Signing Off
This newsletter is five years and two months old. What began as an exercise to force myself to write non-work stuff each week has become a meaningful, often enjoyable activity that has become a significant part of me, how I see myself and the world. For five years we’ve talked about scams, rigged systems, corrupt officials, criminals, and other flavors of injustice. For the last four, we may have become a little hopeful watching a semblance of fairness creep its way into American culture via its laws and institutions.
Aaaaaaand then. In a single evening, all that progress was erased. Simply put, the crooks, scammers, and their capering accomplices won. It wasn’t particularly close.
The Trump campaign perfectly personified America’s scam culture. We are offered cheap (or free) stuff that promises to make our lives better, and we get addicted to it. Even as the price increases, or the features get worse, or it becomes laden with ads and scams, we continue to use it. We want our burrito taxis. We demand eggs and vegetables and beef at a fraction of the cost of other countries. We finance our expensive cars on long payment plans at subprime interest rates, and drive them on cheap gas and huge roads subsidized by the government. We pay for expensive health insurance with massive deductibles, and avoid the doctor until we’re catastrophically ill. We roll our debt from credit card to credit card, or take advantage of buy-now-pay-later links on every checkout page.
At every point in this journey, someone is making money. Our Uber app, Amazon cart, and Facebook feed is packed with ads, monetizing our personal data in exchange for nothing. Half the products in any digital marketplace are deceptive knockoffs. All the while, we’re told how good we have it. Overnight shipping! Zero interest financing! Cheaper prices if you use the app! Flash sales!
We even get a sliver of a safety net, when the government writes everyone checks during the pandemic. Wages start to climb as we reach full employment. People have a little extra in the bank, are a little less worried, and it helps us feel a little less tenuous.
Then, it goes away. But the cost of everything continues to climb. First, companies say it’s ‘supply chain’, but soon the news starts saying ‘inflation’ and damn if eggs and gas don’t cost an extra dollar, right as those wage gains top out. Layoffs happen, as companies who over-hired during the pandemic cut costs to please shareholders, and now we can’t get new jobs because half the listings are fake and the other half use AI to reject the resume before it reaches human eyes.
Some people get their student loans forgiven, which is great if you’ve got student loans, but an increasing number of young men aren’t going to college. The people they’re watching on YouTube and listening to on podcasts say it’s not fair. Two years in, that stimulus money is gone and the gig companies keep cutting pay, and gas is still expensive.
The election comes around, and one party is making promises about all the good things they can do for you, if you just vote one more time. But aren’t they in charge right now? Aren’t things still expensive? Why would we want more of the same?
In hindsight, it seems obvious that a simple message of ‘things suck, I will give you something better’ is appealing to a society programmed to respond to every offer like it’s a bonus bet on a sportsbook app. The alternative of ‘voting to maybe see some form of gradual improvement’ is, it turns out, less appealing.
Maybe this is politics now - the party not in power says ‘get a load of these fuckin guys’ and the party in power is unpopular by dint of being there. We’re a FYGM polity, wondering What Have You Done For Me, Lately? Maybe people are drawn to Trump’s incoherent rambling because their brains are conditioned to infinite scroll, a series of brief, disjointed appeals, each a new cruel joke or fresh outrage. Taxes low! Crime gone! It’s a campaign designed like a For You Page, where everything is bad, or good, depending on where your eyes linger.
The problem with this binary choice, when the Other Side is fully captured by a criminal con man and his criminal co-conspirators, is that their plan is not to cut a few taxes and change a few regulations - it is the total, irreversible overhaul of the United States. It is the wholesale destruction of regulatory bodies, oversight agencies, and any form of consumer or civil rights protections. It is the criminal prosecution of enemies personal and political. It is concentration camps for Others, whose definition depends on the whim of the officer checking papers. It is declaring that White Collar Crime Is Legal, fully metamorphosizing us into the United States of Scamerica run by and for the people who’ve been systematically looting the place for years.
I desperately hope that I am wrong. I hope that the threads of institutional democracy resist the worst of a second Trump administration’s impulses. That states will fight back effectively, that the military will balk at throwing millions of people into camps or shipping them off to hostile countries. That, when the time comes, fair elections are still possible, and voters do what they seem to enjoy most and throw out the party in power.
We’ve had a good few decades, relatively speaking. We came tantalizingly close to addressing the deep and growing inequity in America, to finally reigning in the excess of unchecked capital. But, when given the choice between an uninspiring status quo and the Flash Sale, millions of Americans didn’t bother to vote. The scammers won, and soon they’ll have virtually unchecked power to punish their enemies, pursue their dreams of a nationalist ethnostate, and steal whatever is left to be stolen.
I’ve spent the last five years writing about these injustices because I, like all of you, hoped we could stop them some day, not hand the reins to their most prolific perpetrators. Writing about scams when that’s all anything is feels like a disservice to my readers, and to myself. The point was hope, and right now that feels largely extinguished. So I will be taking a step back from ASD for now, though I can’t predict the future.
That said! Independent of recent developments, I have been working on a new, short fiction writing project with a friend, which will launch hopefully within the next month or two. I will alert ASD readers when the time comes, and I hope some of you join us for that journey.
Lastly, I would like to thank all of you who have read these words in your inbox each week. Your support means the world to me. Stay strong.
- Colin