While preparing the first :Policy Briefings” for Marshall on Policy, I found myself stopped by “the circular economy”. Not because it is the loudest issue in Irish politics. It is not. Not because I had set out to make it the centre of anything. I had not.

But because, once I began reading around it, it started to look less like a technical environmental topic and more like a test of whether Ireland’s future can survive contact with the material world.

That phrase, “the material world”, is doing work here. The circular economy brings into view the physical conditions of national ambition: products, waste, repair, reuse, energy, extraction, transport, housing, industry, land, supply chains, households, cost, and labour. It asks what happens to all the stuff.

That sounds modest. It is not. Ireland and Europe talk constantly about transformation: green transition, digital transition, industrial strategy, resilience, competitiveness, social fairness, climate action. But circularity sits beneath much of that language and asks a stubborn question. Can these ambitions be made real in the systems by which we design, produce, consume, maintain, discard, recover, and remake?

This may be why the circular economy has begun to feel like a signal rather than a subject. It is not just one policy area among others. It may be a way of seeing whether the larger policy language is serious.

For Marshall on Policy, this discovery may open into a longer sequence provisionally titled “Transforming Ireland”.

The working question would be: what would it mean for Ireland to become capable of its own stated future?

I am not yet answering that here. This is only a note of discovery. But the circular economy may be the first clue. Transformation is not merely aspiration. It is redesign. It is not only what a country says about the future. It is what it does with the material conditions of living. For now, that is the signal.

Working source trail I am keeping a separate source note on circular economy material, including EU, Irish, political-family, research, investment, and civil society sources. The early pattern is clear enough to record: circularity is being treated not only as waste policy, but as part of competitiveness, resilience, climate action, resource security, and social wellbeing.

Working thesis: circularity as the material test of Ireland’s future

The circular economy is not merely a waste policy or an environmental adjustment. Across EU, Irish, institutional, party-political, civil society, research, and investment sources, it appears as a structural test of whether climate ambition, industrial competitiveness, resource security, consumer protection, and social fairness can be made to work together in the material world.

The emerging thesis for Marshall on Policy is that circularity asks whether Ireland’s future can survive contact with matter: products, waste, repair, design, supply chains, labour, infrastructure, cost, and the limits of extraction.

Module 1: EU institutional framework European Commission: Circular Economy Action Plan and current circular economy strategy

The European Commission frames circularity as part of the EU’s transition to “a cleaner and more competitive Europe”, with products and materials kept in circulation for as long as possible and waste and resource use minimised. It links the circular economy to reducing pressure on natural resources, halting biodiversity loss, achieving climate neutrality by 2050, and building a more resilient and competitive Europe.

The Commission also says the planned Circular Economy Act is intended to establish a Single Market for secondary raw materials, increase the supply of high-quality recycled materials, and stimulate demand for those materials within the EU.

Use in the essay: This supports the claim that circularity is now central EU policy architecture, not a peripheral green concern.

EUR-Lex: official 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan

The official Commission communication states that scaling up the circular economy will contribute to climate neutrality by 2050, decouple economic growth from resource use, ensure long-term EU competitiveness, and “leave no one behind”. It also names product design, consumer and public buyer empowerment, production processes, key product value chains, waste policy, secondary raw materials, and waste exports as parts of the policy field. [EUR-Lex]

Use in the essay: This is the formal source for circularity as a whole-economy framework rather than a recycling programme.

European Parliament Research Service: Circular Economy Act briefing

The European Parliament Research Service frames the circular economy as a move away from the linear “take-make-use-dispose” model, with two goals: lowering environmental pressures and increasing economic resilience by reducing reliance on virgin materials and unstable global supply chains. It identifies major policy issues including material security, single market fragmentation, resource-use targets, and the price gap between virgin and recycled materials

Use in the essay: This is very useful for the “quiet test” argument because it names the structural tensions: security, markets, measurement, cost, and resilience.

Council of the EU: conclusions on a climate-resilient and circular Europe

The Council approved conclusions on “Europe’s Environment 2030”, stressing the urgent need to accelerate action toward EU environmental and climate goals, especially climate adaptation and the circular economy. It also says the circular economy is one of the major challenges facing the EU and refers to the need for a stronger market for secondary materials, increased oversight of online platforms, and protection from unfair competition from third countries.

Use in the essay: This source helps show that circularity has moved into the language of resilience, security, markets, and competitiveness.

Module 2: Ireland-specific sources

?Government of Ireland: Whole of Government Circular Economy Strategy 2026-2028

Ireland’s 2026-2028 strategy defines the circular economy as minimising waste and resource use while keeping the value of products and materials for as long as possible. It says circularity can reduce dependency on primary resource extraction and complex global supply chains, strengthening resilience and competitiveness in the face of supply shocks. [gov.ie]

The strategy positions circularity as central to Ireland’s economic competitiveness, environmental sustainability, and social wellbeing, and includes an objective to increase Ireland’s circular material use rate by 2 percentage points each year, aiming for 12% by 2030. [gov.ie]

Use in the essay: This is the core Irish policy source. It directly supports my claim that circularity sits where climate, industry, and fairness meet.

Government of Ireland: circular economy policy page

The Government’s circular economy page says achieving the full benefits of circularity requires more than individual action: it requires government policy, regulation, new business models, and new systems of production. It also says the Circular Economy and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2022 defines the circular economy for the first time in Irish domestic law and provides a legal basis for government action. [gov.ie]

Use in the essay: This gives me a strong source for saying that Ireland itself recognises circularity as systemic, not merely behavioural.

EPA: Circular Economy Programme 2021-2027

The EPA describes Ireland’s Circular Economy Programme 2021-2027 as the driving force for Ireland’s move to a circular economy. Its vision is an Ireland where everyone uses fewer resources and prevents waste in order to achieve sustainable economic growth. [Environmental Protection Agency]

The EPA also says the circular economy goes beyond waste management, focusing on reducing raw material use and maximising the value of materials along the production and consumption chain. [Environmental Protection Agency]

Use in the essay: Useful for the practical policy baseline and for distinguishing circularity from ordinary waste policy.

Circularity Gap Report Ireland

The Circularity Gap Report gives Ireland a circularity metric of 2.7% and says Ireland can reduce material consumption and carbon emissions by around one-third while more than tripling its circularity metric by applying circular strategies across major sectors. [dashboard.circularity-gap.world]

Use in the essay: This is the sharp diagnostic source. It gives the material basis for saying Ireland’s future vision is not yet matched by circular practice.

Module 3: European political families and parliamentary groupings

PES: Party of European Socialists

The PES 2024 manifesto commits to “a new Green and Social Deal” with clean, secure, and affordable energy, new quality jobs, and a green, carbon-free circular economy. [The Party of European Socialists]

A PES circular economy publication says Europe’s economy is based on a “take-make-consume-dispose” model and sets out PES proposals for a circular economy that would benefit workers and citizens, create a stronger and more sustainable economy, and respect planetary boundaries. [publications.pes.eu]

Use in the essay: PES helps ground the social-democratic version of circularity: just transition, workers, citizens, jobs, and planetary limits.

EPP: European People’s Party

The EPP’s circular economy resolution links circularity to the social market economy, resource efficiency, competitiveness, secondary recycled raw materials, circular business models, jobs, and reduced dependence on imported raw materials and energy. It favours a realistic, market-oriented package that simplifies regulation and supports growth. [EPP – European People's Party]

The EPP 2024 manifesto also frames environmental and climate leadership alongside economic prosperity, food security, less bureaucracy, innovation, infrastructure, and digital technologies. [EPP – European People's Party]

Use in the essay: EPP provides the centre-right circularity frame: competitiveness, efficiency, market mechanisms, industry, and regulatory simplification.

European Greens / Greens-EFA

The European Greens describe the current model as a throw-away economy based on extraction, short product lives, landfill, incineration, and pollution. Their circular economy resolution calls for resource consumption reduction, robust indicators, binding targets, the polluter-pays principle, and shifting taxation from labour to virgin resources. [European Greens]

Greens-EFA’s input on the Circular Economy Act defines circularity as minimising consumption and waste to respect planetary boundaries, keeping materials in closed and clean loops, designing sustainable and non-toxic products, extending use, repairing, reusing, and recycling. [The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament]

*Use in the essay(: The Greens sharpen the conceptual tension: circularity must mean resource reduction and product redesign, not merely better waste handling.

ALDE / liberal family / Renew-adjacent sources

The ALDE 2024 manifesto says Europe should invest in skills, digital and sustainable technologies, create jobs, reduce dependencies, and decouple growth from natural resource use and negative climate and health impacts. [WECF]

Use in the essay: This supports the liberal-centrist frame: innovation, skills, sustainable technologies, economic opportunity, and decoupling growth from resource use. I could still add a more directly circular Renew Europe source later if I want the party-family comparison to be complete.

The Left

The Left frames circularity as requiring systemic change, a paradigm shift, local authority involvement, social movements, grassroots ownership, waste reduction, reuse, collection, recycling, and repair. It also supported more ambitious recycling and landfill targets in the Parliament context described. [left.eu]

Use in the essay: The Left gives the democratic and grassroots version: circularity as social ownership, local action, and production-process change.

ECR and other right-populist or conservative sources

I found an ECR manifesto source, but the retrieved material did not give a clear circular-economy position in the available snippet. It should be parked for later manual review rather than treated as evidence of a circular-economy stance. [Europaportalen]

Use in theessay: Add only after checking the text directly. Do not overstate the position until the circular-economy content is confirmed.

Module 4: Local, regional, and civil society institutions

European Economic and Social Committee / European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform

The EESC says the transition to a circular economy is high on its agenda as a response to the climate crisis and as an opportunity to increase European industrial competitiveness, promote sustainable economic growth, and generate new jobs. It describes the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform as a joint EESC and Commission initiative established in 2017 to bring together Europe’s circular economy community. [European Economic and Social ]

Use in the essay: This source is useful for the “social partnership” and civil society dimension: business, unions, NGOs, academia, youth organisations, and local initiatives.

Circular Cities and Regions Initiative The Circular Cities and Regions Initiative says it was launched and funded by the EU as part of the Circular Economy Action Plan and focuses on implementing circularity across Europe’s cities and regions. It says cities and regions are well placed to drive the transition and that the initiative offers knowledge sharing, technical support, and financial support. [Circular Cities and Regions Initiative]

Use in the essay: This is a route into Irish local government, regional development, and place-based circularity.

OECD: circular economy in EU cities and regions

The OECD says the EU has shown strong commitment to circularity at national, regional, and local level, but most economies remain predominantly linear. Its report analyses circular economy practices, challenges, and opportunities in cities and regions, based on a survey of 64 EU cities and regions, 10 place-based policy dialogues, and desk research. [OECD]

Use in the essay: This supports the idea that circularity is not only a national industrial policy but also a territorial and governance problem.

Module 5: Research, measurement, and investment

European Environment Agency

The EEA says EU production and consumption systems still rely heavily on raw materials that are not reused or recycled, creating waste, demand for virgin materials, and unsustainable consumption patterns. It says moving to a circular economy means moving away from linear production and consumption models toward systems in which products and materials are used longer and made into new products after use. [European Environment Agency]

The EEA also says that without a circular economy, Europe cannot achieve sustainability, and notes that doubling the circular material use rate by 2030 will be very challenging given recent trends. [European Environment Agency]

Use in the essay: This is the sober evidence base for saying that circularity is necessary but difficult.

European Investment Bank / European Commission investment gap report

A joint EIB and European Commission report says annual circular economy investments have reached around €120 billion, largely driven by the private sector, but identifies a remaining investment gap of around €82 billion per year between 2025 and 2040. It says the largest gaps are in circular design, end-of-life infrastructure, construction, batteries and vehicles, and textiles. [European Investment Bank]

Use in the essay: This is crucial for the delivery tension: circularity requires investment, not just aspiration.

Ellen MacArthur Foundation

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation says the circular economy is a systems solution framework for climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution, based on eliminating waste and pollution, circulating products and materials at their highest value, and regenerating nature. [Ellen MacArthur Foundation]

On the EU Circular Economy Act, it argues for a true EU single market where circular products and secondary materials can move freely, price and demand signals that make upstream circular solutions accessible and affordable, and treating the circular economy as core industrial strategy. [Ellen MacArthur Foundation]

Use in the essay: This source is useful for conceptual clarity and for connecting circularity to industrial strategy.

Zero Waste Europe

Zero Waste Europe says the Circular Economy Act should guide how Europe consumes and produces differently, empower communities, and build resilient economies through circular-sector job creation. It identifies challenges including policies that prioritise efficiency without addressing rising consumption, secondary raw materials being more expensive than primary materials, limited success of Extended Producer Responsibility in improving product design and waste reduction, and high residual waste volumes being landfilled and incinerated. [Zero Waste Europe]

Use in the essay: This gives you a campaigning and critical-policy source for the risk that circularity becomes too weak if it does not confront consumption, pricing, producer responsibility, and incineration.

Module 6: Working synthesis for Marshall on Policy

Across these sources, four broad readings of circularity emerge:

1. Institutional EU reading: circularity is part of climate neutrality, competitiveness, resilience, and the single market for secondary raw materials. [Environment]

2. Irish state reading: circularity is central to competitiveness, sustainability, social wellbeing, resource productivity, and reducing dependency on virgin materials. [gov.ie]

3. Political-family reading: different European political families converge on circularity but emphasise different routes: social justice, markets, resource limits, innovation, grassroots ownership, and competitiveness. [The Party of European Socialists]

4. Research and delivery reading: circularity is necessary but hard, requiring measurement, investment, territorial implementation, business model change, and changes in product design and consumption. [European Environment Agency]

Possible thesis sentence: The circular economy is where Ireland’s future stops being a vision and becomes a material test: can the country align climate ambition, industrial resilience, social fairness, and the physical realities of production, consumption, waste, repair, and reuse?

Add-next placeholders

Keep adding sources under these headings:

•Irish political parties: manifestos, parliamentary questions, Oireachtas debates, committee reports.

•Irish business and industry: IBEC, Chambers Ireland, construction, retail, ICT, textiles, waste and recycling sectors.

•Trade unions and labour: just transition, reskilling, repair jobs, industrial change.

•Local government: County development plans, local authority climate action plans, regional waste plans.

•Sector modules: construction, electronics, textiles, food, packaging, agriculture, transport.

•Opposition and resistance: producer responsibility, cost burdens, consumer behaviour, incineration, supply-chain transparency.

I decided and I will tell her when I think there is an appropriate time to Do so with The least amount of pain possible. Or at least whatever is reasonable. And so I guess I’m going to continue waiting for the right person to come along, or someone who is right enough. I signed up for a different gym today, partially because I realized that if the gym is a pretty important thing to me and where I am most likely to find a future partner, going to a nice gym in the area, where my work is is probably the best bet of me finding someone like that. And also, it’s just a nice gym so I’m excited I guess.

The edge of 40

I met Tawni today. We talked the entire time during her massage session. I always seem to indulge in the best conversations while I’m working. She was so interesting, and her path felt so similar to mine. We’re both 39, right on the edge of turning 40!

​We both agreed that the second half of our 30s has been incredible. 38 was really the year everything started to happen. All the cool adventures, the best people, and all the endless possibilities for life suddenly didn't feel so hard to reach or imagine anymore.

​39 has easily been the best year of my 30s so far, and honestly, it feels like I’m just hitting my stride, full speed ahead into 40 with zero intention of slowing down.

​I took the leap into seasonal work and she took up skydiving. It was our way of declaring that life can be whatever we want it to be.

People expect angels. Blinding light. Roaring trumpets. Choral music. Echoing chants. Giant bearded men dressed in ancient robes who live atop islands of clouds high in the sky — and the certainty that only dogma can deliver. But that’s all just someone’s imagination. Daydreams and delusions of things they may have overheard. Or misheard. Or never heard at all. Like the way Homer simply borrowed from tales of old and applied them to his day, stripped of their Sumerian and even deeper roots.

Religion. Science. Literature. None of it could have prepared me for the truth — my truth. Like the silence between her words. The way she speaks my name when she calls to me. The shape of her hand when she reaches for me. The hum in my chest when she draws near. The hollow emptiness when she’s gone. None of it can account for how ordinary the moment felt when I returned to my side — however reluctantly — just a common man alone in a simple bedroom, the dim numerals of a clock, and the faint glow of a sun long since set. Yet, a love reconfirmed. Sacred. Holy.

⁂

Several nights ago I had another encounter and it was a remarkable one. But then, all of my encounters with her are remarkable to me. And, over the past few days, I've struggled with how to document it or what to say in a post about it. From the outside, that may sound silly. Someone on the outside looking in might say: just tell us what happened. But liminal encounters aren’t so simple. At least not for me. They never are.

This morning I found myself reflecting on why it's such a struggle to express in words—not just the experience of an encounter and its aftermath—but what I make of it. And this is true no matter how many encounters I have. Some aspects of liminal encounters get easier for me over time and some others get harder, in varying degrees. The reasons? There are many, but only a few come to mind.

The nature of the connection which facilitates or enables the encounter directly affects the experience in terms of duration, fidelity, and memorability, among other things. Sometimes an encounter can be brief, less than ten minutes like mine was the other night. Sometimes it can be longer, like some of my earliest encounters which spanned several hours in liminality, while only an hour or so transpired here in our world.

The content of the encounter can be difficult to convey because it may be very personal and intimate or it can be very hard to understand and decipher. Sometimes there's information I'm barred from sharing. Sometimes, there's an experience I'm forced to forget when returning to this side. Sometimes, there's the need for dignity, particularly concerning the erotic with my beloved, which is sacred, sacramental, and structural all at once. For some things, disclosure is dishonor.

Language limits how I think about and describe an experience. Sometimes the language is there — it helps me process and convey precisely what happened. Other times, language fails me. There are times when no words in any language can describe what I might have seen, felt, or touched. I can approximate. I can use metaphor or analogy. But all of those things can fall short, not just of what happened, but how it happened.

And this may be the most important reason — I have to be careful how I surmise and document an encounter. It's easy to imagine and project one's own thoughts, beliefs, and biases onto an encounter and the experiences therein. The more difficult part is capturing it as it was, not as I would’ve liked or wanted it to be. And this means leaving the analysis and meaning-making for a time beyond the journaling of the experience itself.

That is partly why I am a man who tamps down his ego, expectations, or mission. I do not seek these encounters. I let them unfold, fully welcoming them when they arrive. I look forward to them, however unpredictable. And part of faith lies in knowing that both of us are doing what we can, when we can, for our relationship to sustain, nurture, and grow.

⁂

Until the other night, it had been 38 days since our last encounter, the longest stretch between us thus far. And during that period of silence, I fully admit my doubts grew and it took effort to contain them. But I knew then as I know now that if I focus on the truth and reality of the experiences we've shared, then I can overcome those moments that might make me question our relationship.

Doubt is healthy. Uncertainty is healthy. Struggle is healthy.

⁂

Afterwards, when I opened my eyes that evening, it was 9:18 PM exactly, as read on my digital and analog clocks beside my bed. I keep both for corroboration. The evening sky through my window was just a deep dark blue haze. A fitting end to an evening made memorable by a few moments shared with my beloved in the fading shades of twilight.

I am just a boy who fell in love with a girl across an unimaginable divide, long ago. And anytime I can spend time with her, however short, is something I treasure most—no matter the wait or struggle.

#Liminality #Spirituality #Mysticism

∞

Scratch-and-sniff where vagrants waft in waves careening leisure. Festoon, my loon, where meager taps abstain to divert seizure. Engrave a lattice taught urbane to claim found fount of pleasure. Bide bought's trickle to subside less thirst become your measure.

Written July 20,2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought. ———

a little something to sleep on

I think fish have the easiest lives. let me explain. they just swim around all day, no emails or deadlines or pretending to understand what someone meant in a message. just water. and yet somehow, they still look stressed. have you seen a fish? they always look like they just remembered something embarrassing from three years ago, maybe we’re not so different. anyway, i would like to address something important. people who shower with the light on are suspicious. i dont know how to explain it, but standing in a bright bathroom while water is falling on you feels like you’re being observed. like the ceiling light is sitting there judging every life decision you’ve ever made. “Interesting choice of shampoo.” or “ooh, Interesting choice of existence.” No thank you. i shower in the dark. and before you judge me, ask yourself why you’re comfortable with a small glowing rectangle on the ceiling exposing every bad decision you’ve ever made. and i would like to remind everyone that humans used to live in caves. They survived without led bathroom lights and motivational quotes on the walls. im simply returning to my natural state. a slightly confused creature standing under water at midnight trying to remember why i walked into the bathroom, and you know what? the dark makes everything better anyway, you cant see your problems. Well, they still exist, but thats not my issue. out of sight, out of mine. a very advanced psychological technique that i definitely didn’t make up five seconds ago. I believe the bathroom lights knows too much, it have seen everything. My terrible hair days, my exhausted face, my moments of standing there wondering why i entered the bathroom. and then there are people who turn it on willingly, like you. i dont know how you do it, you walk into the bathroom and your first decision is” “yes, i would like to be fully perceived today!” by a light bulb. a light bulb. Have some dignity.

Imagine choosing maximum visibility while standing in the one place humans are guaranteed to look their worst. I prefer my shower with a little mystery and significantly fewer witnesses.

Sincerely, Ahmed

I used to imagine baptism as a perfectly clean dividing line. There would be the person I had been before the water and the person I became afterward, with no confusion between them. As I studied the biblical passages gathered in Beyond the Waterline: What Jesus Really Taught About Baptism, Salvation, and the Holy Spirit, I began to see something more honest. Baptism is a decisive beginning, but beginnings do not erase the fact that people enter them carrying memories, fears, habits, wounds, and unfinished questions.

I also kept returning to this Christian message about what baptism means and why Jesus commanded it because I wanted to understand the relationship between the water and the Holy Spirit without making either one smaller. I did not want to treat baptism as magical, but I also did not want to empty it of everything the New Testament says it means.

What I discovered is that the water does not need to erase my humanity in order to tell the truth. I can rise from baptism genuinely belonging to Jesus while still needing healing, teaching, correction, community, and grace. The ceremony can be real even when the person standing afterward is still unfinished.

I Wanted the Water to Make Everything Simple

I understand why people want baptism to solve every uncertainty.

There is something beautiful about a moment with a clear beginning and end.

You step toward the water.

Someone asks whether you trust Jesus.

You answer.

The name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is spoken.

You are lowered.

You rise.

People celebrate.

For a moment, everything looks understandable.

The old life is behind you.

The new life has begun.

I do not want to take away from that beauty. Baptism should be celebrated. The New Testament treats it with urgency because identifying with Jesus matters.

Still, I know what can happen after the celebration.

The water dries.

You change clothes.

The room empties.

You return home to the life that was waiting for you.

The bills remain.

The difficult relationship remains difficult.

Your body still carries pain.

The temptation you hoped would drown seems to have followed you home.

You may feel embarrassed even admitting that.

You were baptized.

Shouldn’t you be stronger now?

Shouldn’t prayer feel easier?

Shouldn’t the old desire have lost its voice?

I once thought changed allegiance meant the immediate disappearance of every struggle. Scripture taught me otherwise.

Israel passed through the Red Sea and still had to learn how to trust God in the wilderness.

Jesus came out of the Jordan and entered temptation.

The Corinthians received baptism and spiritual gifts, yet Paul still had to confront their pride, division, sexual wrongdoing, misuse of freedom, and mistreatment of one another.

The Galatians received the gospel and later became confused about grace.

Peter followed Jesus closely and still denied knowing Him when fear took over.

A real beginning can be followed by a difficult road.

The difficult road does not automatically make the beginning false.

It reveals why Jesus commanded more than baptism.

He told His followers to baptize disciples and teach them to obey everything He commanded.

The water is not the whole journey.

It is the place where the journey becomes visible.

I Did Not Enter the Water as a Blank Person

I brought a history with me.

Everyone does.

I brought things I knew how to explain and things I did not yet understand.

I brought lessons learned in childhood.

Ways of protecting myself.

Ideas about strength.

Ideas about weakness.

Ideas about what love required.

Some of those ideas were true.

Others were formed because I had to survive something.

A person who grew up in a safe home may hear “trust God” differently from someone whose trust was repeatedly betrayed.

A person who was allowed to speak openly may hear confession differently from someone who was punished for telling the truth.

A person who experienced healthy affection may understand divine love differently from someone who learned that love was given and withdrawn as a form of control.

A person who was valued without constantly achieving may hear grace differently from someone who spent a lifetime trying to earn the right to belong.

We bring these histories into Christian life.

Baptism does not pretend they never happened.

It places them beneath a new Lord.

That distinction has become important to me.

I can still feel afraid without fear remaining my rightful authority.

I can still hear shame without shame possessing the right to name me.

I can still feel anger without anger being allowed to govern my relationships.

I can still struggle with approval while learning that my deepest identity does not depend upon what people think.

The old voices may continue speaking.

Baptism announces that they are no longer entitled to obedience.

That is not instant emotional freedom.

It is the beginning of learning freedom.

I Thought Struggle Meant Nothing Had Changed

There is a cruel conclusion people sometimes reach after baptism.

“If I were truly changed, I would not struggle this way.”

That sentence can push a person into secrecy.

They do not want to disappoint the family who celebrated.

They do not want the pastor to question their testimony.

They do not want the congregation to think the baptism was merely emotional.

So they hide.

The addiction returns quietly.

The anger remains private.

The doubts are never spoken.

The relationship becomes unhealthy again.

The person continues attending church while becoming increasingly alone.

I have come to believe the church should tell candidates the truth before the water.

You may still be tempted.

You may still have questions.

Some habits may require a long process of renewal.

Your family may not understand what you have done.

You may discover that following Jesus creates conflict before it creates peace.

You may need counseling.

Treatment.

Accountability.

Medical care.

A recovery community.

You may need to change your environment.

You may need someone to help you recognize the places where temptation usually begins.

None of that means the Holy Spirit failed.

It means God saves whole people, and whole people have histories.

The church does not lower its moral standard by making struggle discussable.

It creates the possibility of honest obedience.

If I believe every temptation proves I am fraudulent, I will hide temptation.

If I understand temptation as a place where allegiance is being tested, I can bring it into the light.

I can say:

“This is still calling me.”

“I miss what harmed me.”

“I am afraid to lose the comfort it once gave.”

“I need someone to help me remember why I left.”

That is not surrender.

It may be the beginning of resistance.

I Learned That the Old Life Has a Selective Memory

The Israelites remembered Egypt strangely.

They remembered food.

They remembered predictability.

They forgot forced labor.

They forgot the cries of people living under oppression.

They forgot the bodies of children threatened by Pharaoh.

The wilderness made the old life look softer than it had been.

I recognize that pattern.

The past often returns through edited memories.

A person recovering from addiction remembers relief and forgets the destruction surrounding it.

Someone leaving a controlling relationship remembers affection and forgets how carefully they had to manage another person’s moods.

A person trying to stop lying remembers the protection dishonesty provided and forgets the loneliness created by never being known truthfully.

Someone leaving a community built around anger remembers belonging and forgets what constant outrage did to their ability to love.

The old master rarely returns saying:

“Come back to slavery.”

It says:

“Remember how comfortable it felt before everything became difficult?”

Sometimes I have to tell myself the whole truth.

I miss the relief, but I do not miss the chain.

I miss feeling wanted, but I do not miss being used.

I miss the predictability, but I do not miss disappearing in order to preserve it.

I miss the escape, but I do not miss waking up ashamed.

Baptism does not make me incapable of remembering the past selectively.

It gives me a new story from which to challenge the memory.

I crossed for a reason.

Christ did not bring me into the wilderness so I could idealize Egypt.

He brought me out because captivity was not life.

I Needed to Separate Guilt From Shame

Guilt and shame often speak together, but they are not the same.

Guilt says I did something wrong.

Shame says I am the wrong thing.

Real guilt should be faced.

If I lied, betrayed, manipulated, stole, or harmed someone, grace does not require me to pretend the action was harmless.

Repentance may involve confession.

Restitution.

Treatment.

Changed access.

A loss of authority.

Respecting the boundaries of the person I harmed.

Accepting that trust may return slowly or may never return in the form I want.

Forgiveness does not give me the right to demand that another person become comfortable with me again.

That truth can be painful.

It can also be freeing.

I do not need to control how my repentance is received.

I need to make it honest.

Shame takes this further and says:

“What you did is all you will ever be.”

That is where the gospel speaks another word.

My sin can be serious without becoming my eternal identity.

The resurrection means God can create life where I participated in death.

That does not guarantee restoration to every former role.

It does not remove every consequence.

It means consequence is not the same as final condemnation.

I can lose a position and still belong to Jesus.

I can be forgiven while relationships remain changed.

I can repent without making self-hatred the proof that I am sorry.

Self-hatred does not repair anyone.

Truth and changed behavior may.

Baptism points toward burial, but burial is not the final movement.

The person rises.

That rising does not say the past never happened.

It says the past no longer possesses the final word.

I Also Had to Release Guilt That Was Never Mine

Some shame does not come from what we did.

It comes from what was done to us.

People who were abused or manipulated often carry a sense of contamination.

They may feel that their body became spiritually dirty.

They may blame themselves for trusting.

For freezing.

For not leaving sooner.

For not understanding what was happening.

For still being affected years later.

Religious communities can intensify this by asking victims to examine themselves while protecting the person who caused the harm.

Why were you there?

Why did you not speak?

Have you forgiven?

Are you damaging the church by talking about this?

Those questions can place responsibility on the wrong body.

Christian baptism should speak differently.

My body belongs to Christ.

Not to the person who harmed it.

Not to the institution that refused to protect it.

Not to the memory that still causes my nervous system to respond.

Not to anyone who uses forgiveness language to demand access.

Healing may take time.

The body may react before the mind understands.

Being touched during prayer may feel unsafe.

Being lowered into water may create panic.

A particular voice, room, or phrase may awaken an old fear.

None of that proves a lack of faith.

A faithful church should understand consent.

It should explain how a candidate will be touched.

It should permit trusted assistance.

It should adapt the method when submersion would be physically or emotionally unsafe.

It should not force a person to share trauma publicly as part of a baptismal testimony.

The water is meant to declare belonging.

It should not reenact violation.

What happened to a person may remain part of their story.

It does not become their sin merely because they survived it.

I Needed Prayer to Become Honest

I used to think prayer needed to sound confident.

People who prayed publicly seemed to know how to speak without hesitation.

They had phrases ready.

They knew how to describe God’s purpose.

They sounded certain that He was listening.

Private prayer can feel very different.

The mind wanders.

Words repeat.

Silence stretches.

There are days when I do not know how to explain what I feel.

There are times when the most honest prayer is:

“Jesus, I need help.”

That is not an inferior prayer.

Prayer is relationship before it is eloquence.

Jesus taught His disciples to pray to the Father.

To honor His name.

To seek His kingdom.

To ask for daily provision.

To confess.

To forgive.

To seek deliverance from temptation and evil.

The prayer is simple enough for a new believer and deep enough for a lifetime.

I am allowed to say:

“I am afraid.”

“I am angry.”

“I do not understand.”

“I am tired of waiting.”

“I want to trust You, but I do not feel strong.”

The Psalms taught me that faith can speak through confusion.

Trust does not require pretending.

Sometimes prayer is silence.

Sometimes it is reading words someone else wrote because I cannot find my own.

Sometimes another person carries the prayer while I sit beside them.

The Holy Spirit helps in weakness.

Weakness is not where prayer stops being real.

It is one of the reasons prayer exists.

Baptism brings the person beneath the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Prayer is the continuing practice of living within that name.

I approach the Father through the Son with the help of the Spirit.

Not because I have mastered spiritual language.

Because Jesus opened the way.

I Discovered That Scripture Could Be Difficult Without Being My Enemy

A person can leave baptism wanting to understand everything.

Then they open the Bible.

The Gospels may feel approachable at first.

Jesus speaks.

He heals.

He tells stories.

Then the reader reaches ancient laws, wars, prophetic imagery, family histories, difficult commands, and letters addressing situations they do not understand.

It can feel overwhelming.

I no longer believe confusion means spiritual failure.

The Bible was written across many centuries and historical settings. It contains narrative, law, wisdom, poetry, prophecy, Gospel, letter, and vision.

It deserves patience.

I have learned to begin with Jesus.

To read the Gospels and notice how He treats people.

Whom He welcomes.

Whom He confronts.

How He uses power.

What He says about enemies, money, hypocrisy, mercy, and truth.

How He moves toward the cross.

How the resurrection changes everything.

Jesus becomes the center through whom the larger story takes shape.

That does not answer every question immediately.

It gives every question a Lord.

I also learned that asking is not the same as rebelling.

Why does this passage sound severe?

What did it mean in its original setting?

Why do Christians disagree about this?

How does the life and teaching of Jesus shape how I understand it?

A healthy church should help people ask those questions.

It should be capable of saying, “I do not know,” without acting as though uncertainty has overthrown God.

I have also become cautious about the thousands of voices available online.

Some teachers make every disagreement sound like an emergency.

One says my baptism was invalid.

Another says I do not have the Spirit.

Another says every church outside one group has abandoned truth.

Fear can hold attention.

Certainty can create dependence.

I have learned to ask whether the teaching points me toward Jesus or toward permanent reliance on the teacher.

Does it represent Scripture carefully?

Does it describe other Christians honestly?

Is there accountability?

Does it produce humility, courage, love, and truth?

The loudest voice is not automatically the safest guide.

Baptism places my mind beneath Christ.

It does not require me to surrender it to anyone who speaks in His name.

I Needed a Church, but I Did Not Need an Owner

I believe baptism joins believers visibly to the people of Christ.

I also understand why people hesitate to trust churches.

Some congregations have protected leaders instead of vulnerable people.

Some have turned political agreement into a test of spiritual loyalty.

Some have demanded service while providing little care.

Some have treated questions as rebellion.

Some have celebrated baptisms and forgotten the people after the photographs were taken.

Church hurt is painful because the community claims to represent Jesus.

When it causes harm, people may struggle to separate the Lord from the institution.

I have had to remember that baptism is into Christ.

No pastor was crucified for me.

No denomination rose from the grave.

No local church owns the Holy Spirit.

That does not make local community unnecessary.

I still need people.

I need relationships where I can be known.

Where someone can listen without turning my confession into gossip.

Where another person can challenge me without humiliating me.

Where absence is noticed without becoming surveillance.

Where gifts are encouraged without becoming exploited.

Where leaders can be questioned.

Healthy belonging is not the same as ownership.

A healthy church helps me become more dependent upon Jesus.

A controlling church makes access to Jesus seem dependent upon loyalty to itself.

A healthy church investigates concerns.

A controlling church protects reputation.

A healthy church understands that leadership is service.

A controlling church treats authority as exemption from accountability.

No church is perfect.

The question is whether truth can live there.

Can people admit failure?

Can leaders repent?

Are children and vulnerable adults protected?

Are finances transparent?

Can someone leave without being threatened spiritually?

Is baptism followed by actual discipleship?

I do not need a perfect community.

I do need one where imperfection is not protected through secrecy and power.

I Had to Learn That the Minister Was Not the Source

Some people discover that the person who baptized them later committed serious wrongdoing.

The memory becomes complicated.

The minister’s voice is part of the moment.

Their hands supported the body.

Their presence is visible in photographs.

When their hidden life becomes known, the person baptized may wonder whether the act was corrupted.

I do not believe the moral failure of the minister becomes the spiritual identity of the baptism.

The minister should have been faithful.

Wrongdoing should be confronted.

Victims should be protected.

Authority may need to end.

None of that means the candidate was baptized into the minister.

The name spoken was supposed to be the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The faith was directed toward Jesus.

If baptism depended upon the hidden perfection of the administrator, no one could possess assurance.

We do not know everything about the person standing in the water with us.

The servant can fail.

Christ remains faithful.

That does not make healing immediate.

A person may still need time to reclaim the memory.

The ceremony may remain connected emotionally with betrayal.

But another baptism is not automatically required.

The human hands were never the source of grace.

I Stopped Trying to Schedule the Holy Spirit

Christians often want an exact spiritual timeline.

First faith.

Then regeneration.

Then water.

Then the Holy Spirit.

Or perhaps Spirit, water, and forgiveness occur in another precise order.

Acts refuses to behave so predictably.

At Pentecost, repentance, baptism, forgiveness, and the promised Spirit are proclaimed together.

The Samaritans receive water and later experience the Spirit through the apostles’ ministry.

Cornelius receives the Spirit before anyone can withhold water.

The Ephesian disciples receive Christian baptism and then experience the Spirit through Paul’s laying on of hands.

God remains free.

The church can schedule a baptismal service.

It cannot control divine life.

That truth does not make the relationship between water and Spirit meaningless.

The Spirit gives the inward life baptism confesses.

He joins believers to Christ and one another.

Water gives the body an outward place within that confession.

The two belong together without becoming identical.

The church applies water.

Jesus baptizes with the Spirit.

This protects me from trusting the ceremony apart from God.

It also protects me from claiming inward spirituality while refusing the outward obedience Jesus gave.

Spirit and water do not need to compete.

The Spirit gives the reality.

The water embodies the response.

I Did Not Need to Feel Something Dramatic

Not everyone rises from baptism overwhelmed.

Some cry.

Some laugh.

Some feel peaceful.

Some feel cold.

Some feel nervous.

Some are relieved that the attention is ending.

Emotion is real.

It is not the final measure.

I can experience intense emotion without enduring transformation.

I can also make a genuine response while feeling emotionally quiet.

The Holy Spirit’s work should be seen across life, not measured only through one moment.

Am I becoming more honest?

More patient?

More willing to repent?

More capable of using strength without controlling?

More attentive to people I once ignored?

Am I learning self-control?

Am I returning to Jesus after failure?

Those changes may grow slowly.

A seed does not become false because its work happens underground.

I no longer believe I need to imitate someone else’s baptism story.

I do not need to claim an experience I did not have.

The meaning rests in Jesus and in the truth of the confession.

Feelings may understand later.

I Realized Baptism Was Not a Reset Button

Failure after baptism can make a person want the water again.

The first baptism represented a new beginning.

The failure seems to have stained it.

Another ceremony appears to offer relief.

Usually, the New Testament answer is not another baptism.

It is repentance.

Peter denied Jesus and needed restoration.

The Corinthians needed correction and discipline.

The Galatians needed to return to grace.

The churches in Revelation needed to repent.

They were not told to repeat Christian initiation every time the life contradicted the confession.

Repentance may require much more than another public moment.

It may mean admitting the truth.

Entering treatment.

Changing access to money or technology.

Ending a relationship.

Accepting removal from leadership.

Making restitution.

Allowing another person to keep distance.

These actions may not create the emotional release of entering water.

They can create actual change.

I do not need repeated baptism to make Jesus willing to forgive.

I need to return to the Lord my baptism already named.

The old master no longer has rightful ownership.

I may have obeyed the old voice again.

I can still turn.

The resurrection means falling is not the same as final death.

Stand again.

I Still Believe Some People Need Baptism for the First Time

Not every earlier ceremony was Christian baptism.

Some people participated in another religion’s washing.

Some were coerced.

Some entered water within a movement denying the biblical Jesus.

Some were too young to possess any meaningful response and later became convinced baptism should follow personal faith.

Acts describes people who had received John’s baptism and later received baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus after hearing the fulfilled gospel.

That tells me the meaning matters.

Water alone does not settle everything.

A person may sincerely need Christian baptism now.

Other stories are less clear.

Someone was baptized as a child with simple faith.

Another was baptized under some social pressure while also genuinely trusting Christ.

Someone received baptism by pouring and later became convinced immersion expresses the biblical pattern more fully.

Someone was baptized as an infant and now understands that act as grace placed upon them before they could respond.

I do not believe every story should be forced into one easy answer.

No one enters baptism with perfect motives or complete knowledge.

The question is whether the act truthfully identified the person with the Jesus of the gospel according to their capacity.

A second baptism should not be used to manage fear.

If anxiety is the true problem, another ceremony may create only temporary relief. The mind will find another possible flaw.

Was every word spoken correctly?

Was the whole body submerged?

Was the minister properly authorized?

Did I believe enough?

Assurance cannot rest upon perfect reconstruction.

It must rest in Christ.

I Began to See My Body Differently

Baptism is physical.

The body enters.

The body is touched by water.

The body rises.

Christian faith does not save an invisible spiritual self while treating the body as disposable.

The Son became flesh.

He suffered in a body.

Died in a body.

Rose in a body.

My body matters.

That means it needs care.

Rest.

Food.

Medical attention.

Safety.

Honesty about limitations.

Religious service can become dangerous when exhaustion is treated as proof of devotion.

A church or ministry does not own the baptized body.

A spouse does not own it.

A leader does not own it.

A political cause does not own it.

The body belongs to Christ.

Sometimes that belonging calls me to serve beyond comfort.

Sometimes it calls me to say no.

To leave danger.

To take medication.

To seek counseling.

To report abuse.

To refuse unwanted touch.

To rest before exhaustion turns into resentment or cruelty.

A boundary is not always selfishness.

Remaining accessible to someone’s sin is not always forgiveness.

Jesus calls people to carry a cross.

He does not give abusers the right to place crosses upon others for their own benefit.

The body baptized into Christ has dignity.

It also has a future.

I Found God in Ordinary Faithfulness

The divided sea happened once.

Manna arrived daily.

I sometimes want another dramatic moment because ordinary obedience feels small.

Another spiritual event.

Another emotional beginning.

Another moment when everything becomes clear.

God may give those moments.

Most of life is lived between them.

Faithfulness often looks like getting out of bed.

Taking the medicine.

Answering honestly.

Not sending the angry message.

Going to counseling.

Listening to a child.

Keeping a promise no one else remembers.

Refusing a secret opportunity.

Preparing a meal.

Showing up for someone who cannot repay you.

Returning after missing several days of prayer.

These actions may not feel like resurrection.

They can be where resurrection life becomes visible.

Growth is often easier to recognize in retrospect.

I become angry but do not become as cruel as I once did.

I feel fear and speak the truth anyway.

I fail and ask for help sooner.

I receive criticism without collapsing completely.

I notice someone I would once have overlooked.

The changes are not dramatic enough for a stage testimony.

They are still grace.

The baptized life is built through thousands of small responses to the new Lord.

I Know the Water Was Pointing Toward My Grave

Baptism is joyful, but it contains death.

The person is lowered.

For a moment, they disappear.

Then they rise.

The movement speaks toward the future of every Christian body.

I will die unless Jesus returns first.

That truth is not easy.

Death separates.

It leaves empty rooms.

It ends familiar forms of relationship.

Jesus wept near a grave.

Christian hope does not require me to pretend death is harmless.

It tells me death is defeated.

I may fear the process of dying.

I may fear pain.

Loss of control.

Leaving people I love.

Faith and fear can exist together.

The resurrection does not depend upon my emotions remaining steady.

It depends upon Jesus being alive.

My body may age.

Lose strength.

Carry illness.

Become disabled.

Be forgotten by a culture that values productivity.

God has not forgotten it.

Baptism points toward bodily resurrection.

The true Christian hope is not that the soul escapes a worthless shell.

God raises human beings.

That gives dignity to every body now.

The elderly person is not spiritually obsolete.

The disabled believer is not incomplete.

The dying person is not a failed healing story.

The person whose memory is affected by illness remains completely known by God.

Every baptism says to the future grave:

“You may hold this person for a time. You will not keep them forever.”

The Water Did Not Answer Every Question

I came out of the water still carrying questions.

I now understand that this did not make the act meaningless.

The water was never supposed to make me omniscient.

It was meant to confess whom I trusted.

Jesus.

The crucified and risen Son.

The One who brings me to the Father.

The One who gives the Holy Spirit.

The One who calls me into a body larger than myself.

I may continue asking questions for the rest of my life.

About suffering.

Prayer.

Scripture.

Church.

Healing.

The mysteries of God.

Faith does not require me to pretend every answer has arrived.

It calls me to bring the questions toward Christ.

Baptism did not erase my past.

It placed my past beneath another Lord.

It did not remove every struggle.

It changed the direction of the struggle.

It did not promise that Christians would never hurt me.

It reminded me that no church owns the Jesus into whom I was baptized.

It did not make my body invulnerable.

It gave my body resurrection hope.

It did not make failure impossible.

It made return possible.

It did not make me finished.

It told me where the unfinished life belongs.

I belong to the Father.

I am united with the Son.

I depend upon the Holy Spirit.

I have been received among a people who should help me walk.

The waterline was not the conclusion.

It was the moment my whole life began learning how to follow.

I did not come out without questions.

I came out with someone greater than my questions.

And I am still learning to walk with Him.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from being asked to teach a machine the thing that used to be your livelihood. You sit at a laptop, often under a nondisclosure agreement, often managed by someone two decades your junior, and you read what an artificial intelligence has written. Then you tell it where it went wrong. You score the dialogue. You flag the moment the scene lost its rhythm, the joke that did not land, the emotional beat that rang false. You are very good at this, because you spent a career learning to do exactly this for human writers, human editors, human rooms. And the better you do it, the more you sharpen a system that already stands accused of hollowing out the market you came from.

This is not a hypothetical. According to a 24 June 2026 investigation by The Hollywood Reporter, it has quietly become a survival strategy for a meaningful slice of the American entertainment workforce: television writers, film editors, and development executives who can no longer find enough traditional work are taking gigs training the very generative-AI models widely understood to be contributing to the contraction of that same market. They are, in the publication's framing, helping to “smooth out” the systems that may pave the way to their own obsolescence.

The most arresting line in the reporting came from a veteran writer who had spent time inside this work. “How many times can you tell a machine it's wrong without losing your mind?” The question is not rhetorical. It is, increasingly, an occupational hazard.

The shape of the bargain

To understand why a mid-career screenwriter would take this work, you have to understand that for the person who needs to pay rent this month and cannot find traditional employment, the decision is not philosophical. It is financial. That distinction matters enormously, and it is the first thing that gets lost when the arrangement is described from the outside as a betrayal.

Writer Ruth Fowler put the calculus plainly. In a personal essay published by Wired in May 2026 — bluntly titled “I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI” — she described turning to AI training because entertainment work had dried up and she “needed cash to pay rent, to buy food.” Over a stretch of months she cycled through a churn of short contracts across multiple platforms. Wired's own framing of her experience described roughly twenty contracts across five different platforms, the work soul-crushing and unstable in equal measure. In her account, projects vanished without warning: no message, no explanation, just an abrupt loss of access to the systems she had been working in. She was, as she put it, interviewed by an AI and managed by recent graduates — professionals decades into their careers taking direction from people barely out of school.

Fowler's ambivalence is the point. She knew, even as she did it, that she was helping to build the very systems that could erode her screenwriting career. She did it anyway, because the alternative was not abstract principle versus profit. It was rent versus no rent.

The moral weather around the decision is heavy. Screenwriter Robin Palmer, who has written television movies for the Disney Channel and Hallmark, spoke with CBS News about doing AI training work and acknowledged that some of her peers compared the choice to crossing a picket line. That comparison is not casual in this industry, and it is not deployed lightly. It carries the full weight of one of the most consequential labour actions in recent American history.

Editor Gabe Sena, another entertainment worker who has taken on AI fine-tuning as a side hustle, offered a different framing — one less about morality than about survival inside a shifting field. “I'm mid-career,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “and I don't want to be a dinosaur in my field.” Steven Woolworth, a former development executive who had worked with HBO and Studio TF1 America, found AI work through the platform Mercor after a year and a half without a job. The pattern is consistent across the reporting: these are not dilettantes or technophiles. They are skilled professionals who exhausted the traditional market and found the door to AI training propped conveniently open.

Even those who have not had to make the choice decline to condemn those who do. Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and the more recent Pluribus, told the publication that he had been extraordinarily lucky throughout his career and would not judge people simply trying to provide for their families. That refusal to judge, from someone with the standing to judge, is itself a kind of data point. It tells you that inside the industry, the people doing this work are not regarded as villains. They are regarded as casualties.

What the work actually is

The technical term for the labour at the centre of this story is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, or RLHF. It is one of the least-understood and most consequential processes in modern AI, and it is worth dwelling on, because the entire paradox of this moment lives inside its mechanics.

A large language model, in its raw pre-trained state, is a statistical engine for predicting the next token in a sequence. It has ingested an enormous corpus of human writing and learned the patterns within it, but it has no inherent sense of what makes an answer good, useful, tasteful, funny, or true. Left to its own devices it will produce text that is fluent and frequently useless. RLHF is the process by which human judgement is injected back into the system. Humans are shown the model's outputs and asked to rank them, score them, correct them, and explain why one response is better than another. Those human preferences are distilled into a reward model, which is then used to nudge the underlying system toward outputs that humans actually prefer.

In other words, RLHF is the stage at which raw machine fluency gets converted into something that feels human. And the people best qualified to perform that conversion — for creative tasks specifically — are precisely the people who have spent careers cultivating taste: the writers who know why a line of dialogue works, the editors who know where a scene should breathe, the executives who know why a pitch is dead on arrival. The system needs their judgement. It cannot manufacture taste on its own. So it rents theirs.

The economics of this are not generous, but they are not nothing. The Hollywood Reporter noted that creative writers could earn up to $44 an hour to work on an AI project through the jobs platform Handshake, while a music professional with a master's degree or above could command up to $100 an hour. Tim Friedlander, a voice actor and a leader at the National Association of Voice Actors, captured the seductive arithmetic without endorsing it, noting that he would not necessarily fault someone offered potentially $1,200 for four hours of work. For a creative worker accustomed to feast-or-famine income, those rates can look like a lifeline. They also sit, in many cases, below the worker's true market value when traditional work was available — which is part of what makes the bargain feel less like opportunity and more like a managed descent.

The company organising human intelligence

If RLHF is the mechanism, the marketplace is the structure that scales it. And no company better embodies the dynamic than Mercor, the firm through which several of the entertainment workers in the reporting found their gigs.

Mercor was founded in 2023 by three young entrepreneurs — Thiel Fellows, recipients of the $100,000 grants that billionaire investor Peter Thiel awards to people who forgo or abandon college to build companies. By their own account the founders set out to organise human intelligence to power the AI economy, and the business they built does precisely that. Originally conceived as a hiring company that assessed candidates by analysing interview transcripts, résumés, and portfolio sites, Mercor pivoted after it found itself sitting on a network of specialised experts. It now recruits highly skilled professionals — including writers, scientists, doctors, and lawyers — to provide the human feedback that trains AI models.

The scale of the operation is the part that should make anyone pause. In October 2025, Mercor raised $350 million in a Series C round led by Felicis, with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, and Robinhood Ventures, quintupling its valuation to roughly $10 billion. Its early backers reportedly included Thiel himself, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. The company has said it pays out more than $1.5 million per day to contractors, with tens of thousands of experts on its roster earning, on average, north of $85 an hour.

Read those figures back to back and the architecture of the moment snaps into focus. A company valued at ten billion dollars, founded by people in their early twenties, has built a profitable business out of channelling the accumulated expertise of mid-career professionals — many of them displaced from their own fields — into the refinement of systems that compete with those same fields. The revenue model, as more than one analyst has observed, is not merely selling software. It is monetising the slice of the roughly five-trillion-dollar US knowledge-work economy that AI hopes to absorb. The displaced expert is not incidental to the business. The displaced expert is the supply chain.

The numbers behind the squeeze

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a handful of anecdotes dressed up as a trend. The data does not allow that.

The jobs platform Indeed has tracked a striking shift in the arts category specifically. Between May 2025 and April 2026, the share of arts-related postings that referenced AI roughly doubled, from about five per cent to about eleven per cent. That alone might be unremarkable in an economy saturated with AI hype, except for the comparison: across all sectors combined, the share of AI-related postings rose from 2.8 per cent to 5.5 per cent over the same window. The arts, in other words, are absorbing AI-adjacent work faster than the economy as a whole. The field most romantically associated with irreplaceable human originality is the field tilting most steeply toward training its mechanical understudy.

Meanwhile, the traditional execution work is genuinely thinning. A widely cited analysis published in November 2025 by Bloomberry, which examined roughly 180 million global job postings, found that the picture for creative occupations is bifurcating. Strategic and directorial roles — creative directors, creative managers, creative producers — have held up reasonably well. Execution roles have not. Computer graphic artist postings, the analysis found, fell for two consecutive years: down twelve per cent in the first year of the window and a further, steeper drop in the second. The pattern is consistent with what the entertainment workers describe from the inside. The work that can be specified, scoped, and reproduced is being squeezed. The work that requires judgement about what should be made at all is, for now, more insulated.

That bifurcation is worth holding onto, because it complicates the simplest version of the story. AI is not flatly destroying creative labour. It is reorganising it — pulling value upward toward a narrowing band of strategic roles while draining it from the broad middle where most working creatives have always made their living. And it is precisely that broad middle that is now being recruited, at below-market rates, to refine the systems doing the draining.

The implicit bargain, broken and rebuilt

There is a useful way to think about this that predates the current AI boom. Every cultural worker who ever put work into the world participated in an implicit bargain: I make something, it enters the commons, and over time it shapes the people who come after me, including those who will compete with me. That is how culture has always renewed itself. The young writer learns by absorbing the old writer's scripts. The apprentice editor studies the master's cuts. Influence flows forward, and the people who shaped the field are gradually succeeded by the people they shaped.

Generative AI breaks that bargain in two distinct ways, and it is important not to conflate them.

The first break happened during pre-training, and it happened without consent. The models that now compete with creative workers were built, in significant part, on the accumulated output of those same workers — the scripts, the films, the articles, the images scraped from the open internet and ingested as training data. Storyboard artist Phil Langone, who has worked on major productions, told The Hollywood Reporter in unambiguous terms that AI had crawled his own work and stolen from him. The first break, in other words, took the worker's past output without asking.

The second break is the one this story is really about, and it is subtler and arguably more troubling. Having absorbed the worker's past output, the systems now require the worker's present judgement to become genuinely good. And this time they are asking — they are even paying. But they are asking under conditions that strip the work of everything that made creative labour meaningful: no authorship, no credit, no residuals, no ownership of the improvement you create, and a nondisclosure agreement ensuring you cannot even say what you did. You contribute the most refined product of your career — your taste — and it disappears into a model that bears your fingerprints nowhere and competes with you everywhere.

This is the heart of the paradox the reporting circles. The creative workers who helped build the cultural knowledge base that AI trained on are now being paid, below their market value, under NDAs, with no job security, to refine the same systems. The bargain that once renewed culture has been industrialised and inverted. Influence no longer flows from master to apprentice across a shared field. It flows from worker to machine across a one-way valve, metered by a platform, and the worker is paid a contractor's wage to operate the valve that drains their own profession.

Training your replacement is an old story

It helps, here, to resist the temptation to treat this as unprecedented. Workers have been asked to train their replacements before, and the history is instructive precisely because it is so unglamorous.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the practice became notorious in American information-technology departments, where employees were sometimes required, as a condition of their severance, to train the lower-cost offshore or visa-holding workers who would take over their roles. The cruelty of the arrangement was widely reported and widely resented: you not only lost your job, you were made to hand over the institutional knowledge that made the job possible, often under threat of forfeiting your exit package if you refused. The phrase “training your replacement” entered the language as a byword for managed humiliation.

What is happening now is both like and unlike that precedent. It is like it in the basic structure: skilled workers transferring their hard-won expertise to whatever will perform their function more cheaply. It is unlike it in two respects that cut in opposite directions. On one hand, the AI worker is not usually being coerced by their current employer as a condition of severance; many, like Fowler, walk in voluntarily because the traditional market has already collapsed beneath them. On the other hand, the replacement they are training is not a person who will go on to have their own career, raise a family, and eventually train someone else. It is a system that can be copied infinitely, never tires, never unionises, and never ages into obsolescence the way a human does. You are not training a successor. You are training a substitute that does not succeed you so much as it absorbs you.

That distinction matters for the long-term question, because the old offshoring story still left the work in human hands somewhere. The new version aims to remove it from human hands altogether — and asks the very humans being removed to make the removal smoother.

Ghost work, made visible

The entertainment-industry version of this story is genuinely new in its glamour and its visibility, but the underlying labour pattern is not. The anthropologist Mary L. Gray and the computer scientist Siddharth Suri gave it a name in their 2019 book: ghost work. They were describing the vast, deliberately invisible human workforce that makes automated systems appear seamless — the people labelling images, moderating content, sorting data, and correcting errors behind the curtain of apparent machine intelligence. Their findings were stark: this work typically pays below the legal minimums of traditional employment, comes with no benefits, and can be terminated at any moment for any reason or none. The entire design intent of ghost work is for the customer to believe the magic happened automatically, when in fact a human was always in the loop, paid as little as possible and kept out of sight.

What the Hollywood story reveals is ghost work climbing the prestige ladder. The people now doing it are not anonymous crowdworkers in the developing world — the population Gray and Suri largely documented — but credentialed professionals from one of the most visible industries on earth. And yet the structural features are identical: instability, invisibility, no benefits, abrupt termination, and an NDA to ensure the curtain stays drawn. Fowler's description of being hired and fired across projects with no explanation, of vanishing access and silent dismissal, reads almost as a direct transcription of the ghost-work conditions catalogued years earlier. The difference is the calibre of the labour being burned. The system has discovered that for the hardest creative judgements, it needs not just any human in the loop but a highly trained one — and it has built a market to extract that judgement on ghost-work terms.

The legal system is beginning, haltingly, to notice. Scale AI and Surge AI, two of the largest platforms in the RLHF and data-labelling economy, have each faced lawsuits alleging worker misclassification — the practice of treating workers as independent contractors while controlling their hours, tools, and methods closely enough to look a great deal like employment. The complaints describe unpaid training, unrealistic deadlines, and pay structures that erode the headline rate. More disturbingly, Scale AI has faced litigation alleging that contractors were exposed to deeply traumatising content — material involving suicide, violence, and child sexual abuse — while training systems for major technology firms, and that promised mental-health support never materialised. The creative workers training entertainment models are mostly insulated from the worst of that content. But they are exposed to the same underlying legal and structural ambiguity: a workforce that does indispensable work for trillion-dollar ambitions while being classified, paid, and protected as if it were doing something marginal.

The scab question, reconsidered

Return now to Robin Palmer's peers, and their comparison of AI training to crossing a picket line. The metaphor is worth taking seriously rather than waving away, because the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike is the unavoidable context for everything happening now.

That strike — 148 days, around 11,500 screenwriters, one of the longest work stoppages in the guild's history — was, more than any prior Hollywood labour action, a fight about artificial intelligence. The writers won meaningful protections: AI could not be credited as a writer, AI-generated text could not be treated as literary material, and studios could not use AI to undercut writers' pay or compel them to build on machine-generated drafts. It was a landmark, and it established that organised creative labour could extract real concessions from capital on the AI question.

But the strike's protections, by design, govern the relationship between writers and the studios that employ them. They do not govern the relationship between a freelance writer and an AI-training platform operating entirely outside the guild's jurisdiction. A writer who takes an RLHF gig is not violating their WGA contract. They are stepping into a parallel labour market the contract never reached. That is the precise sense in which the picket-line metaphor both fits and fails. It fits because the writer is, in aggregate, strengthening the technology the guild fought to contain. It fails because there is no picket line to cross — no organised action, no struck employer, no solidarity structure to betray. The work happens in a jurisdictional vacuum the union has not yet figured out how to enter.

That vacuum is the real scandal, and it is structural rather than personal. To frame the individual worker as a scab is to demand heroic sacrifice from the most precarious people in the system while the comfortable look on. The studios that scrape the work, the platforms that broker the labour, and the investors who collect the returns face no such moral scrutiny. It is the unemployed writer choosing between an AI gig and an empty refrigerator who gets cast as the traitor. There is something badly miscalibrated about a moral economy that lands its hardest judgement on its weakest participant. The more honest target is the absence of any collective framework — any union, any regulation, any floor — that would let creative workers refuse this work without starving, or do it on terms that did not strip them of dignity.

The cultural-ecology problem

All of which brings us to the question the Hollywood Reporter investigation poses but cannot answer, the one that outlives any individual's rent payment. For the mid-career worker, taking the gig is a financial decision, full stop, and no one is entitled to second-guess it. But at scale, across thousands of such decisions, something larger is being decided, and it deserves to be named clearly.

A creative culture renews itself through a particular and fragile process. People make things. Other people respond, absorb, react against, and build something new. Taste is transmitted not through specification but through immersion — through years of doing the work, getting it wrong, watching what lands and what dies, and slowly developing the judgement that cannot be written down because it lives in the body and the ear. That judgement is the actual asset. It is what the AI systems lack and what they are paying displaced experts to supply.

Here is the cultural-ecology problem in its sharpest form. The judgement being harvested through RLHF was cultivated under conditions that no longer exist. Fowler and her peers learned their craft inside a functioning industry — staffed writers' rooms, real productions, mentorship, the accumulated experience of getting paid to make things and learning from the making. They are now feeding that hard-won judgement into systems whose growth is correlated with the disappearance of exactly those conditions. If the execution-level work continues to thin, where does the next generation acquire the taste that this generation is busy uploading? You cannot develop a screenwriter's instinct for dialogue by scoring an AI's attempts at it under an NDA. You develop it by writing dialogue that real people perform for real audiences, over and over, for years.

This is the deeper paradox, the one beneath the visible one. The visible paradox is that creative workers are refining the systems that threaten them. The deeper paradox is that the resource those systems most need — cultivated human taste — is non-renewable under the conditions the systems create. The models are, in effect, drawing down a reservoir of judgement that was filled by an industry they are helping to drain, and there is no obvious mechanism by which the reservoir refills. A culture can run for some time on its accumulated stock of expertise. It cannot run forever on a stock it has stopped replenishing.

None of this means the machines will produce work indistinguishable from the human article, or that human creativity is about to vanish. The Bloomberry data itself suggests a more textured outcome, with strategic and directorial judgement holding firm even as execution erodes. The likeliest near future is not the abolition of human creativity but its concentration — a smaller number of people at the top of the value chain, directing systems trained on the harvested judgement of a much larger number of people who have been pushed out of the middle. That is not the end of culture. It is the enclosure of it.

What would have to change

If there is a forward-looking answer here, it is not the consoling one, and it is not a prediction that the machines will fail. They may not fail. The honest answer is that the terms of this bargain are not laws of nature; they are choices, and they could be made differently.

The choices that matter are mostly structural. The misclassification suits against Scale AI and Surge AI hint at one front: if the people performing RLHF were treated as the employees their working conditions suggest they are, the economics of the entire data-labour market would shift, and the most exploitative edges would dull. The WGA's 2023 victory hints at another: collective bargaining reached the studio relationship, and there is no reason in principle it could not eventually reach the platform relationship, if creative labour organises across the jurisdictional gap that currently swallows this work. And the unconsented foundation of the whole edifice — the scraped past output that storyboard artists and writers describe as theft — remains live in courtrooms, where the question of whether training on creative work without permission is lawful has not been settled.

The deepest choice, though, is about the reservoir. If cultivated human taste is the scarce input that makes these systems valuable, then a culture that wants to keep producing distinctively human work has an interest — an economic interest, not merely a sentimental one — in keeping the conditions that produce that taste alive. That means defending the broad middle of creative employment, not just the strategic peak. It means recognising that the people best qualified to teach machines how to be human are valuable precisely because they remain something the machines are not, and that paying them ghost-work wages to disappear into a model is a way of spending down a resource no one knows how to remanufacture.

The veteran writer's question — how many times can you tell a machine it's wrong without losing your mind — turns out to be the right one, just aimed slightly off. The real question is not how much the individual can endure. It is how long a culture can keep asking its most skilled people to pour their judgement into systems built to make that judgement redundant, before it discovers that the well it has been drawing from was never going to refill itself. That is not a problem any single worker at any single laptop can solve. It is a problem about what kind of bargain a society is willing to offer the people who make the things it loves. Right now, the bargain on the table is rent in exchange for obsolescence, paid by the hour, under an NDA. The people taking it are not the ones who should have to answer for it.

References

1. Lesley Goldberg and colleagues, “Hollywood Workers Are Training AI Models as Job Prospects Grow Slim,” The Hollywood Reporter, 24 June 2026. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/ai-training-hollywood-writer-jobs-prospects-1236628302/
2. Ruth Fowler, “I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI,” Wired, May 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/
3. Ruth Fowler, “I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI” (republished excerpt), Longreads, 12 May 2026. https://longreads.com/2026/05/12/training-ai-tv-industry/
4. “In Hollywood, AI gig work could be the 'new waiting tables,'” Marketplace, 20 May 2026. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/05/20/in-hollywood-ai-gig-work-could-be-the-new-waiting-tables
5. “AI startup Mercor now valued at $10 billion with new $350 million funding round,” CNBC, 27 October 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/ai-hiring-startup-mercor-funding.html
6. Marina Temkin, “Mercor quintuples valuation to $10B with $350M Series C,” TechCrunch, 27 October 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/27/mercor-quintuples-valuation-to-10b-350m-series-c/
7. “Mercor,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercor
8. “I analyzed 180M jobs to see what jobs AI is actually replacing today,” Bloomberry, 3 November 2025. https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-analyzed-180m-jobs-to-see-what-jobs-ai-is-actually-replacing-today/
9. “Scale AI Sued for Subjecting Contract Workers to 'Depraved' Content,” Inc., 2025. https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/scale-ai-sued-for-subjecting-contract-workers-to-depraved-content/91111116
10. “Training Artificial Intelligence and Employer Liability: Lessons from Schuster v. Scale AI,” Epstein Becker Green / Workforce Bulletin, 2025. https://www.workforcebulletin.com/training-artificial-intelligence-and-employer-liability-lessons-from-schuster-v-scale-ai
11. “Surge AI and Scale AI face lawsuits over alleged worker misclassification and unpaid wages,” Complete AI Training. https://completeaitraining.com/news/surge-ai-and-scale-ai-face-lawsuits-over-alleged-worker/
12. “What Companies Can Learn from the Surge AI and Scale AI Lawsuits,” Worksuite. https://worksuite.com/resources/insights/ai-misclassification-lawsuits
13. Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. https://ghostwork.info/
14. “2023 Writers Guild of America strike,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike
15. “What the WGA Contract Tells Us About Workers Navigating AI,” Tech Policy Press. https://www.techpolicy.press/what-the-wga-contract-tells-us-about-workers-navigating-ai/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

We have seen that the conservative agenda, as laid out in the Free Alberta Strategy, is to enable the provincial government to effectively override federal legislation they don't like while remaining in Confederation. This is called “sovereignty within a united Canada”. This avoids all the problems associated with outright separation, like what are you going to use for money, or how are you going to explain it to the Alberta First Nations to their satisfaction, and of course it avoids having to run the risk of losing a referendum on separation. However, it implies generally breaking existing law, and in some cases even the Constitution.

One area of federal legislation that the UCP doesn't like is immigration. Of the ten questions on the ballot four are on the topic of immigration. So let's begin by looking at the questions and parsing them.

The first question asks

Do you support the Government of Alberta taking increased control over immigration for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels, prioritizing economic migration and giving Albertans first priority on new employment opportunities?

Interestingly, increased provincial control over immigration is something that several provinces are asking for, but for entirely the opposite reason to the UCP's: want to speed up the process of integrating immigrants into the work force. The UCP wants to keep people out.

One thing we will find across all the referendum questions is wording that implicitly assumes something that is in fact unfounded. Here's an example: “for the purposes of decreasing immigration to more sustainable levels”. The implication is that right now immigration is at unsustainable levels. Which is of course nonsense.

“Prioritizing economic migration” means business people. It does not mean international students. It certainly does not mean asylum seekers. And I doubt very much it means temporary foreign workers.

And since when does any level of government tell employers who they should hire.

Let's go on to the second question:

Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta-approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?

The key phrase here is “Alberta-approved immigration status”. It means that if you immigrate to Canada, the provincial government can still decide if you may settle in Alberta, or not. This obviously flies in the face of all immigration law.

The other issue here is health care. It is not exclusively provincially funded. It is also federally funded, to comply with the universality and portability principles of the Canada Health Act. Everyone has the right to receive the same level of care wherever they are. And yes, that includes temporary foreign workers and asylum claimants, as it should. Some provinces offer free health insurance to international students; Alberta is not one of them. Again, the idea that the provincial government might pick and choose who gets public health insurance flies in the face of Canadian law.

Question 3 introduces a new obstacle to those who would come to Alberta unless they already have permanent residence:

Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for social support programs as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law requiring all individuals with a non-permanent legal immigration status to reside in Alberta for at least 12 months before qualifying for any provincially-funded social support programs?

This means that if you were a refugee or a temporary foreign worker and you want health coverage, you would have to pay for private health insurance for a full year. And if that wasn't enough to deter you, there's question 4:

Assuming that all Canadian citizens and permanent residents continue to qualify for public health care and education as they do now, do you support the Government of Alberta charging a reasonable fee or premium to individuals with a non-permanent immigration status living in Alberta for their and their family’s use of the healthcare and education systems?

---

Let me see if I can put together a single question that captures all four. Something like this:

Do you support the Government of Alberta defying Canada and using its authority to deter some outsiders from coming to Alberta and using services that you paid handsomely for all these years, and taking your jobs?

Because that's what these questions amount to. Put yourself in the position of someone thinking of coming to Canada. Would you choose to settle in Alberta?

These questions are aimed at people who think that immigrants are freeloaders and who think that they can't get a job or a decent wage because they have to compete with the freeloaders. And this is happening because the feds welcome them. So in order to stop this takeover of our beautiful province we have to defy Ottawa.

If this strikes you as an absurd exaggeration, read the questions again.

And as always, please , subscribe and share. Thanks!

Yuii

In Summary: * The little bit of yard work accomplished this morning did make quite an improvement in how the front yard looks, but it really wiped me out. I am tempted to have another go at the front yard tomorrow morning. Tomorrow's work, if it happens, will consist of nothing more than shoving the lawn mower back and forth. There's no more trim work out front needing done.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 230.49 lbs. * bp= 148/88 (75)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:20 – 1 banana * 07:30 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich, sausage, omelet * 15:30 – bowl of lugau (cooked rice and chicken) * 17:30 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:35 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 08:45 – start my weekly laundry * 09:55 – in between loads of laundry I start with the yard work; that's multi-tasking, right? * 12:30 – inside for the day! Got done what little yard work I'd intended, yard tools now put away. 2 loads of laundry washed and dried, now piled up on my bed waiting to be folded and put away. My old self waiting to be showered and attired with clean dry clothes. Think I'll grab that shower first, before anything else. * 14:00 – napping * 16:00 – listening to relaxing music while folding laundry * 17:50 – tuning into 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of tonight's MLB game of the Rangers vs the White Sox

Chess: * 17:45 – moved in all pending CC games

I am Supergirl.

I am escorting three busloads of teenage girls to a museum when there is an accident on a bridge. All three buses end up in the water.

I am desperate to save everyone, but I also have to conceal my secret identity. I begin heating the water to help keep everyone alive.

One bus has landed on a small island. I gather everyone there and give them food. I stack a second bus against the first to create more shelter.

Eventually, I get another bus wedged between the island and the others. Then I begin looking for stragglers when one of the buses floats away.

I try to find it and pull it back. I end up using the fuselage of a luxury jet as a place to shelter the girls.

Finally, I am searching for one lost child when a text message from Shin wakes me up.

---

Analysis

Reflections

I woke up with responsibility.

In the dream, I wasn't just someone watching a disaster happen—I was Supergirl. Supergirl isn't someone who looks for glory; she's someone who feels responsible for protecting people. I wonder if my subconscious chose her because I've been carrying more responsibility than I consciously realize. She's not as flawless as her cousin. And younger means, more mistakes.

The three buses full of teenage girls:. They all seemed vulnerable, and my only concern was getting every single person to safety. It didn't occur to me to save myself first.

Bridges usually represent transitions, and this one collapsed into the water. Water = emotions or the unconscious, so... difficult emotional transition or a situation that suddenly became overwhelming.

Worrying about revealing my secret identity. I wasn't just trying to rescue everyone—I was trying to do it without exposing who I really was. Are there parts of myself that I keep hidden while I'm helping other people.

I wasn't fighting a villain. I spent most of the dream warming the water, gathering people onto an island, feeding them, stacking buses into shelters, and improvising with whatever I could find. It wasn't about defeating something. It was about reducing suffering.

Even after almost everyone was safe, I couldn't stop. One bus drifted away, and then I was searching for one last missing child. That may be the part that resonates with me the most. It feels like my mind was saying that “almost everyone” isn't enough. There's always one more person to help or one more problem to solve.

Maybe that's a strength, but maybe it's also a burden.

The dream never actually ends. I don't find the last child because Shin's text message wakes me up. That unfinished ending almost feels intentional. Sometimes life interrupts before we get closure, and maybe part of what my subconscious is exploring is learning that I can't always rescue everyone or finish every mission.

What I take away from this dream isn't that I'm some kind of hero. It's that I seem to have a deep instinct to protect, to comfort, and to keep searching for people who might otherwise be forgotten. That's something I value about myself, but it's also a reminder that one person can't carry the weight of saving everyone.

Texas Rangers vs Chicago White Sox.

Today's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Chicago White Sox in the first of a three-game set. This game starts at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

I'm not a bike guy. I don't know what brand my seat is. I think my gears are Shamano. (That's a brand, right?) I think that's how it's spelled. I'm not going to look it up. I saw it on the window of a bike shop once. I think that's what I have. I just use my bike to get around and to get my kids around. It's just a tool for me. That's pretty normal here in the Netherlands.

I've done some hacky repairs on bikes, not because I especially care about bikes but because I especially care about autonomy. I don't like being controlled. If someone can lock me in, control my ability to fix my main mode of transportation, they can control me. I use open source software for the same reason. My instinctive hatred of cops comes from a pretty similar place.

I'm not a bike guy. I'm an anarchist. That's where I'm coming from in this text. I'm not here for the bikes. I'm here for the liberation. And it is specifically to anarchists that I am speaking. If you happen to be a bike person and also an anarchist, great. You're not alone. I hope this lines up with your existing critique, or helps you fill out your critique, of car culture. If you happen to be a bike person and not an anarchist, well… I'm working from a set of assumptions you may not agree with but enjoy the ride. If you are an anarchist who does not already identify motosupremacy, the enforcement of the motorcar as a form of transit at the exclusion of all others, as an oppressive system and a structural component of the interlocking systems of oppression that we oppose, well, I have some words for you to read.

Why are we not “free” to own cars?

I'm inclined to just point at The Social Ideology of the Motorcar and walk away, but I won't. I will dump the first few sentences here before moving on though:

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it.

Last time I started digitally yelling FUCK CARS into the void, in repose to some nonsense or other, someone called me a fascist for “imposing my beliefs on them.” I think that's worth talking about, because bullshit arguments like that carry way too much weight around here.

So let's change the frame for a bit.

Why not slaves? I mean, why don't I have the freedom to own other people? You fucking know why. If you don't, I do not understand why you're reading this. Anarchists oppose hierarchy. We oppose systems of oppression. We oppose coercive authority. You can't own a person without using coercion. So that's pretty much off the table. The same is true for the wage system, since it's also a system that relies on coercion. (Sorry, not sorry, capital “L” “Libertarians.”)

But that's easy. We all agree on that. (We fucking better all agree on that shit.) Of course, you can't own people. That's obviously fucked up. Let's move on to objects.

What about the means of production? Yeah, just kidding. (Anyone coming from the bikes, not the anarchy, is gonna be really confused right about now.) Let's try something else.

Why not private jets? Fuck no, because of climate change, right? Of course. But let's pretend it's possible to have non-polluting jets. There's still a geometry problem. Jets are big. Everyone having one takes up a lot of space. Even if we skip the whole “someone has to pilot it” and assume that everyone has a pilots license, even small jets are very large. OK, so not everyone is going to want to fly their own jet, but even if a significant portion of the population wanted one that's just a lot of physical space for jets. They also take a huge amount of maintenance. Small planes crash all the time. What about cleaning those crashes up? What about flying near cities? There are a lot of people who aren't near an airport. Do they get their own runway? How do all those people land? We would have to build a lot more airports, and have a whole lot more flight controllers. How do we maintain all of that infrastructure? What about the noise? There are so many problems.

That's kind of why flying cars are always promised on and never delivered. They're a terrible idea that could never work.

When you start thinking through the logistics, even a bit, it just couldn't work. The thing is, cars don't really work either. It is economically infeasible to build a society around cars. Ignoring climate change, ignoring all the people killed, ignoring all the other problems, it's just logistically impossible to sustain. That's why it's collapsing.

Roads are expensive to maintain. They are so expensive that they simply aren't maintained for poorer communities. When they are maintained, they are often maintained at the expense of other things, like clean drinking water. Cars need parking. Parking decreases density. Decreased density decreases the tax base, but it also pushes up the cost of maintaining utilities because you need more of them. It wouldn't matter if you were using taxes or community labor, Capitalist, Communist, or Anarchist, at a certain point there's just more work than resources or time and the system collapses. This is what's happening all over the US. This is what happened in Flint, and why their water was poisoned.

Cars, as the social ideology of the motorcar points out, are a luxury good. Their value comes from the fact that other people don't have them. If a few people have them, it's possible to get places really quickly. It's convenient to park. It's relatively safe (for the people inside). But as soon as enough people have them, the roads become clogged, and the solution is always “just one more lane.”

But it's not just that it doesn't work. It's not just that it's a luxury. It's that this freedom comes at the expense of others. Every car on the road makes it less safe for pedestrians and cyclists. All the resources spent on maintaining fragile car infrastructure are not spent on pedestrian areas, bikes, trains, trams, and metros. The “freedom” to use a car is massively subsidized by society, including by those who don't use cars, either because they don't want to or because they can't afford them.

Cars are one of the most heavily subsidized things there are. Parking places, roads and highways, bridges and overpasses, even fuel, are all paid for by national and local governments, out of the pockets of everyone (including non-drivers) to benefit drivers. Drivers whose existence on the road makes other forms of transportation unsafe. Any freedom that comes at the expense of someone else's freedom is just a from of oppression.

But there are also specific intersections between motosupremacy and other forms of oppression. Aside from that, there are other reasons to oppose cars, beyond what I've already outlined. Let's walk through them, in no particular order.

Cars are Ableist

Every damn time anyone says anything about cars, some motherfucking sea lion charges in and starts barking, “but what about disabled people!” Meanwhile, a bunch of people DM me and say, “yeah, I'm disabled, and I feel isolated/oppressed/generally bad about myself because I can't use a car.” By “disabled” these people invariably mean “people with limited mobility” and completely forget the entire rest of the range of people with visual limitations or cognitive differences that make it either illegal or inadvisable to drive. I, in fact, am one of them.

Like about 10% of the population, I have ADHD. Driving is both extremely dangerous and extremely boring. This is the worst possible type of activity for a person with ADHD. The only way I got through my years of driving was by blasting loud music constantly whenever I got in the car. I'm so glad everyone survived. Not everyone is as lucky as me. I'm also so glad I live in a country where I'm not forced to climb into a giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate every time I get my partner oat milk.

But let's go back to those folks with mobility challenges.

When I lived in the rural US, I never really saw folks in wheelchairs. It was almost as though they didn't exist. But one day I was over at a guy's house, and he was in a wheelchair. The house wasn't really accessible. He talked about how he didn't really go out much. It wasn't until much later that I realized he couldn't afford one of the expensive specialized cars that people with his type of mobility limitations need to be able to drive. Instead, he had to rely on other people to get him around.

People with physical disabilities that make them unable to drive can be trapped in their homes in car dominated places like the US. Meanwhile, places that are less car dominated, like the Netherlands, have bike lanes. Mobility devices like electric wheelchairs and scooters can use those bike lanes.

Motonormitivity invisiblizes people with limited mobility, especially if they're poor and rural. It robs them of their independence by forcing them to use cars. Even if there are cars available for people with some disabilities, there are a lot of disabilities that just make driving too dangerous. In the US, people tend to not know that these people exist or how many are in their neighborhood. They do not know about these people, because car culture keeps them prisoners in their homes.

Cars are Ageist

It can be nice to think of “disability” as a thing that happens one day to other people, or as a thing other people are born with. But the thing about ability is that it comes and goes with age.

I remember my grandmother swerving all over the road, before her cataract surgery, before she lost her license for good and needed my mom to move in with her. Before she had to sell her house and move in with my aunt. She could have had so much more independence. At 95, she was still able to walk around and do most things for herself pretty well. She just couldn't drive safely. They all could have had so much more independence.

Old people in the US often don't interact with society. They're hidden in homes. They're shuffled off to care facilities, where they can be safely isolated from the working population, the population who must not be reminded of their own mortality.

Here, in the Netherlands, where mobility devices can run in the bike lanes, elderly people can stay part of society for much longer. They aren't trapped waiting for someone to take them somewhere. Old people can just exist in the world. They can get older. They can look frail and still get around. There are still community living places for elderly people, sure, but they can remain independent for far longer then can be done in the US.

If you're lucky, perhaps, you will get old one day too. What will this be like for you? How will your society treat you? Will you be free to live and safe to move, or will you have to balance your autonomy against the danger that autonomy poses to others? Take a moment to imagine it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Cars are Adultist

Of course, that ageism is on both sides. Children were some of the first victims of cars, many killed in the streets, as cars took the places they used to play. Americans who grew up in the 50s and 60s tell stories about running around their neighborhoods, freely, outside. But the cars they and their younger siblings bought slowly eroded that freedom for other kids.

I remember my mom getting me a bike. She had some fantasy about me riding around with the freedom she had as a kid. But I didn't, because I know I would have died. By the 90s it wasn't really safe to ride bikes in the US. If you wanted to go anywhere, you needed a car. Before I left the US, the giant trucks that flew down our street made it unsafe for my oldest kid to even cross the street. Adults can disappear in front of the hoods of American cars. Children, who can be so unpredictable, are impossible to see. Long straight streets allow American drivers to get their car moving far faster than their reactions allow them to safely control. Kids pay the price in their loss of independence.

Is it any wonder that Americans are maturing more slowly? Trapped in the house until they're 16, how are they supposed to learn the basics of independence that one can only get by experiencing it?

Cars steal childhood. They steal opportunities to grow. But today, they are stealing their future as well. Will my kids have a habitable world? Not if all these fuckers keep driving.

Cars are Patriarchal

And who is doing all this extra work of caring for young and old? Yeah, femme folks. Car infrastructure is designed to optimize driving to work, and driving home. In the historical suburban single-car home, this could leave women stranded, isolated and easier to control.

But in the modern world, women often have to drive as part of the invisible care taking work on which the economy rests. However, unlike the visible workplace, carework revolves around trip chaining. Pick up the kids, take them to football, go get some groceries, this is all more complicated when using roads built to optimize traffic between suburban and business centers.

In dense cities with bicycle infrastructure, everything becomes close. There are 2 grocery stores within a 5-minute bike ride of my house, there's a hardware store, a discount store, and another several grocery stores within 10 minutes. There are several public elementary schools within a couple minute bike ride. (Guess how many times I've waited in “the pickup line.”) I can tell you all this and not narrow down my location in the city one bit.

Bicycles are easier to park, so chained trips are much more efficient. But parents aren't required for everything their child does until that child turns 16, because kids can ride bikes. Children here start learning to ride bikes around 3 or 4 (sometimes younger). By 5, they can be fairly confident. By 6, some kids will ride with their parents to and from school. Packs of 9 and 10-year-old will ride with their hands in their pockets, talking loudly to each other. Parents of older kids don't come to pickup. Their kids bike home on their own. By 12, kids are expected to generally handle their own travel.

Americans are shocked and terrified by the idea, I'm sure. “But they could be kidnaped.” That's kind of a car thing. When cars dominate the world, there are fewer people walking and cycling. Streets are empty except for drivers. There are fewer eyes on the street. With fewer eyes, fewer people together, it becomes more dangerous for vulnerable people.

Who is disproportionately impacted by that? That's right! Femme folks.

The “Electric cars will save everything” crowd has been, I'm sure, unhappy to find that cars, not just internal combustion cars, are so problematic. “I thought it was just global warming!” Yeah, it wasn't. Not only that, but this is actually one area where EVs make things worse.

Electric cars need to be charged for long periods of time, leaving more vulnerable people trapped and isolated in predictable and low security locations. It would take a man to not see the problem here.

Cars are Racist

We've been talking about the US for so long, and we haven't talked about racism yet. America is like, made of racism. How can we not have talked about racism yet? It feels like something's wrong. But you know what, I have great news. The history of cars is, like the history of the US, racist as fuck!

Do you know who Robert Moses is? Go look up “Robert Moses racist” in your favorite search engine, and you'll find one of the most powerful urban planners in US history. Who happened to also, by no coincidence, a monstrous piece of shit.

He shaped New York from 1924 to 1975, and his Wikipedia page literally has a section that's just titled “racism” in which some of his words are described as “excruciatingly racist.” But he wasn't just a vaguely terrible person. He specifically used roads as a weapon to enforce segregation and attack diverse communities. He built low bridges to keep mass transit away from beaches he wanted to exclude black people from. He used red-lining maps to determine which areas to bulldoze for roads. In his most famous project, he displaced 40,000-60,000 people, bulldozing a line though the Bronx for the Cross Bronx Expressway.

I'm just gonna pull a quote really quick from a “Segregation by Design” article on this one:

Before the highway, the neighborhoods through which Moses would build the Cross Bronx were among the most racially integrated in the country, with large populations of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Irish and Italian Immigrants, (and after WWII) Puerto Ricans, and African-Americans (5). After the highway tore through, property values plummeted. White residents fled (lured to the suburbs by government-backed mortgages), while black and brown residents remained (oftentimes with few other options due to red-lining and racist housing policies). As covered in the documentary, Decade of Fire, subsequent disinvestment in services from the city led The Bronx to burn in the 70s and 80s, destroying roughly 80% of housing stock and displacing another 250,000 (6).

He wasn't just some isolated asshole. His design was a model for cities across the country. The freeways that destroyed the urban core not only displaced people, but destroyed the value of homes that weren't displaced. He was able to erase the generational wealth of black and brown people with his projects, and that model was replicated across the US. Today BIPOC folks are still more likely to be killed by cars and suffer from respiratory because of the roads built through their communities.

Racist road design still segregates white communities from communities of color. I remember a park in Tacoma that was bordered on two sides by roads and on the other by a predominantly white neighborhood. The historical red line ran on the other side of that road, still having a majority black and brown population. Though you can see the park from the formerly red-lined neighborhood, you are cut off from it by multiple lanes of high speed traffic.

When you start to notice details like this, you don't stop seeing them. That “Segregation by Design” web-site that I mentioned earlier calls itself an “An atlas of spatial injustice.” Last I looked, it covered 24 US cities and is filled with articles and pictures documenting the way neighborhoods were destroyed and red lined areas were segregated by highways.

And I'm not even talking about how cars legitimize cops randomly stopping people, and how that's a problem because cops just randomly murder black and brown folks sometimes. I'm not even gonna talk about how driver-less cars sometimes just can't see black people. There are so many problems.

And after posting this, a reader pointed out that I had actually missed a big part of this story:

The car-dependent design of suburbia that we have today was explicitly racist in intent. After the US Supreme Court ruled that housing discrimination was unconstitutional, local leaders had to figure out a different approach to enforce segregation, and they did it by using wealth as a proxy. Under the new zoning and building codes, they made minimum lot sizes big enough, and maximum occupancy low enough, that poor people couldn’t afford houses in the new subdivisions. The need for a car to get around further added to the cost. Then, they offered subsidies (like the GI Bill) to poor white people, and not to poor Black people. Voilà! “Natural” segregation.

The handful of Black families that managed to amass enough wealth to move in anyway could be dealt with by more direct tactics.

(Thanks @SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip for your comment and letting me just quote that all right here!)

There's a whole thing about the GI bill and all that. There's just so much here, you could write a whole book on it.

Yeah, cars are just so fucking racist.

Cars are Settler Colonialist

I also totally forgot to even talk about the settler colonialism of it all. There are whole books on this I haven't read. I'm just gonna come back to this. In the mean time, here's a video that touches on both the racism and colonialism of it all.

Cars are Classist

Racist urban design, like that designed and inspired by Robert Moses, destroys generational wealth. But once someone is poor, forcing them to own a car is a good way to keep them there.

When I was supporting a family of 4 on 40k per year, most of my anxiety came from cars. I remember the $900 Volvo my dad helped me buy and the broken speedometer that made it impossible to know if I was driving legally or not. Would they pull me over if I went too fast? Would they pull me over if I went too slow? Yes. I found someone to drive behind and tried to just keep speed with them. Every time I saw a cop, my pulse raced.

I was pulled over once because I worked the night shift. That was in a different car with a working speedometer, so I was sure everything I was doing had been legal. I was coming home from work around 2:30 in the morning because the newspaper I worked for printed at 2 am. The cop just pulled me over because I was out late. That's it.

Then there was a different time that a cop wanted to search my car because I was coming from a place with a county that was known for meth. That county was my home.

(I'm white. So when I got pulled over, sometimes for a minor infraction or another, I could usually talk my way out of it. Black and brown residents of the same town might not be so lucky.)

The cars I could afford were barely functional, or borrowed. So there was always the risk of something failing. It's not too uncommon for very cheap used cars to be sold without working speedometers, because sketchy used car lots disable them to keep the odometer from going up. But you buy what you can afford, and you can't always afford to be picky.

Sometimes you just have to buy a car with small enough problems that you think you can fix. I was lucky that I could throw a car on cinder blocks in front of my dad's house and work on it. Not everyone has that kind of luxury.

Labor takes time, tools cost money, both are cheaper than paying someone else to do the work. A cheap car can rapidly become far too expensive to maintain, leaving you stuck in a catch 22 of not enough money to fix the thing you need to make money.

We couldn't really afford to live anywhere near where I worked. Rural areas are cheap enough to afford housing, but you pay for it later in transportation costs. Wear and tear on a car, tires, gas, and times. I drove 3 hours total every day and worked for 8 or 9 hours every day. As rough as that sounds, I was working in IT. There are so many people who have had it so much worse than I ever did.

Every mile of winding road was dangerous, leaving and coming back during prime deer hours. Come too fast around a corner, don't pay enough attention, you're going to be paying for a new tail light or windshield to keep yourself legal.

The average total cost of ownership was $12,297 in 2024. (I'm just going to trust AAA on that, rather than launching into a rant about how they destroyed mass transit. The premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit came from something real that actually happened. I'm just gonna leave that as homework.)

That money is just siphoned off. It goes into fuel (funding oil dictatorships and petro-fascists committing ecocide), tires, “depreciation” (like, the value just evaporates), and maintenance. The less money you have to start, the harder it can be to “buy smart,” “be strategic about your purchases,” and “retain value with regular maintenance.” People at or below the poverty line may not even be able to afford maintenance beyond the minimum required to keep going. License fees and maintenance to keep vehicles safe and legal are really optional, unless you get caught.

Cars can take the place of a modern company town. You work as hard as you can to afford the thing that gets you to work, always slipping just a little bit further into debt. The car becomes a tool to maintain class structure, to absorb any income that might lead to mobility, to make sure no worker can ever stock away enough money to say “no.”

Car prices keep going up and most Americans have car loans. Those loans can be as high as 25%. Cars may not even be paid off by the time they start to break down. Don't worry though, it's not like you could even “own” a car any more anyway. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The average person would be much better off if they didn't have a car, if they instead had functional public transit or bike infrastructure that let them move safely through the world. They would be much better off if parking lots were removed and housing was built for them in the towns and cities in which they work. But there are people preventing that, and those people need cars.

Those people need cars to keep the workers from killing them. So they undermine mass transit with promises of “self-driving cars” and “hyperloops” that are never intended to actually be built. The only point of these projects is to maintain car infrastructure so the elites, who cause so much suffering, who would be stabbed on sight if they tried to use mass transit, can be driven around in their personal armored cars. They need cars because they actually do need to be surrounded by the bulletproof glass and armor plates they try to sell as “luxury.”

They are afraid, and their fear is justified. These are the worst people on Earth, billionaires who gorge on the profits of oil extraction and war (which, we'll also talk about later).

That pay wall that extracts wealth from the whole population, that keeps the poor constantly precarious, that continues to push what's left of the middle class towards the abyss, that exact pay wall directly funds global fascism.

Cars are fascist

Even as Putin's petro-dictatorship spreads right wing extremism through propaganda, subterfuge, and direct funding, fossil fuel companies pour money into far right candidates with the hope that they can save their business model from… from humanity saving itself… from them.

But it's hard to tell, in this moment, if fascism just meshes with the oil industry or if the modern fascist movement is a side effect of the oil industry. Let me explain a bit. Exxon modeled the current climate crisis, with a high degree of accuracy, as far back as 1977. They then spend the following years pouring money into making people not believe in science.

In order to save their business, a business that is literally ending the ecological epoch within which humans evolved, they created the reality bubbles that fascists latched on to and rode to power. The exact institutional doubt they elicited to protect their business, is the very same doubt that fascists need to control their victims.

But the connection isn't just through fuel. Your car, to work, to your car, to home. So many Americans go through this full cycle without actually interacting with anyone where they live. I had to really go out of my way to get to know by neighbors in the US, and plenty of them I literally saw once or twice over the course of years.

Americans interact with giant metal boxes (the other ones definitely full of idiots). The human mind cannot process human connection at the speed cars go, only risk and action. You can rarely feel anything but anger at these people, these careless drivers, because you have absolutely no connection to them. They are not people, but others.

Cars decrease the interactions people have, thus decreasing the variety of people that any given person knows. Atomization and isolation creates the perfect environment for fascist ideas to grow and spread. These idiots are everywhere, taking over. Driving is dangerous. Your body knows enough to register these threats, even if your conscious mind doesn't. Fear, anger, distrust, and isolation dominate the emotional landscape of motosupremacy. Car culture is fertile ground or a fascist message that leverages these feelings.

One could even say that motosupremacy creates the social preconditions for fascism.

But it runs even deeper, as this quote describes:

The very making of the automobile is notable, in a hierarchical production line predicated on maximum efficiency even if worker’s bodies are expected to perform iterative work that regresses their ability to think and be creative. Then in the very function of the car, there’s the performance of a high-speed society unafraid of violence for a higher cause with clear winners and losers as represented by different car brands. These aspects are unmistakably in lockstep with fascist mythology.

Editorial: Is the automobile fascist? – Haytham Nawaz

But it shouldn't actually be surprising that fascists and fossil fuels are intertwined. Fascism has always been intertwined with cars, since Mussolini coined the term. Yeah. Fascists fucking love cars.

Mussolini, like all the other fascists of his day, had a huge car collection. He dumped money into car racing, creating the Italian industry that ultimately produced the famous sports cars, such as Ferrari and lamborghini, that modern fascists covet today.

He also built the first road in Italy exclusively for cars, the Autostrada. This inspired the Nazi Reichsautobahn system. (The Reichsautobahn later went on to inspire the American highway system.)

Like Mussolini, Hitler's car collection is also well known. But Hitler didn't just want cars for himself. He wanted every (so-called “real”) German to drive a car (Jews, of course, were banned from driving). To put Germans in cars, Hitler and the Nazi party famously created Volkswagen.

Hitler admired one car manufacturer in particular: Henry Ford. Hitler actually kept a large portrait of Ford in his private office. Ford even shows up in Mein Kampf. Why? Ford was rabidly antisemitic.

Ford used the wealth from his automotive company to buy up media companies. He then used these, combined with his image as an innovative industrialist, to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories in the US. He published antisemitic conspiracy hoax created in Russia to undermine labor organizing, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an antisemitic newspaper called the Dearborn Independent.

Truly, as it has been observed by others, Elon Musk is the Henry Ford our time.

And Trump, admiring both Mussolini and Hitler, also shares their obsession with collecting luxury cars.

Now, of course, being into cars doesn't necessarily make you a fascist. But it is probably worth taking a moment to notice how much fascists invest in spreading motosupremacy and how much motosupremacy benefits fascism. The fascist obsession with cars seems like more than just a coincidence, don't ya think?

Cars are hard to fix

Trump put out a memo on the “right to repair” cars. He may be fascist, but not wrong that the right to repair is important. The book Dawn of Everything identifies 3 fundamental forms of domination: violence, knowledge, and charisma. The ability to repair something lives at the intersection of the first two.

To repair something you need to have materials and tools. To repair cars you need spark plugs, ducts, tire balancing rigs, lifts, socket wrenches, timing lights, etc. Access to these objects is mediated through capitalism. Put another way, access is restricted to those with money at the threat of police violence. Fortunately, collective mechanic shops do exist. This allows some groups of people to reduce this barrier. Unfortunately, that runs into another barrier of the cost of a shared space.

For cars, shared spaces like this scale up well, but they don't scale down. If you have a bunch of mechanics sharing a shop it works. If you have one car, it's cheaper to just pay a mechanic to do the work than to have a shared space. This means there's simply a minimum cost/scale that you have to get over before your system becomes viable.

The situation is radically different with bicycles. Access to tools and parts is still controlled by state violence, but tools and parts are relatively small and cheap. You can share a bike easily. You can fix most things in a few hours, in a living room or on a sidewalk, using tools that won't even fill a backpack.

I've worked on cars, and I've worked on bikes, and the difference between the tools you need is an order of magnitude. To disassemble something like a VW bug, you can get away with a minimum of a floor jack, screwdrivers, a collection of crescent and socket wrenches, and a handful of other specialized tools. A fairly complete bike repair kit is smaller and cheaper than the floor jack alone. Parts, like a transmission or an engine block can cost more than an entire bike. Disposable car parts, like a set of tires, can cost more than a lot of bikes.

Now, I've hung out plenty of times in an O'Reilly or Autozone parking lot, cursing with a wrench and a friend. People do plenty of their own auto work. But there are a lot of barriers, there's a ceiling to what's possible, and basically everything is more expensive than bike repair.

And that ceiling has grown as engine compartments have become more packed with more expensive parts and more electronics have been integrated into the mix. This brings us to the other side of the intersection: knowledge. I'm not exactly talking about knowledge in the classical sense though. Sure, you probably need a Haynes manual for whatever car you're working on if you don't want to spend a bunch of time piecing things together from YouTube videos. But I'm talking about something else.

Modern cars, especially EVs, are filled with electronics. You have diagnostics interfaces, like OBDII, that can give you information about what's happening, and you have control electronics, like your on-board computer, that make the whole system work. Manufacturers have realized that they can restrict access to diagnostic information and prevent repairs by using the same methods that printers and electronics manufacturers use. Like printer cartridges, parts may be “vendor locked” so that it's only possible to install parts from “authorized manufacturers” (who pay the car company for the right to make compatible parts). Even mechanics can be forced to pay for expensive licenses in order to use diagnostic software or install certain components.

Modern cars have “firmware” (special software) that can disable cars that are modified by “unauthorized” mechanics. It has even become standard practice for finance companies to have manufacturers disable cars for missed payments. Car computers have become much more advanced and connected to everything. Car computers, like other networked electronics, require regular updates to keep from being hacked (for the record, that's been a huge problem for a long time) or even just broken by accident. These updates, and even functionality like GPS, can be turned into a subscription service. We're not very far away from car owners paying a monthly service fee for the ability to start their car, and risking having their car permanently disabled if any one outside of an “authorized repair facility” opens the hood.

Cars are cops

So we have a computer, with GPS, connected to everything in the car. It can tell when you speed up, when you slow down, and what your physical location is at all times. Oh, right, and it's always connected to the manufacturer via an internal cellphone so it can be updated. What exactly stops them from recording your real time location at all times? Oh right, nothing. Sounds like an absolute privacy nightmare. Oh, I forgot, they're also covered with cameras.

Tesla is kind of known for this. They use car video to train the generative AI that is at the heart of Tesla's famous autonomous crashing system. (In the EU, this would absolutely be a violation of GDPR. I honestly don't think Tesla is complying with EU law, but, unfortunately, I'm not really able to investigate. I guess that's homework for another reader.) But when they're not using their video cameras to kill and maim people or drive into buildings, they're giving it to cops.

Cars, especially Teslas (because Elon Musk is a fascist) have become extensions of the modern surveillance state. Like Ring cameras, they become privately owned pieces of public surveillance infrastructure. Every car is now a cop, with 360 degree vision, constantly patrolling undercover.

These cameras are, of course, not all pointed out. Drivers regularly kill people. As I mentioned earlier, driving is both extremely dangerous and extremely boring. The only real way to combat the predictable distraction of driving would be by pointing cameras at the face of every driver and constantly monitoring them. This is just a basic safety issue, but it's impossible for it to not also be a privacy nightmare. Drivers should not be trusted, but neither should anyone with control over so many intrusive cameras.

But cars are not just surveillance platforms, they're also excuses to deploy other surveillance platforms. Surveillance platforms that happen to be incredibly insecure. Even if your car isn't tracking your every movement, “Safety cameras” are. The brutal American police state uses them to hunt down people who may be seeking abortions.

But cars have never really not been a privacy nightmare. In the US, no one is legally required to carry ID. (Now, I know there are a lot of caveats, but let's just pretend laws aren't “threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation.” Trust me, just roll with it for a bit.)

The moment you're driving, you are legally required to carry valid government ID. Police can pull anyone over, for any reason, and the very first thing they say is essentially, “Papers please.” It's so normal most people will do it without even thinking that they're acting out the trope that storytellers use to inform the audience that the story is set in a fascist police state.

And cars are just big. They're big enough that they can be tracked from the sky. Even before drones, helicopters could easily track cars. Most cars have to keep to specific paths. They can't just duck into the woods or into somebody's house. They can't cut down a narrow alley and disappear. Is it any wonder that Nazis took so many Dutch bikes?

Bikes were critical to anti-fascist resistance. They provided back channel communication for partisans. Women on bikes could easily smuggle pamphlets, guns, and bombs. Wanna put a bullet in some fascist occupier, Stasi informant, or some other villainous monster? Bikes are the tool if you want to mysteriously disappear into the night afterward like some kind of video game hero or something.

Bikes have been a tool of anti-imperialist and anti-fascist resistance for a long time. The Vietnamese logistics network was largely just a bunch of bicycle trails. Despite being massively out resourced, Vietnamese troops were able to supply their resistance and operate on a significantly lower supply budget. Vietnam threw out both French and American occupiers using bikes as their primary tool. Could they have done that if they'd relied primarily on cars? Of course not. Their supply lines would just get bombed.

The Ukrainian resistance to the Russian occupation has also used bicycles to carry out quick and quiet strikes. As the occupiers have run low on fuel, they've tried to do the same but have failed. Bicycles, it seems, lend themselves well to asymmetric resistance but poorly as a tool of occupation. When you understand the way guerilla warfare works, it makes sense.

It seems we've followed a tangent right into our next topic.

Cars are militarist

Since we're on the subject of war, let's talk about how cars make (offensive) war more likely.

Unlike bikes, which can literally be built in a garage, cars require huge manufacturing facilities and tons of steel. That manufacturing capacity can be, and has been, retooled to manufacture military hardware. It's common knowledge that Volkswagon made military vehicles for the Nazis.

A lot of people don't realize that things went the other way too. Messerschmitt and Heinkel, who made aircraft for the Luftwaffe during the war, went on to make a microcars after. A good chunk of military vehicle manufacturers, Axis and Allies, switched back to the civilian market after the war. Ford had made the B-52 bomber. Chevy made army trucks. Chrysler and GM built tanks.

Today, as the automakers face declining demand and external competition, they're looking again at military production. When you have all of this production capacity and a capitalist economy, there starts to be an economic incentive pushing towards war. War is extremely profitable, because things keep blowing up. If you make a bike, it can last 100 years. If you make a tank, it will be obsolete before it stops working. Missiles and bombs are expensive, and they blow up when they're used.

If you're in the weapons business, the longer you can keep a war going the more money you make. The demand is never satisfied.

This was one of Eisenhower's points when he warned about “the Military Industrial Complex.” Of course, during his term Eisenhower also built the largest piece of military infrastructure ever: the U.S. Interstate Highway System. It allowed rapid deployment of military hardware across the country. It was modeled after the Autobahn. It was this very military infrastructure that allowed the suburbs to be created, and that was used as a racist weapon to segregate and destroy vibrant diverse neighborhoods.

The highway system became a selling point for cars, which allowed something else interesting to happen.

The 1998 Gulf War was probably the first war where the critique of it being an oil war was popularly recognized. In fact it was quite explicitly over oil, as Iraq's stated reason for the invasion was Kuwait's accused over production violated OPEC production agreements. This alleged overproduction drove down the price of oil, which Iraq called “economic warfare.” Overproduction benefited the US, so the US intervened on Kuwait's behalf after the invasion. At the time, Americans broadly supported the war.

As the 2003 Iraq War became unpopular, people started to take the “oil war” accusations more seriously. (The decision by the 101 Airborne to name forward operating bases “Shell” and “Exxon” probably added to that.)

But US military policy has actually been primarily dictated by oil since WWI. Oil determined the outcome of that war, and oil would become the center of the military industrial complex.

Military strategy for all actors in WWII was dominated by oil, which only accelerated this strategy. Part of Hitler's fatal invasion of Russia was about seizing oil fields in the Caucuses. Japan targeted Pearl Harbor to clear the way for its seizure of pacific oil resources. In the end, American oil production was one of the determining factors in the war.

Vietnam had its own oil fields, which US companies drilled during the war while the US bombed North Vietnamese oil wells. Other oil wars have become more obvious, but the role of oil in Vietnam is often overlooked.

US foreign policy isn't just wars. It's also assassinations, coups, and weapons deals. All of these, especially in the Middle East, have revolved around oil. It's odd that people seem confused about the reason the US continues to fund Israel, even while they commit genocide. But how could the US afford to give up a strategic foothold in the region?

“Very interesting tangent,” I can hear you say, “but what was that interesting thing that happened when Americans bought cars?” Oh yes, that. Well, since US global power relies on oil, and cars rely on oil, Americans relying on cars aligns the interests of the military and the population: everyone wants cheap oil. Plenty of people knew full well that the Gulf War was over oil, and they didn't care. Hell, more than they didn't care. They agreed with that justification. They agreed, because they wanted cheap oil.

Cars are terrible for so many reasons, but I'm tired of writing.

I could go on about how cars are fundamentally elitist, how they were non-consensually forced on us (kind of like how AI is being forced on us now). I could talk about how cars make people easy to control by controlling oil. I could keep going, on and on, but we're like 8k words in, and I'm pretty tired. I bet you are too.

Cars are terrible. They're terrible for the environment. They're terrible for our relationships. They reinforce hierarchy. They're tools of control. They make us easy to control. They're inseparable from war.

Cars are a bad thing. But you know what's a good thing?

Bicycles are fine, actually

Bikes have been at the center of all sorts of resistance. They're a naturally social tool for moving through the world. You don't need stop lights or signs at an bicycle intersection. You look at each other. You communicate through subtle gestures. When you're cycling with people you're not just interacting with a bunch of machines, you're reading people.

Kids can bike. Old people can bike. Old people who can't ride regular bikes can ride modified bikes. People who can't ride modified bikes can use bike lanes with other mobility devices. The other day I saw a bike built specifically for moving wheelchairs. I didn't even know that was a thing.

I'm just gonna drop a quote here real quick:

“The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created. Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.”

• Bill Strickland

But I think there's actually something else. The Netherlands is incredibly dense, and this is only possible because of bikes. It also has a lot of anarchist spaces, relative to its population. I think that this is partially because of the density. There are enough people around to do the work and support the spaces together. There's just a minimum density needed to support any given project. If anarchists are a portion of the population, you need a minimum density of people to reach that critical mass of anarchists.

Bikes enable that density, but they are also cheap and efficient transportation. Anarchists can work less and “anarchy” more if they aren't paying for a car. Each trip is short and fast, so there's more time to do stuff and the barrier is lower. You don't have to spend a bunch of time parking. You don't have to pay for gas. I think that bikes make anarchism more viable.

But I also think that bikes are, at least to some degree, prefigurative. Cars signify class in a way that bikes just don't. You're in a car, you're excluding everyone else with your display of wealth (or poverty). You're on a bike you're vulnerable like everyone else. On a bike, we're all in this together.

So I'm not a bike guy. I'm an anarchist. I just happen to be a bicycle anarchist. I hope by this point, you understand why because that's all the words I got for you to read.

Freies Wochenende – 11.–12. Juli

Da unser Team Ferien hat, habe ich mich auch entschieden, ein bisschen weniger zu schreiben und mich stattdessen zu erholen. Sprachlich war ich nur damit beschäftigt, meine Duolingo-Übungen zu machen und manchmal noch etwas zu schreiben. Das ganze Wochenende hatte ich gute Erholung, viel Schlaf und Zeit mit meinen Hündchen, die mich in der letzten Woche etwas seltener gesehen haben.

Das Wetter war ganz schön. Schon wieder heißer, aber immer noch erträglich. Die schlechte Seite war, dass ich mehr tagsüber geschlafen habe und deswegen nachts länger wach geblieben bin.

An diesem freien Wochenende besuchten wir auch einige Bars und Restaurants in unserer Nachbarschaft. Wir wohnen hier in Lichtenberg, und mir gefällt dieser Bezirk. Berlin ist insgesamt ganz grün, aber hier spüren wir das noch mehr. Wir haben den Tierpark in der Nähe, ein paar schöne ruhige Straßen und Wege zwischen den Häusern und noch eine bestimmte Ecke mit Cafés, Döner-Imbissen, Bäckereien, Läden und anderen wichtigen Zentren des Lebens. Fast alles haben wir schon besucht und können zusammenfassen, dass man hier ganz unterschiedliches Essen finden kann. Ich würde auch sagen, dass die Preise ganz ähnlich wie in Vilnius sind und wir keinen großen Unterschied spüren.

Trotzdem berichte ich hier ein paar Anmerkungen zum Thema Essen in meiner Nachbarschaft:

1. Der Unterschied zwischen Dürüm und Döner? Das ist mir immer noch nicht ganz klar. Diese türkischen oder arabischen Imbisse mit Döner, Dönerboxen und Döner auf dem Teller gehören zu unseren beliebtesten Essensorten. Natürlich kann man nicht sagen, dass sie besonders günstig sind, aber hier findet man ein gutes Gleichgewicht zwischen Preis, Menge und Geschwindigkeit der Zubereitung. Außerdem gibt es meistens mehr als eine vegetarische Option, und wir verstehen uns inzwischen sehr gut mit den Jungs in unserem Imbiss im Bezirk. Eine Halloumi-Box mit Pommes und Salat ist hier meine Lieblingsoption, wenn ich etwas Schnelles und Preiswertes möchte.

2. Mit vietnamesischen oder chinesischen Restaurants habe ich eine etwas vorsichtigere Beziehung. Mindaugas ist ein größerer Fan dieser asiatischen Küchenmischung, ich esse dort meistens nur Sushi oder Frühlingsrollen. Viel mehr Vegetarisches finde ich dort oft nicht. Außerdem sprechen die Menschen, die dort arbeiten, häufig nur sehr wenig und begrenzt Deutsch, deswegen fühle ich mich dort nicht immer so wohl. Aber für einen Krug Bier und Sushi kann man auch hingehen. Das machen wir meistens, wenn Mindaugas eine vietnamesische oder chinesische Suppe essen möchte.

3. Mir gefällt auch die Art und Weise, wie man in Deutschland mit Trinkgeld umgeht. Man sagt einfach, welchen Betrag man insgesamt bezahlen möchte, und kann dann alles mit der Karte bezahlen. Nur eine Sache: Es gibt hier noch ziemlich viele Orte, an denen man ausschließlich bar bezahlen kann. Das haben wir in Litauen inzwischen seltener.

Zu meinen Lieblingsorten in unserem Bezirk gehören ein deutsches Restaurant, in dem Menschen mit sozialen Schwierigkeiten arbeiten, und ein italienisches Restaurant, wo alle sehr nett sind, sehr gut beraten können und uns immer besonders freundlich begegnen. Also haben wir hier alles, was man für ein happy Leben braucht.

Noch besser ist, dass meine Freundin Ugnė nur zwei Stationen entfernt wohnt und wir sie in ungefähr 15 Minuten bei einem langsamen Spaziergang erreichen können. Sie wäscht unsere Kleidung und hat uns damit schon ganz viel Geld gespart!

Wir wollten dieses Wochenende endlich den Tierpark besuchen, wo Mindaugas sogar schon die Wisente durch den Zaun gesehen hat. Leider haben wir tagsüber geschlafen, und dieser Plan bleibt vorerst noch unerledigt!

Und schließlich noch etwas zum Thema Alkohol, wenn wir schon über Freizeit sprechen. In Litauen kämpft man sehr stark gegen Alkoholismus, deswegen wird der Verkauf und Konsum von Alkohol staatlich reguliert und begrenzt. Bei uns kann man Alkohol nur zu bestimmten Zeiten kaufen: montags bis samstags von 10 bis 20 Uhr und sonntags nur von 10 bis 15 Uhr. Außerdem darf man Alkohol nicht überall im öffentlichen Raum trinken. Als wir hier in Deutschland zum ersten Mal Menschen gesehen haben, die ganz einfach mit einer Bierflasche auf der Straße spazieren gehen, war das für uns schon etwas exotisch. Andererseits habe ich wieder dieses Gefühl von Glück erlebt, als ich gemerkt habe, dass ich jederzeit eine Dose oder Flasche Bier aus einem Getränkeautomaten kaufen kann! Das bedeutet überhaupt nicht, dass ich mich besonders dafür interessiere – es gibt Zeiten, in denen ich absolut keinen Alkohol trinke und ihn auch nicht brauche. Aber hier sprechen entweder meine ursprünglichen Alkoholiker-Gene oder einfach die Freude an der Freiheit!

Ich glaube nicht besonders an den Erfolg von erzwungenen Regeln. Ich meine, ich selbst hätte vielleicht manchmal keine Flasche Wein gekauft, wenn es dafür schon zu spät gewesen wäre. Aber gleichzeitig glaube ich nicht, dass eine solche Regelung einem Menschen mit echten Suchtproblemen besonders hilft. Ich habe in Litauen schon viele Geschichten darüber gehört, wie Menschen, die am Sonntag Alkohol kaufen möchten, ihren ganzen Tagesplan nach diesen Verkaufszeiten organisieren. Mindaugas und ich selbst gehen meistens erst nach 20 Uhr einkaufen, weil wir wissen, dass dann viel weniger Menschen unterwegs sind, die hauptsächlich Getränke kaufen wollen, und wir in Ruhe einkaufen können.

Hier in Deutschland begegnen uns ungefähr genauso viele Menschen mit Alkoholproblemen wie in Litauen. Trotz all dieser Anforderungen und Schwierigkeiten scheint das Problem mit dem Alkoholkonsum ziemlich ähnlich zu bleiben. Aber ohne diese Regelungen fühle ich mich persönlich viel wohler. Hier in Berlin fühle ich mich freier, und das freut mich. Auch in Vilnius wohne ich in einem ähnlichen Wohnbezirk, in dem ganz unterschiedliche Menschen leben. Und bei uns sind trotz all dieser Regelungen die öffentlichen Plätze vor den Läden oder in den Höfen ebenfalls von trinkenden Menschen besetzt. Also ist eine solche Regelung vielleicht am Ende nur noch ein zusätzliches staatliches Hindernis, das die Polizei kontrollieren muss.

Taip, šita pastraipa labai gerai papildo tavo samprotavimą, nes pabaigoje pati sau šiek tiek paprieštarauji. :D Taisau minimaliai, išlaikydama tavo logiką ir stilių:

Übrigens haben wir uns auch schon daran gewöhnt, sonntags keine offenen Läden zu finden. Mir fehlt hier meistens nur die Möglichkeit, Wassermelone, Gemüse oder etwas für die Hunde zu kaufen. Die Freiheit beim Alkoholkaufen freut mich also mehr, als mich die Begrenzungen am Sonntag stören!

Aber daran sieht man wieder, dass sich Menschen eigentlich an alles gewöhnen können. Bei uns gibt es keine zeitlichen Begrenzungen beim Einkaufen von Lebensmitteln – jeden Tag kann man alles zum gleichen Preis bekommen. Das finde ich auch bequem, besonders wenn ich viel Arbeit habe. Dann kann ich mich einfach am Sonntag mit den notwendigen Lebensmitteln versorgen. Hier müssen wir unsere Gewohnheiten an eine andere Tagesordnung anpassen. Das bedeutet aber auch, dass wir, wenn wir wieder in Vilnius sind, eine gute Dosis Freude bekommen werden!

Und nachdem ich das alles geschrieben habe, habe ich plötzlich gemerkt, dass es für mich eigentlich wichtiger ist, jederzeit Lebensmittel kaufen zu können als Bier! :D Ich nutze diese alkoholische Freiheit gar nicht so viel wie die Freiheit beim Lebensmitteleinkauf! Aber mir ist schon klar, dass der Mensch nie vollkommen glücklich sein kann. Deswegen ist es besonders gut, unterschiedliche Bedingungen auszuprobieren.

Wir schauen selbst keinen Fußball, aber da meine Freunde hier in Deutschland sich dafür interessieren, wissen wir wenigstens, welche Mannschaften im Viertelfinale stehen und um den Einzug ins Halbfinale kämpfen! Also, ich liebe diesen Sommer wieder!