when the tariffs hit.

looking to the summer

hello everyone!

i’m going to be more-or-less not writing this summer — i have thirteen posts scheduled for June-August that’ll fill in for me every monday while i spend the summer kicking back on various beaches around chicago and reading up on the french revolution — so i’m going to take this moment to make some predictions about the state of things to come this summer in the ole’ u.s. of a…

1. stop posting about politics online, at least for now

okay so if you’re in the united states as a student on visa, or if you’re working in the country on a visa, or if you’re in any situation wherein ICE might have claim deport/disappear you, especially in the light of the events of the past week, try to avoid posting, liking posts, retweet, whatever, about what’s happening in the middle east for now.

absolutely find people around you in your irl life who you can talk to about this stuff — what’s happening in gaza is deadly important stuff and very likely what will be looked back on as the primary moral failing of our time, plus the imperial boomerang almost always makes its way back eventually. keep in mind that we’re starting to see surface-level online political engagement becoming a dangerous thing. as we spiral forwards into the consequences of this new interconnected age, those consequences are going to be more and more dire. i think the way forward is to find ways to get more involved offline, to form a sort of irl solidarity, but i could be wrong! an online solidarity could be possible! but… if you’re in the u.s. on visa, be careful out there. eyes are everywhere.

i wrote about this at the start of the month. don’t be like this other substacker, talk with your real world friends about issues before posting. real positive change is going to start in our real lives, together. it’s likely not going to start online because online protest doesn’t change the system as the social media platforms are rapidly becoming governmental institutions in their own right (on this note: if the socialist wave ever hits the united states, i think we should probably nationalize Google into something like an online National Archive); organizing together can get us, at the very least, some hope for the future, some hope that we can steer things towards a more positive future. to be sure, any better future we might hope to achieve won’t arrive narly in time to save the palestinian people from their likely annihilation — and just to be clear, the palestinian people who are a people and certainly don’t deserve to be genocided for their being where their homes have been for generations and generations — but at the very least we can hold this tragedy in our hearts and not give up the fight for real systemic change and proper decolonialism.

all i’m saying is it’s important to be safe right now. get offline and join local groups, try to move away from the mass media and social media as both are saturated with saccharine mass-market attempts at steering your politics away from empathy and material change towards a blunt individualism that does nobody any good, but above all: don’t be stupid. things are changing rapidly and by the end of summer, who knows what will happen.

2. when the tariffs hit