The Fumble
Attention Conservation Notice: This isn’t an attempt at a holistic explanation of the election so much as it is an attempt to store my current mental state for future reference, and as such, it may be even less coherent than normal. If you want to read an actually coherent holistic explanation from somebody who knows what they’re talking about, the best one I read was: The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost. Also, this is best read if you imagine me talking in a calm, normal, reasoned sort of voice for the first thousand or so words, and then every thousand after that getting increasingly agitated and loud with a sort of “I don’t care if they kick out out of the restaurant!” borderline hysteria by the end.
It’s been a month or so now since the election, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate the way I feel about how things went down, especially in the wake of a million “this confirms my priors” postmortems. I’m disappointed and irritated, to put it mildly, but it’s also a very specific disappointed and irritated that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then it hit me: I feel the exact same way about the Harris/Walz campaign as I do about the 1990 San Francisco 49ers.
For those of you that don’t have 30+ year old sports failures memorized, let me recap. As the 1990 season started, the 49ers had won two Superbowls back to back, Joe Montana was at his peak, Jerry Rice could catch anything, their win in the previous Superbowl still holds the record for “most points scored by a team” and “widest margin of victory.” They’re blatantly the best team in the league, and in contention for “best team of all time.” This is the team people mean when they talk about "The 49ers". People start murmuring about “A three-peat”; at the time, no team had ever won three Superbowls in a row, and the Niners looked like they were about to make it look easy.
This was the era where the NFC was totally dominant, so the other “best team in the league” were the New York Giants. As was becoming tradition at the time, the “real” superbowl was going to be the NFC championship game. Coming into that game, the Niners looked unstoppable, they’d already beat the Giants once that year, there was this mounting excitement that this really might happen. Lots of “you’re only saying it’s impossible because no one ever has” vibes.
Wikipedia has a surprisingly compelling summary of the game, but the short version is: game turned into a grueling defensive slugfest, with both teams staggering down the field and mostly kicking field goals. The Niners stayed ahead, but barely. Then, in the fourth quarter, Montana took a hit so hard not only was he out for the rest of the game, but he wouldn’t play again for almost two years. Steve Young did his best, but then with under three minutes to go, the normally infallible Roger Craig fumbled the ball, the Giants recovered, and at the last second kicked a field goal. Game was over, Giants won 15–13. And that was it. Giants went on to win the Superbowl. Whoops.
I’m not saying the Niners “deserved” to win, because that’s not how this works. I’m also not saying that the Giants only won because they got lucky with two unexpected disasters. What I am saying is that I watched that whole season, and I know the Niners could have won that game, but when it really mattered they couldn’t get it done. There is a very specific kind of irritation watching someone who should have been doing well enough that those disasters didn’t matter.
And that’s how I feel, a month out from Harris/Walz blowing the big game, is that bone-deep frustration that this was winnable.
A lot of that is fueled by finding out just exactly how close it was. It was a broad rinsing, but shallow; the last numbers I saw showed that something like 200,000 votes in the right three or four cities would have swung this the other way. Still a loss, but that’s not a mandate, or a landslide. There wasn’t One Cool Trick that would have done the job, but you get the sense that any number of combinations of Little Cool Tricks might have. Heck, this could have gone either way based on how nice the weather was in the midewest that Tuesday.
Like all Presidential elections, this was all vibes, and the vibes went bad. The winning vote was “bleah, who even cares anymore.” Because the specific big difference between this year and 2020 was the group that showed up to vote against Trump in 2020 didn’t show up this time.
I will say this though: I will go to my grave convinced that if they’d let Walz continue to call people weird and leaned even harder into “do you really want more of these assholes?” and “not going back” that Harris would have won. “Weird” was working. Not going back was working. Turn the Page was working.
Instead, I guess that was “too negative”, Walz vanished, and Harris started campaigning with the daughter of an infamous war criminal who came to national attention right when the voters you’re trying to court got old enough to be politically informed. To be clear, I don’t think Liz Cheney cost any votes, but she sure didn’t get us any. That was all wasted effort.
So now we’re in the middle of the Democrat’s most despicable tradition: the post-loss argument about which group to throw out of the boat. This year it’s the Transgender community, who have committed the terrible crime of “continuing to exist.”
Throwing the civil rights of our transgender sisters and brothers under the bus to try and pick up a few votes is, of course, a moral horror. “But!” I hear the worst people alive say, “it’s just a sound strategic move!” No! It’s a stupid strategic move! Because look—there’s already a whole-ass American Political Party whose core platform is “not everyone counts as real people.” The voters whose issue is “I only want people like me to be treated well” are already voting for the other guys! Why would you go see a cover band when the real band is playing next door? So you end up in Electoral Stupid Limbo, where you’re not bigoted enough to get the bigot vote, but have made it clear to a group of voters looking for a candidate that you won’t help them out if you win. So they stay home!
This is what is so enraging about abandoning “weird”, is that “weird” made it clear that this was the platform for everyone else. The Republicans have tied up the weirdo bigoted middle-aged white guy demographic, and I’m convinced a campaign centered on “screw those guys, we’re sick of them treating us like crap” would work, mostly because it was working.
I’m gonna come back to that in a second, but if you’ll indulge me, my entry for the department of “recent surprising events have confirmed my priors,” is that I remain convinced that there are, effectively, no such things as “undecided voters.” What you have is, both “teams” have a core group of voters that always show up, and then each team has another pool of people who will either vote for them or stay home, but won’t switch sides.
And yeah, there are definitely Trump-Biden-Trump voters, but if you dig in a little further they all seem to be voting for “not the chick,” rather than any kind of team preference. These guys aren’t “undecided”, they’re “sexist” and that’s a different problem.
This is one of the places where I think using the sports metaphor is really apt. Trying to “flip” voters is like trying to convince people to root for a different team. “Come on and root for the Cowboys just this once, the 49ers aren’t even going to make the playoffs!” Absolutely not, that’s deranged, I’m gonna root for whoever the Cowboys are playing. The people you want to get are the people who watched every 49er game until Steve Young retired. “Come on back! We’re good this year! Lemme tell you the good news about this neat kid we got to play QB!”
The big difference, I think, that this election really displayed is that the Reps have a larger group of core voters, but the Dems have a larger group of “maybes.” Higher floor vs higher ceiling.
There’s a fundamental tactical asymmetry here, in that the Red Team can focus on depressing Blue Team turnout and have that work, but the opposite doesn’t. After a decade-plus of playing the refs, the Red Team has gotten very, very good at this. The Blue Team has to actually get the “maybes” to turn out to win.
The problem is that the Dems keep trying to pick up the other team’s “maybes.” That’s the endless “pivot to the center” that never works. Why? Why spend all that time courting people that aren’t ever going to vote for you?
I think the “fourth why” really is how old most of the Dem leadership is. Most of the people running the show, either “on camera” or more importantly “behind the scenes” have been doing this since the 70s. A lot of great things game out of the 70s that I like a lot, like Star Wars, or The Sting! But things have changed since then.
One of the big things that changed is that the dems are now the “big tent” diverse party. They haven’t won the “white vote” since before Jimmy Carter. (I’m using “white” here as a shorthand for straight, cisgender people whose ancestors were from select areas of western europe and are probably Protestant, in the vague American way.)
I think the core problem, the “fifth why”, is that those 70s era leaders still think of “white, probably Protestant men” as the “real voters.” “If we can get them, we win!” Nope. Statistically, they vote Red team. Like it or not, and there’s a class of consultant who really do not, the Dems have been the “everyone but white guys” party for half a century.
And look, there is a way to maybe get that mass of vaguely racist, vaguely sexist white men to show up, and that was to run somebody that looks like Joe Biden But when you’re running a young-ish woman of color, there’s no getting that vote. They’re gonna find a whole bunch of reasons why they obviously support women, just not this woman. That’s not great, but it should not be a surprise. That’s just baked-in to the population we have. Once you’ve got a candidate that looks like this, you have to put all the energy on “everyone else.”
Speaking of the “male vote”, there was a lot of chatter around the fact that Millennial white men went for Harris but Gen-Xers went for Trump. And, while that’s accurate, I don’t think that it’s a “generational” thing so much as I think there’s a standing wave somewhere around 35-40. There’s a certain kind of dude who’s finally successful, got a good job, fancy truck they like, has all the wraparound shades he’ll ever need, is well paid, successful, and they can’t figure out why people still don’t like them. Their kids are jerks, their wives aren’t as hot as they thought they deserved. (These are the “I’ll do anything to protect my family” doofuses who refused to wear a mask. “I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that” was wear a mask and get vaxxed, it turns out.) There’s that oft repeated line about people getting more conservative the older they get, and this is usually framed as now you make enough money you’re for tax cuts, but no, I think this is about guys who never learned that the trick was to grow their own personality and develop empathy deciding that if they can’t have “social power” they might as well get some “political power.” The number of dudes online who made their whole personality “if Trump wins I’ll get laid” was bizarre. (And so I’m calling my shot now, in another two elections we’re going to get a whole set of thinkpieces about “why have Millenial men gone to the right?” Because they passed through that threshold.)
There’s a deep, deep insecurity there. (I saw someone online say that if we could cure baldness, the male vote would move left 20 points.) This is where the anti-elite thing comes from: a whole bunch of comfortable, insecure men who have convinced themselves that someone, somewhere think they’re better than they are, and they’re gonna vote for someone to take them down a notch. The people who want to be jerks, but think the worst possible thing is for them to be criticized for being a jerk. They tend to really dislike “liberals” because they’re giving “those people” things they “don’t deserve,” but mostly they dislike anyone who makes them feel like maybe being a jerk isn’t the best idea possible. The Red Team’s whole messaging the last several cycles has really centered on this: these people think they are better than you, but they are not! Let’s take ‘em down!
I’m bringing all this up because this was one of the brilliant things about having Tim Walz being the one saying “weird,” and why it was such a mistake for him to vanish after the convention.
There aren’t a lot of “cool dads” in pop culture, not as good role models anyway. So having Walz show up as CoolDadTM saying, basically, “hey, fellas, there’s a better way to be a man and protect your family,” seemed like a real opportunity. This is the “toxic vs tonic masculinity” we were all talking about back in September.
And that’s what makes this election so maddening, is because what they were doing looked like it was working.
The real teeth-gritting part is that I can almost, almost see the logic in trying to peel off some R votes in an election where the stakes are “this guy wants to be a warlord.” There are probably Republicans to campaign with who are broadly well-liked enough for that to have worked. Clint Eastwood? Arnold Schwarzenegger maybe? But instead, they front and centered the Cheneys, and this is the other problem with having your leadership be that old, because to them the Cheneys are fellow “serious people”, but to everyone in that critical elder Millennial to younger Gen-X demographic, instead the Cheneys are “a big part of the the reason all my high school friends aren’t still alive.”
Again, I don’t know if that actually lost votes, but it also sure as hell didn’t gain any, and it was a huge opportunity cost versus things that could have.
Having someone that looks like Walz pointing at the loser weirdos calling them loser weirdos, while the creeps made fun of his kids? That was working.
But the real problem, the actual catastrophic problem there, is that the Dems didn’t actually have an answer to “well, if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?” Your whole argument about saving democracy evaporates when this is the third election in a row you’ve run on that, and haven’t been doing anything to save it with the resources you already have. To be fair, that wasn’t necessarily Harris’ fault, but it was her problem. If you’re a less-engaged, lower-information voter—which by defintion all those “maybes” are—it’s real easy to hear all “that stuff” about what Trump did, and then conclude it’s bullshit because obviously if it was real he’d be in the slammer. (But if you focus on the fact that he’s weird and gross? All that “danger to democracy”power slides away, and he’s just another asshole.)
Voters like it when the people they voted for actually wield the power they gave them. The dems have a long and inglorious history of just… not doing what they can because reasons. Because that’ll score more moral points with… somebody?
I was mid-draft of this mess when Biden pardoned his kid, and as near as I can tell the reaction from the Dem base was “yeah, man, like that! You shoulda done that one day one and kept going.”
Most normal sane people, the people you want to vote for you, would also absolutely do whatever they could do pull their kids out of a fire. The people you were gonna get blowback from weren’t going to vote for you anyway. It was a perfect microcosm of not using the power available because they thought that might impress… someone? Someone who still didn’t vote for them? Instead, you were asking people to come out and vote for someone who wasn’t even willing to help his own son until it was clear that wasn’t going to hurt him politically, but his party was going to fight for you?
Your sales pitch can’t keep being “the other people might do things! Vote for us so we keep doing nothing!” That’s a bad position.
A whole lot of people showed up in 2020, and the Dems didn’t do anything to make sure those people stuck around, instead they assumed they would and tried to flip others. There’s a sense that summer 2021 was the Democrat’s “Mission Accomplished” moment. “We’re done! Democracy saved! Pandemic over!” And then they let all the social programs expire and all the criminals off the hook. And then a whole bunch more people died?
Of course, when you do wield power, you have to actually show off a little, make some noise, take the credit. There’s a line I read somewhere over the summer that Biden was Progressive President with Centrist Vibes, and that’s stuck with me. And part of that was just not talking about the things they did manage to do.
Which brings me to my last major problem, which is that it’s hard to miss that people believed a lot of obviously untrue stuff this cycle. The Information Environment is absolutely cooked for the Dems these days, after years of Reps playing the refs and a media owned by a shrinking group of very rich Billionaires, who, I think, genuinely wanted Trump to win.
Pretty much every post-mortem on this one I’ve read boils down to “voters believed a lot of really obvious and easily disprovable lies.”
I continue to be slightly baffled by how much certain chunks of the center-to-left hate Biden? But aslo, if you only get your news from the NYT, I guess that makes sense. There’s a basic “tell people what you did and then keep telling them” side that the Dems can’t do, and big chunks of the media will refused to help with.
There’s a story I can’t find a link to again about a group of people who voted for Trump because “he gave us money last time,” and it turns out they thought the COVID stimulus checks were his personal money, not—you know—a program the Dems in congress voted for. This also tracks very closely to some conversations I had in real life over the summer, where it was very clear the people I was talking to were convinced Trump did a whole lot of things that were actually done by the Dems because he, you know, put his damn name on the checks.
There’s also that chart that was going around showing that “knowingly consuming” political news tracked incredibly closely with candidate choice: those that consumed a lot went Harris, those that didn’t consume any went Trump. (The other theme for this piece is that I failed to keep my references organized, so of course I can’t find that chart again.)
But the key word there was “knowingly.” I’m gonna loop back to that “male vote” for a second, because there is so much weird right-wing manosphere garbage in every “male hobby” out there. Video games, gyms, table top gaming, everywhere. So you start going to the gym, and maybe you personally don’t listen to Rogan, but the other guys there do, and this stuff seeps in. I cannot tell you how many middle aged guys I know who consider themselves to be proudly “independent centrists” and then two sentences later they start quoting opinions that would have got you kicked off 4chan a decade ago. It’s insane how good a job the far right has done in building out a media ecosystem that doesn’t look like one. It ought to be the easiest thing in the world to build out a youtube channel talking about Warhammer or Battletech or Star Wars, or TTRPGs from—if not a left perspective—at least from a non-fascist perspective, but instead I keep getting youtubes with the caption “pretty funny!” or “sounds about right!” that are just straight up nazi propoganda over promo photos of Luke Skywalker and Kathleen Kennedy. And then, the real kicker is, if you “don’t consume political news” you don’t have any context and aren’t reading any of the stuff pointing that out. Neat!
The flip side of all that, though, is that we’re clearly in a post-campaign era. I think overall Harris & co. ran a really solid campaign—excepting the part where they lost, obviously—but the other guy just mumbled his way though various slurs and swayed on stage to music made by people that hate him. But nothing got covered like that, and you end up with coverage about made-up versions of the two candidates. This post-truth era where no one believes either candidate will do what they say they will, good or bad. (Which is causing a lot of shocked pikachu memes at the moment.)
So, to summarize: going into this, the Dems had four big problems that I think mattered more than anything else:
- International, wide-spread repudiation of incumbents.
- Running a Woman of Color in a racist, sexist country.
- The overall Information Environment being wired for the other team.
- Not having an answer for “if Trump did all these crimes, why isn’t he in jail?”
And this is why I’m so frustrated about them abandoning “weird”, because it cut through all of those like a hot knife through butter:
The worldwide anti-incumbent attitude? Weird/Won’t go back neatly harnessed that energy, aikido style, and directed it away, framing this as moving on from what was basically the “Trump-Biden” era, but also the whole 90s era political scene that’s just never gone away, and the guy that Biff from 80s classic Back to the Future was literally based on.
The racist/sexists? “Do you want those weirdoes to be in charge?”
The Information Environment? No one would cover things like policy proposals, but they sure as heck carried “weird.” There’s no way to garble that!
Trump’s crimes? If you talk like he’s a threat to civilization, you have to answer why you don’t act like that. But if you just keep pointing out what a sadsack dipshit loser weirdo he and his cronies are, that drains all his mystique away. Plus the Red Team hated that, and started doing some really, really dumb things because of it.
You gotta focus on the base. Your own base. Not take your base for granted and try and pick up the other guy’s. Parts of this campaign felt like that kid in class who skipped the final project but tried to make it up on extra credit. (Didn’t work for them ether.)
I think the key political element of our times is that everyone, and I mean everyone is absolutely seething with anger. The entire Trump project is based on harnessing that from one subgroup and redirecting it towards everyone else. That health insurance CEO was gunned down while I was wrapping this up, and the utterly wild reaction to the shooting is what I’m talking about. People are done. This was basically the third “table-flip” election in a row, and that can’t be great. “Weird” was a way to harness that, direct it, say “we hear you, and we’re as mad about the same stuff you are.”
Would it have worked if they’d kept going with “they’re weird and we’re mad” ’til the end? I don’t know, but I’d sure like to have found out.
Oh wait, they’re really kicking us out of the restaurant…
“The First Time as Tragedy, the Second Time as Farce”
And it turns out none of it mattered.
The polls really were wrong. Just not in the way anyone had guessed; no one had “solid proper rinsing by Trump” in their list of guesses.
The usual post-election grievance, told-you-so, cognitive bias express—she’d have won if only she’d agreed with me on this—quickly descended into vacuous points-scoring as the scale of the rinsing settled in. Because there wasn’t One Cool Trick that could have won this one—it turns out this really wasn’t an election about policy, or campaigns, or ground game, or Get Out The Vote, or spending, or experience, or the personal qualities of the candidates, or The Information Environment, or even Harris’ race or gender. This really was a vibes election; and the vibe that won was “ehhh, who cares.”
Because the candidate that won was “did not vote.” As I write this, Trump got a million and change less votes than he got when he lost in 2020, Harris meanwhile got about 12 million less than Biden. Unlike early indications, a whole lot of people stayed home. That’s a large enough number to defy easy explanation.
It’s traditional, in these sorts of pieces, to offer a theory of explanation, so here’s mine: I think this is where a decade-plus of Obstructionism-as-Policy paid off. The point to gumming up the works wasn’t to change minds or drum up support, but to make voting seem pointless. And so, when it mattered, a whole lot of people threw up their hands and stayed home.
You add to that the increased prices in the shadow of the pandemic, and a country awash in right wing propoganda as background noise—again, the the goal of which is to suppress turnout—and the demographic that determined the outcome were the “low-information” former voters who said, “nothing ever changes, what’s the point?” (Probably with a side order of “I voted to save democracy the last two times, and all that happened is my grocery bill doubled.”)
This also happens on a backdrop of the elections in the shadow of the pandemic being very bad for incumbents world-wide, so there’s an element of “throw the bastards out”, but keep in mind people didn’t change sides, they just declined to participate. There certainly were some small number of Biden-Trump voters, and we’ll be hearing endless fawning interviews with them over the coming weeks, but it seems clear they didn’t make a difference.
It would be so much easier if there was a thing. Personally, I desperately want the reason to be whatever idiot told Tim Walz to stop saying “weird”, but it seems clear, looking at the numbers, that this result was priced in early; whoever the Blue Team ran was going to lose, and whoever the Red Team ran was going to win, all other details being unimportant. No big lesson here, no moral point, just apathy. It’s hard to believe anyone would sit this one out, but being able to turn away while muttering “not my problem,” is a core American trait. There’s something poetic about America choosing autocracy because not choosing it wasn’t worth the effort.
The other worst American vice is a sort of toxic optimism, the belief that things will work out, it’s not that bad, it’ll be fine, you’re overreacting. I am here to tell you: no. This is not going to be okay. We’re in real trouble now. This time, we are well and truly fucked.
I don’t think any of us are capable of imagining the catastrophe that has befallen us. Not necessarily because of the scale, but because while deadly, it is going to be so stupid. Less 90s Dystopian Movie Future and more dropping dead from the results of a regulation-free food supply. Speedrunning the reasons why we have a professional civil service.
There’s some cold comfort from the knowledge that there’s going be plenty of opportunities for grim, joyless schadenfreude over the next few years as the leopards gorge themselves on faces. I have to confess an almost hysterical fascination with how the “Find Out” phase of “Oops All Tariffs” is going to go.
But make no mistake: everyone, everywhere, is in more danger now than they were a week ago.
It’s also traditional to end these sorts of pieces with a ray of hope, an exhortation to keep fighting, a source of optimism. On those fronts, I will decline. Partly, because as we’ve just demonstrated, Hope leaves a lot to be desired as a strategy; as the man says, it’s the hope that kills you. The aesthetics of “resistance” didn’t work last time. Optimism is what got us here in the first place. The moment calls for something else. Some “secret third thing.” I don’t know what that is yet, and neither does anyone else.
All we can do now is hang on to each other and brace for impact.
is it still called a subtweet if you use your blog to do it
There’s that line, that’s incorrectly attributed to Werner Herzog, that goes “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.” (It was actually the former @WernerTwertzog.)
But sure, false attribution aside, I grew up hearing stories about that. The reason my family lives on this side of the planet is because of reasons strongly adjacent to that. Disappointing, but not surprising, when that energy rears back up.
What does keep surprising me over the last few years, is that I never expected that last third to be so smug about it.
Internet Archive Loses Appeal
In an unsurprising but nevertheless depressing ruling, the Internet Archive’s has lost its appeal in the case about their digital library. (Ars, Techdirt.)
So let me get this straight; out of everything that happened in 2020, the only people facing any kinds of legal consequences are the Internet Archive, for checks notes letting people read some books?
Ableist, huh?
Well! Hell of a week to decide I’m done writing about AI for a while!
For everyone playing along at home, NaNoWriMo, the nonprofit that grew up around the National Novel Writing Month challenge, has published a new policy on the use of AI, which includes this absolute jaw-dropper:
We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of Al tie to questions around privilege.
Really? Lack of access to AI is the only reason “the poors” haven’t been able to write books? This is the thing that’s going to improve access for the disabled? It’s so blatantly “we got a payoff, and we’re using lefty language to deflect criticism,” so disingenuine, and in such bad faith, that the only appropriate reaction is “hahahha Fuck You.”
That said, my absolute favorite response was El Sandifer on Bluesky:
"Fucking dare anyone to tell Alan Moore, to his face, that working class writers need AI in order to create."; immediately followed by "“Who the fuck said that I’ll fucking break his skull open” said William Blake in a 2024 seance."
It’s always a mistake to engage with Bad Faith garbage like this, but I did enjoy these attempts:
You Don't Need AI To Write A Novel - Aftermath
NaNoWriMo Shits The Bed On Artificial Intelligence – Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds
There’s something extra hilarious about the grifters getting to NaNoWriMo—the whole point of writing 50,000 words in a month is not that the world needs more unreadable 50k manuscripts, but that it’s an excuse to practice, you gotta write 50k bad words before you can get to 50k good ones. Using AI here is literally bringing a robot to the gym to lift weights for you.
If you’re the kind of ghoul that wants to use a robot to write a book for you, that’s one (terrible) thing, but using it to “win” a for-fun contest that exists just to provide a community of support for people trying to practice? That’s beyond despicable.
The NaNoWriMo organization has been a mess for a long time, it’s a classic volunteer-run non-profit where the founders have moved on and the replacements have been… poor. It’s been a scandal engine for a decade now, and they’ve fired everyone and brought in new people at least once? And the fix is clearly in; NoNoWiMo got a new Executive Director this year, and the one thing the “AI” “Industry” has at the moment is gobs of money.
I wonder how small the bribe was. Someone got handed a check, excuse me, a “sponsorship”, and I wonder how embarrassingly, enragingly small the number was.
I mean, any amount would be deeply disgusting, but if it was, “all you have to do is sell out the basic principles non-profit you’re now in charge of and you can live in luxury for the rest of your life” that’s still terrible but at least I would understand. But you know, you know, however much money changed hands was pathetically small.
These are the kind of people who should be hounded out of any functional civilization.
And then I wake up to the news that Oprah is going to host a prime time special on The AI? Ahhhh, there we go, that’s starting to smell like a Matt Damon Superbowl Ad. From the guest list—Bill Gates?—it’s pretty clearly some high-profile reputation laundering, although I’m sure Oprah got a bigger paycheck than those suckers at NaNoWriMo. I see the discourse has already decayed through a cycle of “should we pre-judge this” (spoiler: yes) and then landed on whether or not there are still “cool” uses for AI. This is such a dishonest deflection that it almost takes my breath away. Whether or not it’s “cool” is literally the least relevant point. Asbestos was pretty cool too, you know?
Happy Bell Riots to All Who Celebrate
Stay safe out there during one of the watershed events of the 21st century! I was going to write something about how the worst dystopia Star Trek could imagine in the mid-90s is dramatically, breathtakingly better than the future we actually got, but jwz has the roundup of people who already did.
Can you imagine the real San Franciso of 2024 setting aside a couple of blocks for homeless people to live? To hand out ration cards? For there to be infrastructure?
Like all good Science Fiction, Deep Space Nine doesn’t say a lot about the future, but it sure says an awful lot about the time in which it was written.
There we go: Harris/Walz 24
Candidate swap complete. Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go win this thing.
The party conventions are always a sales event—they’re the political versions of those big keynotes Apple does—but this one was remarkably well put-together, probably the best of my lifetime, which is especially insane considering they had to swap candidates only four weeks ago. I’m acting like Belle’s father from Beauty and the Beast, just staring at it asking “how is this accomplished?” I’m really looking forward to next summer’s deluge of tell-all behind-the-scenes books, explaining how in the heck they pulled any of this off.
This bit from Josh Marshall’s piece on the final night stuck with me:
What I took from this is a sense of focus and discipline from the people running Harris’ convention and campaign — not getting lost in glitz or stagecraft but defining a specific list of critical deliverables and then methodically checking them off the list. This was going on in the midst of what was unquestionably a high-powered and high-energy event. There was a mix of discipline and ability there that could not fail to have an impact but was also, in the intensity of the final day of a convention, easy to miss.
The other nights had some of this too. But it came through to me most clearly tonight.
I continue to think there’s more going on in this campaign than much of the political and commenting class has yet understood or reckoned with.
There’s a thing going on here that’s not just a “honeymoon phase” after a surprise switch-up. Personally, I think a big part is the Dem’s long overdue embrace of being the “regular people” party, but critically, without a self-destructive “pivot to the center.” In the US “The Center”, like “libertarian” is just a code word for a republican who smokes weed and doesn’t openly hate the gays. For ages now the Dems have surrendered so much American iconography—camo, flags, guns, the entire midwest—and it’s incredibly refreshing to see the Dems openly embrace all that “Real America” stuff, leaving the Repubs with nothing but looking like the creepy weirdo loosers they are.
I tend to think of the Democrats as, effectively, a British-style coalition, just without the framework the parliamentary system provides of actually having each member party having a public number of seats. Instead the factions are fluid and more obscure. Which makes intra-party negotiations hard even in better times, and even more so when the “other side” isn’t a coalition and is full of wannabe petty dictators. From the outside, and probably from the inside, it’s hard to tell how the various factions are doing versus each other.
There are, bluntly, a lot of issues that just aren’t on the ballot this year, which for whatever reason have fallen outside of the contextual Overton window of the ’24 election. The lack of formal coalition dynamics makes those so frustrating; there’s no way to know how close they were to being on the ballot. And, of course, the reason I keep calling this a “harm reduction” election is that for those about six things I’m subtweeting, the other side would be an absolute catastrophe. And that’s before we remember that the baseline of the opponents here really is “…or fascism.”
That said, it’s such a relief to see that the party seems to have finally shook off the Clinton/Blair era “Third Way” hangover and landed in a much more progressive place than I’d have ever hoped a few years ago. This feels like a group that would have held the banks accountable, for starters?
The first Bill Clinton campaign is the one this keeps making me think of, that explicit sense of “the old ways failed, here comes the new generation.” (Speaking of, can you imagine how hard Harris would kill on the old Arsenio show? For that matter, how hard Walz would?)
But more than any of that, this is a campaign and a candiate that’s here to play None of this gingerly hoping “we can finally talk about policy,” this a group that’s solidly on the offensive and staying there. The Dem’s traditional move has been to blow what should have been easy wins (looking at you 2000 and 2016) mostly by wrecking out the campaign to chase votes they were never going to get, or because actually trying to win power was beneath them somehow. Not this time. Non-MAGA America is deeply, profoundly sick of those assholes, and Harris has really captured the desire to move on as a country.
Finally!
In any case, we’re really though the looking glass now. No one has any idea what’s going to happen. Yeah, I saw that poll, and yes that one, and that one. We’re so far outside the lines I don’t think any of those mean anything we can interpret with the data we have. At this point, anybody who says what they think is going to happen without ending the sentence with a question mark is lying.
To quote Doctor Who: “Oh, knowing's easy. Everyone does that ad nauseam. I just sort of hope."
On Enthusiasm
Remember Howard Dean? Ran for president in 2004. Had huge grassroots support, got “the kids” really excited, and then got too excited in public, and went home to let Kerry lose the election.
I always thought the media kerfluffle around the “Dean Scream” was bizarre. Years later I saw a documentary where he was interviewed, about the election and other things, and he came across as sane, thoughtful, charismatic. Afterwards, he was a tremendously successful head of the nation party apparatus. Towards the end, the interviewer asked him if he’d do “the scream”, and he refused. Seemed embarrassed by the idea, kinda pissed the interviewer would bring it up. Oh, I thought, this is why you lost the election. You have a brief moment of actual personality in public, it’s still the thing you’re the most known for, and even now you can’t bring yourself to embrace it.
The Dems, at least for the last 20–30 years, have had a strange aversion to “enthusiasm”, treating it as somehow low-class or embarrassing. I guess this partly their self-identity as the “adults in the room,” and partly a reaction to looking over at Reagan and saying “screaming crowds are the thing the other guys do”.
So the guy in ’04 who has the kids all excited allows the media to shame him out of the race for being excited. And clearly he was actually embarrassed, based on that interview. He should have leaned into it, made that his thing. Opened every event with that yell, get a call and response going. Instead, nope, we’re gonna let the most boring man in the world lose the election to the war criminal running on ending social security.
And of course, the really maddeningly weird thing is that the Dem base is much more purpose-driven, more emotionally-connected to outcomes. They’re the ones who will stay home unless you fire them up! The main opponent has always been apathy!
So the Dems that win are (mostly) charismatic outsiders, whereas the party wants to run “grownups.” So you have Gore, who runs basically as a robot, and then as soon as he loses shows up on Futurama and is incredibly funny. Remember how scandalized the other Dems were by Clinton playing the sax on Arsenio? I think this was one of the dynamics that fueled the Bernie-Clinton feud too; somehow the Dems though people yelling “Bernie or bust” meant he wasn’t electable?
I suspect this is mostly a generational thing. The batch of boomer-age Dems that have been running the show the last 30 years have always treated “people being excited” as not grown up enough. And fair enough, if you grew up in the 50s & 60s, there was a very, very limited number of things you were allowed to “like” or express feeling about; maybe sports? Otherwise, stoicism was the goal. Maybe because an entire generation grew up with parents who had undiagnosed PTSD?
The younger generations aren’t like that? Or at the very least, have a different set of “things you’re allowed to be excited about” and aren’t fundamentally embarrassed by the concept of “excitement” or “emoting”. So those people start being in charge, and they’re like, no actually, stoicism isn’t the goal, let’s get the base fired up. Which turns out to be really valuable when the opponent isn’t “the other guy” but “staying home”?
Anyway, my Hot Take is that Harris/Walz is what you get when the Dems stop treating “enthusiasm” as something low class and embarrassing.
More than anything, Biden had a vibes problem; I see that Harris is now polling ahead of the convicted felon/ failed businessperson on “the economy”, as opposed to Biden who was well behind. It’s the same economy! Same administration! Same failed casinos! Vibes issue.
Being “the grown ups” meant being reactive, trying to stick to “serious topics”, with the result being that the other side gets to dictate the terms of the fight and then ground you down over a year(s)-long campaign.
But now we’ve got a team actually trying to fire up the base, setting the terms, taking the initiative. Part of why “mind you own damn business” has popped so hard as a campaign theme is that this is the kind of topic everyone actually cares about and has wanted a Dem to run on since forever, instead of the finer points of NATO funding or whatever.
This really does feel like a campaign run by people who at a critical age, instead of watching Mr Smith goes to Washington, watched Heathers. As they say, let’s not go back.
Meet the Veep
And there we go, it’s Walz. Personally, I was hoping for Mayor Pete, but as Elizabeth Sandifer says: “…when you create the campaign's new messaging strategy you get to be the VP nom.". I love that he’s a regular guy in the way that’s the exact opposite of what we use the word “weird” as a shorthand for.
The Dems claiming the title of the party of regular, normal, non-crazy people is long overdue; this is a note they should have been playing since at least the Tea Party, and probably since Gingrich. But, like planting a tree, the second best time is now, and Walz’s midwestern cool dad energy is the perfect counterpoint to the Couch Experience.
“Both sides are the same” is right-wing propganda designed to reduce voter turnout, but the Dems don’t always run a ticket that makes it easy to dispute. What I like about the Harris/Walz vs Trump/Vance race is that the differences are clear, even at a distance. What future do you want, America?
As I keep saying, this is a “turn out the base” election; everyone already knows which side they’d vote for, and the trick is to get them to think it’s worth it to bother to vote. Each candidate is running against apathy, not each other. Fairly or not, over the summer the Democrats found themselves with a substantial enthusiasm gap. The Repubs didn’t have a huge amount of enthusiasm either, but the reality is the members of the Republican coalition are more likely to show up and vote for someone they don’t like than the Dems, so structurally thats the sort of thing that hurts Team Blue more.
Literally no one wanted to do the 2020 election over again, and in one of those bizarre unfair moments America decided to blame Biden for it, instead of blaming the guy who lost for not staying down. But more than that, complaining about how “old” everyone was also a shorthand for something else—all the actors here are people who’ve been around since the 80s. We just keep re-litigating the ghosts of the 20th century. Obama felt like the moment we were finally done having elections rooted in how the Boomers felt about Nixon, but then, no, another three cycles made up entirely of people who’ve been household names since Cheers was on the air.
And then Harris crashes into the race at the last second with an “oh yeaaahhhh!” Suddenly, we’ve got something new. This finally feels like not just a properly post-Obama ticket, but actually post “The Third Way”; both in terms of policy and attitude this is the campaign the Dems should have been running every election in the 21st century. And for once, the Dems aren’t just trying to score points with some hypothetical ref and win on technicals, they’re here to actually win. Finally.
I’m as surprised as anyone at the amount of excitement that’s built up over the last two weeks; I was sure swapping candidates was an own-goal for the ages, but now I’m sure I was wrong.
Rooting for the winning team is fun, and the team with the initiative and hustle is usually the one that wins. It’s self-perpetuating, in both directions. (This is a big part of how Trump managed to stumble into a win in ’16, it was a weird feedback loop of him doing something insane and then everyone else going “hahaha what” and all that kept building on itself until he was suddenly the President.)
Accurately or not, the Dems had talked themselves into believing they were going to lose, and were acting like it. Now, not so much! The feedback loops are building the other way, and as Harris keeps picking up more support, you can see the air bleeding out of Trump’s tires as his support drifts away because he’s only fun when he’s winning.
I have a conceptual model that I use for US Presidential elections that has very rarely let me down. It goes like this: every cycle the Republicans run someone who reads as a Boss, and the Democrats run someone who reads as a college Professor. And so most elections turn into a contest between the worst boss you’ve ever had against your least favorite teacher; with the final decision boiling down to, basically, “would you rather work for this guy or take a class from that guy”. (Often leading to a frustrated “bleah, neither!”)
And elections pretty consistently go to the team that wins that comparison. As a historical example, I liked Gore a lot, but he really had the quality that he’d grade you down on a paper because he thought you used an em dash wrong when you didn’t, whereas W (war crimes notwithstanding) seemed like the kind of boss that wouldn’t hassle you too bad and would throw a great summer BBQ. And occasionally one side or the other pops a good one—Obama seemed like he’d be your favorite law professor of all time.
Viewing this ticket via that lens? This one I like. We have the worst boss you can imagine running with the worst coworker you’ve ever had, against literally the cool geography teacher/football coach and the lady that seems like she’d be your new favorite professor? Hell yeah. I’m sold. Let’s do this.
Pretty Weird
Absolutely loving this new Gen-X energy the Dems have suddenly discovered by just pointing out that the Repubs are super weird.
And they are! The republican party has been an absolute freakshow since at least the Gingrich era, and certainly since those tea party assholes. I distinctly remember wishing that Gore had run on a platform of “look how weird these guys are” and W looks positively sane next to the current freak farm. Normal people don’t actually care what goes on in other people’s bathrooms, houses, or pants?
This has completely thrown the repubs for a loop. I see they’re basically trying a Pee-Wee Herman “I know you are but what am I” move by trial-balooning various flavors of “we’re not weird, you the ones with ____” with various totally normal things in that blank spot, with a side-order of “weird is what all the bullies called me, who then is the real bully” crap.
The past couple of decades have tought the repubs that saying things like “ahh, who is the real villan” or “but you participate in society, interesting” or “then you are no better than they” is the equivalent of the roadrunner painting a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain, and that the dems will reliably run right into it, Wile E. Coyote–style.
So it is incredibly refreshing to see that the dems have finally discovered the correct response, which is “shut the fuck up, you freaky weirdo!”
Because everyone who has actually lived a life knows there is a difference between weird (kid plays too much D&D) and weird (do not, under any circumstances, leave your drink uncovered near him).
This election, more than usual, is everyone in that first group vs everyone in the second.
On the Other Hand…
…based on the amount of panicked flop sweat coming off of the republicans, this crazy gamble might pay off.
Is this where Gen X—the ignored generation—slides in, saves the country from a wannabe strongman, and then gets no credit? Because that would be pretty great.
C’mon, man
Well, there’s Undecided Voters NOW.
But not, I suspect, the kinds they have in mind. Good work, morons. This is what’s going to motivate the base, huh? Backstabbing the guy who won the last election for us?
That queasy feeling of knowing you’re watching a Historical Event that’s gonna be talked about in your grandkid’s history classes, but you don’t yet know what the end of that conversation is going to be.
My inclination is that this is one of those catastrophic miscalculations, a game-threatening bad play call. The premise is that that “america” has gotten “less sexist” since 2016? As they say, we’re about to run an experiment to see if Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton or if it was because she was a woman.
I think the case against Biden was badly overblown, a case of a panic spiral getting out of control. Letting that debate happen was clearly an act of breathtaking political malpractice, but the what polling there was still showed the difference between the candidates as being within the margin for error? And, wildly under-discussed is how bad polling has gotten the last decade or so. All the polls are just cooked now, we’re a long, long way away from Nate Silver calling all the races correctly ahead of time. And to paraphrase a tweet I saw and now can’t find, “Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel” is the sort of sentence that would have been shocking in 2016, but now the response is like the people in Clue finding another body, just a shrug and then walking back to the other room.
I think this is a huge unforced error, but one after a year of own-goals and stepping on rakes. This should have been one of the easiest cruise-to-reelection second terms of all time, but instead—here we are. There’s a just-so-story–style lesson here about not flaring off your goodwill a year out from the election.
I still don’t believe there are any actual undecided voters. And I simply don’t believe that there was anyone who was unwilling to vote for Biden who is willing to vote for Harris. Who are we even talking about here? What’s this mythical demographic the Dems can now access?
The plural of anecdote is not data, but in my orbit, the only people who actually brought up Biden’s age or ”mental state” were people who were always going to find a reason not to vote for him. Because, of course, none of those people ever bought up the other guy’s mental state. Get ready for that same crowd to start saying things like “well, of course I support a Black woman as president, but Harris…”
There’s three options in this election: “Harm Reduction”, “Fascism”, and “Fuck it, I don’t have enough empathy to tell the difference between the first two.” Anyone who is actually still describing themselves as an “Independent” “Undecided” voter here in the middle of the Disaster of the Twenties is, at best, an Asshole. And is probably actually a Trump voter, but needs the pageantry so they can blame “the libs” for “making them do it”. But this is the solution? Harris is going to unlock the middle-aged white guy asshole vote? Really?
Deep Breath
On the other hand, if you’ve bought in that Biden had to go, this is about as good as solution as exists. And dropping the news after the whole RNC news cycle has burned out makes it clear that they made the decision longer ago than it looks. “White women in the suburbs” is going to be one of the deciding demographics of this one, and Trump does the worst there when he’s being an unhinged racist bully and wanna-be gangster, and Harris is going to be drawing that foul constantly.
Credit where credit is due, there’s no more narrative about how everyone is too old. We’ve got a real sharp contrast between the parties now, let’s see if they can leverage it. Here’s hoping I’m wrong and this’ll move the needle with both of “the youths” and the “mad about Gaza” demographics. And, for once, the Dems have an actual move to respond to the GOP claiming to be “the law and order party”—“convicted felon” vs “former prosecutor” is a hell of a hand to be able to play.
This was winnable in January, it was winnable a month ago, and it’s winnable now. But god damn let’s stop giving up points.
All that said, the ticket is still the same as it has been: Warm Body/Warm Body vs Fascism. President Harris, let’s go.
Not the Time For Trick Plays
For as long as I can remember, the Democrats—both the party and the pundit-and-commentary class—have had an unfortunate fascination, a weakness really, for magical-thinking schemes. Magic Bullets, somewhere between a Captain Kirk plan and playing to a theoretical referee. There’s always some “thing” thats going to happen and solve The Problem, so we don’t have to do anything. The Mueller report, the state criminal charges, hell, the Supreme Court is gonna decide in favor of Gore. Anything to avoid doing the actual work. And this usually comes as a late-in-the-day last-ditch effort to make up for not having done the work.
But this thing about swapping out Biden as the candiate really takes the cake.
This seems insane to me. I understand that I like Biden more than most people as far to the left as I am, but that’s not the point. This is a single-issue election: beat Trump. Everything else is commentary. The incumbent in American Presidential elections has a huge structural advantage, and Biden is literally the only guy whose ever beat Trump in an election. Seems like a slam dunk to me, no matter how many bad debates we have.
(Also, buried in the background noise is that neither of them did well in the debate. And the other guy has a pretty hard ceiling of support.)
And look, I get it, there’s stuff he’s doing you hate, there’s issues you disagree on. Me too! But I guarantee whatever issue those are, the game show host will be worse.
I heard a lot the last week that the Dems have this deep bench full of people who could take over as candiate. Great! The 2028 primaries start now. Get them out on the trail today stumping for the sleepy grandpa. Let ‘em show us how great a campaigner they’d be. Whoever makes this happen gets the next nomination. While we’re at it, let’s make sure to tell folks about what this administration has actually pulled off the last couple of years? Take the credit. The fact that there is anyone over the age of 3 who can grump with a straight face that Biden “is the worst president of my lifetime” is a catastrophic PR miss. That’s the work they skipped, and all the hypothetical candidates in the world aren’t going to counteract forgetting to tell anyone what you did.
I love a good trick play as much as the next person who knows what an “onside kick” is, but there’s no crazy stunt where we pull Zaphod Beeblebrox out of a hat and he wins the election for us. The next president is gonna be one of those two guys. Let’s focus on making sure, at the very least, the wrong one doesn’t get there, not daydreaming about fucking unicorns.
Programming Note: Icecano will be off next week. Regular service resumes on July 15th.
Post-Debate Hot Takes & Hand-Wringing
I see after last week’s debate the Hot-Takes-and-Hand-Wringing-Industrial Complex has throttled up to maximum capacity. To be sure, it wasn’t exactly a high-point in American Presidential politics, and in a “normal” election year, this would have been a profound unforced error on the part of Biden and the Democrats. But it’s not a normal election, and so here’s my hot take: I actually don’t think it’s going to matter one bit.
Here’s my even hotter take: I don’t believe there’s actually a single undecided voter in the country.
American National Politics is built around the semi-mythical character of the “Undecided Voter”. Conventional wisdom says that in a given cycle, each party has an about even 40-something percent of the electorate that will vote for them no matter what, and then you have something between 10 and 20 percent who can be persuaded to one candiate or the other on “the merits”. I’ve never really believed that there were as many undecideds as we like to think. I think there are a lot of people who are performatively undecided, but they’re like the people who claim they tip servers “based on performance” but somehow only ever find reasons to make the tip smaller—they knew when they walked in that they were only going to tip the poor kid 10%, but they needed to make a production out of how it was the server’s fault, not them being an ass. And those people always seem to end up deciding the same way every cycle. (This applies to 3rd party “spoiler” candidates too—I don’t think they matter as much as we sometimes like to pretend. Literally no-one who voted for Jill Stein was ever going to vote for Clinton; Stein was the excuse, not the cause.) But the upshot is that many of the rituals of an American presidential election are built around the idea that there’s this pool of voters who are equally open to voting to either candidate, depending on who makes the better sales pitch.
This time, we’ve got something that hasn’t happened in living memory: both people running have already done the job. This is literally a redo of the election we had four years ago. Despite various outbreaks of magical thinking, everyone knew who was going to be running in this election as of thanksgiving 2020: It’s the sleepy-but-surprisingly-competent corporatist-centrist grandpa vs the racist tv game show host turned convicted felon and aspiring fascist, with the only third choice being a smörgåsbord of excuses providing air-cover for “fuck it, I’ve convinced myself that I have enough privilege that I can sit this one out.”
Nearly everyone already had to decide which of these two guys to vote for. The sales pitch this time isn’t the campaign, it’s their respective terms as president. I don’t believe that anyone is going to change their vote from last time, and I certainly don’t believe that anything this year is going to change anyone’s mind. Instead, the Dems need to realize that the opponent isn’t Trump or the Republicans, the opponent is apathy. Assume the number of “deplorable” votes is fixed. This isn’t a change hearts and minds election, this isn’t even really a competing policy election. This is a harm reduction election. This is a fight apathy and get-out-the-vote election. And you don’t fight apathy by putting a likable old guy with or without a cold and a stutter on stage next to the living manifestation of every mistake ever made by the American Experiment. Nobody changed their vote based on that tire fire that was on CNN, but nobody was ever going to.
And look, please don’t mistake any of the above for “optimism.” It’s not that we’re not in trouble. We’re in bad trouble, we’ve in terrible trouble. We’ve got problems the likes of which we can barely comprehend, but “a good debate performance” was the solution to none of them.
Restoration of Service in Progress
Nothing for three and a half years, and then we caught COVID twice in seven months. Wear your masks people! This current variant is no joke. Ripped through the school one last time before summer vacation, and we all got hit. Finals week was a little white-knuckle, but we all got through it and then took a four-day nap.
And then how’s this for squeezing lemon juice in to the paper cut: I managed to shake off the COVID after a week or so, but I was so stuffed up that I then rolled right into a full-blown ear infection, so now I’m pumped full of antibiotics. (Sure, sex is great, but have you ever had your ears pop after having them stuffed up for two weeks? Me neither, but here’s hoping I do soon.)
I know this is just yelling at the weather at this point, but I really can’t believe “we” decided that it was okay for everyone to just be sicker all the time. I missed two weeks of work on this thing—two weeks—I haven’t ever missed that much work since I started working. And I’m fortunate to work at a place and in a field where that wasn’t a disaster, but also someone is always out sick, and out sick for days at a time. No one seems to talk about this much, but “work” has just quietly reorganized around more people being sick more often.
It’s funny, summer vacation used to mean “yay, we can go places!”, and I have to admit now my reaction is much closer to “oh thank goodness, we can stay inside and get eight weeks off from being exposed.”
An aside about that gif at the top: I absolutely love the look of that scene from the end “Heaven Sent” where the Tardis wakes up. The light streaming through the doors, the lights flickering on almost looking like she’s stretching, and especially that last shot where the time rotor warms up in the foreground with Capaldi framed in the doorway in the background. That’s why you hire the lady that made the Tank Girl movie to direct your show.
X-Men 97
I liked it! I liked it a lot.
Taken mostly on it’s own: a really fun show, well made, great look. Really captures what’s fun and bonkers about the X-Men as a concept and a team. They nailed an animation style that looks like how you remember the old show looked, as opposed to how it actually looked.
Taken from the perspective of someone who retained more facts about “X” “Men” than is recommended by the surgeon general: And it also did a great job both following up on the old cartoon as well as riffing on stuff from the comics, and allin a way that spent a lot of time winking at long time fans but stayed completely accessable to people with no prior knowledge beyond “that one is Wolverine, right?” Immediately in the S-tier of revivals/reboots/continuations, or whatever we call these things now.
Taken as a show that’s part of the broader media-social-political landscape of the Twenties: Holy smokes I cannot believe they really had the balls to spend 10 episodes finding new ways to say “Magneto was Right.”
April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic
This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. I’m republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .
I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the area—according to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.
Cal Expo itself is a strange beast—a 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekend—RV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.
The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.
As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.
The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.
The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.
The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.
Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.
We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!
Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:
Back when we still thought this was all going to “blow over” in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.
(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went it’s own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is “Creepio”, who has schemes of his own. I’m not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)
Implosions
Despite the fact that basically everyone likes movies, video games, and reading things on websites, every company that does one of those seems to continue to go out of business at an alarming rate?
For the sake of future readers, today I’m subtweeting Vice and Engaget both getting killed by private equity vampires in the same week, but also Coyote vs Acme, and all the video game layoffs, and Sports Illustrated becoming an AI slop shop and… I know “late state capitalism” has been a meme for years now, and the unsustainable has been wrecking out for a while, but this really does feel like we’re coming to the end of the whole neoliberal project.
It seems like we’ve spent the whole last two decades hearing about something valuable or well-liked went under because “their business model wasn’t viable”, but on the other hand, it sure doesn’t seem like anyone was trying to find a viable one?
Rusty Foster asks What Are We Dune 2 Journalism? while Josh Marshall asks over at TPM: Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business?. Definitely click through for the graph on TPM’s ad revenue.
What I find really wild is that all these big implosions are happening at the same time as folks are figuring out how to make smaller, subscription based coöps work.
Heck, just looking in my RSS reader alone, you have:
Defector,
404 Media,
Aftermath,
Rascal News,
1900HOTDOG,
a dozen other substacks or former substacks,
Achewood has a Patreon!
It’s more possible than ever to actually build a (semi?) sustainable business out there on the web if you want to. Of course, all those sites combined employ less people that Sports Illustrated ever did. Because we’re talking less about “scrappy startups”, and more “survivors of the disaster.”
I think those Defector-style coöps, and substacks, and patreons are less about people finding viable business models then they are the kind of organisms that survive a major plague or extinction event, and have evolved specifically around increasing their resistance to that threat. The only thing left as the private equity vultures turn everything else and each other into financial gray goo.
It’s tempting to see some deeper, sinister purpose in all this, but Instapot wasn’t threatening the global order, Sports Illustrated really wasn’t speaking truth to power, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand didn’t shutter everyone’s favorite toy store. Batgirl wasn’t going to start a socialist revolution.
But I don’t think the ghouls enervating everything we care about have any sort of viewpoint beyond “I bet we could loot that”. If they were creative enough to have some kind of super-villian plan, they’d be doing something else for a living.
I’ve increasingly taken to viewing private equity as the economy equivalent of Covid; a mindless disease ravaging the unfortunate, or the unlucky, or the insufficiently supported, one that we’ve failed as a society to put sufficient public health protections against.