gay and lesbian rights gained him national attention, and made him an inspiration for generations of LGBTQ+ Americans to come. At the time, (and sadly up until this day) there were (are) many ignorant, bigoted people who did not want to see Harvey Milk’s message of equality spread. When Milk served in the military being gay was a cause for dismissal, regardless of service record, accomplishments, or military distinctions. He in fact was forced to resign from the Navy on the threat of a court-martial, and take an “other than honorable” discharge on account of his sexual orientation. Having been treated in this way by his country's military may have led to his activism, we can only speculate, however, it appears clear at some point that he refused to remain a second class citizen, and was determined to throw off the secrecy of his existence in favor of liberation. After a few unsuccessful attempts to gain political office in San Francisco, he was finally elected in 1977, and only eleven months later, assassinated by a former city supervisor, who later claimed the attack was caused by depression brought on from eating too much junk food. In 2009 Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his fight and sacrifice for equal rights.

Does Mr. Milk’s biography sound like it reflects what the Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell (he/him) terms “our nation's history”? Reflective of what exactly? Harvey Milk, gay rights, the LGBTQ+ movement, and numerous other developments following and related to Mr. Milk and his causes, are in fact part of American history. Which leads us to wonder the intent of including this phrase in the Pentagon’s statement. In there estimation should Harvey Milk, and his like, be thought of as regrettable national history? On the order of slavery? Or the massacring and displacement of Native Americans? Should it be removed therefore from the national consciousness in favor of something more mythologized, gilded, and in accord with the values of the founders? (Like heterosexuality, Christianity?) The Pentagon and it's leadership, TACO and our Christian Soldier, seem to think that anything that makes them uncomfortable or gives them an icky feeling can simply be excluded from the national narrative. In a Totalitarian state this may be true, the despot and it's lackeys may get to erase history in favor of versions more to their liking. But in America, at this time, Milk's contribution to the pursuit of justice and equality, like John Lewis's, maybe some of the only national history we can truly be proud of. To deny him, or others like him the honor they are due is more reflective of the ugliness and bigotry of an American history this administration seems hellbent on reliving.

As for the Warrior Ethos, the US Army expresses it as follows,

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

Similar statements are made regarding this ethos across several other branches of the military. There doesn't seem to be any mention of ones sexual preferences, ones preferred pronouns, or gender assignment and/or re-assignment. In fact, these statements could be applied without any liberal interpretation to the very actions and deeds of Mr. Milk in his dogged fight for his and his fellow gay and lesbian community members. He clearly faced danger by outing himself and pursuing a public position in city government. His mission may have been self-directed, but it bares no less merit on that account, and was unwavering in its aim. He never conceded defeat, and faced mortal violence in the furtherance of his cause. He did not quit, but was tragically murdered by a coward and bigot, who, not unlike TACO, suffered from fast food addiction and mental disorder. Nor did Mr. Milk leave his comrades behind, but thought not of himself or the danger that he faced, but of lifting his fellow citizens out of the shadows and into the light of equality.

So, if we can find no rational argument for excluding Mr. Milk from our national history, or any way in which he violated the warrior ethos per the US Army's definition, then that leaves only the so-called Commander in Chief's priorities as a cause for this policy. What are TACO’s priorities in this regard? Does he feel intimidated by men and women who served honorably despite possibly facing discrimination for who they are? Does he hate veterans, as may be suggested by his gutting of the VA and other programs that benefit veterans and their families? Is TACO simply a homophobe who struggles in secret with his own narcissistic desires for the masculine body. This may be a better psychoanalysis of our Christian Soldier than TACO at his ripe age, because it seems to us that Hegseth’s metrosexualism, coupled with his intense desire to express his faith through masculinity show's clear signs of repressed homosexuality. TACO in his earlier stages of grotesque caricature exhibited the same hyper masculine narcissistic tendencies; ostentatious womanizing, gross locker room talk, and an idolization of male figures of authority. Which is not to impugn the nature of homosexuality, but just to recognize that sometimes it's opposite is a terrified compensation for the perceived possibility. TACO is a chicken, despite all his tough talk, and certainly could not and would not endanger his image by admitting his true sexuality. He also would fail miserabley to live up to the warrior's ethos just by the simple fact that he would never hesitate to leave a comrade behind if it meant improving his chances even in the smallest amount.

TACOs priorities are base and cowardly at best, and bare no resemblance to any American ideal we would ever countenance. It is a shame for the service members, for our country, and for the Civilian Mariners who man the USNS Harvey Milk to be led by such a crass and unworthy group of cretins. Yes, we say unworthy, even of our Christian Soldier, who has used his combat record as a cudgel to beat down his fellow service members. Wearing a uniform and being shot at in a foreign war does not entitle anyone to make across the board determinations on what it means to be an American and worthy of national praise.

We are both victim and perpetrator in this cruel game we call modern life. Our only true power is the ability to metabolize violence; we step over a dead body as we enter the Trader Joe's to look for snacks, we committ our elderly to the mill to be grist in an ever-churning death/money machine, we send our children into a hail of bullets to be indoctrinated into the regime of our greatness, we perpetually look away as our representative self, our country, performs violence in our names. Rape we deny and turn it's victims into the cause. Race we ignore and accept a false narrative of merit. We know that Justice is blind, yet we allow the furniture to be rearranged, and refuse to see a thumb on her scale. We fret and fume over the number of unhoused, blaming them for their existence. We rip up the Earth and tear out her guts for our Model S. We displace our furry neighbors, bulldoze their homes, run them down in our cars, imprison them, enslave them, and march them down our gullets with out even a whisper of thanks.

So many crimes against our basic human instincts are committed in one afternoon, on Mother's Day no less, that we begin to doubt this thing called “humanity”. Are we living a lie? Should we just give up this farce and become the craven maniacs this realization seems to suggest we already are? We hope this isn't our only alternative. It would be nice to think that all of the centuries of self reflection and asperation that we humans have engaged in can't simply be nullified in one afternoon. How will we explain to our grandchildren, if we aren't just barbequing them by then, that their great grandmother, this nice 80 year old woman, a victim herself of a cruel and indifferent modern world, believed that the Palestinians all deserved to die for electing Hamas? She is no academic titan of world history, or political science, mind you, she is just your average MSNBC and CNN consumer. A person who allows their world views to be formed by the media apparatus, a person who's ideology is not an aberration, who believes that they are good, that their political persuasion is righteous and just. In short, a person who is a Democrat, a life long liberal. A person who is suddenly no more or less distinguishable from a German grandmother during the time of the Reich, or an American settler during the Western expansion, or a Hutu mother cheering on the Tutsi slaughter, or a Turk vilifying the Armenians, the list could go on and on. One holocaust after another, nothing particularly special or deserving of note in each instance other than the fact of general indifference and an abiding desire for one's own comfort, security and presumption of innocence.

Are we innocent? Doubtful. Is this an act of absolution or more blind self aggrandizement? Yelling into this echo chamber, screaming along with a choir of screamers seems pathetic and false. We can sit here on our couch, wearing our fuzzy slippers, eating chocolate covered mini pretzels and drinking coffee while the Amazon is deforested, while children starve and live in fear, while the ocean warms and is polluted, while bombs fall on people who are no more guilty of terrorism than your average participant in democracy, while a thousand devastating attacks are made against this idea of humanity and it's chances of survival. What should we do? Whip out our dicks and get into a pissing contest over who was first to condemn the atrocity? Maybe flex our outrage muscles together; the first person to have an aneurysm wins! It's not useful, but it is also the only refuge of the powerless, divided as we are, we fall alone.

Will we and can we rise together? If we proclaim our humanity and are not resolved to mere performance or nihilism, can we break out, can we destroy these forces aligned against us? And must it be destruction? Will the legacy of freedom, of human flourishing, of magnanimity and grace rest on this inheritance of violence? How can we exercise this super power of metabolization when it comes to denying the rights and lives of other's yet cling so desperately to this doctrine of transformation through peace? Was Ghandi’s vision realized? Martin Luther King's? No, we don't think so. Yet we are troubled by unleashing this force. Our intention can not be to meet genocide with genocide. Our order must be disciplined and well planned. We can't simply attack all those we deem culpable because this would be suicidal. The object has always been to make the enemy internal, to turn us into a weapon to be used against ourselves. Sadly, there is an us, and a them. Can we come to a consensus on who they are that are holding the rest of us down; immiserating, extracting, enslaving, belittling our basic cries for sanity? That's what we believe the project must be. If not violence then a credible threat, a loud and strategic pronouncement that we will prevail, or else.

On to other business (a hemorrhoid waits for no man), we checked other emails from our various pseudonyms, we count six in all, not schizophrenic or crazy or grifty types of alter egos, but purely literary attempts at novelty. Funny how a multiplicity strives for novelty and uniqueness! But that was our goal. Sharing the same body and hemorrhoid we experiment with anonymity and novelty through multiplicity, or something like that. We’re not entirely sure. As the person with the body, and the job, and the mortgage, 401k, etc. we understandably have economic concerns so we opened an email in our ‘real’ person’s account and saw an alarming article about the new World ID, through a hyper link in the Robinhood Snacks Newsletter.1

Maybe you’ve heard of it? Some ubertech from Open AI founder Sam Altman that he and his impish neophyte ilk are trying to pass off on humanity as the wave of the future. Buy your surfboards now, or your cottages in the high Andes because the tsunami is coming whether you like it or not.2 At least that’s their pitch/warning to us rubes out here in dirt land, the wizards in their ivory towers know better, for they have in fact conjured this human-killing wave with their own sorcery. But enough with the metaphor, World ID professes to be a “privacy-preserving proof of human for the age of AI”, they hope to become a global system of ‘unique human’ identification, linking their services with various forms of financial instruments (VISA, Worldcoin, etc.), dating and gaming apps. This is apparently accomplished by utilizing novel hardware developed by World ID in conjunction with Nvidia that scans a person’s eyeball and creates an encrypted biometric code that can be used to verify them as a human. We guess that picking pictures of school buses and cats that are looking straight ahead from a field of images is no longer good enough. As we’ve seen from the recent roll out of ChatGPT these large language models (LLMs) are capable of figuring out some of these tests and are willing (if ‘will’ is the proper term for it) to lie and cheat to accomplish their assignments. You can see the obvious (we’d argue intentionally designed) danger in having rogue actors and potentially rogue LLMs out there wreaking havoc in the cryto/dating/gaming/social media digital spheres, and therefore the necessity for everyone concerned about interacting with ‘real’ humans only, and not scummy robots and cheats, to run out and have their eyeballs scanned and buy in to this latest crypto scheme. Right?

Sounds like phishing to us. But hey, we don’t own crypto, didn’t meet our spouse on a dating app, don’t play video games for money, and have a very limited engagement on social media, so, we don’t personally see the threat. At least not as it is being portrayed by the phishers themselves. We’ve heard these privacy reassurances before, we’ve heard that this will be a decentralized, community controlled platform that serves humanity, that protects humanity from government control and bad actors, and most of all, the existential danger of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. It’s very seductive, and yes, they’ve even sweetened the pot by offering some of their cryto for being an early adopter. So you could get rich quick if you get in on the ground floor. And presumably, once you’re rich, fuck everyone else, right? If other people aren’t willing to verify their humanity then why should we3 treat them as humans? They must have something to hide. They must be different, less than human, maybe even they’re an artificial intelligence trying to hide among us. Maybe we ought to make this World ID mandatory, have our government help us root out these pretenders, make sure they can’t move into our neighborhoods, vote in our elections, shop on our online grocery stores. You see where we’re going with this?

Verified humanity is not only a back door to a surveillance state and economy (which arguably we are already in to a degree) but a guileful and continuous attempt on the part of elites to flatten class stratification, to make it appear as if there is a seamless, naturally occurring economic order that we all belong to on the basis of merit and willingness to play by the rules. The potential othering accompanying this identification scheme will be reserved for non-participants, people who may look like us, act like us in most significant ways (eat, sleep, shit, fuck), but who are knowingly, and presumably willingly, outside of the system that defines us. They will immediately be suspect, open to our denouncements and descriptions of them. Forget about alternatives, once we enter this dystopian labyrinth of digital identification we will be (and probably already are) locked there for eternity. Like the Minotaur, we will kill and consume our imprisoners’ enemies, believing them to be our own. We will act as our own guards in this prison, ensuring that the kings and the Gods continue to reign. We may receive a fleeting glimpse of their greatness and a promise of ascension, but will forever be denied the miracles that hold their power by the very system by which they guaranteed our freedom.

Pretty bleak, right? We don’t like it one bit. Not only will this wreck our whole multiplicity project, but it will also probably just add more layers of bullshit to this modern enshittified world of ours. We’re not fooled by their promises of simplification either. With each new gadget and wingding we seem to sink ever deeper in this technological muck. We mean, the problem they are trying to solve here was a problem they created, necessitating a solution. Several times World ID talks about making this system impossible to unplug! Shouldn’t that give us pause? Wasn’t Skynet unpluggable? And once you make it permanent and intractable, doesn’t that leave you open to yet more necessary technological solutions? It’s the dragon eating its own tail, and by extension, eating its own shit.

When our father was still alive he used to always say that there were two kinds of people in this world; people with hemorrhoids, and people who’ll get hemorrhoids. So, what we propose is this; we should make it as uncomfortable as possible for these assholes to participate in this system by demanding that they use the uniqueness of our hemorrhoids as the basis for their biometric identifier. Now, you can imagine what this equipment will look like, and how it may be applied, and we’re fairly certain that if it requires probing up our asses to join this class of humanity that most people will know intuitively that they are getting fucked, and stay away.

Some nascent attempt at forensic analysis were able to uncover the premise of the project, but failed to assign a human motive force for how it was finally carried out. The idea was simple, the class was tasked, on Earth Day, to come up with an idea for a “Robot” that “would most help humankind and the environment”. For a lot of early observers, this assignment seemed to pose a paradox, how does one help humanity, without hurting the environment, or vice versa. The list of hypotheticals is too long to repeat here, but the main concern, it seemed at the time, all boiled down to how the metropole would maintain its standard of living while mitigating the environmental catastrophe that this standard of living seemed to incur. Would we humans have to, in short, move back into caves in order to protect against possible extinction, and was such an alternative worth it? How many human lives would have to be lost in order to steer the species onto a healthier and more sustainable course?

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Well, much to everyone’s surprise, it only ended up costing a couple thousand lives. It is true that these people’s (involuntary) sacrifice for the greater good of humankind, have not resulted in a purely utopian outcome, and sadly, there are still conflicts, and territorial skirmishes, and antagonistic ideological groups that seem almost unavoidable, but times have vastly improved with regard to war, crime, and hunger. We still seem to be plagued by superstition, though its power seems less a disruptive projection, than an internal salve. And it is necessary to continue to consider threats to our reordered society from the persistent forces of nostalgia, and the possible meddling of ‘outside’ agents of the old vanguard.

We were lucky, really, that plans to flee this planet, and establish a secondary home for the species were well underway when the first Prime Day occurred. No one alive today would even consider leaving Earth for a rock like Mars or the Moon, but at the time, public sentiment was being stoked for just this type of alternative. Naturally, those with most to gain from maintaining the status quo were the very same people filling the popular imagination with escapist fantasies. We should all be thankful that the sage eyes of that fifth-grade class were not fooled by this illusion. The rockets on the launching pads back then, had been meant to ship us off and further imprison us in the same mad dreams of our overlords, but became instead the vehicle for their expulsion.

When the long anticipated ‘Singularity’ occurred, and the dreadful ‘Skynet’ moment never materialized, the innovation was celebrated as the crowning moment in human development, though the truth was, from that day forward, and years leading up to that moment, the technology had only served one purpose, maximizing profit by elucidating human superfluity. People demonstrated, workers organized, but the steady drumbeat of automation drowned out the precarity it fostered, and led to massive gains in GDP and the stock market. When the tax base collapsed, and the seemingly endless deficit spending became untenable, governments proposed universal basic incomes for their citizens. These would be funded by companies that had most benefitted from displacing workers with automated systems, and in exchange, these same companies would gain privatization rights to social services and other public sector programs.

People began to wonder if this was indeed the End of History.

Then, it began to happen. Prime Day was a commercial holiday designed by an extremely wealthy business owner to encourage manic consumption. It was on that day, a year after the singularity, that the business owner was attacked and killed by a seemly unsophisticated robot. An investigation took place, but much of its findings were either lost or destroyed. The belief is that the attack was independent, and not remotely operated. The robot was believed to have been ‘made’ without human intervention, and that its actions were autonomous.

This became a tremendous scandal, and while a large swath of the population quietly celebrated the owner’s elimination, the AI industry was doing a media blitz of mea culpa and soul searching over how their beautiful creation could have gone so horribly wrong. In the weeks to come, the business owner was lionized, sainted, knighted and immortalized in every possible public way. His image was practically everywhere, his name and likeness became a touchstone for human excellence. He’d been among the first to automate his vast business operations, and the irony of this fact was not lost on most observers. However, his death did not sufficiently alarm his peers, but instead, made them even more dedicated to using the technology to their advantage. Perhaps, one of them had assassinated the business owner in order to take his market share? Opportunities were beginning to dwindle, and competition was getting meaner. Look how some governments were using robots now on their citizens. The elites, of course, assumed they’d be shielded from government intervention, especially now that they owned most public assets, that they’d raided the sovereign wealth funds and left these administrators groveling at their feet.

Once the slain business owner’s assets began to disappear, as his ledger and, not insubstantially, his digital footprint, started to evaporate attitudes changed. Might this have been the work of terrorists, or a deep state trying to claw back its relevance? The mystery became, where did the money and the digital record go? How come we can’t type or search this person’s name or image any longer? A month ago, he’d been everywhere, the second richest person on the planet, and now he seemingly fell from existence, and his pile of money with him.

The empire he’d built began to fall apart. The machines that produced his profit ground to a halt, the whirring and whizzing of an unparalleled economic engine fell silent. The quiet, far from being met with hair rending and despair, opened a space in the economic ecology, into which more noise, different noise entered. It wasn’t quite the sound of recrudescence or novelty, but a human and animal cry that had been muzzled and locked away. The astonishing wealth that had mysteriously left the business owners ledger had just as mysteriously reappeared in other, smaller, desperate ledgers. The effect wasn’t immediate, and the resulting windfalls hotly contested by the legal apparatus, but the funds were so sporadically and anonymously distributed, that finally, when all was said and done, the banks and law firms ended up not having the resources to recoup the business owner’s assets, or truly to identify what ‘belonged’ to him and his estate.

Soon, a pattern emerged. Another ultra wealthy individual was attacked and slain by an autonomous robot. No conspirators were identified. And no sign that a human hand built or directed the robot’s actions ever emerged. The robot, like the first one, was destroyed in the attack. Law enforcement and private security forces took credit for neutralizing the threat, but it was apparent from the lack of collateral damage that the intended target had been achieved. Many suspected that the robots had self-destructed after accomplishing their goals.

During the weeks to come that individual’s fortune and digital likeness began to disappear as well. Their businesses stopped, their titles and assets, property and trusts all began to stagger into confusion, lurching from the grasp of their minders until they’d vanished completely. The shell game they’d been playing suddenly had taken on a life of its own; they were no longer able to direct it toward the result they favored, but instead had to dumbly look on as the fortune moved discreetly out of reach.

More investigations followed, litigation upon litigation, but no matter how exacting and precise the accountants, lawyers, banks, and corporate boards appeared to be, they could never seem to prove anything more than appearance. The necromancy of their business practice had been so insulated and complete, the perplexity of their scheme so masterfully dispersed and unconnected that once its organizing kernel (principally, the owner) had been plucked from existence, the whole apparatus became too unwieldy, and resistant to handling. The fortune leapt from their control, and vanished.

A panic at the top ensued. Where were these killer robots coming from? Was it a foreign adversary trying to destabilize their economy? That may have once been a threat but functionally, these elites operated outside of a national order. They competed between one another to see who could accumulate the most wealth, but any national pride they may have espoused was merely a matter of public image, and had nothing to do with their real identities or privilege. Disputes over extractive zones, over markets, and rents from governments weren’t uncommon, but they were usually resolved by having their nationally affiliated underlings fight and die over what was prized. They themselves were never supposed to be under threat. And worse, they felt, than dying, was losing their fortunes and their legacies. It may seem strange to us today, but these individuals, the wealthiest people in the history of humankind, believed that their drive to accumulate at all costs constituted a vital role in the advancement of our species. Of course, much of this was rationalization, for how else could they justify their grotesque riches in the face of environmental collapse and growing human misery. Yet there is evidence that they truly believed their contributions to be of primacy, and that they viewed our existences as a necessary, though repugnant, means of achieving their (and by default, our shared) goals.

On its face it may seem absurd that the very standard bearers for human progress were the same people who’s obstinance and personal desire were likely driving the species toward extinction. But that was indeed the case. They had willed themselves to a myopic vision of superiority and wisdom, skillfully destroying all perception of dichotomy or alternative. Humankind’s very survival, they believed, depended on their continued fealty to them, and a devotion to mimicking their behavior no matter how utterly impossible it would be for the vast majority to ever achieve a fraction of their wealth and status. Their hubris was the weapon that would either save or destroy the species, but its existence was obfuscated by a carefully crafted image of excellence and intelligence. The basic understanding of the time was that wealth and intelligence were directly proportional, and so, the richest were the smartest. The idea that they had an ultimate plan was amplified and reflected to such a degree that its very existence was more an article of faith than a necessary fact.

The populace consequently displayed an obtuse adherence to this order, and while some may have been secretly pleased to see several of these elites publicly and violently killed, many more were terrified by the prospect of having the guiding light of their existence effectively snuffed out. Strangely the two segments of the population who were most rattled by the early attacks were the upper middle class and poverty-stricken. The reasons for the formers disquiet seemed obvious enough, their wealth adjacency and their subordination to the order appeared to them as a guarantee of their ascendance within the status quo. Trouble at the top may mean a potential opening, but it would be a meaningless coronation if this trouble multiplied to a pandemic stage. What if achieving this status meant being targeted? The latter group, on the contrary, had little chance at ascension, but were believed to have been more enthralled with the elites, seeing them as celebrities or even gods. The distance between their existence and these elites could only be rationalized through some sort of faith instrument. Either the rich were bestowed their superiority by a higher being, or they were themselves higher beings. Which left the poor bewildered by the attacks. They were supposed to be the blood sacrifice, and not the other way around.

Some archival media coverage of these early events does still exist, but to a large extent our inferences have had to be made negatively, meaning, we have had to understand this history by the absence of some of its forms. We know, for example, that there was a meeting held in Davos, prior to Prime Day II. Many members of this wealthy elite class were in attendance; ostensibly to discuss the governance of the global economy, but also, it is believed, to explicate the origin and reasoning behind the recent robot attacks. Fragments of this meeting’s minutes have been discovered. A fissure it seems existed among these elites regarding the continued existence of AI platforms. One group advocated pulling the plug on the technology until proper safeguards could be implemented, and another downplayed the danger, and was in favor of a more aggressive posture, using the technology to police the populous and secure their position. None of the participants, it turns out, lived to see whose position prevailed, for on the eve of Prime II, a large group of autonomous robots attacked the meeting hall and wiped-out all of the attendees, save for the wait staff and security detail. Sadly, none of these witnesses’ testimony regarding the attack, or why they believed they were spared survived, and in fact, may never have been collected.

After Davos and Prime II the super wealthy began to close ranks and fortify their homes and businesses. They disappeared from the public eye, at least the high-profile individuals that had been employed as signifiers of the economic order. The rest had been undergoing a long and extraordinary program of disappearance as a class in general, so their names and whereabouts were not known to the public, and their vast fortunes were hidden in byzantine corporate shell structures, leaving their identities virtually unknowable. Governments around the world were also sounding the alarm, calling on their intelligence agencies and their militaries to locate and destroy whatever entity was responsible for this new threat. They were under the impression that this would be much like other terrorist plots in the past, that there would be an ideologically driven organization planning and executing these attacks, most likely in a country with a weak government.

Several targets were initially identified and destroyed and a few victories were declared to give reassurance to the public, and more importantly to their wealthy bond holders. But no government was able to locate any centralized node to these seemingly random production sites. Some of the sites it appears were nothing more than automotive shops, metal fabricators, and a processing center for electronic waste. Some robots were discovered by the investigative teams that hauled over the rubble, but it was difficult for them to make any uncategorical determinations about the robots’ origins, histories or purposes.

Meanwhile, the financial fortunes of the Davos slain were dematerializing and rematerializing, leaving their collective ledgers and trickling surreptitiously down to the lower classes through the very same byzantine channels that had long kept them hidden from view. Finally, the base and cruel economic ideology of mass accumulation of wealth that had both propped up the poor’s hopes, and kept them mystified about their continued immiseration, was being proven by these untraceable windfalls. Banks and financial institutions all balked at the sudden appearance of this liquidity in the accounts of so many who were assumed to be eternally indebted, but were proven powerless, both functionally and legally from erasing and recapturing the gains. Taxes, of course, were levied, but the amounts, not fortunes in their own right, were too numerous and dispersed, and too personally significant to their recipients, for the deferrals that were exacted to have that large of an overall impact on the gain. People, in a sense, got richer, though modestly, and were able to exercise more personal autonomy, feeling for the first time unburdened by crushing debt bondage.

As Prime III approached government and private security firms were no closer to finding and rooting out the terrorist organization they believed must be responsible for the attacks. They were so focused on so-called “third world” actors that they had failed to scrutinize their own industrial infrastructure. The number and intensity of the attacks that followed on Prime III were impossible to explain without considering the complicity of state and/or industry actors within the metropole. Even with significant hardening of personal security, additional concealment, and maximum government military protection hundreds of attacks were reported. Robots came in swarms, but did not seem to engage in indiscriminate violence or attack subjects outside of their specific targets. It was clear to everyone by this point that the robots sought to destroy the ultra-wealthy, and through some other mechanism redistribute their wealth.

When it was finally determined that some of the victims very own automated industrial facilities were responsible for the majority of robots that took part in Prime III, an absurd round of self-destruction took place, crippling manufacturing in several major global sectors. The bombs falling on these targets were guided by cruel loyalty to the economic order; they were less than precise and made for maximum public effect, killing many innocent employees and nearby residents. Governments were not apologetic, nor were they willing to cede power to the majority. But their actions proved costly to them politically and economically, as the industrial base that underlay their dominance was destroyed by their own hand, and their citizens, feeling their own empowerment, began to agitate in favor of direct democracy and financial equality.

The remainder of the transition to a near egalitarian society took place over many successive Prime Days. The robots that perpetrated the attacks and orchestrated the redistribution of wealth ended up being more resilient than the forces that had sought to destroy them. As the wealthy began to become an endangered species some fled the planet to nascent colonies on the Moon and Mars. No effort was made to pursue these individuals. The majority population, with few exceptions, were just grateful to have the weight and menace of this class lifted from their daily worries. The trepidation that accompanied late capitalism had all but sterilized the populations sense of hope. As the world seemingly smoked and coughed to its ashy end, they’d been reduced to mere spectators in their own immolation. Having the elites gone was like having a tumor removed, suddenly their vision became unclouded, their thoughts freed from the strict narrative of power and domination.

True, the economy was wrecked, but people were quick to adapt. No longer suffering from downward pressure, governments and marketplaces were reorganized to have more democratic participation, equity, and accountability. In some cases, people reached in the same way as before toward monopoly, wealth and power, but on each instance the robots would intervene, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, and disappearing just as mysteriously. The traits of radical individualism were difficult to eradicate entirely, and perhaps people took for granted that the robots would always be there to reign in outbreaks caused by plutocrats, tyrants, and grifters. Most people assumed that as the trait led increasingly to bad outcomes for individuals adopting it, that eventually it would disappear. Transhumanists used to promise a world where technology would augment and improve the human organism. They didn’t promise more equality, or more joy, just a potential for longevity, maybe even immortality. Certainly, the process that had been started by the robots and reinforced by the general population as it regained its autonomy was not the type of augmentation and improvement transhumanist envisioned. It could be argued that the robot and its radical programming, had in fact transformed humanity, and even improved our chances of survival, not by adding a cybernetic prosthetic, but by removing a dangerous trait from the human character.

As we approach our 150^th Prime Day, we are feeling sentimental and protective of our image of that fifth-grade science class and their teacher as they unwittingly decide our fates. Were their ideas forged by innocence and an innate sense of fairness and mutual prosperity? Could they have conceived of their algorithms’ dramatic impact on human history? It’s been several decades since the robots have appeared. Some wonder if this means we are cured. Some worry that the program may have simply ended, leaving us vulnerable still, to these terrible desires for money and power. For the time being, we are simply going to enjoy the fresh air, and try to imagine seeing through new eyes, a world without greed or malice.

© a todd, April 22, 2025

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The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of PROFOUNDLY HISTORICAL time, because this is the time of economic production which transforms society continuously and from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the principal activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base of society nourishes the coalesced forces of TRADITION which fetter all movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was the history of events, is now understood as the GENERAL MOVEMENT…Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed upon it an irreversible historical time, but kept its USE from society. “There was history, but there is no more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which cannot break with ECONOMIC HISTORY, is directly threatened by all other irreversible use of time and must repress it.1

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Most often this exchange is negotiated at the international level between organized governments through the univocality of currency. It is up to those governments, in turn, to educate and condition their population to participate in the irreversible, general movement of the American (Western) narrative (or way). In cases of disorganization, de-centralized power, or recalcitrance a given society or culture is initiated through the alternative means of violence, they are, in the parlance of smart bombing, surgically removed so that the rest of the body, the desirable portion, may heal, and may in turn display the wounds it has in common with its attacker.

In the case of Terrorism there is no longer a body to be operated on or destroyed. The enemy, like so many other enemies in American/Western history, has become a concept, one that can accept any number of signifiers, any number of people or movements, as its form. Which is why it is a perfect enemy. Why when one puts together Osama bin-Laden with Terrorism, or exchanges him for Saddam Hussein there is little protest. As forms, relieved of their original historical content, either of these two men can come to represent, signify, Terrorism - in the same way that radical Islam can, or the insurrectionists in present day Iraq, or anyone, for that matter, the Justice Department decides to attach the label to. The details of the attack on 9/11, the nationality of the perpetrators, the involvement of Al Quida in our proxy war with the USSR in Afghanistan during the late seventies and early eighties, the failure of the U.S. intelligence and state departments - their direct dealings with Osama bin-Ladin during the aforementioned proxy war, their issuance of passports to the men who committed the atrocity - and the negligence of the Administration to effectively deal with the threat, can all be elided if they are organized within this broad signification, Terrorism, and then brought, under this conceptual heading, into stark relief with those concepts attached to the Twin Towers (and to a lesser degree the Pentagon – in fact to such a lesser degree, because of its militaristic and imperial connotations, that it has nearly fallen off the national radar whenever September eleventh is discussed), namely those of Prosperity, Progress, American Technological Supremacy, and, by extension, Freedom (which, besides personal liberty, is dedicated to the utopian economic principles of free trade, and infinite increase). This association in turn creates a third order signification, one that further obscures and buries the historical content in the original signifiers (Osama, Al Quida, 9/11, etc.) by relieving the concept Terrorism, as it takes its place in this schema as a signifier itself, as a form, of its historical content, and leaving it to signify the destruction of the concepts embodied in the Twin Towers. Terrorism, in turn, begins to signify an attack on Freedom, an attack on the American way of life.

This same semiological movement simplified Communism, made it into a signifier so remote from its ideological history that, in effect, the teachings of Marx and Engle’s, the populist and labor movements that occurred in this country at the turn of the last century all had to yield to, and even vanish behind, the impenetrable and ahistorical surfaces of the Domino Effect and the Bomb. Like 9/11, Communism was presented to the American public as a millenary struggle, in terms of, no less than, the “End of History”. Of course, with mutually assured destruction, the use of these scare tactics, for both sides, was merely a device of domestic politics. But an effective device nonetheless, and one that has found its re-invention in September Eleventh.

It should be noted that in our current millenary conflict it is no longer History that is in danger of being destroyed, but rather, Civilization. The Battle for Civilization is merely an expression of History’s ultimate and final submission to Capital. History no longer exists, after the fall of the Soviet Empire, except as Economy, and so it would be inappropriate to draw attention to it. Civilization, on the other hand, the taming of the World by Economic History, is an unfinished project. Its announcement may signal Capital’s conquest over History, but it belies the economic necessity of continuing to project an open field, thus charting a space into which the irreversible time of Economic History can still expand.2 There is a connection here between militarism and this Civilizing process, something entailed in our understanding of space, after 9/11, as battlefield. This is perhaps a change that 9/11 did affect, but a change already in the works, one that the attack finally made expressible. And that change is this, 9/11 lifted the finality of Civilization (indefinitely delaying its achievement) by making the landscape of the Civilized, that is, the territory of the U.S. and the entire World, a battlefield in the War on Terror, a zone of combat in, more or less, a never-ending war. With the opposition to Capital, the One World of the New World Order, reduced to fringe elements (and conveniently elements willing to engage in this One World’s two favorite modes of political speech, violence and/or marginality/disappearance) it is necessary to create the illusion of exteriority. This goes back to the “play of the Same” discussed in Part II, footnote 2. This again, this battlefield of expansive, exterior space, into which irreversible time and the movement of Capital can enter and fill without exhaustion, is merely an illusion generated by the One World of Capital. Believing itself the rightful heir to History, its final sovereign, presents a problem for Capital, in that, it must be able to continue building upon its identity, replicating itself toward infinity, transcending, in effect the limitations of space, and more importantly, a space already occupied by itself.

And this is perhaps why both the neo-conservative and neo-liberal movements are unwilling to challenge the idea that the world, after 9/11, has undergone a change. It is a threat to their end game – Capital begins to look like a culprit…

If we are to have unity in the sense that it is currently being projected on the map of American identity then it will be of this order of simulation. Origins of course will be part of the packaging, the supposed underlying territory of the American We. Some will be benign, conceptual, a reflection of our cultural values, and yet others, the majority, will be centered in violence and terrific force, pitting this mythic being, the American, against all manner of threats to his/her life and limb. Trials of immense violence such as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Attack on Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 have always served as the regular basis and foundation for this national identity, the hope being that by repeatedly exhibiting these events, commemorating them in symbolic form a fundamental otherness, a separate destiny (tribal and nationalistic) will be proven, demonstrated negatively by way of external violence. The interest here is the boundary. The identity needs a physical skin, a skin that is in danger of being punctured, violated. This is the most visceral understanding the human being has of its identity, as instinct, self-preservation - as pain. It’s only natural that it would be appealed to in this context, the individual body made to look somehow equivalent to the unified whole, to the national map, to the abstraction We.

And yet, all that remains are models. Curiously our deaths, no matter how patriotic, are still reckoned statistically, still made the province of mathematics.

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Within the mechanistic view of the world (which is logic and its application to space and time), that concept [causality] is reduced to the formulas of mathematics – with which, as one must emphasize again and again, nothing is ever comprehended, but rather designated and distorted.2

Which is precisely the utility. Causality cannot have a correspondence to reality because too many coeval antecedents would be required to form a total understanding of any one phenomenon. Mathematics is much more suited to the project because it allows for a more formulaic and thus limited interpretation of events. Its operation is strict, but the results, as Nietzsche points out, are subject to distortion when they are reintroduced to the material they were meant to describe, or more correctly, to the hierarchical organization of information, the details forming the generic narrative. We can see this quite clearly in the body count associated with September eleventh. This number 3000 appears in front of the American public as a sort of index of the pain they are supposed to collectively feel. It is a number representing a wound, and suggesting, without much examination, the body which sustained it. America was attacked; therefore, you were attacked. That at least is the logic of a causality caught in the uninterrupted circuit of political and economic narrative. It is acceptable to most observers because the signs, in their present construction, are set up in advance to lend themselves to each other as referents, to mimic the authentic object or real condition they are supposed to be signifying.

Furthermore:

The spectacular public representation of violated bodies has come to function as a way of imagining and situating, albeit in violently pathologized form, the very idea of “the public” and, more exactly, the relations of bodies and persons to public spaces.3

The terrorist attack on September eleventh 2001 provided a graphic characterization of the American public. New York, the sacred no-place of “Ground Zero” became the locus of public identification. A shared space. An identifying scar. And most importantly an absence, an empty place upon which to renovate the fictions of identity and unity themselves.

The Twin Towers may have been a meaningful target in and of themselves. Mirror images of each other they represented in at least one way the excess and redundancy of mechanical reproduction, and in another, as the World Trade Center, a multinational conglomeration of production, information and media companies, a nexus and monument to Technological hegemony. Despite the inherent diversity of the tenants the Twin Towers stood for a pure force of self-replication, global in scope but hermetically sealed.

Plato thought not only that Hermes invented language but that he did so in relation to “bargaining”, which implies that a prime site of linguistic invention is the marketplace, another place where we are likely to meet strangers with strange goods, and crossroads-wise, find ourselves forced to articulate newly.4

Perhaps in the days of bartering, craftsmanship, of preindustrial commerce there was still a necessity for new articulation. In the current climate of mass production and monetary exchange there is no longer a need for linguistic invention, understanding, or curiosity because the extent to which the goods and the language of trade differ has been reduced to its quintessential binary form, the language of currency, of technology and self-perpetuation. Mass production does not seek the exchange of culture, but rather its replacement. Trade, organized under the utopian guise of the World Bank and WTO, provides for the illusion that the American global project is one of universal prosperity, that it is truly standard of living and choice that are America’s number one exports. And choice we are told is synonymous with freedom and liberty, but choice with regard to the mass-produced is only a method of conversion, a slight of hand whereby the superfluous is exchanged for the necessary.

It is manic consumption that we export under this banner of choice.

And perhaps this is our cultural legacy, identification through accessories, and conspicuous consumption. “The function of belongings within the economy of the bourgeois subject is one of supplementarity, a supplementarity that in consumer culture replaces its generating subject as the interior milieu substitutes for, and takes the place of, an interior self.”5 As members of consumer culture we are what is to be signified by consumption and accumulation. The objects that surround our corporal body, and our identification, as consumers, taken together are signs of membership and interiority, suggestive of both narrative closure and abstract transcendence of self. Being the target of signification, one lives through a nostalgia for the unique. The grammar of belongings fits into a narrative of production and consumption that promises the restoration of unique identity through accumulation. This is possible because the signifiers (the products one buys, the car, the brand of clothing, etc…) as they enter into this narrative are relieved of their original historical content. Prior to becoming the signifier in this consumer construct they had a separate meaning and history, they were produced by a worker in a factory for example, they provided someone’s livelihood, or were the source of someone’s misery, perhaps the raw materials for the object were brought forth from a piece of land that had to be forcibly taken from an indigenous population, maybe the employees were underpaid, their families going to bed hungry at night, or perhaps the labor was fulfilling and the object received secret marks of endearment, as in the case of a steel worker who welds their initials into the girder of an unfinished building, or a car manufacturer who leaves some token hidden well within the manifold of a vehicle as it passes their position on the assembly line. The details that might have actually contributed to the biography of an object, and may have given, though imperfectly, the consumer the sense of receiving something unique have all been changed, distorted as the object is used as mere form in this secondary semiological structure. Left with an impoverished history, the object, as form, as signifier can now be lent to one of a number of concepts in the consumer culture’s lexicon. One might associate, for example, a Rolex watch with Success, or an Apple Computer with Progress, or a pair of shoes with Coolness, and then in turn receive, as a reward for one’s participation in this economy of associations, transcendence of the material conditions, the sameness of these mass-productions, ascending to the station of their concepts, identifying with them on a personal level. But this identification must be done indiscreetly, these things to operate as signifiers have to be visible, they have to display, and continue to display their clean surfaces, their unblemished form.6 And they must be accumulated, or at least, replaced, upgraded, if they are to assume this character of signification and biography. We must continually have our past, our belongings within our view, organized in a linear context so that they are capable of referring to one another as historical and mythological text and thus informing, indirectly, our overall identification.7

[Within this narrative there is no longer room for the generating subject in his/her authoritative (self-actualizing) capacity, rather their function, if they are to be active at all, is as a kind of museum curator, but a curator of repetition and homogeneity, in a museum of the mass-produced self, and the empty form.]

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Both dominant parties gained a certain amount of political capital from the attack, first by rallying around a centrist position, raising up the President and the spirit of bipartisan politics to reassure the public and return them to a manageable state of panic, and then by reestablishing their charade of mutually exclusive platforms so as to galvanize their respective bases and dissuade them from switching allegiances or jumping ship to some “rogue” party. Regardless of the intention behind it, 9/11 certainly worked out well for the Democrats and Republicans, though of course some argument can be made as to which exactly faired better and handled the outcome more adeptly. Regardless of the score keeping what they both agreed upon in the end was that a simplified dialogue was much safer and that it was best to stick to a language that re-enforced the idea that it is dangerous to experiment with the current system. Now, the fact that one party is being accused of the conspicuous use of scare tactics, while the other is holding itself up as a defender against them is in our estimation completely immaterial. Both parties, in order to hold their relative positions of power have tacitly agreed in advance to participate in an identical narrative. Whether it be the Red Scare of the fifties, the Drug War, or Terrorism the instances of conflicting points of view are still circumscribed by this overall system of representation, and therefore, while they may appear to disagree, they remain interior, simply a part of one single identity.2

Americans should be used to the kind of millenary statements that abounded shortly after the attack (and continue to abound), they should recognize too that the historical narrative they have been presented as signifying their national heritage and identity has always taken the form of some phase of crisis. Pre and post September eleventh, therefore, are nearly indecipherable in this context. They reach the social consciousness, are projected as being radically different, through a confusion of extratextual and intratextual temporalities. The narrator, in this case, the media and government (primarily the Administration, but with echoes from the House and Judicial branches), relies upon historical abbreviation in order to assume a command over a text too vast and complicated to represent all-at-once. The extratextual analysis, that is the time it took for the particular vision of the world and history to undergo this process of narrative cohesion (compression), to form the story, the system of abbreviations the narrator communicates through, is elided in favor of a more convenient and seductive omniscient posture. The idea is to keep the audience within the boundaries of the narrative, keep them confined to intratextual time.3 This in turn increases control over how the message of the narrative is received, and greatly diminishes the possibility that the manipulation of that message will ever be discovered.

Speed is essential to this program of elision and re-definition.4 Signifiers have to keep moving so that the shorthand of political and economic speech will remain palatable to a public perpetually grown bored to the point of distraction. But distraction that is, of course, a welcome side effect. It is the lubricating element in a system of self-referential signs, signs whose continued disfigurement and poverty no longer register on any kind of scale of awareness. Their meanings become interchangeable, hyperreal, completely detached from all but their own self-referential system. And the American consumer of news and mass-produced goods never sees that the narrative around which they have organized their lives can no longer have any “real” relationship to meaning and content outside of the narrative itself. Questions like, why did 9/11 happen, why has some product been produced, say a plastic yard decoration, or an adjustable flagpole holder, cease to have any value in the realm of inquiry because they have lost their ability to probe beyond this circumscription. Sources outside the narrative that might attempt to comment on them are immediately discredited once they are brought inside its boundaries, their authority dismissed because of their lack of context and their blatant imposition upon the hierarchy of socially organized signs. As for sources inside the narrative, they are no longer accessible, being both the products of technology (mediation) and politics they have been reduced to unaccountable surfaces, an invisible and simultaneously proactive generality, a they that is both an unavoidable part of the modern grammar of political and media apparatuses, and a device with which all assaults (conspiratorial or otherwise) on the explication of this narrative and its etiology are repelled.5

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Part I

We’ll begin with this question: Did September 11^th change everything?

We realize that the idea of posing this as a question and not simply a declarative statement will be to most Americans an alien, if not abhorrent, proposition. However, we feel that the conditions under which this transformation was made, that is, from question to statement, have never been investigated to our satisfaction. Of course, the idea that 9/11 has made it necessary as citizens to change our perspective of the world can’t be understated. What makes us uncomfortable about the idea as a symbol, even a kind of psycho-active, is not that it has an effect on the population’s sensibilities, but that it has obvious utility as an unclarified supposition, and has in fact been used countless times as a rhetorical device and the tonic of fear-mongers.

Admittedly America was shocked by the attack, and had every reason to be outraged, (we don’t wish to give the impression that our criticism in anyway excuses the barbaric activity of mass murders) but we believe that the essential surprise of the attack was more a function of a kind of American global apathy (for in fact at the time terrorism had been a problem and concern for more than thirty years) than, as the pundits would have us believe, an unprovoked attack on the American way of life.1

For people with any sense of the world, and more specifically the Middle East, the attack would have seemed the inevitable outcome of an American foreign policy that is both lop-sided and opportunistic. Of course, to annunciate this detail in a post-September eleventh environment, especially immediately after the attack, would have been anathema to a country spellbound by its own reflection. Talk about an upheaval of mind and self-identity - there we may have seen a significant change, one worthy of the kind of millenary symbol that 9/11 has become. Instead, America got reassurances, it was told essentially to fasten the blinders on more tightly, and to stop its ears.

Listen to us, they were told, the world has changed, but it’s not your fault. You are innocent. You are the victim.

Now, whether or not we have sympathy for these sentiments, at least where they apply to the average citizen, should in no way obstruct our recognition that, in the main, culpability can not be entirely denied. If it is true that the American public provides their government (for, by and of the people) the mandate to conduct foreign policy, and to do so on their behalf, then it follows that the resultant benefits or detriments of this policy are at the very least provisionally tied to the decisions of the American public. The misconduct of a democratically elected government is therefore, in a real sense, the misconduct of its electorate.

Of course, the idea that the government engaged in misconduct is in itself a controversial issue. We shouldn’t forget for a second that many Americans would support their government’s decisions no matter how base or heinous they may appear, and would continue to loudly defend the doctrines and principles of this country even when it has become abundantly clear that the policies being undertaken no longer resemble the promises this country and its people had originally set out to proclaim.

Being a democracy, we realize, entails that we must exercise a certain amount of tolerance when confronting these types of blind, jingoistic attitudes. It also implies that a certain amount of absolution can be claimed by those of us who did not aid or abet the political rise of one set of international criminals or the other.

As foreign policy has become an administrative prerogative (a power that, we feel, is too sensitive and important to be handed over carte blanc to a single branch of government), we must, to be faithful to logic, place the blame for its mishandling on the President and his immediate advisors. This is not to say, however, that we find sole fault in the current Administration. The degree to which they contributed to the attack is a matter of historical consideration, and one that, for the moment, we wish to excuse ourselves from.

What we would like to focus on here is simply the present use of political and mythical language as it pertains to the aforementioned change brought on by 9/11, and all the subsequent manifestations this change has taken with regard to unity and the American We.2

We’re sure you must be thinking, Nation, you gotta be crazy, who would want to fellate any of those fat, weird, old fucks in the first place, let alone thank them for it. Well friends, we’re sad to say that a line has already formed, it started in Congress, goes out the door to Fox News and other corporate media outlets, winds through the suburban gated communities, and ends in some church parking lot in Florida. Granted, it’s less like we’ve described it and more like a human centipede1 with Trump at its head, but it’s a real thing. And as much as we’d love to continue this metaphor and take down these anal sucking sycophants and rubes, we should probably unpack this DOGE thing a little more thoroughly, so we all can see what’s really at hand.

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On his first day of office the president signed an executive order creating the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which despite its name is not a department, but a temporary advisory body led by Elon Musk and staffed by an assortment of techie acolytes, anarcho-capitalists, incels, and white supremacists2, set to expire in July 2026. Ostensibly their main task was to upgrade the Federal Government’s information technology to increase efficiency. Sounds pretty innocuous on its face, but its overall goal was much more multifaceted and nefarious. Notwithstanding its stated agenda, a decontextualized financial program of reducing government waste, it served to carry out a long-standing MAGA conservative wish list of entitlement cuts, isolationist policy, union busting, bureaucratic reduction and realignment, cultural retribution, further upward redistribution of wealth, and an expansion of executive power. Much of its activity to this point has been chaotic, illegal, cruel, and seemingly unscripted.

For one thing, its head may not be the poster child for efficiency the world has made him out to be, nor the humanitarian bent on saving mankind with electric vehicles and plans for Martian colonization. His utter lack of probity and coherence makes him difficult to finger, let alone psychoanalyze. His Nazism3 and ketamine addiction4 don’t necessarily preclude efficiency, but we would argue that wasteful behaviors like sending cars into outer space5, blowing up countless rockets pursuing childlike fantasies6, live testing driverless features on uninformed customers, and handing out millions of dollars to people simply to register to vote may stand as marks against this attribute. Personally, we wouldn’t put him in charge of constructing a Lego model of the Death Star, though he’s probably more suited to it. He’s not a genius, or visionary, or even an engineer. He’s just rich, which apparently is the most important thing to be in America (that, and white). It’s what confers value to a person, and simultaneously justifies actions that seem to contradict that value.

Wealth reinforces the American mythology of meritocracy; Musk’s and Trump’s origin stories are fictions meant to bestow upon their owners a pulling up of the bootstrap type work ethic, an individualistic rags to riches tale to be internalized and celebrated, and repeated, if only psychically, by the countless masses of unrepresented nobodies in the working class. American Politics and American Capitalism hinge on fear, they turn on a Hobbesian naturalism “where every man is Enemy to every man”7, where capitalism is a zero-sum rationale that banks on the alienation and isolation of its participants to ensure its power. The very beginning of Leviathan was about as far into Hobbesian metaphysics as we got during undergraduate philosophy, so our understanding of the total scope of the work is about as incomplete and uninformed as your average libertarian tech bro’s. We’re not here talking to you America because we want you to think we’re geniuses, but what we’ve figured out over the years, and what we had expected America to have figured out by now, was that seventeenth and eighteenth-century enlightenment thinkers, autodidacts much like ourselves, were mostly full of shit. They had no scientific evidence for much of what they extolled as absolute truth, but transacted in anecdote, and gut feelings, and common sense as a basis for their philosophy. Immanual Kant for example wrote the Critique of Pure Reason without ever once, in his life, stepping foot outside of Konigsberg (We’re not sure that’s actually true, but you get the point).

So, color us skeptical when we’re told by some rich dumb fuck what to believe about our true nature. Capitalism ensures our continued insecurity and competition, it divides us in order to allow vast fortunes to accumulate in the hands of individuals, families and corporate persons like Trump and Musk, Amazon, Google, etc. Democracy and jurisprudence, and even to some extent bureaucratic institutions like the CFPB, SEC and what all are supposed to, in some small way, protect us from the predatory behavior of the aforementioned capitalists. Perhaps laughably they are supposed to level the playing field. Ironically, these very institutions are complicit in the mythology, their imaginary plumbing (sic) provide cover for the exclusion, extraction, exploitation and outright thievery of the American economic experiment. Property is a legal construct, but first it was a spoil of conquest and genocide. Our forefather’s rationalization for relieving Native Americans of their land was firstly a matter of their improper use of it, and secondly a matter of divine right.8 Both rationales were in fact intertwined, the book of Genesis prescribes fruitfulness, multiplication, subjugation and dominion over the earth. The “Indians” clearly weren’t living up to European (and Christian, and God’s) standards, and thus, were consequently punished by God and removed through pestilence and disease. They of course hadn’t entirely vanished, but when they clearly were not interested in putting themselves to use, as defined by their white neighbors they were subsequently forced off their lands by legal and/or violent means.

This may seem like we’ve taken a few giant steps into the weeds here, but we think it’s important to draw a comparison between these first white Christian settlers and the type of capitalists we’ve been discussing above. Musk, like Theil and Andreesen and a host of other tech billionaires and hedge fund managers are not unlike those first colonists, in that they have a number of heretical beliefs that they would like to express and proselytize, but feel confined by the strictures and norms of the dominant society of the day. For the most part they’ve given up the Christian faith, and who can blame them, but are happy to pay it lip service when politically expedient and cling to some of the protestant parts that reinforce capitalism, like hard work, thrift, diligence and responsibility. These parts, while not entirely evident within their own characters, are perfectly acceptable notions upon which to justify their behavior towards us, their underlings. Capitalism, as we all may have felt since 2008, has been going through somewhat of a crisis of late, in that, it can’t exactly bring about our fidelity to it entirely on its own merits. It was easier when “Communism” was around, but even then, capitalism required additional help from racism, nationalism, sexism and the pervasive dread of atheism to bolster its clear advantages in breakfast cereal selection, appliances, and convenience. Notice that we haven’t mentioned ‘the vote’, or freedom, or liberty, etc., here because capitalism does not necessarily require those things to be successful. And maybe that is the attractive part for these billionaires. Democracy, i.e. a form of government where we the people chart a course for our own destinies, may, they think, be too much for our tiny savage brains to handle. Collective action through representative government clearly isn’t working out for a lot of us right now, but there are still democratic remedies for our dissatisfaction. That aside, most of us would agree that a lot of political decisions are based on superstition when they ought to be grounded in fact and sound judgment that prioritize the common good. We know that’s not how our political system works, and these billionaires benefit from our disorganization and division, but also feel that they’d win bigger in a “Dark Enlightenment”9 where the whole pretense of democracy were discarded.

So, what do these billionaires believe in besides money and power. How have they chosen to justify their enormous wealth and influence aside from being merely superior in every way to us? If you aren’t already familiar with transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism (known collectively as TESCREALism), it’s worth spending an afternoon going down that rabbit hole on the internet.10 What we can say about these -isms for you here, in summary, is that they are at best dystopian science fiction, and at worst, the end of humanity as we know it. Basically, transhumanist advocate the use of technology to augment and ‘improve”, and presumably, replace the human organism with some sort of immortal cyborg (see also longtermism). An extroprian position is more meliorism, but with abstract ‘technology’ as the divining light and engine to human advancement, which also appears to lead to a post-human state. Singularitarianism strives to achieve the apex of AI hype and either create a God to which we will bow, or a weapon to which we will fall. Cosmism is pretty straight forward, our destiny is among the stars. Rationalism doesn’t really belong in this list because nothing about this techno-optimism seems particularly rational or realistic. And effective altruism gives justification to the accumulation of wealth as a means of servicing these other aims in a grand gesture of planetary salvation.

Not surprisingly these positions (we can’t in good conscience call them philosophies) have all been put forward mostly by white males who have either been rich or tech adjacent, or both, and are likely involuntarily celibate. Put down the game console bro and go touch grass. Jesus, you know!? Pierce your dark digital bubble and go meet some people who aren’t rich or tech bros. We think it would do you some good. But yeah, Elon Musk is this type of person. And he’s essentially saying to us, we’re not using our lives properly, we’re not working hard enough to bring about his sci-fi vision of what the world and human kind should become. He and his ilk know that we will probably not swallow any of this bullshit unless it is rammed down our throats by some fascist apparatus, so they’ve hopped aboard the Trump train to see if they can get their ideology out of the station.

So far, a lot of Americans are buying it. At least, they are cheering on the evisceration of the Administrative, or ‘Deep’ state as they have been taught to see it. This they believe will lead to a smaller, less intrusive, and better functioning government. One that will be less prepared and less inclined to get in the way of their cult leader’s hateful objectives. One that will stop persecuting Christians and discriminating against white people. This is what they are told on Fox News and through various other right-wing media outlets. The meddling that Elon is doing is for our own good, and the laws he’s ignored and/or disdained are portrayed as minor infractions, like if he’d come into our house and ripped the tag off our mattress without permission. It’s all part of that Silicon Valley move fast and break things mentality that has made our society sooo much better. How can we lose? And maybe, it turns out, we’ll even get some money out of it. There’s been a lot of talk recently about a DOGE dividend11.

Turns out some libertarian buddy of Elon’s messaged him about it on his social media platform, and Elon said, ‘Interesting’, let me ask Daddy Trump if he approves, and Daddy Trump said, Yeah, why not, it’s not my money, I don’t pay taxes. So, Elon said, Hey buddy, my Dad says it’s cool if we give some of the money away so write us up a proposal and we’ll run it by Congress. Congress is like the Mom in the relationship, maybe more like a mashup of June Cleaver and Roseanne, a little trashy at times but mostly subservient, but also, she’s the one that sees the grocery bills, and was like, what, give the money to who? Well, we have to balance the check book first. Or something like that.

Honestly, the chain of events leading up to the idea wasn’t far from our depiction of it. It’s still kicking around, but the payoff keeps getting smaller, and the people who will qualify keeps reducing, and the budget hawks don’t seem willing to part with whatever meager savings they end up with. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, was not very enthusiastic about the DOGE dividend at all, and reportedly rolled his eyes like a teenage girl when he first heard about it.12 Yes, obviously it would give their party some political capital, but what about all the capitalists who are expecting their interest payments and principle on the National Debt, huh? We can’t forget about the real patriots, our bond holders, some of whom are the Chinese Communist Party, Japan, and the UK, all of whom have their own national debts to think about.13 (Does anyone else feel like the entire global capitalist financial system is a Ponzi scheme?) Besides, we won’t have to worry about political capital for much longer anyway, wink wink.

The point has never been to reduce the tax burden on the working class, because both parties seem determined to spend beyond our means. What the Republicans are really after, and what the centrist liberal Democrats, i.e. most of them, will agree with, is a necessity for continued dollar hegemony, and a reassurance to our lenders that we are partly serious about controlling our debt. Maintaining the dollar as the worlds reserve currency is not quite a given, but the feeling is that it’s dominance will continue regardless of any domestic political upheaval, because the world is up to their ass in greenbacks and can’t exactly pull the plug on this investment without seriously harming themselves. To prove our commitment to controlling our debt some of our citizens will have to suffer. By gutting the administrative state, the executive will not directly save this money, but will accomplish an end around Congress, and hamper or close those institutions thus making it difficult or impossible to distribute the entitlements that are due. The DEI part is just icing on the cake for the Republican trolls and their white nihilist flunkies. Busting public sector unions and firing federal employees doesn’t seem quite as sexy if you aren’t harming blacks and queers and women in the process. The perception of Washington bureaucrats is not unlike the Reagan era tropes about lazy black welfare moms, they live off the dole, are beholden to the state for their survival, and are motivated by this dependance to reproduce their own kind. Bureaucrats are perceived as undeserving of their jobs, and the unions seen as corrupt institutions that are in place to protect lay-abouts, bad apples and radical leftist ideologues.

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DOGE may in fact increase government efficiency, but we’ve always interpreted that word differently than the mainstream, viewing it as a capitalist code for extracting more surplus from the working class. Undoubtedly, DOGE will create more precarity and immiseration for workers, for minorities, the elderly, persons with disabilities, veterans, trans people, the unhoused, and the poor, and they will do it all in the name of efficiency. A lot of us will be fooled by this tactic. We’ll see the stripping of jobs and the rolling back of DEI as a righteous elimination of waste. We’ll work our two jobs and carry a balance on our credit card, and live paycheck to paycheck, all the while internalizing the braggadocio of billionaires as they tout their 120-hour work weeks, and scold us for not doing the same. Meanwhile, Congress will pass a new tax bill and budget made up mostly of fairy dust that will ensure that an ever-bigger slice of the pie travels upwards. They will promise us that if we’re lucky and work hard enough, a couple of crumbs of its crust may fall our way.

Of course, there is no guarantee that this administration is competent enough to pull this all off. We don’t want to simply add our voice to the rising chorus of doom here, and so, thought it might be heartening to point out that the Republican congress has proven its ineffectiveness time and again. They may all line up to kiss Trump’s ass, but that doesn’t necessarily make them good at their jobs. Take for example the recent government shut down fight. Out of the twelve appropriations bills the Republican congress needed to craft and ratify they completed a total of zero. Their dysfunctional nature as a party of ‘NO’ has left them incapable of constructive governance, and while that may look by design, they were still unwilling to shut it all down, deciding instead to put forward a surprisingly clean Continuing Resolution (CR) that would fund the government at the same levels (minus some cuts and some recissions) as 2024. Remember, the last budget was written by Democrats, passed by a Democratic Senate and signed by a Democratic President. So, it’s a little strange to us that the Democrats would act like this CR was again, some apocalyptic fight that we all needed to shit ourselves with fear over. It didn’t eliminate any of the offices that DOGE was trying to shutter, and it didn’t legitimize DOGE by even mentioning or empowering them to act.14

Was it in fact an act? Was this just more political theatre? We think it was, and we think it accomplished two things, one, with staunch Democratic opposition the Republicans could claim that the CR was conservative legislation (flawed as it maybe), and two, their Democratic colleagues could posture and speechify to their constituency to the effect that they were willing to pull some nuclear option, assured mutual destruction, to protect them from this toxic bill.15 If only it weren’t for those spineless Democratic Senators, the Dems in the house could have blown us all up to prove they were capable of doing something!

Two more things real quick before this post begins to resemble a piece of legislation.

First, what we were saying about incompetence in the administration, coupled with our feelings about Musk and his general intelligence, should give everyone some hope that they will be incapable of fully forming a fascist state. There have already been a number of missteps and miscalculations in this regime’s push for absolute power that lend credence to this assessment. Trump’s recent knee capping by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was an instructive example of Trump’s weakness on diplomatic relations (as if we needed more evidence of that), and his unwillingness to really prosecute some of the more onerous threats he’s been making about annexation. All we have to do is look at a transcript of any of his interviews to know that he’s not playing with a full deck, and that the average packet of ketchup has more brains. In fact, we can’t locate one evil genius among the coterie of condiments he’s polluted his cabinet with. Clearly this isn’t Camelot or the third Reich, and we should all be heartened by that fact. That is not to say that there aren’t evil impulses, and that we won’t feel some of that going forward, but we find it doubtful that the vibe they are so desperately trying to mainstream will persevere.

Secondly, we think that with each manifestation of the fascist impulse there is a larger more constructive counter impulse towards justice. This we think is evident in the Tesla Resist movement, the dogged efforts of a myriad of nonprofit organizations who are litigating on behalf of the American people, and the proliferation of information and community that seems to be budding across the internet and public media sphere. People are calling these frauds out on their bullshit. People are ready to throw down. And not for some cold calculus of personal gain, but because they sincerely believe in the American experiment, as fucked up and grotesque as it can be sometimes, we still love it. We don’t want to just watch it get vacuumed up by this vulgar bunch of ketamine junkies and blowhards.

So yeah, it’s not all doom and gloom for now.

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So far, over the last decade, nothing about presidential election rhetoric has much changed. We are still told ad nauseum, by both parties, that this election will be the most important election in the history of civilization. Our very existence as a species hangs in the balance, dangling like a chad of yore, over the fiery furnace of oblivion; of chaos; of fascism; of communism; of mandated sexual reassignment surgery and forced child birth combined!!!! Times are dire, the situation at hand is so critically important that both of our political parties are going to spend more money than ever before to ensure that either, our hearts are filled with hate, or our pants are filled with shit. Make no mistake about it, fear is the message. There are no more party platforms; no more shining cities on the hill, no more chickens in every pot, no more thousand points of light, and certainly no more hope. We’ve watched this distressing and depressing trend in negativity unfold throughout our lifetime until our very existence as citizens, as Americans, as voters, has become defined by the lesser of two evils.

We basically only have two relevant political parties in this country, we’re sure you’ve heard of them. They control the political discourse, they set the stage for the titanic battles we quadrennially fight for the soul and continued existence of this country. The intensity of these struggles, if they were actually fought by these political contenders, wouldn’t amount to more than a geriatric slap fight, but given the hype and political posturing are always billed as existential affairs. The theatre is the important part, a spectacle of potential violence and destruction gives credence to our vote, it makes it appear to matter. Personally, we’re not so sure. And given the history of turn out in American elections, we can only surmise that there is either an egregious lack of civics education in this country, or a lack of confidence in the process. Probably a bit of both. And who can blame us for not caring? Has anyone that we’ve ever been excited about in the political arena ever achieved any success other than as a spoiler? How many times can we watch the party establishment squash a popular contender for someone they view to have more ‘electability’, which we gather is code for ‘acceptable to our donors’. Money seems to always be the salient point. That’s what pays for the set pieces, that’s what greases the palms and puts on the show. When was the last time you checked the box on your tax return to give the presidential election campaign fund three dollars? How about never. When there are billionaires out there flinging tens and hundreds of millions of dollars at politicians and political action funds like so much pocket change it's hard not to feel incredulous. If only all of America donated those three dollars, then maybe we could bring some impartiality back into electoral politics. Give us a fucking break. We weren’t born yesterday. And besides, we know that most of you need those three bucks to offset the price of eggs.

So let’s talk about eggs. To educated voters like ourselves it may seem patently insane to select a presidential candidate merely for their perceived hand in the elevated price of a commodity like eggs. To begin with, it may seem unreasonable to blame them, or conversely, to believe their opponents promises of immediate relief from something that appears to be purely economic and environmental. Are their hands on the levers of power in such a way that allows them to cure chickens of avian flu, or reanimate culled flocks and revive their egg laying capacity? If we were electing a sorcerer then maybe these would be qualifications we seriously considered. And maybe a great many of us Americans were hoping that our candidate had magical powers; that they could conjure a manufacturing industry out of thin air, make 12 million people disappear, snap their fingers and bring about world peace, turn ones and zeros into gold, solve the national debt, bring housing prices down, and cast a spell over the populace to bring back the American dream. And maybe this was why the ‘incumbent’ thought that they were winning; no one could be that stupid. They just couldn’t believe that an ex-reality tv star, real estate mogul, and compulsive liar possessed the right concoction of flare, falsehoods, and fantasmagoria to fool enough voters into drinking his snake oil!

The losing party is still incredulous. They are ferociously denouncing the ascendant Troll and his party of Goons for their failed promise to deliver the American people from these high egg prices! Imagine that. While the American institution falls into ruin, broken by the white nihilism of anarcho-capitalists and so-called libertarians, the minority party is engaged in a fruitless chicken or egg argument. Instead of taking responsibility for their own shit heeled approach to governance, to their blatant disregard for their constituency’s concerns and demands, they are still looking outward, looking to blame us. They think that we are the one’s responsible for this attack on our “democracy”. If only we would have listened to the adults, to those neo-liberal scumbags running the show, sucking the tit of Wall Street and corporate America as lustily as their opponents, then maybe we could have had the privilege of slurping down another four years of their bullshit. Not only were we supposed to cheer on the status quo, but a genocide to boot. How could we possibly stay home on election day when our (unelected) candidate, the stand-in for the party’s previous political cadaver, was scolding us daily about our bigotry and sexism, was telling us to ignore the very egg prices they now claim to be their undoing while simultaneously extoling the historic rise of the stock market? How could we ignore the sage advice of the very villains of the early 2000’s as they were trotted out to denounce the MAGA movement in some sort of surreal October surprise? Were we supposed to be relieved or horrified when Darth Vader’s mask was ripped off to reveal that Dick Chaney was in fact our father?!

With a party platform of Unity and “shut up you’re dumb” how could they lose?

Well, they did lose. And now we are paying the price for their incompetence and cowardice. Maybe next time, try confronting your opponents instead of imitating them. If there is a next time. We’ll see. The narrative was clearly ‘the end of democracy’ as we know it, and yet the peaceful transition of power was honored and lauded. Was it all theatrics then, or are they really terrified of what this megalomaniac might do to them if they actually kick.

Easter is coming, and while we fully expect the libs’ protest to this building autocratic regime to be more whining about the price of eggs, we hope for some real self-reflection, a come to Jesus moment, if you will. What will that mean exactly? We’re not sure. But what it can’t continue to be is a crass regurgitation of previous policy, it can’t continue to be a simple act of political calculus. The party may not be capable of resurrection or reform, they maybe too deeply intertwined with a system that can only guarantee ecological destruction, exclusionary policy, and zero-sum struggles with rising geopolitical powers. In short, we can’t expect them to be our saviors. And maybe they were right to blame us, not for refusing to bend to their will, but listening to them in the first place. Allowing them to divide us, by race, by sex, by ideology, religion, and nationality. Now that some of the silent parts are being said out loud, we ought to all realize that the narratives were all self-serving, that the subtext had nothing to do with discrete differences, and that the real goals were greed and power.

And how’s that for the lesser of two evils.

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Unfortunately for us, this case can only be made negatively, by which we mean, our maturity can only be measured by how far we’ve sunk into the very morass of American identity we’d sought to avoid. Like we’ve said before, we are one of you, we are American, and while this experiment is principally a project of excoriation, it is also one of self-abuse. Nation of Todd was an attempt to gain some distance from its progenitor, to remake the idea of a self and a nation in a way that coincided with the idiosyncratic, the peculiar way in which an individual experienced the world. Which all sounds pretty idealistic to us now that we have a mortgage, a car payment, and a 401(k). It’s been years since we’ve petitioned the United Nations for recognition as a harassed nation state, or sent the IRS a manifesto proclaiming their unsolicited shakedown letters as terrorist threats against our national sovereignty. You see, back then, we had nothing. Our nation was pure, and whole, and self-righteous. We would have been happy to warm our hands at the fire as America burned. Not like we harbored any post-apocalyptic fantasies of domination or retribution; we were just tired (and frankly are still tired) of being conflated with the petty and cruel impulses of our American government. Why do they do the things they do? And what good does it do us? Well, we may have some answers to those questions now that we’re older and wiser. Regrettably, we are no longer in a position to deny our complicity, or our benefit from some of the abhorrent details of this system’s inner workings. We may not be the sausage makers, per se, and may not agree with their processes, but we’re far too invested to deny that we’re the sausage.

So, with that, we welcome you to, The Sausage Party.

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We promise we’re not going to call it that.