#reactionaries

This post is just really strange because they cut out any context of who could have written it (for all we know, they could have written it themself and posted it as a post from a "tankie"), but it also shows a bunch of out-of-context photos of people reblogging, which is not proven to be tied to the photo above at all. All in all, this just seems like a Tumblr equivalent of a false flag with all the cut context, but please do tell me if I am misunderstanding something. The framing of Zionism as being in line with the claimed Uyghur genocide is also really weird, because I am pretty sure that principled Marxist-Leninists would support Palestine and would also see that the claim of a Uyghur genocide is unfounded (please correct me if I am wrong).

Even if it did come from an actual "tankie", what I have seen is that the vast majority of people that they would designate as tankie support Palestine (one of them being me), so I have no idea where they get this idea that tankies are Zionists while also denying the Uyghur genocide (they never tell you that the PRC's currency has several minority languages: one being Uyghur).

This tactic is not just approaching people on the far right that might have a positive or at least not hostile position toward socialism but a much more decisive and risky step. It's a direct alliance with the majority of the far right and not just a simpatetic minority.

Now, such a tactic might seem counter productive and damaging. And in most cases, it is. However sometimes it can be an option. When the situation grows sufficiently dire. When faced with a particularly dangerous enemy invasion, especially a directly genocidal one, a Querfront can be organized, because the enemy is directly in favour of the extermination of your people. Or when the national situation has grown sufficiently dire that a revolution must happen, even if it means aligning with reactionary forces.

This is not a tactic to be weighted in lightly and should be considered an extreme measure to be taken only in front of mortal danger that is understood by both parties as being extremly detrimental, and as such, more important than political position.

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Banning drag will not improve your quality of life.

Banning books from schools will not improve your quality of life.

Banning abortion will not improve your quality of life.

Your material conditions will not improve. Your rent will still be too damn high. Your car bill, your light bill, your insurance, all of it will continue to be too damn high.

So… “Become more informed about the world still being in dire straits in society’s treaty of minorities, become financially destitute.”