The Politics of Despair

Down bad by demonic design.

Making this one free for a while since a lot of you have told me you’re waiting to get paid to subscribe and I understand that more than anything.

If you haven’t casually used the phrase “I wanna kill myself” in the past six months, maybe you’re not on twitter or you’re not nearly as dramatic as the rest of us. However, the uptick in the use of the phrase isn’t some silly trend. People aren’t making fun of suicide, quite the opposite, they are expressing a feeling of despair. Grief is often talked about in stages and people love to poke and prod til they know which one you’re at. But one thing folks cannot really combat is despair. Despair means you have lost all hope and more importantly, you’ve already accepted there’s no going back.

It’s been F I V E months since we gave over the government over to dementia and drugs. We are watching a daily genocide that people are still happy is happening after 18 months and still being lied to about it. Kids and people being kidnapped, disasters left without aid and another war! Politicians being assassinated, schools getting shot up daily, rent goes up and then you become a criminal when you can’t afford it all because everyone is tryina replace every job with AI. These people are playing in our face and we let them because they do it via video and 280 characters. They do it with memes and with tiktoks, not because they are dumb but because they know for a fact it works. For all the hemming and hawing we do, we still log in, quote tweet, RT and worse, simply view. Our healthcare system has been replaced by google searches and a subscription to videos of some person who kinda looks the way we want to, with resources we’ll never have available. Oh but wait here comes an ad for the Temu version of the Kardashian in-home health clinic.

The US is an insanely privileged country, I’d say the most privileged in the world. Things we can do here we can’t do in Europe and other places, not even because we are rich but because we do not give a shit about human decency or empathy. Everyone feels like they’re gonna die because you are in country that wars with and within its own population. We’ve never hated each other more than we do right now but it’s so pathetic because we were all led there by the nose. Our blind agreement to big up anyone who makes a lot of money by letting them scam every aspect of our life, has now come back to bite us not just in the ass but the neck and the fuckin head. We are willing to give up our DNA just for AI family pictures. Convenience is how capitalism has caught us all in a web of constant monitoring. It’s literally chewing our fucking heads off and the worst part is we lock in to the harm every day.

I don’t have a tiktok account and I never will. If anything, I’m grateful that it is now impossible to watch the videos without an account. This was not some self-righteous decision I made to be cool. When I heard about how much data mining the app does, I was like yea absolutely not. For years, I have been focused on ways to remove more and more of my digital footprint. Somewhere along the way society became really cool with computers constantly monitoring our every move and then bottlenecking us into groups so they can sell us shit and brainwash us to move product. You log in to see what your friends are doing between forty ads for shit everyone your exact age, race, and sexuality have been looking at. We repeat that the phones must be listening to us because it’s easier to pretend than to admit holy shit my phone knows so much about me it can tell me what to do. It never dawns on many that there’s a reason why the asked you to OPT-IN to cookies. The choice is literally yours. You give the phone all the information, then the people who hate you use it to make sure you don’t fight them.

I’ve been off instagram for months and as I do twice a year I’m getting ready to delete twitter for at least 3-4 months. That’s right I spend maybe a quarter of the year on twitter if I can help it! This is deeply on purpose. I cannot watch people post lists of movies in between the X-rays of dead children who were shot in the heart. The algorithm IS the misinformation. Consider that all your friends tweets are now on the For You page instead of the Following. The app has literally forced you to click a tab that was unanimously unpopular because it’s made to adjust to your dissent. Every change you hate about these apps persists until you get used to it and forget the real reason you didn’t want to do it: because it’s fucking up your brain. If I click a tweet to read about something in the for you tab, my following tab is flooded with 100 tweets about the topic immediately creating an illusion of discourse on my timeline and then….I add to it like a fucking lemming which makes my friends also add to it. Just a bunch of smoke and mirrors to ruin my day.

My dreams are filled with stuff from instagram and for the past year I’ve had a lot of issues with remembering things people did that did not actually happen. Everything is so vivid and lucid that I often have to spend the day sorting through what is a memory and what is content my brain made in my sleep. It’s devastating and absolutely brutal to one’s mental health. I can’t compartmentalize for likes. I think that’s what pisses me off the most: all of this for #engagement aka approval. We’ve even convinced ourselves that staying engaged in between posting about ourselves is helping the world (sure it might, but really at the bare minimum I would think).

Social Media has not been #fun or even useful for a very long time. It is a very obvious and powerful political tool. Twitter is owned by a man who used it to get his candidate elected. Instagram is owned by the man who spread so much misinformation he’s regularly accused of ruining THE WORLD. You posting is not a protest, it’s not even free will, it’s not even helpful cuz bitch you’re shadow banned! You’re on there because you cant stop yourself. Even though you KNOW they use the tweets to fire you, deport you, sell to you, lie to you and confuse you. The misinformation IS is the internet. We’ve entered an era where people are asking AI to tell them if something is AI and your fyp is offering you up whatever it takes to make sure you feel absolutely insane. Is it worth it just so you can tell your friends you went to the farmer’s market? Does anyone even care about your story about your day? Are the views even real or did people just tap the button. You have no idea but what you do know is you feel like absolutely shit every time. When’s the last time you checked your socials and didn’t ideate right after?

I can’t opt-in to my own destruction and I sincerely hope you will stop too. All the tweets will still make it to you, all the videos, all the lame content. We are the drones and vessels for all this stuff. When I log out I don’t have to be bogged down by stupid cat videos which only serve to make me numb for ten minutes; to distract me into thinking there was ever a time where this world was peaceful for everyone or anyone really. I don’t experience fatigue of caring because the app reminds me that I can buy new shoes or that such and such has a new nose and life is easier if I just think about that stuff for a while. I don’t have to ponder luxury items in the midst of devastation and I do not have to spend my day engaging with people who may or may not be real, trying to make me believe that I am the only one feeling the way I do. I cannot log in to feel alone and pointless with millions of other niggas. I can’t spend my day talking to or reading shit from the dumbest and cruelest people alive. That’s not my brand of solidarity.

The despair comes from all of this. A lot of us feel despair because we knew that this was coming. To know of the collapse of empire is not the same as being part of it. There is no precedent for whats happening. It makes us feel better to call it Hitler’s playbook or find some other random historical fact that matches up with whatever our Cheeto in Chief (Love you Michael!) happens to come up with for the day. But nobody has ever experienced that collapse of empire in a NUCLEAR armed world. Nobody has ever experienced a world economy collapsing like this one is and nobody has ever seen an army with this much money and weapons. An army that has a base in every single country on the globe (including the two poles!)and has probably bombed them at one point. There has never been this much information and thus misinformation out in the world. Every sentence you hear and read should be fact checked at this point but people in the richest country in the world don’t have any reliable sources.

Who can believe in a world where you get sneaker commercials in between livestreamed horrors? Of course Bisan had to block all of you living normally, how can her fucking brain even process after two years of starving and living in hell that some of you are eating caviar with chicken nuggets just to try it. How can you wonder why you feel crazy when every day you’re expected to point out niggas are dying, get censored for it and then have to post videos of your face, tits and ass with a song playing in the background to get the same 500 people from your group chats to see that a baby was burned alive. Oh wait, they already posted it and they have more followers so who actually used the socials for good?

I want us to divest from the idea of having a platform. Divest from the idea that you are a source of information. Invest in learning historical shit and reading up on facts. Invest in being extremely choosy about what newsletters you pay for to get world news and being diligent and loyal to your sources. It’s how journalism used to work and we are not rewriting the playbook in any useful way. Get back to learning instead of teaching or “spreading” information. Put your mask on before you help others. We have been mollified into begging the hand that slaps us for help. I have to make it through this era because as a radical who believes in a better future I’m determined to not only live to see it but to be a part of it physically, not just digitally. The revolution will NOT be televised and if you run that song back you’ll realize Gil-Scott was not behind the times, he was ahead of them.

I’m taking my brain back and my life back. I was a person before social media and as I watch all the propaganda from my childhood be reused and re-edited to the same exact ends as twenty, thirty and forty year years ago, I can’t play dumb or hopeless. A picture of MLK Jr in color does nothing but create an argument about how it could help. When I’m off socials all the info that makes it to me is naturally parsed through by real humans who I trust sending me what matters. From there I can share that verified information with others using my own discernment. I can take a minute to talk to people on my side about what it means for us. I can express my sadness to actual response from loved ones not strangers.

I’m still hurting but I’m not bogged down with people tryina make me believe I give a shit about Tyrese fucking Haliburton in 2025. Please! Enough! I don’t want to dissociate nor distract myself. I don’t want the only reason anyone finds out I died to be because my amazon order went bad in front of my door. I don’t want to suffer through cheap pan ads to find out what someone I met at a party nine years ago did last night. I don’t even want to know what my friends did before they tell me. I simply will not survive the collapse of empire using the empire’s tools. Stop drinking the kool-aid, or at the very least begin to seriously moderate your consumption. The algorithm does not care if your life ends, it can still get views from the all the sad friends rewatching your page.