Another Lost Generation

I wake up and cause a climate catastrophe. I do it again while taking a shower, at the same time I’m dumping chemicals into our water system. The clothes I’m putting on were likely made in a sweatshop, or were otherwise produced by someone underpaid and overworked. The milk in my cereal was made by a cow who has been forcibly impregnated (raped) continuously over several years. Even though I don’t eat meat, that cow will be ground up into a paste as soon as she can no longer produce milk. As I check my email and scan my news feed, I’m using a device made of strip-mined toxic materials and of components manufactured by a corporation that installed nets around its factories to discourage workers from jumping.

I am complicit in environmental devastation that will cause millions to starve and in the poisoning of a dwindling water supply. I personally reap the benefits of slave labor, animal abuse, human exploitation, and torture.

It’s only 9 in the morning.

As I ride the bus to campus I see an entire family begging for change in front of a supermarket overflowing with food, but there’s too much on my mind already. My tuition is filling the pockets of administrators who are slashing salaries of overworked professors and my textbooks perpetuate a racket which exploits the hopes and dreams of my peers. I’m surrounded by nervous and naive teenagers who are already thousands of dollars in debt and who probably have no idea that payments on that debt can be pulled directly from their bank accounts with no warning at all. Some of my required classes explain to me how capitalism is making my life better, while others narrate the tragic disappearance of the American Indians without using the word genocide.

There are people across the world who feed their whole family for less than a dollar a day, I’m living in a world where a dollar is little more than a mouthful. If I took the time to grow my own food then I’d have no time for class, but it’s not as if I have access to enough land for that anyway. So I’m stuck buying plastic wrapped organic produce, which was grown naturally on a corporate farm by illegal immigrants who work 70 hours a week just so they don’t get sent back to a country being eaten alive by drug cartels armed with assault rifles generously donated by the ATF. It’s impossible to escape the exploitation, cruelty, and violence that underlies every facet of American society.

It’s noon, lunch time, that means more money for Monsanto and more animals screaming in their cages. Usually I pack a lunch so I don’t have to buy as much food loaded with high fructose corn syrup or coated in pesticides. Still, the crunch of organic carrots doesn’t quite drown my thoughts about the students and felons being paid barely above minimum wage to run the dining facilities, many of which have been contracted out to multinational corporations in light of dwindling funding for higher education. The student workers are trying desperately to keep up with the 10% tuition hike every year while the felons are trapped working for the same government which stole their future over a trumped up drug charge. Did I mention that my school is legally required to buy all of its furniture from Colorado Correctional Industries? The amendment that made slavery illegal has a glaring exception for those convicted of a crime.

Maybe I’m too cynical, I think I’m just seeing through to the truth of things. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the history we ignore and I’ve learned many of the disturbing stories behind the polished products which fill our lives. A friend of mine wrote his thesis on labor history in Colorado, at one point he asked his professor why everything they were learning was so depressing. “If you want something uplifting then go study theology, this is history.”

I slink off to the edge of campus for a cigarette. Smoking outside recently became illegal on campus and, even though I’m white, I don’t want to run into any of those peace officers who have a nasty habit of getting away with beating innocent people. I know smoking is bad for me, but I’m already inhaling the fossil fuel fumes that fill the air and at least the smoke from my hand rolled cigarette is carbon neutral.

As the day goes on I’m churned through an educational assembly line, walking beneath inspirational quotes about the “timeless human spirit” which have been carved in stone just above a glass ceiling. I have to be here; even though it’s a corrupt and exploitative institution, college is my best chance of keeping factory work in my past where it belongs. So I fill my blood with caffeine, nicotine, and amphetamines as I get back to work.

I stop at the supermarket on my way home, thankfully there’s no one panhandling this time. I’m not here for much; a block of cheese, a couple bell peppers, and a bottle of ibuprofen. Looking in my basket I can see cows being stuffed with GMO corn and cocktails of antibiotics as machines literally suck life out of them. I see the inspector who was bribed into granting organic certification, but she’s not getting paid much either and has a family to feed. The plastic packaging will probably end up in the ocean somewhere. Then there’s the pharmaceutical industry, I don’t want to even start on that one.

At every step along the way, at every moment in my day, I am complicit in or benefiting from some horrible crime or injustice. But what choice do I have? I have to survive, there are certain items I need to keep going and my budget places very real limits on what I can buy. So I’m trapped supporting a system which perpetuates human exploitation on an unimaginable scale.

My last stop on the way home is the liquor store. I head to the back and snag a local brew from an employee owned company which uses 100% recyclable materials. Beer is one of very few products that I can buy guilt free, which should tell you a lot about my drinking habits. Soma has never tasted so good.

I know it seems like I’m overly pessimistic, seeing what’s wrong with everything around me, but this isn’t a piece about what’s good in the world. There are plenty of people who write and sing about the beauty and wonder of life, I’m not blind to that either. I’ve loved and danced, laughed and played, climbed mountains and swam in the oceans, and it was all wonderful. All things considered I have a great life, but most of that was pure luck. I am a straight white cisgender male, who is also tall, conventionally attractive, and was born into an upper middle class family with intelligent and well educated parents. The world was handed to me on a silver platter, but this isn’t about me. The coziness of my own little corner of the world does not mean that things are ok. This global perspective is characteristic of my generation, the information age has given us a window to the wider world and what we see could mildly be called depressing as fuck.

We know our oceans are being poisoned and global temperatures are rising, we know our government is owned by the rich and fucks the rest of us on a daily basis, we know de facto slave labor produces most what we buy, we know that the few good jobs left are paying less and less, and we know that neither our social nor political institutions provide any avenues for affecting real change. Hell, many of us cast our first votes for hope and change six years ago and we’re seeing all too clearly how well that’s turned out.

So some of us tune out, reveling in petty distractions or drowning this knowledge with some obsession or addiction because the thought of it all is unbearable. Others collapse into despair or develop some debilitating mental illness because we cannot bring ourselves to look away. Either way, we’re working so goddamn hard nowadays (or not working at all no matter how hard we try) that all thoughts of making the world a better place fade in the face of making it through one more week.

We are a lost generation. Raised on fading hopes and broken dreams, we came of age and naively stepped forward to claim the promised rewards of our struggles, only to find them snatched away every time we try to take hold. Stumbling forward we look around asking ourselves “What the fuck is going on here?” failing to find any satisfying answers. Scarcity in an age of abundance, plutocracy in the paragon of democracy, slavery in the land of the free; contradictions, myths, and lies everywhere we turn. We’re lost because the world doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

I find myself writing this instead of rolling my boulder of homework a little higher up the hill. A small but growing stack of bowls and plates sits on my desk in front of a hookah held together with duct tape. Although I’ve ensured that it’ll be another late night, the cynical satisfaction I’ve found in composing my thoughts will probably preserve my sanity for at least one more day.

After reaching the point of exhaustion I scan my news feed one more time. A sardonic smile crosses my face as I find another video of police beating people at a protest against police brutality. I probably shouldn’t have watched it, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before and I attend those kinds of protests too so it’s only a matter of time till my face is smashed into the pavement.

This can’t go on and we all know it. Even if we weren’t losing our hopes and losing our minds, no society built around the use of a finite resource can survive for long. Ideally a revolution occurs before it is the only option, needless suffering can be avoided and the absence of desperation allows for clearer heads to prevail. Yet at the same time as more and more of us are realizing how little we have left to lose, defenders of the status quo are resorting to more and more desperate measures. I guess they’re just in denial, but they’ll learn the hard way that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

The largest class war between the haves and the have nots will be fought in our lifetime and we will be on the front lines. Previous generations failed to wrest power out of the hands of the psychopaths who run our government and the corporations which own it, so now it’s our turn to try. It’s our turn to fight for a better world but now the stakes have changed. Global climate change and resource depletion threaten our entire species, if we fail then the next generations may not have enough clean air to breathe. The water is rising, we fight or we die.

Right now though, I’m exhausted. A long and grueling day of attentive listening and hunched scribbling has left me drained in both body and mind. The most I can muster is to share a few links on facebook expounding and detailing various specifics of our increasingly desperate situation. I woke up ready to start fucking shit up but I looked around me and saw that there aren’t enough of us ready yet. Many still have hope that things will work out, that life will make an exception for them and they’ll have their little fairy tale. Someday that illusion will break and that naive denial will fail in the face of cold hard reality. We’ll stop lying down and start looking up, start fighting to make the world a better place. A mass of angry young people who feel they have nothing left to lose can turn the whole world upside down. Once we realize how powerful we are there will be no stopping us. It could happen any day and at any time, there’s no way to know what will trigger this pent up desperation and rage. I don’t know when it will happen, but I do know that the longer we sleep the worse the nightmare will become.

Today wasn’t a good day. Sometimes I can forget what’s going on around me and find a little peace of mind in the daily grind, but not today. Instead today was just another straw on the camel’s back. There’s only so much more I can take before I snap, but I know that when I snap I won’t snap alone.

A brief analysis of Occupy Wall St

The Occupy Wall St movement is almost universally misunderstood, even amongst those who would consider themselves occupiers. I cannot truthfully say that I know 'the truth' about the movement though I consistently see the same misunderstandings. Occupy Wall St was an expression of popular anger at the gross injustices of our social, political, and economic systems. There were no official goals, no explicit demands, and no consensus on which specific issues should be the focus. However, if a single message can be gleaned from the entire movement it is this: there is a class war going on and we are losing.

This class war is being waged on a variety of fronts, many of which initially appear completely unrelated. The wars on drugs, terror, and crime share a common enemy: the poor and disenfranchised of the world. Corporate personhood, corruption in government, and the two party system are only some of the ways that democracy is quashed. The consolidation of media outlets, propaganda relabelled as public relations, and internet censorship schemes all seek to throttle the development and exchange of ideas. Concentration of wealth, a currency controlled by a self interested elite, and a predatory economy all prevent people from having the time or resources to effectively enforce their basic human rights. It all comes down to control, control of the masses to solidify the power of a neo-aristocratic class.

The ultra-wealthy elites looked at Occupy Wall St and saw a true threat to their power. People across the country, indeed across the world, coming together to show just how mad they are. We were talking, sharing our struggles, realizing that our personal and financial problems are shared by millions. To borrow from the feminist movement, we began to realize that the personal is truly political. Yet this in itself is not threatening, instead it was our show of strength. We saw how many of us there are, how many of us are mad as hell and don't want to take it anymore, and we started to realize that we are strong. The proletariat were starting to see their true power and the ruling class was terrified.

In response, there was a massive, coordinated campaign to silence and destroy the movement. Occupiers were mocked and vilified in the media, we were supposedly just angry kids who had no cohesive message and offered no solutions. These claims were false or patently absurd, you do not need a solution to identify a problem and the message was simple: there is a class war going on and we are losing. We were relentlessly hounded by police and federal agents, in Denver the peaceful encampment was stormed by pseudo-soldiers with tear gas and paintball guns full of pepper spray. In Boulder we were lucky, the police resorted to sleep deprivation via hourly visits and the city council issued edicts that would criminalize standing still in a public park at night. Yet elsewhere elderly women were being pepper sprayed and a veteran was almost killed by a tear gas canister to the head. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security worked in cooperation with major financial institutions to coordinate a Nationwide crackdown on Occupy communities everywhere. The full and terrifying power of the ruling elite was exposed; the greatest propaganda machine the world has ever known, a surveillance system that only the Stasi could envy, and a domestic police force systematically desensitized to brutalizing the same people it is supposed to protect. Driven home at the barrel of a gun, the message was clear: Do not challenge the status quo.

It would be a mistake to say that the system is broken, it is performing the function for which it was designed. The sad truth is that we cannot use the ballot box to resolve our social, political, economic, or environmental problems. The game is rigged, so the winning move is not to play.  I believe that we are speeding towards an abyss, a humanitarian catastrophe where billions will suffer and millions will die. Yet all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. I fear that we will only awake from this artificially induced dream when we are faced with a devastating social crisis. At this point it may be too late, the powers that be might capitalize on this to cement their control or we might enter a new dark age while simultaneously facing environmental catastrophes. No matter the outcome, the longer that we sleep the worse the nightmare will become.

Still, the greatest legacy of Occupy Wall St has yet to make itself known. We stirred the pot, scum may still float at the top but now we are more aware of them. Information has started to spread, ideas flow more vigorously than ever, and a new international network of activists has formed. We know that the system is failing, we know that it must fall, and we are awaiting the next opportunity to bring it down. Now with more experience, more allies, and greater resolve, whenever the next political movement appears, we will be ready.

Anarcho-transhumanism; my interpretation of what that means

It all comes down to liberty and what that means for humans living in this world. Before I became interested in anarchy, I was fascinated by the implications of the technological singularity. It directly implies that we humans can evolve to the point where the reality we experience would be radically different from the one we live in today. This can be relatively simple, such as enhanced senses (hearing, vision, etc.), or it could manifest as radically reimagining the conscious experience. (Enhanced memory, cognitive processes, etc.) If it is possible for us to experience existence in an unimaginable variety of ways, then how is that different from the possibility of living any of a huge variety of possible lifestyles?

I consider the human form limiting, a temporary stepping stone towards a much broader and vast state of being. Our persistent dependence on very specific physical conditions becomes in itself oppressive given that it is possible for us to be free of those limitations. Any limitation or arbitrary restriction of liberty is offensive to me, including things such as my need for a certain ambient temperatures or organic chemical energy. In this sense, anarchy takes precedence as capitalism and statism directly impact my ability to meet physical needs. My current dependence on certain means of satisfying those needs is restricting, and oppressive in the context that there are many ways of meeting those needs. Anarchists seek to end the oppression and restrictions imposed by our current social systems but, for me at least, that is a means to post-human existence.

I define liberty as the ability to act upon will. As an anarcho-transhumanist, I seek to maximize liberty for all. This directly aligns with most of the goals of anarchism and transcends them. If it is my will to shape the physical world into a certain form, any conditions which prevent the implementation of my will are restrictions which ought to be overcome. 3D printing is an excellent example, having a 3D printer which can create an unimaginable variety of objects increases my ability to shape the world as I desire. Therefore having greater access to 3D printers maximizes my liberty. Today, the greatest restrictions on my liberty come from capitalism and the modern state but, once those are overcome, the struggle to end restriction imposed by my physical form will take priority.

I cannot speak for other anarcho-transhumanists but, for me, anarchism is a means to the next step of human evolution. Anarchy is the necessary condition to transcendence; I want to transcend therefore I am an anarchist.