Against Entropy
What I want is a transparent model of the kinds of harms that are likely to fall onto which brains and bodies when someone swings a wrecking ball through the governmental institutions that do work that is tragically flawed but nevertheless necessary to the sustenance of our collective life.
What I mostly have is a surfeit of takes, including some very good specialist analysis and a whole lot of overconfident storytelling, and the anodyne and decontextualized output of major news orgs, and some lists and spreadsheets, which are all fine.
I want something that works differently, though. I want something more like the kind of dashboard Chrisjen Avasarala might summon in The Expanse to understand the ongoing collapse of a system of governance within her remit: High-level information, showing the whole of the board. Expert briefings, sure, and links to deeper analysis, but above all, a structure that conveys not the spectacle, but the potential damage and the inflection points:
- Without recourse to cynicism, mindreading, or conspiracy, which supposedly outstanding decisions are already known—or nearly known—in advance?
- If Thing X happens, what is the range of likely results?
- Mostly importantly, what can I do?
I would like such a system to model for two kinds of action:
- meaningful obstruction by the people who can catch the hammer-blows before they land, delay them long enough for more people to strongs up and/or duck (flatten the curve but it’s the arc of a blunt instrument), and maybe deflect them entirely, and
- meaningful protection by the people who can save the data, tell the truth about the contours of reality, feed the babies, care for the sick and disabled, run the schools, and demonstrate all the other pragmatics of love.
Obstruction vs. protection
Right now, meaningful obstruction is largely available to members of the legislature and the justice system who can try to stop things that are illegal, unconstitutional, and/or wrong and federal workers who can maybe throw sand in some gears. Those people already know what is happening. The thing I want is not for them, but for those of us who can call phones and visit offices and send money to legal efforts. There may also come a point when the level of emergency becomes so intense and so clear that a critical mass of outraged civilians can assemble and wield broader power to stop the destruction of necessary public goods. We will need sensemaking for that, too.
Meaningful protection, though—that’s never enough when you’re a citizen working against the power of your own government, but it’s accessible to everyone. I am going to make my phone calls and thank my representatives from trying to get in between the damage and its targets, and ask them to keep trying, but protection is my beat. And sensemaking is necessary here, too, to a point.
Uncertainty is a creeping void
It’s very hard to think or act when you can’t tell if you’re about to lose your job, have your research killed off, have your healthcare terminated, witness unstoppable crimes, or just experience extended and apparently unescapable moral injury.
The uncertainty of this moment—this intentional multi-system chaos filtered through some combinaton of opaque algorithms, overwheming feeds, news orgs with a very high normalcy bias, and professional terrifiers—is going to try to degrade and dissolve us because chaos is highly transmissible across interconnected systems. The thumb-headed global-economy-shorting accelerationist-ass scammers looting our institutions are on the side of entropy. I’m against it!
I am on the side of building conditions for life.
I know that doing the work necessary for sensemaking during that first year of covid helped, because people told us, a lot. I don’t know if it’s possible to make even a clear specification for the kind of system I want, or if that’s really the thing we’re going to need a few weeks or months into the future. In the meantime, I’m continuing to work toward livable networks where we can find and protect and care for each other, because I think that’s necessary. I’m connecting locally.
If the uncertainty is getting to you, I have the plainest and most time-tested advice which is: Unless or until clarity about the most crucial levers becomes available, do what you can reach. Make the calls. Care for the people you can find. Hold on by hanging onto each other.
Wayfinding for tired people
I’ve found all of these useful at various points in the past couple of weeks:
- Making Sense of It All from Liz Neeley at Liminal and her crew are doing model sensemaking work for a well-defined community focused on science and higher ed.
- Protect Democracy’s How You Can Protect Democracy (and Authoritarian Playbook)
- 5 Calls, for calling your representatives and asking them to represent you
- Just Security’s Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions and Lawfare’s Legal Challenges Tracker
- 47 Watch’s executive documents tracker, collecting executive orders, press releases, proclamations, and more