(Roughly) Daily

Adam Mastroianni (and here) with a diagnosis of the malaise (“Borg vibes,” as he calls them) that so many of us feel– and a remedy (or, at least, a constructive response)…

Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.

We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.

On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.

On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.

Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly…normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?

Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it…

Eminently worth the read: “Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot,” from @mastroianni.bsky.social‬.

Pair with: “Apocalypse 24/7” (an excerpt from Roy Scranton‘s Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress)… a deeper, darker– but sadly, all-too-credible– dive into the context that Mastrioanni sketches… while (as your correspondent reads it, anyway) it doesn’t contradict Mastroianni’s prescription (“pick up a sponge and start washing”), it reminds us just how much grime there is to get through… all the more reason to get started…

* Robert Frost

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As we grapple, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” was released. Dropping between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, as the follow-up to Dylan’s hit single “Like a Rolling Stone“, it was not included on either album. But it reached No. 1 on Canada’s RPM chart, No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart, and has been ranked by Rolling Stone No. 203 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.

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