Entering the Dark Forest

Doom and Gloom Coming for US

Normally, I try to steer clear of any reference to partisan politics in this blog, but the recent US election is pretty worrying. Indeed, my present mental state is such that this may wander a bit.

We’ve just elected a pathological narcissist would-be autocrat as President, again, along with the rogues gallery of racists, theocrats, ideologues, and grifters that he brings with him. This went badly the last time, and while nothing is certain, the indications strongly point to it being much worse this time around.

As I revise this text over and over again, there is an incoming stream of horrifying news of proposed cabinet members for this Evil League of Evil that is forming as the next US administration.

I’m not a political pundit, and I don’t want to become one. You can find a lot of theories about what went wrong (possibly, they are all correct — an impossibly divided electorate that can’t reach a consensus), as well as terrifying predictions of what’s about to go wrong. I’m sure you can find other, better, more serious sources than this. I’ll leave that up to you.

The first Trump administration was chaotic, distracting, cruel, and ultimately disastrous with the mishandling of the CoViD Pandemic. Immigrant and refugee families and children were permanently traumatized. International alliances were destabilized. Climate mitigation and preparation was canceled or indefinitely postponed.

And then of course, there was the attempted self-coup, which capped off months of attacking our electoral system.

The next four years are likely to bring more challenges — and thus more opportunities to be spun into chaos by hateful, selfish, incompetent, and short-sighted leadership. It remains unclear what exactly will happen in any detail. Perhaps the most depressing aspect will be watching “my” country betray values, citizens, residents, and allies. The myth of equality before the law has been shattered — very clearly, some people are allowed to be above the law.

Managing anxiety will be a really major part of my next four years, I can tell already.

Speaking of nature… no matter how hard the next administration insists climate change is a “hoax”, it is not. It is coming for us all. And with a denialist administration in the USA, not much will be done to mitigate it or prepare for its consequences.

The most direct impact on our lives, however, will probably be economic: felt at the grocery store, and certainly also when buying any imported products, such as computers and electronics. So that’s going to be a pretty big burden.

So, my poor (probably ADHD) brain is going to be in danger of doing cartwheels through the trees for the next four years, like a squirrel on speed. This is something I’m going to have to manage.

Throw Me Some Hope

There are, I am told, a lot of ways that this can still be fought. There are organizations and government agencies with sufficient independence to resist. And the structure of the USA, with 50 member states and a federal government, provides a lot of complexity to get in the way of a fascist takeover. We can put some sand in their gears.

But for the most part, that fight isn’t going to be mine, though I’ll likely pitch some in to private organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union. But we don’t have a lot of money to contribute, either.

I am, however, keenly aware of the enormous privilege I have experienced as a citizen of a powerful and stable and mostly liberal democratic nation for most of my life. Most of humanity has experienced and is still experiencing rule by authoritarian governments as bad or worse than what I’m fearing as a worst case (which is probably the yellow on this chart). Including international contacts whom I respect. Clearly they do find ways to manage, and so must I, if it comes to that.

Maybe our number is just up, and we’ll be falling under the same sort of regime here. I’ve never been one to believe “it can’t happen here”. But it is disappointing.

However, it’s also important to remember that, as fragile as democracy might be, autocracy is extremely brittle. Every liberal democracy in existence was built on the ruins of a prior failed autocracy. So it definitely is possible to come back. It’s just really painful, and people die in the process. There are a lot of people opposed to Trump’s ambitions, and many of them are well organized.

I also take some comfort in the fact that, as bad as his intentions are, Trump is not a very competent dictator. Most dictators get into trouble after they surround themselves with yes-men to soothe their ego, then start believing their own hype, resulting in some fatal error that makes their regime fall to pieces. With Trump, at least, he is already weakened by narcissistic injury and dementia, already surrounding himself with yes-men and cheerleaders, and his “platform” such as it is, is pretty much composed entirely of fatal mistakes. So the collapse may be sooner rather than later — maybe soon enough to keep him from obliterating the administrative state and leaving the country too vulnerable. “Yay for accelerationism!”, I guess?

So, while I expect chaos to reign for the next two to four years, I still think there’s a reasonable hope that we’ll have real elections in 2026 and 2028 in which we might hope to rectify our mistakes. And even if that is interrupted, there will be other opportunities beyond that.

When I hear Democrats proclaim that “This is not the end”, I am uncomfortably reminded of Guinan’s words to Picard in this moment from  “Star Trek: The Next Generation” – “The Best of Both Worlds, Pt. 1”, as they brace themselves for what looks like a hopeless battle with the Borg.

What Can We Do About It?

The first thing I have to acknowledge is that there isn’t a lot we can do. Not for the nation or the world. We’ve lost the main lever we had for that with the election. So, this is mostly going to be about protecting ourselves and our friends from the fallout: damage control.

The way I see it, the direction all this pushes me towards is increasing our self-sufficiency and reducing our dependency on government and corporate platforms which range from unresponsive to actively hostile towards our needs. We need to get control of our technology infrastructure at an even lower, more fundamental level than we have been doing.

And then we need to start building community with others. I tried to do that around the Lunatics Project years ago, but that has essentially dissipated since then. Now it’s really just me. I’m going to have to start over again, with only a few shreds of what I had to start with.

Basic Preparations

First of all, we need to be able to rely on our own equipment, in case public systems fail. If we have an electrical outage during bad weather (again), then we may need to run a generator to power heating or cooling. We need a vehicle for commuting to work, obviously, but also to escape to a safer location if something really bad happens. And when we had a wildfire on our land, a major reason was tall grass, because the mower wasn’t working. So we have to keep that in working order.

In tension with this, is the need to keep some cash on hand. Cashflow problems have plagued us for a long time, but we’re going to have to be more cautious, if a crisis is likely. Or if prices on key supplies might suddenly spike.

The one thing that really does not make sense: hoarding toilet paper. I don’t know why people keep doing that.

I’m also going to have to finish the renovations on our home. A working, comfortable bathroom is a big plus for managing your anxiety as well as your day, and there are other irritating problems that need fixing, such as bad light wiring. I need to get through this to create a more stable and calming environment for our family. That’s also a lot of work.

Possibly I will need to make a regular routine of meditating, or something along those lines. Obsessively stimming with solitaire games on the computer is probably not the healthy option.

Speaking of health… the outlook on that front is also poor with the new administration. Not only are we not going to get any kind of meaningful reform, they may destroy what little we have. And then there’s the anti-intellectual, anti-vaxxer, anti-public-health agenda. And of course, the war on women’s reproductive rights.

Projects: Lunatics, Film Freedom, Commissions, and/or Contracts

This is the Lunatics Production Log, so I should address some of the more “professional” aspects. I’m already facing the changeover with Patreon and have accepted that Dec 31, 2024 needs to be a hard deadline for releasing “Lunatics!” episode one, “No Children in Space”, in whatever state I can get it to. That makes that an immediate priority, even if world events and personal disruptions make that harder to concentrate on.

The truth is that I’ve been slowing down on the work on “Lunatics!” and there’s no clear reason for it, except that I seemed to be weighed down by everything else that’s happening. This year has been marred by several major maintenance emergencies, taking up weeks of my time and all the stress that accompanies that, including three car breakdowns, two collisions, and of course, the failed emergency generator and mower which required carburetor rebuilds and fuel system cleanup, to say nothing of a major (and still on-going) remodeling project.

But I digress.

Money and/or job-security is likely to become a problem. We are currently dependent entirely on Rosalyn’s teaching job at a college in Texas, where she teaches A&P and Biology. With Christian Nationalists and Anti-Vaxxers calling the shots, it’s very possible that such subjects become politicized. And public education funding is threatened. Right now, that’s focused on K-12. But community college might be put on the chopping block, as this progresses. In a broad sense, authoritarians don’t like citizens to be educated, as that can lead to them questioning authority.

So maybe it’s time to hedge our bet with some other income.

I probably need to open up commissions or take commercial contract work. I’m going to have to look into what I can package to offer for that. I’ve often considered whether I might do animated title design or possibly master DVDs with DVDStyler. I’ve done a few in the past for side projects, and I could probably do yours, for a reasonable price!

Platform Independence

When you put your own content on a corporate platform, whether free or paid, you are putting a great deal of trust in that corporation — giving them a great deal of power over you. They can shut you down, track you, and push you right out of business anytime they choose. And yet, they also encircle you and trap you on their platforms, making it very hard to move away.

In more subtle ways, selective “algorithms” are corrupted to serve interests that are not yours or your audience. Usually these have been business interests, but they have become increasingly political in recent years.

This is not new, and that’s why I’ve already spent years trying to disentangle myself from corporate platforms. In fact, struggled to avoid getting on them in the first place, but I got careless, and now I am hugely dependent on Gmail and have accounts on YouTube, Facebook, and other usual suspects.

However, an authoritarian regime coming into power — one with particular designs on harming segments of our society — raises new fears of control and censorship targeted to track and oppress any of their targets. What was once inconvenient may well turn deadly for some of our fellow citizens: minorities ethnic, racial, or gender-based; anyone made vulnerable by missing or “improper” paperwork; anyone they decide they don’t like or wish to scapegoat. The platforms’ power can be corrupted to this purpose, and no matter what they might say about being trustworthy to resist such activity, history says otherwise.

It’s time to get off these platforms.

For about a year now, I’ve been stalled by minor technical issues and “cold feet” in the process of migrating from a cloud-based platform to a dedicated server. What this situation is telling me is that I need this thing up and running, and soon.

Of course, this is just a first step. We also need to disentangle ourselves from deeper levels of control. For example, even if you eliminate dependency on a corporate publishing platform, there are still other layers, such as fundraising, sales, and the payment platforms that underlie them.

Also, part of the reason we have become reliant on centralized corporate platforms is because there are advantages to centralization, which need to be addressed in some other way, if we are to give up on the centralized platforms.

Embracing the Fediverse

An important tool for that is the concept of “Federation” — where a large, diverse collection of smaller platforms can act similarly to a single large platform. Think of replacing a ship with a large collection of rafts, roped together. The ship was more efficient, so long as everything was going well — but, the ship can sink, and when it does, it goes down all at once.

The rafts, on the other hand, are annoyingly inefficient. It’s a bumpy ride, traveling from one side of the flotilla to the other, if you have to do that. But they also are far more fault-tolerant. If one raft is compromised — sinks or gets taken over by a nut who wants to ram icebergs, then you can cut the ropes and the rest will be okay.

We  have something similar to that in the digital world, with the “Fediverse” — a collection of software and software instances that, collectively, provide services similar to the big social media and publishing platforms, while maintaining a greater independence, avoiding single chokepoints (and thus avoiding censorship), and generally being more robust. Like the flotilla of rafts, they still suffer from being a little more complicated and less convenient. There is sometimes drama between individual instance owners. But this is a small price to pay for independence, in my opinion.

So, I’m embracing Fediverse platforms extensively.

The Virtual Studio (& Community)

As always, I’m relying on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) for everything. And I am also installing local platforms for publishing and collaboration — that’s the “Virtual Studio” that I’ve been planning since about 2019.

A major step forward came when I found out about YunoHost, which greatly lowered my technical barriers. Since 2023, I’ve had a YunoHost-based prototype of the Virtual Studio up, though not open for business. This is currently based on a virtual private server (VPS) running on a “cloud” node provided by Digital Ocean

Aside from the platform-dependency argument, the cloud-based solution is a poor fit that ends up with prohibitively poor performance.

For the same cost, I can greatly increase performance by moving to a co-located server, which has been my plan for over a year, but I kept running into minor technical issues and got cold feet about it.

In the end, my trepidation over the political situation comes down to a kick in the pants to get moving on this migration. I need to be much more flexible, and this is the way to get there.

There are details yet to work out, still, but here are some guidelines I plan to follow:

• Self-Host as much as I can, so I am the one who controls the platform.
• Fediverse/ActivityPub ALL THE THINGS!
• Distribute material over multiple sites, so as to avoid single points of failure.
• Use multiple payment/commerce systems, in case one of them becomes frozen or compromised.

Not much about the plan has changed from last year’s November 2023 Summary, which included a diagram of the proposed layout:

And I have decided that I will not just build this for our own internal use, but also make it available through some commercial, yet-to-be-defined plan. Hosting a small service sounds like a lot of work, but it does sound like an honest living, so I’m going to try it. This seems like the most basic way for me to “embrace community”.

Conclusions

So, these are my action items. I’ll be reporting more about all of these, especially for technical details:

• Solve maintenance and other household issues to be ready for chaos in 2025.
• Finish “Lunatics!” / “No Children in Space” by hook or by crook before 2024-12-31.
• Finish migrating to a colo server for the Virtual Studio
• Open up for commercial commissions and contracts.
• Open the virtual studio up as a hosting platform (2025 Q1, probably).

The cats, at least, seem completely unworried by these events. I will do my best to emulate their calm, but no promises!