latest updates: the "sundown agenda" ‖ the growth of climate reaction ‖ Cohost and the "caricature problem" ‖ the forthcoming future of decent portions of America ‖ what i read in 2024 ‖ mediations on getting sick + East Germany musings

the "sundown agenda"

Where the state in the early twentieth century appeared weak because of its lack of control of the metropolis (to which fascists responded by marching through the cities), the state in the early twenty-first century appears weak because it apparently does not control its borders (the actual massive accretion of border technologies notwithstanding). This is why migration politics, although not a major part of the state’s total activities, is so important for far-right movements which contest the power of the state[...]
—Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right

as immigration politics continue to spiral and the Trump administration begins to gear up for "large-scale" immigration raids in major US cities, it seems prudent to begin outlining something i call the "sundown agenda". in short, the sundown agenda is the overarching effort to de facto recriminalize being a visible minority. this effort largely models itself after the sundown town (and an oft-associated, infamous exhortation: 'Nigger, don't let the sun set on your head'), hence my name for it

like many portions of the contemporary right, this agenda takes an amorphous form that is both disorganized and centralized at the same time. the broader belief that certain kinds of people should neither be seen nor heard is centrally accepted across most of the right—in many respects it informs what the right does and why—but how this should be accomplished is scattershot. this is fortunate in many ways (a consensus on this subject can be intensely damaging: see the push against trans people for instance) but unfortunate in others (it is hard to fully grasp the scope of the problem, and in many cases fighting this agenda is fighting only one head).

illustrating the latter point, consider the apparent ICE raids against Diné (Navajo) citizens and the recent Trump administration argument for ending birthright citizenship that seemingly rest upon overturning American citizenship for natives too. it would be understandable to see these as completely unrelated events—but from my perspective, they both belie a fundamental axiom of the right-wing that groups like Native Americans are "apart from" the United States and can only become American through total assimilation. it is this system of beliefs that allows one to argue “The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes. If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is.” without shame; and it is that system which sees unlawful detention of Diné by ICE (forcing them to prove their citizenship and place in this country they were forced to join, rather than forcing ICE to demonstrate they are in some way undocumented immigrants) as acceptable.

state-level contributions to the sundown agenda

the apparent raids in Arizona and arguments by the Trump administration for banning birthright citizenship are obviously big problems; but just as alarming for many people are state-level contributions to this agenda. this post was actually inspired by one: Wyoming, which i have already detailed for its fossil fascists, is likely to pass a bill (HB 116) "invalidat[ing] driver licenses issued to unauthorized immigrants by other states" in the coming days. although dubiously constitutional and apparently ambiguous on legal penalties, what is not unambiguous is the bill making it de facto illegal for undocumented immigrants to drive alone in Wyoming (whether they are residents of the state or merely driving through). per the reporting of WyoFile:

Law enforcement chiefs interviewed by WyoFile said they weren’t entirely certain if undocumented immigrants driving with such licenses would be detained. In many cases, they said, offenders would be issued a ticket then — if someone else could take the wheel — travel on. But if not, they may end up stranded or, if there are other criminal charges, even jailed. “If you don’t have a driver’s license you can’t drive,” said Col. Tim Cameron, who directs the Wyoming Highway Patrol. “They would need an alternative method of transportation or another driver.”

even more concerning are other measures that Wyoming could potentially take up. HB 133, another bill introduced by a Wyoming Freedom Caucus member, would completely ban sanctuary policies (there are none in Wyoming) and defund polities which attempt to pass them. but it would also "charge government officials who don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities with a felony"—an incredibly punitive and almost certainly unconstitutional measure designed to silence elected officials with sympathies to undocumented immigrants. Wyoming is not the only state considering such a bill either: in Tennessee, where sanctuary policies are already banned, a new sweeping anti-immigration bill threatens to criminalize even voting for a sanctuary policy. under this bill, doing so would "become a Class E Felony and grounds for removal from office."

obviously, the harm of bills which make it illegal to vote the "wrong" way are immense, and they are yet another step toward democratic backsliding whether they pass or not. i will reiterate that they are also almost certainly unconstitutional—it seems inconceivable to me that any court could ever legitimize making it illegal to vote a certain way when you serve on a democratically elected body, at least not without precipitating a disastrous constitutional crisis. but the right is willing to test the legal system on this subject.

there are also the bills intended to stoke fear, and which you might call an unusual form of stochastic terrorism. in Mississippi, an immigrant bounty bill (modeled after a similar one in Missouri) has been making news; although likely unworkable for at least a dozen reasons and unlikely to be taken up, the bill certainly makes it feel like criminalization (even potentially at the hands of a private actor) could happen anywhere.

what you can do about it

all of this is fightable—most of it should be legally inactionable, and will presumably be challenged on that basis. but it's important to get organized and be organized against this reaction; on the legislative, legal, and labor side there should be proactive efforts to ensure that undocumented immigrants are shielded through sanctuary policies, and consistent resistance against any policies that would jeopardize this status. undocumented immigrants should be made aware of their rights in advance (see Arise Chicago's toolkit for immigrant workers and Immigrant Legal Resource Center: Red Cards as just two resources) and given resources to lean on if they are detained (NNIRR's hotlines for example). if you can, you should join a broad organization like DSA or volunteer your skillset to an organization which will have it. in short: there's a lot you can do right now, but you must be the person who chooses to do it.

the growth of climate reaction

Today’s [proletarian] reactionaries are increasingly ethno-nationalist and, rather than acknowledge the fires they see with their own eyes, will instead dial up the violence.

Since they are both conservative, the bourgeois capitalist denialist ISA and the proletarian reactionaries ally on the right. For example, when the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party movement after the election of Obama, they took advantage of anti-Black racism to astroturf an apparatus conducive to deregulation. In what Ernesto Laclau called a “chain of equivalences,” deregulation stitched itself to ethno-nationalism.
—Tad DeLay, Future of Denial

i promise i'm not always bad news; unfortunately many of the things i take an interest in will be significantly affected by the change in administration, and there's a lot i want to say about that. one of those things is climate change: already it has become obvious that the second-Trump-term backlash to climate change mitigation is going to be significantly stronger than anything we experienced in his first term.

i don't say this particularly lightly. you may remember my essay "Just How Bad The Antifa Wildfire Panic Got In Rural Oregon in 2020" which recounted some of the collective psychosis that gripped the American right during 2020 (a psychosis which has largely been memoryholed). things have been bad in this space for years now, and it is evident that what Tad DeLay characterizes as the "proletarian reactionary" response to climate change has developed into a fever that will not recede easily. but the highly-visible Oregon roadblocks of 2020 were in many ways just the first great culmination of climate change, widespread anti-government paranoia, and the Obama-era and Trump-era revitalization of the far-right. the militia movement has been aggrieved and preparing for domestic crisis since Waco, and was given second wind by Obama's presidency. Oath Keeper "community preparedness teams" appeared in Ferguson during the 2014-15 civil rights protests there and deployed themselves in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico during the disastrous 2018 hurricane season. given the confluence of absolute fucking disasters that occurred in 2020, it is not particularly surprising that 2020 was a landmark year for climate reactionaries.

what might be surprising though is how the stories of the proletarian reactionary militia groups have continued at an alarming pace. it is likely you are familiar with Kyle Rittenhouse (who fashioned himself as something of a militia teenager) and the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer because those are not climate related and are conventionally ideological for militia groups. but you probably are not familiar with the Oath Keepers trying to render disaster aid during tornado outbreaks in 2021; or the Echo Company militia feeding people and attempting to recruit among those displaced from the 2022 Oak Fire; or the efforts by the Oath Keepers and their sympathizers, after January 6th, to reinvent themselves (or at least complicate their image) as a sort of accessory to FEMA and disaster management. this is new behavior, and behavior that has allowed militia groups to become an increasingly normalized feature of disasters. these groups now launder political reaction through the rhetoric of private community service,¹ a pivot that is handsomely paying off. some states like Idaho have outright repealed their prohibition on such militia groups. but even places like Nassau County, New York—effectively suburban New York City—are finding this manifestation of reactionary politics quite appealing. in March of last year, Prism reported on Nassau County's Republicans, and their effort to organize the county's own disaster militia.

militia groups are only one half of the backlash, though—and the second is actually the part i'm particularly worried about.

the proletarian reactionary as a surrogate for the bourgeois capitalist

the other half of the backlash consists of proletarian reactionaries in state legislatures acting out the interests of DeLay's "bourgeois capitalists" (as opposed to those capitalists taking initiative themselves). perhaps because it is being led by proletarians and not by fossil fuel executives, this reaction seems uninterested in the usual deregulatory schemes and is instead prepared to settle fossil fuel hegemony by force and state mandate.

Oklahoma: ground zero of fossil fascism

ground zero for this phenomenon is Oklahoma, as helpfully described by Heatmap's Jael Holtzman. although stereotypically associated with coal and gas, the state now produces nearly half of its energy from renewable energy. this green energy revolution has been so inarguably great for Oklahoma that even its terrible Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, frequently flexes the state's renewable energy credibility and thinks the free market should decide its energy mix—an implicitly pro-renewable position cloaked in conservative rhetoric. to this point, Oklahoma has actually been a remarkable success story for renewables and how they can thrive in a very conservative state. under the surface, however, an extremely grim revolution is brewing: one that seeks the ban of all green energy in the state.

to be clear, Oklahoma is not the only place where backlash to renewables is occurring. around 15% of US counties have restrictions or outright bans on such developments, most of which have been passed in the last 15 years. it is effectively impossible to build wind turbines in several states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Connecticut; solar bans have not yet been taken up by an entire state but are a growing problem in the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic areas.

but what distinguishes Oklahoma's experience is the character of the backlash to renewables and the totality of the demand. when you look at Tennesseee and Vermont's functional bans, for example, these rested on concerns like property values and noise pollution—classic NIMBYism, in other words. Tennessee's governor at the time, Bill Haslam, explicitly opposed a total ban on wind projects in the state; certainly Vermont, one of America's most liberal states, has no hang-ups about green energy. in Oklahoma the character of the backlash is explicitly fossil fascist—that is, motivated by reverence for oil and gas and ideologically opposed to any alternative which threatens these. to the extent that NIMBY-like concerns do exist, they are recognized only insofar as they advance this fossil fascism.

Jim Shaw, a newly-elected politician who successfully primaried the chair of the Appropriations and Budget Committee in part by running on a statewide wind moratorium, makes this fossil fascism quite explicit. Shaw believes that a "taxpayer-subsidized 'green energy' agenda" is a "huge land grab is destroying our agriculture and ranching communities, our overall way of life and working to eradicate the oil and gas industry." in an interview with Breitbart, he explicitly argues that green energy would be the death of Oklahoma. there is no hiding behind aesthetics, or noise, or setbacks—and a significant of his contemporaries are clearly in the same headspace. on January 9th, he appeared with numerous other legislators, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and Education Secretary Ryan Walters at a "Stop the Green" rally demanding Governor Stitt pass an "Executive Order to stop the wind turbines, solar, and other “green” energy agendas from destroying Oklahoma!" this desired Executive Order is unlikely happen for reasons already stated—Stitt is effectively pro-renewable—but in many ways it is also a diversion. from my perspective the real point of the rally was to demonstrate how widely fossil fascism has penetrated in Oklahoma, and to scare other legislator into compliance.

the organization behind the rally, the Freedom Brigades, seems to confirm this assumption; in an interview with Holtzman, its founder Charity Linch stated "I don’t believe that [pro-renewable Republicanism is] going to continue in Oklahoma. If [other Republicans] haven’t figured it out yet, they will very soon." indeed the Freedom Brigades have quickly become a vanguard against green energy projects in Oklahoma—and that they have the Attorney General on their side is not trivial. (Drummond, it should be noted, has fought extensively to instate a law that would prevent Oklahoma from investing in companies that boycott or divest from the oil and gas industry; he is also now running for governor in 2026.) this is to say nothing of Freedom Brigades' several elected officials, of which Jim Shaw is just one. Representatives Tim Turner and Neil Hays (both attendees of the organization's January 9th rally) are just as oppositional as Shaw is to green energy, and now they have a body count to show for it. just days ago they killed a wind farm project in their region, apparently with the backing of House Speaker Kyle Hilbert no less. Turner's words at the rally—“It’s time to let the outsiders know, we will protect our quality of life in Oklahoma. Time to get back to oil and gas—drill baby drill!”—seem disturbingly close to a promise for what is to come in parts of America whose economies are heavily reliant on fossil fuel revenue: compliance by force.

Wyoming: the farcical conclusion

and the logical conclusion of this "what is to come" is not something we must idly speculate about either. Wyoming, another state heavily reliant on fossil fuels, once saw its politics moderated by an interesting sort of old-guard frontier libertarianism. its current governor, Mark Gordon, comes from this wing of the party and is comparatively moderate.² but in the Trump era the state as a whole has simply careened to the right behind an ascendant, far-right Freedom Caucus. their vicious efforts in the 2022 elections saw them gain an ally in Secretary of State Chuck Gray, and in the 2024 elections the Caucus took a majority in the state House of Representatives and scalped numerous leaders of the legislature. that majority is now seeking to completely reshape an already conservative state.

given its significance to the state, the fossil fuel industry is not exempt from that reshaping—and in this area the Wyoming Freedom Caucus can best be described as accelerationist. nowhere is this more evident than with the ‘Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again’ proposal, a just-introduced bill by Freedom Caucus ally Cheri Steinmetz and Freedom Caucus Chairman Emeritus John Bear that earnestly argues "carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and is a beneficial substance" and would make it unlawful to enact any sort of carbon reduction measures in Wyoming. to say this is an expression of fossil fascism and a move to benefit the bourgeois capitalists is obvious. Steinmetz is blatantly laundering fossil fuel corporation talking points when she speaks of carbon mitigation measures bearing "high economic costs and questionable environmental benefits, and clearly negative effects on our people and our industries." she's even doing so when she speaks of people "vilifying this essential gas"—points that come from the George C. Marshall Institute and its successor in the CO₂ Coalition, at least one of which has been funded by Exxon Mobil and both of which are allies of the American Petroleum Institute.

but that's to be expected. really it is the penetration of these extreme beliefs which is remarkable, just as in Oklahoma. in ordinary circumstances this bill could be written off as posturing or attention seeking—but, in Wyoming's legislature, its only impediment is whether the Freedom Caucus will take it up or not. in my mind that is a very real question. multiple Freedom Caucus members such as Representatives Christopher Knapp and Scott Heiner—who have argued Wyoming should maximize fossil fuel production and minimize any carbon sequestration—seem to agree with Steinmetz. and when Steinmetz brought the CO₂ Coalition to the legislature last year, multiple Senators attended. fossil fascism has many takers in Wyoming.

if there's any good news, it's that Mark Gordon would probably veto this bill if it reached his desk. it would certainly be easy to justify: even constrained to its own internal logic the bill would be a disaster for Wyoming and the independence the Freedom Caucus claims to want. but Gordon will be termed out in 2026,³ and it seems very unlikely that his successor will be comparatively moderate like he is. will the interests of fossil fuel companies in Wyoming be lessened by then? will the Freedom Caucus in Wyoming be lesser in influence by then? the chances of a fossil fascist state government in Wyoming seem alarmingly plausible before the end of the decade. and mind you, i have not touched on the other canards of fossil fascism. racism and immigration fearmongering are just one constant—the hardliners in Wyoming want to bring the boot down on "illegals" and the indigenous. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is already promising to "DEPORT illegal immigrants" as Governor and has called on Donald Trump to immediately begin rounding up anyone with a deportation order. a genuinely fossil fascist government, even with the constrained powers of a U.S. state, would be capable of enacting a great deal of localized harm—particularly if it began to deputize and normalize the militia groups who have become increasingly common in disaster areas.

a more optimistic conclusion

fortunately, the nationwide context remains much better. it's hard to make of what a second Trump administration will do for militia groups, but much of America's existing climate progress and green infrastructure will be hard to dismantle. even in the worst case scenario right now, the reaction is also limited in geographical extent. most states are still making state-level progress on climate change because it's good business and creates good, high-paying jobs. almost $100 billion in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act are effectively future-proofed (and Republicans are divided on the tax credits it passed, making it much harder to repeal those). believe it or not, federal initiatives like the Climate Corps are also surprisingly insulated from the next few years because they didn’t employ people directly (an issue-turned-benefit, you could say). markets, of course, still quite like renewable energy over most fossil fuels and are not likely to change their minds because wind turbines make certain Republicans mad. finally, America is just one country even if it is a very large contributor to climate change. it would take monumental backsliding here to offset everyone else's progress—and, at least right now, it is an open question whether American backsliding will be more than a selective and regionalized phenomenon. is the creep of fossil fascism bad? yes, and it is very worrying—if not for everyone, at least for the people likely to be affected by it. but i'm ultimately not a doomer here and, at least right now, you shouldn't be either.

footnotes

¹ of course, these groups are still quite explicit in terms of who they seek to marginalize and who they identify as the enemy. you need look no further than the things they get up to on the side—unlawfully operated militia training facilities in Vermont, voter intimidation in Arizona, confrontations with civil rights protesters, and efforts to police the US-Mexico border extrajudicially among others.

² to the point where he has faced censured for being too moderate; in general, Gordon has a bad relationship with much of his party and a very bad relationship with the Freedom Caucus of his state.

³ with the caveat that he may challenge Wyoming's term limits in court.

Cohost and the "caricature problem"

or: an unintentional Cohost requiem

The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private [corporate tech] platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. [...] Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible. So, too, with our online activities, where our relationships and conversations are our modern-day yields, designed to harvest ever more data. As with corn and soy grown in great monocrops, quality and individuality are sacrificed in favor of standardization and homogenization, even when homogenization takes the form of individuals all competing to stand out as quirky and utterly unique.
—Doppelganger, chapter 2

i'm in the middle of reading Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, and in the second chapter of the book she makes a point about corporate social media (and corporate technology more generally) and how it has enclosed the internet. far from the libertine, do-what-you-want spirit that once characterized the internet—or even the promise of freedom of expression and mass social connection that was effectively the selling point of early social media—we now live in an almost totally enclosed, enshittified internet experience. our social relations online are almost fully privatized and monetized by megacorporations, and the resultant data we inevitably give these corporations is trivially bought, sold, and analyzed by anybody who wants to do that. it is quite bad, and leads to many subsequent bad consequences.

one consequence is, as Klein observes, a mass homogenization—something that likely has an already existing name but which i personally call the caricature problem. i'd like to take some time to sketch this problem out, how Cohost avoided this problem and why it was so enjoyable, and what we'll be losing now that it's gone.

the caricature problem

in short, the caricature problem is this: the internet is so enclosed and so algorithmically captured that it punishes expressing the totalities and complexities of ourselves. to stand out we must exaggerate or flatten ourselves—become caricatures of who we are—into digestible, predictable personalities for consumption. we must in effect become marketable brands. as Klein notes, this is not incongruent with individual quirkiness or uniqueness: actually, those qualities frequently become a manifestation of this problem. even when we would prefer not to, we frequently become pigeonholed into acting out the qualities which other people perceive as defining us. gimmick or single-issue accounts "breaking character" and receiving backlash can be thought of as an example of this—but virtually all of us are subject to this pressure at some point or another, and in one way or another. often times we (preemptively) reduce ourselves like this without even realizing it.

how does this problem come about?

as described, this probably feels like an inevitability. of course social media run by Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and a cadre of other cretins with psychotic technolibertarian beliefs would render us all caricatures in this way. these are people with a very specific, very inhuman idea of what social relations should look like. but the problem is created by something more fundamental: that we mediate nearly all of our online social relations through private actors at all. the enclosure of the internet provides corporations with such a wealth of data that it is trivial for them—both individually and at scale—to manipulate every aspect of how people interact and in what ways they do so. and of course they have every market incentive to do so (to say nothing of other—frequently political—incentives).

the most prominent and omnipresent manifestation of this is algorithms, without question: how you experience social media today is overwhelmingly determined by mechanical processes that are hidden or obfuscated from you as much as possible. a good social media algorithm is invisible, and yet in its essence reflects the amount of data you (and everyone else) put into it. needless to say, we put an unfathomable amount of data into these private actors—the things we post, who we talk to, the things we like and interact with, and so on—and all but hand them the capacity to "objectify and quantify social life in numerical form," as Richard Seymour puts it in The Twittering Machine. but it should be no surprise that to "quantify social life" in this way produces perverse incentives—rounded personalities are punished, caricatures are rewarded; substantive exchanges with complexities are buried, simple narratives encouraged; and personalities become hostages to their algorithmically-served-up audiences.

this is bad, but perhaps it would be easier to stomach if the ability to "quantify social life" was not simultaneously being sold back to users in the form of metrics, which are actually even more omnipresent. social media is simply awash in numbers: likes, dislikes, reshares, comments, quoted posts, views, follower counts, post numbers, and a frankly endless number of other meaningless units. and this is to say nothing of dashboards that track profile statistics, link clickthroughs, and other business-oriented number values that have little meaning but are usually accessible to literally anyone.¹ it is simply trivial to become a caricature because you are given the ability—in painstaking detail—to know exactly what people want from you, exactly what they don't, and what might make people care or be more social with you the next time you post. this is obviously a recipe for disaster. unless you're explicitly looking for it, who sincerely wants to be on the wrong side of an issue, or the bad end of a ratio, or become the main character of the day and have thousands of people gawking at you for sport? and conversely who doesn't like being reassured they're correct, or having 10,000 people listen to what they say (even if it means compromising on their personality)?

many other factors besides algorithms and metrics inform all of this, of course, but they alone demonstrate the point sufficiently in my view. (they also have unique relevance to Cohost and why the website largely avoided these issues.)

Cohost and its lack of the caricature problem

now, i cannot give you any sense of what should be done about this at the systemic level besides "fundamentally overthrow the existing political, social, and economic system we live in, since replication of this issue is good for business"—and obviously that's a bit of a non-answer. but i do think there are alternatives to this that can exist even within a capitalist framework. Cohost demonstrates this quite well.

ask virtually any Cohost user and they will tell you that Cohost was an incredibly freeing experience for them—a space where they felt the ability to be themselves instead of a living commodity. frequently, users of the site talk about being "deprogrammed" and "detoxed" from the corrosive influence of Twitter and Mastodon metrics, which had previously governed how and what they posted about; others talk about how Cohost finally allowed their art to coexist alongside their other interests. Nicky Flowers writes of the site that "i didn't have to be Nicky Flowers™️, Internet Person Trying To Appear Professional Enough To Hire. no number-go-up, no clout. i was simply nicky." and still another common feeling is that Cohost had a sort of egalitarianism among posters where, because you could only infer influence, even "big accounts" were approachable and able to be socialized with on equal terms.

all of these experiences—and others like them—were clearly and in large part facilitated by Cohost's explicit design choices. from the beginning Cohost committed to no algorithms (instead opting for a chronological timeline and a Tumblr-style tagging system) and a near total absence of metrics (the only numbers was a private-facing notification number, which could be turned off). these were highly-touted selling points for the website, they were substantial talking points in word-of-mouth, and they were extremely well-liked choices by people who used the website actively.² even among skeptics the initial shock and discomfort from the metric choice in particular consistently tended to wear off with time. many of the theoretical problems one might conjure from their absence also simply did not happen in practice.³ "lack of engagement" for example was a reason many artists on Twitter were skeptical of the site's lack of metrics. far from this dampening visible enthusiasm for creative projects though, Cohost had a bustling art scene—especially among writers and musicians, whose mediums of choice mesh poorly with contemporary social media. although anecdotal, it also seems well established that Cohost users were quite generous and had an unusually high click-through rate for artist projects.

i will refrain from drawing strong, sweeping conclusions here due to self-selection bias, but i would argue that Cohost demonstrates quite compellingly that metrics—and algorithms—are completely unnecessary components of a full social media experience. we do not have to be turned into caricatures. it is also entirely possible—even with a small team—to build a functional, modern, well-liked social media platform without either of these. this of course begs the question of why companies don't do this more.

what we will lose with Cohost

i don't need to tell you that the answer is capital. it always is. whether they acknowledge it or not, websites make an explicit, ideological choice to encourage this phenomenon. as Richard Seymour says, data is "one of the most profitable raw materials yet discovered," and yet it is simultaneously easy to induce users to make more of it. you can see a sort of vicious cycle: data is produced by engagement so you juice engagement with algorithms that reflect user inputs. you provide metrics that quantify a user's social life back to them so they know what algorithms and people following them want. those users produce more data. rinse and repeat, the users are—in the most dehumanizing sense possible—the product. Cohost's model eschewed this, so it's an obvious nonstarter for most people in the social media business today. for most social media companies an explicit part of the path to profitability includes selling out their users (usually in multiple ways!) to venture capital firms.

but this illustrates what we will lose without Cohost: an actually existing example of a better world that is possible; a sort of socialism-in-one-website if you want to be tongue-in-cheek about it. it's not as if Cohost ever threatened the existing capitalist hegemony in social media or anything, but you might still analogize its loss to, say, Cuba, or Rojava, or the Zapatistas suddenly collapsing tomorrow. Cohost was—more or less—a genuinely socialist, cooperatively-owned social media company, a beacon of light in an appalling industry. it really sucks to see a radical experiment like this fail, and it's not obvious that another experiment like it will occur given what needed to align to make Cohost happen in the first place. the market is also a harsh mistress: that Cohost lived its values; demonstrated social media might be able to exist without making users a product to be bought and sold; and allowed its users to be real, fully fledged people means devastatingly little. as far as most people are concerned what Cohost stood for is not a viable product because it failed, and the discussion ends there.

but i don't want to say everything is completely dour, even though the probability of another Cohost-like website is obviously low. strictly speaking many Fediverse communities are also examples of this model, and so someone will continue to keep the lights on (just at a much, much smaller scale) where markets almost assuredly won't. in my view the model is also clearly sound, even at Cohost's scale, with better planning and better budgeting. if someone ever scrounges up the money and coordination to make it real, i don't see anything actually stopping a Cohost-like website in principle. maybe a "successful Cohost" in the future will succeed because it learns from its predecessor—becoming the 1917 to Cohost's 1905. i don't know.

if nothing else, though, i hope that the principles of Cohost (there is value in being in the same place as everyone; metrics are ruining our lives; human curation is good and social media algorithms have been a disaster; etc.) continue to inform the immediate future of radical social media. i would like to look back upon this as a "dress rehearsal" to a tech future that does not completely suck ass

footnotes

¹ at one point—and perhaps still, although i have not checked—Twitter provided every user with a dashboard of all of their posts, the amount of interactions they received, the best performing tweet over a given timeframe, and dozens of other measures from which it would be trivial to determine what you should and should not post.

² by far the most consistent critics of either of these choices were users who did not even register for the site, at least in my experience.

³ a lengthy aside i'd just like to put on record somewhere: to the extent that there were actual points of friction introduced by these design choices, these tended to be more inconveniences than legitimate issues with continued usage of Cohost. should tagging or following cool people that interact with your posts have been such a load-bearing aspect of discovery on Cohost? perhaps not, but i would not describe this as an actual issue—this feels too weighty for what was more an inconvenience than anything. many of the issues were closer to future-proofing than anything else. deprioritizing metrics can, for example, be a legitimate impediment to identifying where abuse is actually coming from. on Cohost this could have eventually become a serious issue since it was possible to sort of "quote retweet" a post, and none of these notified the person whose post was being "quote retweeted". but to my knowledge this was never a substantial vector for harassment; certainly Cohost was never lacking in harassment or harassers who could have done this. in any case, i think i would rather grapple with the complexity of squaring that circle than put up with Twitter metrics because it's slightly easier to trace who is imploring their 100,000 followers to harass you.

the forthcoming future of decent portions of America

or: climate change, insurance markets, and how fucked we are

back on Cohost i briefly talked a few times about the insurance market and how completely fucked it is; however, this deserves a more lengthy consideration in light of the disastrous wildfires this week in California. to put it shortly: consider this a likely shot across the bow for what to expect as climate change gets worse; events like wildfires, floods, and hurricanes get more frequent and damaging; and insurers get squeezed on the properties they protect.

a brief overview of a complete disaster

i'm sure i don't need to extensively recap the sheer devastation in California, but: this was and is literally the worst fire event in Los Angeles history. i think there is a decent-to-good chance that ultimately the Palisades Fire (in Pacific Palisades and Malibu) and the Eaton Fire (in Pasadena and Altadena) become the second and third most destructive fires in California history—they will definitely clock in no worse than third and fourth on that list. both have destroyed an estimated 5,000 or structures, and it is likely that they impacted over 10,000 structures each, so don't be surprised if structure loss numbers are revised up again. as of writing, there are at least 11 fatalities—that would be miraculous if it held given the circumstances.

needless to say, this event will go down in history as a measuring stick for what is possible in Los Angeles' future. my suspicion is that this term it is probably going to rewrite how to think about the wildland-urban interface and just how far that actually extends into a city. from the Eaton Fire, for instance, several buildings have burned in Altadena and Pasadena that (in my estimation) are as far as two miles away from the foothills. only the winds relenting and the ability of aircraft to operate seems to have actually prevented the fire from burning all the way to the 210. spot fires were also observed up to three miles ahead of the fire—effectively making any possibility of firebreaks an academic one. it is quite clear that we are extremely unprepared for the future intensity and worst case scenario for wildfires! but, perhaps worse still, we have not even begun to seriously consider whether many of the areas that burned (or could burn) will need to be written off.

the broad strokes of California and its insurance crisis

one reality is that many parts of California are—or should be—uninsurable. companies like State Farm (currently the largest home insurer in California) and Allstate have increasingly reflected this, leaving the state and cancelling many existing policies they do hold. according to AP, in the past two years 7 of the 12 largest insurance companies by market share in California have restricted policies they write or left the state entirely. the uninsurability of many parts of California has also been reflected in the state's increasingly desperate efforts to intervene in the insurance market. beginning this year California will incentivize insurers to not leave by "requir[ing] home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas [...] In exchange for increasing coverage, the state will let insurance companies pass on the costs of reinsurance to California consumers." but in all probability—and even supposing this plan works, which is debatable given this week's events—this will necessitate massive premium costs (and spikes) for many people, reflecting their high-risk situation.¹ this is not ideal in a state which already has the worst housing crisis in America.

more realistically the situation will get significantly worse regardless of what California does. this is for a number of reasons, some of which are complicated and some of which are simple. one complicated reason is that for a long time California's insurance industry has been severely constrained by 1988's Proposition 103. Prop 103 is a well-meaning Ralph Nader-led policy that "requires the “prior approval” of the state’s insurance regulator before insurance companies can implement property and casualty rates, including homeowner’s insurance" and makes it so that "property and casualty insurance companies cannot take all the losses associated with one event [...] and then simply put them onto next year’s rates." while this is obviously beneficial for homeowners and has saved them literally billions of dollars in premium hikes, these rules have also subsidized an unbelievable amount of high-risk development that is now coming home to roost. until last month, they prevented insurers from factoring climate change into their premiums; more generally, insurers have not been allowed to price policies according to current or future risk. this was also not a good idea and it has likewise come home to roost. in many cases the only available remedy for insurers if they think they're overexposed to risk is to aggressively cancel policies, as State Farm has done.

but cancelling policies—in many cases—obviously fucks over policyholders because it is a nuclear option. indeed, Pacific Palisades had many State Farm policyholders whose policies were not renewed in March of last year, leaving them scrambling for coverage; as a result many of those households have flocked to California's insurer of last resort, the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan. although intended to be temporary and providing only basic (and narrow, and expensive) coverage, FAIR is an increasingly load-bearing program in fire-prone areas. there are now more than 452,000 FAIR policies—double the number that existed in 2020—and the number continues to grow rapidly. this is both because FAIR cannot deny any person who "has made a diligent but unsuccessful effort to buy home insurance" and because it provides generous coverage of up to $3 million. consequently though, its exposure is massive. in Pacific Palisades alone that exposure is around $6 billion by some accounts. and the FAIR program is also likely insolvent, or close to it. according to Susan Crawford:

As of last June, the FAIR Plan, which may not deny fire insurance to anyone, no matter how risky their property, had a surplus of just $385 million available to pay claims. As of last March, the Plan had about $700 million in cash on hand (in addition to the surplus). It had about $5 billion in reinsurance, after a deductible of about $900 million (as long as that deductible is met by a single event).

as it currently exists the program is not well-placed to resist a massive wildfire shock—much of that $6 billion in exposure in Pacific Palisades has clearly gone up in flames (plus an unknown amount of exposure in Pasadena and Altadena). Crawford also notes that "the Plan's requests for premium increases to match its risks have been taking 18 months to two years to be approved (after substantial slashing) by the California Department of Insurance." given that total insured losses could be as high as $20 billion (with total economic losses in the $50 billion range), there is good reason to assume the program is not in a strong position to immediately cover its losses. it is entirely conceivable—perhaps even likely—that some sort of emergency funding, emergency rate increases, or in the worst case scenario a bailout will be necessary for people to eventually see payouts—to say nothing of the forthcoming teethpulling needed to get those payouts. (FAIR denies all of this and expects to be able to pay out, for what that's worth.)²

and of course there are also a lot of people who are either uninsured or self-insured because of the widespread policy cancellations. those people are generally going to be extremely wealthy or extremely fucked, and sometimes both. i don't think we need to linger particularly on this camp; the wealthy will take their money and go or rebuild (perhaps at onerous cost), the less fortunate will become a part of California's growing homeless population.

counterintuitive outcomes and their problems

disasters often make for complicated and counterintuitive outcomes. strangely, the middle-class and less fortunate in places like Pacific Palisades (at least if they still have insurance) are among the most likely to rebuild. this is because insurance policies are often small relative to current property values in California—another symptom of the state's ongoing housing crisis—making it so that only the state's poorest are able to recoup their losses in full. Jake Bittle, in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, observed this phenomenon in the aftermath of the Tubbs Fire, which burned over 5,600 structures in 2017:

The Tubbs fire revealed that the insurance equilibrium in [California] relied on flawed math. The home prices in a housing-scarce city like Santa Rosa could get up into the millions, but most fire policies provided only a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of coverage, insuring only a portion of a structure’s value. This made sense to an extent, since electrical fires and other small blazes might only damage part of a home rather than level it altogether, but it was also a financial decision on the part of the insurance companies. The companies knew that wildfires were still possible, and they didn’t want to be liable for rebuilding an entire neighborhood’s worth of mansions, so they offered only enough coverage to satisfy lenders and homeowners. Thus, in the aftermath of the Tubbs Fire, many victims like José Guzman found that their insurance policies were not sufficient to cover the cost of rebuilding the homes they had lost, and one’s insurance policy set a ceiling on the value of one’s future home. It didn’t matter if a victim rebuilt their home on the same lot or bought a new home somewhere else. Unless she had extra savings to make up the difference, she could only get what her insurance payout would buy.

Strange as it might seem, this dynamic gave the middle-class homeowners in Coffey Park a distinct advantage over the wealthy homeowners in Fountaingrove when it came time to rebuild. Because the houses in Coffey Park were more modest than those in Fountaingrove, there was a smaller gap between the average insurance policy and the average home value, so most victims could afford to build new houses that were similar to the ones they had lost.[...]

now, to the untrained eye this may seem like a very good thing. ideally you would want families to be restored in whole, but the system is still preventing middle-class and lower-income families from being wiped out and rendered totally insolvent just because their houses burned. their neighborhoods and communities can also still be rebuilt where they used to be—something like Paradise, California, where an entire community was wiped out and scattered, need not happen here.

the problem, though, is the combination of California's housing crisis and these low insurance payouts mean the best option—or only option—for most lower-income families is to rebuild where they are. any other option necessitates significant loss or outright bankruptcy. but by rebuilding where they are, many families simultaneously become locked into living in fire-prone areas that will burn again—and therefore into holding properties that should be uninsurable (and eventually will be no matter what). many Californians, in other words, are now stuck with a bag they can only offload at prohibitive cost. Coffey Park is just one at-scale example. it was rebuilt in large part because it was the only place many policyholders could afford, and it was rebuilt in such a way that in the lifetime of these policyholders it will probably burn again. says Jake Bittle:

[The Tran family] insurance policy gave them only enough money to build a Coffey Park–caliber house, and there was only one Coffey Park. Moving back was a difficult decision, but it was also, in many respects, an easy one. Most other residents I interviewed had the same ambivalent journey as the Trans did: they liked the neighborhood, and they liked the idea of moving back, but they also knew they didn’t have much of a choice. Unless a victim wanted to downsize or move far afield, they had a significant financial incentive to stay put. [...] insurers didn’t have any control over fire-safety standards for the rebuilt homes, so the new version of Coffey Park turned out to be just as vulnerable to wildfires as the old one. Since the neighborhood was outside the wildland-urban interface, protected by the freeway, it was exempt from the stricter building codes that the city of Santa Rosa adopted after the fire. The new homes were still spaced just a few feet apart and separated by wooden fences, and many of the new yards were planted with flammable mulch. The new home builders also declined to pay for fire-prevention upgrades like hardened concrete walls and fireproof windows. It might be a long time before another fire skips over the freeway, but when it did, the insurance companies would again get stuck with a massive bill. (emphasis mine)

the same, unfortunately, will probably be true in Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and Altadena. the wealthy, at least, can generally cut their losses (even if it means returning to a middle class lifestyle—and many of the wealthy in Pacific Palisades certainly will not even have to do that) despite the insurance crisis. they have the ability to move and to turn their properties over, or to rebuild at their own risk. many middle-class people have no such flexibility, and that flexibility is only getting worse.

buying time against the inevitable

one of the truths we are not prepared for in this era of climate change is that many parts of California; the Mountain West; the Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf Coasts; and entire sections of states like Florida and Louisiana will—purely for economic reasons, not even factoring in other considerations—have to eventually be ceded to nature or left to fend for themselves. everything will be done to resist this (especially if this will be felt most by homeowners), but it will happen eventually.

if you believe that is exaggeratory, it really is not. to continue the example being used throughout this piece: consider that FAIR alone has exposure of over $430 billion from its 452,000 and growing policies (essentially a million per policy)—and there are still literally millions of people for whom FAIR is likely to become the only option sooner rather than later. much of this is and will be concentrated in fire-prone areas that, in one or a series of bad years (like 2017 and 2018), could go up in flames and immediately render the program incapable of paying out without a significant bailout of some kind, most likely from the federal government. in many ways the bet California is making amounts to "if something truly catastrophic happens, the federal government will step in and make it go away." this is a bad bet to make for a lot of reasons (one of those reasons, incidentally, is the particularly grim "wrong person wins a presidential election and just hates California").

as you may be able to infer, though, California is hardly the only state assuming their own policies or the federal government can, against market forces, prop up state insurance markets forever. Hamilton Nolan, in a piece last year called The Insurance Apocalypse Conversation America Won't Have, lays out some of the absurdity of what is happening, saying: "[...]what we are really dealing with is sort of the paper fiction of insurance—just enough to keep the real estate market pumping and stave off immediate exodus, with the implicit knowledge that in the worst case scenario [...] states will run to the federal government for a bailout, and then keep on doing the same thing."

the state of Florida in particular—California's Wario, you might say—is speedrunning this same problem as over a dozen of its insurers have bolted and the constant threat of hurricanes has turned the insurer of last resort Citizens into a massive and growing liability. for five years now the state has been locked in an interminable battle with its own insurance market, forcing hundreds of thousands of people off of Citizens and onto private insurance every year in a desperate bid to artificially float the market and to simultaneously reduce its own liabilities. and yet every year, Citizens gains new policyholders. no amount of clearing the rolls can save parts of Florida from being uninsurable outside of everyone subsidizing high-risk areas, so that is what happens. it is pretty unambiguous that Florida expects someone else to pay for its mistakes, too: CNN quotes Mark Friedlander, an industry trade group guy, as saying "Citizens is allowed by state regulations to implement a premium surcharge to its policyholders and other Florida consumers to ensure all claims are paid." even if you aren't a Citizens policyholder, if you are a resident of the state of Florida one day you will be paying for someone else's property being lost.

or, at least, you will be under the generous assumption that money can even be recouped from Florida citizens at all. the state has seen premium increases averaging nearly $1,300 a year—by far the most in the country—and presumably many Florida rateholders are not super interested in subsidizing someone else's problems on top of that. but more pressingly: literally hundreds of billions of dollars are tied up in cities like Miami, and many of those assets are completely fucked (and, incidentally, covered by Citizens!) in the not-too-distant future between warming oceans, stronger hurricanes, saltwater intrusion, and rising seas. it is rather improbable that all of this will be paid for by the state of Florida and its citizens.

learning to let go

one other forthcoming reckoning—and something that informs the shape of the expectation that the federal government step in to keep everyone solvent after a natural disaster—will be with the 30-year mortgage and the nature of homeownership. Polly Mosendz and Eric Roston, writing for Bloomberg Green and touching on some of the aforementioned problems that lock people into disaster-prone areas, observe that:

Homeowners in Florida and California have already been trying to reconcile their mortgage duration and dwindling insurance options with neighborhoods that may not live to see 30 years. In a nation where long-term loans are the gateway to homeownership for most families, climate change is rewriting the basic assumptions about risk. The lending industry relies on insurance to absorb some of the risk of mortgages failing. And the insurance industry is largely predicated on the idea that if a home is damaged or destroyed, a comparable structure should be rebuilt on the same spot. This model will have trouble accommodating land changed beyond recognition, no longer able to host a dwelling.

for many homeowners, huge portions of their wealth are tied to that homeownership—something that is increasingly hard-won and pricey, especially in places like California. but it is increasingly unreasonable to assume that a home which exists now should continue to exist indefinitely, uninsured or insured. consider—even if we were somehow able to freeze global warming at 1.2C—what a home in Los Angeles or Miami might deal with between now and 2055. even in ideal circumstances there are still tens or hundreds of thousands of homes that will be effectively worthless by 2055 due to their risk profile and potential for burning. since we cannot freeze global warming, of course, climate change is set to make this much worse in every way possible. many homes that have been built, simply put, should not be there.

there is not a particularly good way to remedy this—and because any policy would necessarily involve hardship and grief for potentially millions of homeowner there is certainly no way to remedy this which is acceptable in the current Overton window. whether people are prepared for it or not, though, something will happen. insurance is one of the only industries taking climate change seriously, and the numbers are already very, very bad! basically every other aspect of property ownership, meanwhile, is not equipped for the world we live in now, and the world we'll be living in soon. one of the great political issues of the next thirty years—whether this is implicit or explict—will be who sets the terms for forthcoming mass displacements, and how those terms are implemented. will it be homeowners, who have a mess of interests? will it be politicians, who demand insurers continue to subsidize high-risk areas until it's too late? will it be insurers, who one day simply declare whole swathes of America uninsurable? personally—and although this would obviously need to be among the costliest programs in US history—i would hope for some sort of managed buyback and relocation scheme that attempts to get people out of dangerous homes and into more stable, satisfactory ones. their former properties would then be rewilded but i find it disturbingly plausible that the future will just be a horrible combination of interests with minimal benefits—a system which fucks over everyone while supporting almost nobody.

as one person on Bluesky grimly noted:

Americans have somehow settled on demanding a mixed economy that features none of the benefits of free market capitalism or command socialism, but all of the liabilities of both.

footnotes

¹ this idea, in my opinion, also just sounds unbelievably bad:

The rule will require home insurers to offer coverage in high-risk areas, something the state has never done, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara’s office said in a statement. Insurers will have to start increasing their coverage by 5% every two years until they hit the equivalent of 85% of their market share. That means if an insurer writes 20 out of every 100 state policies, they’d need to write 17 in a high-risk area, Lara’s office said.

² an issue with taking the word of FAIR here is that the insurance crisis, in its most distilled essence, is "insurers not wanting to tell homeowners sweet lies about how insurable their properties are, and people and politicians wanting to make them tell those sweet lies anyways." FAIR—by virtue of being a state-administered insurer of last resort (that also literally cannot reject most people)—is under even more pressure to tell those sweet lies, and to thus be fast and loose with its solvency (at least in public).

what i read in 2024

in today's edition of birzeblog i'd like to recap all of the books i read in 2024—i did not really do this on Cohost and i have been quite inconsistent in my blogging so far, so you all have missed a lot. in total i read 60 books. that was well over my goal of 40, so in 2025, i'll be upping my reading goal to 50. that's about one book a week—i think i can manage pretty well, assuming nothing bad happens. anyways, let's not waste too much time. this is a long post even confined to my brief blurbs on each book.

January

1. Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest (Sandi Doughton): an interesting look into the inevitable, next Pacific Northwest earthquake; there's quite a lot going on geologically in the Seattle metropolitan area and personally i found this book to be a pretty good introduction to it all. probably a worthwhile book if you're a paranoid Seattleite.
2. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar): the first of several urbanist and urban planning books that will make this list—and one i actually have to reread in 2025 because i forgot to mark it up on my first reading. this is an excellent book as an introduction to how badly we've fucked up American cities with parking, and what can be done to fix that. i would consider this one of the canonical must-reads for urban reformists.
3. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (M. Nolan Gray): the second of the urbanist books (and another i need to mark up), Arbitrary Lines is to zoning what Paved Paradise is to parking. i don't think you'll agree with literally everything M. Nolan Gray suggests here—he is against zoning entirely, and i do think there are at least some cases where a system of zoning is warranted—but after reading this i do think you will concur that substantial zoning reform is necessary as a baseline. one fun fact i learned from this book: zoning as we know it in America is only about 100 years old, and it was initially a controversial practice that was constitutionally challenged (obviously, it was held as constitutional) and required government incentivization to become widespread.
4. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Jason Hickel): an interesting, introductory book to degrowth. i am not a degrowther—and found most of this book's argumentation unconvincing and at times revisionist of history—but many of the basic ideas of degrowth are not particularly objectionable and i would like to see those become commonplace in society. as we'll get into further down the list, i think Cuba provides a model for a lot of what degrowthers have in mind.
5. Aurora (David Koepp): the first fiction entry on this list, Aurora is a delightful post-apocalyptic book that contrasts two siblings—a wealthy prepper and an ordinary sister—and how their lives change when an extremely powerful geomagnetic storm destroys the power grid. i don't want to give very much away here because so much of the book rides on character development, but i found it enthralling enough to read it in just one day.
6. The Great Transition (Nick Fuller Googins): a frankly beautiful fiction book with a beautiful, interesting, climate-change informed setting. it's admittedly a small category but in terms of climate-influenced speculative fiction i consider this one of the best books of the category. consider this a wholehearted endorsement.
7. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien): i talked about this one on Cohost extensively as moderately disappointing because of my frame of reference. from my post on the matter:

   if you have a world where 40% of people are now non-cis and body modification is so normalized that it can be done without actual surgery, it just strikes me as almost conservative that people would still find it remarkable to be trans—certainly enough so for it to be a social category worth distinguishing from being cis in the vast majority of cases. that's how this tends to go in furry spaces, where basically everyone is already non-cis and often times extremely transgender. ditto with queer identities and to a lesser extent sexuality. perhaps we would go full abolitionist with these descriptors if given a chance to start over in a revolution of this sort. or perhaps the inverse of what i describe is true: a kaleidoscope of new identities would form, and be given legitimized social meaning in a world where the gender binary has been completely broken. either seems more plausible, and more interesting. i would also consider it rather conservative that, in such an advanced society (where augmentation of reality is possible through body modification and AI is considered sentient) there would be no serious grappling with transhumanism or the possibility of identifying as non-human at all—or how that might relate to gender expression and society as a whole. i don't even mean therianthropy here necessarily, although if we're being serious therians would probably be the vanguard of questioning humanity and its imposition.

February

1. Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (Janette Sadik-Khan): a very insightful book by New York City's former transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who you—from pedestrianizing Times Square to the massive expansion of bike lanes in the city—could say kickstarted NYC's ongoing revolution in transportation infrastructure. this book goes over not only the benefits of all of this new infrastructure and the deprioritization of cars generally, but also how that was won and what it took to build the support for it. a welcome addition to any bookshelf, in my view.
2. Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (Arnold August): if you don't mind a fairly uncritical treatment of Cuba, Cuba and Its Neighbors is one of the most insightful books on the system of government there. this book gave me a newfound appreciation for their system of government in specific and the extent to which i believe it can be credibly called democratic. for maximal effect i of course would recommend supplementing this book with People's Power by Peter Roman, which will appear downlist.
3. Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future (Ashley Dawson): i don't actually have all that much to say about this book, which i found fine (if inevitably dating because it is now an eight year old book on climate change); i think i mostly just don't like Ashley Dawson's political prescriptions, which at times in this book come off as underinformed and bordering on NIMBY.
4. Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (John P. Clark and Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater): although the systems described herein were abolished by the Zapatistas in 2023 and have subsequently been reorganized and decentralized further, this book remains an invaluable asset to anyone seeking to understand the Zapatista governance and decisionmaking process, and the revolutionary culture of EZLN-held Chiapas. genuinely one of the most insightful and inspiring books i've ever read, with ideas and models that i hope can one day will be emulated everywhere and not merely in a few pockets of the world. if you are an anarchist: read this book.
5. People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government (Peter Roman): this book is a more balanced and critical examination of the Cuban system than Arnold August's, and it also fills in details and influences on the Cuban system that August's book does not. if you have to choose between the two, i'd recommend this one. but i think both are useful books to learn from in their own ways, and as i said i would encourage you to read both and synthesize your own conclusions from them.
6. The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Lionel Shriver): easily the most wonkish fiction book i've ever read, i am definitely in the audience of ten or so for this one. steer clear of this one if you have no interest in a narrative which basically teaches you fiscal policy along the way—and it must sound very weird for me to say that if you have never heard of this book—but i found it a very unique book and quite enjoyable on that basis. it feels like a book that exists because someone was willing to entertain someone's passion project, and literature desperately needs more of that.

March

1. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin): i don't know that you need me to sell you on this one. it's Ursula K. Le Guin, this is one of her classics, if you only read a few books from her this should be one of them. it's arguably better than The Dispossessed.
2. The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis (Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros): truthfully, i don't remember all that much from this one—possibly because i didn't mark it up, possibly because i didn't mesh with its particular style. but if you find this blurb interesting, pick this one up at your next opportunity:

   Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now. Weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” for each place, this work considers both the serious consequences if we continue to pursue business as usual, and what we can do—from government policies to grassroots activism—to write a different, more hopeful story.

3. Social Ecology and Communalism (Murray Bookchin): a very influential text for me, and a good and digestible introduction to the extensive thought of Murray Bookchin. also highly recommend as an introductory text to the anarchist-oriented side of left-wing politics, since much of Bookchin's theory was influenced by anarchist thought. (fun aside: optimistically this year i'll be going through all of Bookchin's major works, since i haven't done that yet.)
4. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer): a must read for anyone, but especially for the leftist-minded. politically, i think your praxis is incomplete if it cannot accomodate this book. (incidentally: i have observed both on Cohost and in my notes that this book synthesizes well with social ecology and Bookchin's writings generally; one day i hope to make a full-fledged essay out of those notes.)
5. Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Chaia Heller): this theoretical text from Chaia Heller is joined at the hip to social ecology; Heller is a student of Bookchin and takes after him extensively. however, you don't need to be a social ecologist to find this a very interesting book, and i think this is a solid one for challenging and refining how you feel about the natural world. just one observation from Heller, for example, worth your time:

   More and more, the ‘nature’ we know is a romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’ marketing researchers believe we would be likely to buy. The less we know about rural life, for instance, the more we desire it. Ideas of ‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic ‘wilderness’ and ‘country living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable quality of life. So many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but hope to find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.

April

1. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Janet Biehl): the definitive account of Murray Bookchin's life, and how his ideology changed throughout the years. accept no substitutes—Biehl was a close friend and confidante, and so knows her stuff.
2. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias (Kevin Cook): truthfully, i could not tell you the difference between this one and...
3. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage (Jeff Guinn): ...this one. i am partial to Guinn's book over Cook's, but both are worthwhile volumes about the Branch Davidians and the fateful Waco siege for which they are so infamously known. this is also a good set of books for contextualizing the backlash and aftermath to Waco, which in many respects are the immediate cause of the American militia movement and fodder for anti-government objection generally. Alex Jones in particular got his "start" being a Waco conspiracist, and for a long time that was his bread and butter.
4. I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (A.M. Gittlitz): a frankly delightful book on the obscure but often-memed Posadist ideology, an extremely unorthodox variant of Trotskyism named for its leading figure J. Posadas. Posadas, it turns out, was a very interesting guy who was rather influential (and bounced around a lot) in Argentine Trotskyism—and for most of his life, he was not particularly eclectic. most of the political positions for which he has become notorious came late in life, and during periods of infighting in his niche of Trotskyism. his children are also fascinating—one of them loves Donald Trump, apparently.
5. When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich): if you have ever wanted to learn about the dark world of consulting and the unimaginable power it—and McKinsey in particular—has over the world then this is the book for you. the sheer amount of wrong McKinsey has been a part of is unbelievable. we should annihilate this company and all companies like it.
6. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (David Neiwert): an important book in peeling back all of the connections of the modern American far-right; there are so many figures who play off of and influence each other, and this book does an admirable job of weaving them into any sort of coherent narrative.

May

1. The Making of the President, 1960 (Theodore H. White): the first of a classic series of political books; i have yet to read the other ones, but hopefully that will occur this year.
2. A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings (William H. Reid): there's not much to say about this one. it's a niche topic but seems to be the definitive book if you're interested in an account of the Aurora mass shooting back in 2012.
3. Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (John Staples Shockley): this book is a bit dated (having released in 1974), but it is the first comprehensive account of the development of La Raza Unida Party, and its control of Crystal City through 1974. if you're a third-party advocate looking for history, this is a fascinating book if you can get your hands on it. it is of course best supplemented by subsequent work, some of which i have read and will appear in the next month on this list.
4. Crossroads: My Story of Tragedy and Resilience as a Humboldt Bronco (Kaleb Dahlgren): not much to say about this one. for the other non-Canadians: see also the Humboldt Broncos bus crash Wikipedia page

June

1. Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (Armando Navarro): this book builds on Shockley's Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town and is what i'd consider the definitive account of the La Raza Unida period of Crystal City. meticulous in its detail and an invaluable read for any person interested in this fascinating piece of Chicano history.
2. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (David P. Chandler): a thorough examination of the infamous S-21 prison of Democratic Kampuchea; lots of details from this one that stand out, such as the extreme gender imbalance in prisoners (very few women were murdered in S-21) and the disparity in treatment of prisoners (although nearly all prisoners were executed, high-ranking prisoners were treated notably better so they could be coerced into lengthy confessions). also interesting how much supporting staff was necessitated for a prison that "only" held 1,500 prisoners at any given time and processed around 15,000 people across several years. Chandler figures something like 300 in total.
3. Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark (Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe): not worth your time, really.
4. Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Jeffrey H. Jackson): this is as much an interesting study of the society and politics of Paris in 1910 as it is a study of its most calamitous flood; if you signed up for a narrative about the Seine, this book will also give you a crash course in the class dynamics and and social order of the period. i think that's neat, and somewhat enlightening. YMMV.

July

1. The Workingmen's Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Philip Sheldon Foner): if you've ever wondered what the first Marxist party in the United States was like and its history, Foner has you covered here. it was surprisingly successful given its status as a sort of Frankenstein-party between two competing and effectively mutually exclusive ideologies (Marxism and Lassalleanism), and quite a few significant figures in left-wing history were involved in the party. also, fun fact: because it ultimately reformed itself into the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), if you count the SLP as still existing we're at most one generation removed from WPUS right now.

August

1. Commune Or Nothing!: Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Chris Gilbert): Venezuela's communal project is another fascinating ongoing left-wing experiment, and Chris Gilbert does an excellent job in this book sketching out its nuances, its difficulties, its relation to the state, and the inevitable communal conflicts with the state. even if you are oppositional to the Venezuelan state, i think the communal project is a beacon of light and worth learning about as a potential model.
2. Killed by a Traffic Engineer (Wes Marshall): a shocking amount of traffic engineering is pseudoscientific, and this book systematically dismantles that pseudoscience in straightforward and easy to read detail. thank to its many short, to-the-point chapters, this is also a very easy book to pick up and put down. i highly recommend it as both an indispensable resource for many of the problems with trafic engineering (and how to make things better), and as catharsis that things are actually wrong.
3. Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk): just a broadly excellent book for any disability advocate or person interested in intersectionality; also an incredible source of information on the Black Panther Party and its work in this space, which i was unaware of before this point.
4. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Helmut Gruber): Vienna and its housing is often upheld in socialist spaces as an example of what is possible with a committed socialist movement even in a hostile capitalist country, and this book goes to great lengths and detail in describing the unique circumstances that made Red Vienna possible. it doesn't hold back on criticism and shortcomings of the Viennese experiment either, and in this respect i think it's quite a valuable book on this historical period and what might be possible today. it also goes into the extensive efforts of the Austrian SDAP to create a working-class culture out of Vienna's proletarians, to mixed but truly interesting results. one additional fun fact from this book: the SDAP experimented with state-built single-family housing but found it far too expensive to build at scale relative to apartments—thus, the communal social housing that so characterizes Vienna became the norm:

   Between 1919 and 1934 the municipality built 63,924 new domiciles in Vienna, 58,667 of which were in apartment dwellings and 5,257 in one-family houses. In practical terms this meant that every tenth dwelling was a new creation of the public authorities and that almost 200,000 Viennese were fortunate enough to reside in them. [...] After 1924 the municipality took over the building of one-family housing communities, but soon abandoned such efforts on the grounds that they were too costly in comparison to superblock apartment buildings.

5. Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures (Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro): an absolutely fascinating book on how past and present socialist states have related to the environment. this book introduced me to Cuba and its frankly awe-inspiring efforts to protect the environment, and its revolutionary efforts to create a sustainable agricultural system in the absence of large amounts of oil and chemical fertilizers (due to the ongoing blockade). while Cuba continues to have many problems—and it can be argued that its environmental successes are largely in spite of its desires, not because of them—i think Cuba is a model for a better future. particularly if you're a degrowther, you should look to Cuba and what it's doing and learn from it.
6. Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (Grist): it's a good anthology, you should read it and make a day for it. the last piece is truly excellent.
7. The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger): i found this novel to be pretty entertaining; it is exceedingly politically unsubtle, however, and your mileage might vary on that one.

September

1. Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement (Jeff Ordower): if you're a labor organizer or a climate organizer, or both, this seems like a pretty good book to have on your shelf. i learned some nifty stuff from this one, like the origin of the term just transition (coined by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) leader Tony Mazzocchi); there are also some really cool under-the-radar initiatives this book profiles, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworkers’ union based in Washington.
2. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (John Vaillant): a gripping account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 intermixed with broader story threads about the nature of Canada as a country, Fort McMurray as a symptom of settler-colonial society, climate change as a phenomenon, and the oil industry that created Fort McMurray and its complicity in these aforementioned threads. somehow this book is both sweeping and narrow in scope, and manages to be good at both—it is probably a top five book of the 60 i read, and i would consider it obligatory reading especially if you are Canadian.
3. Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Tad Delay): this is a frankly devastating entry into this list on all counts, and is not for those inclined to doom about things. but i find it an important reality check and a good addition to the canon of climate-related books. Delay covers a wide range of subjects here with care, and makes a number of interesting points i did not consider before reading this book. you might find this to be one, for example—is it actually a market failure to end the world?:

   Accessible fossil fuel reserves are worth a couple of hundred trillion dollars. Total fossil fuel resources are worth $2.4 quadrillion. Incentives point in the wrong direction. Climate change isn’t a “market failure.” It’s a market success. [...] We will probably burn through most of our fossil fuel reserves. Capitalism will incentivize renewables inasmuch as they are profitable, not because the legal and political superstructure meets its unserious goals to stop the progress of this storm. In the meantime, the vulnerable suffer. Who has agency to switch algorithms? By the end of this book, you will need to decide whether even the revolutionary’s desire for agency is denial.

October

1. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Kevin Flynn, Jim Dwyer): there is not much to be said about this one—i will observe for the record however that Rudy Giuliani is a fucking moron, and it is unbelievable how badly New York City's agencies work(ed) with each other.
2. Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (Brandon Keim): probably the most interesting and heartening book i read this year. this book will give you a lot of new perspective on animal intelligence and, if it's even possible, where we might draw a line that distinguishes humanity from all other things. for example: i wrote a bit about this book earlier this year in relation to voting, because it is not an inherently human concept. several animal species (bison, African wild dogs, and honeybees to name a few) make decisions through a voting process that can be clearly observed and explained.
3. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin): this book should probably be mandatory reading for literally anyone trying to get a computer science degree. so many of my experiences and concerns about technology and especially the internet are reflected by this book, and i am very much hoping to get to Ruha Benjamin's other work this year because this made me an instant fan.

   [...]the hypervisibility of Black celebrities, athletes, and politicians can mask the widespread disenfranchisement of Black communities through de facto segregation and the punishment apparatus. How can a society filled with millions of people cheering for LeBron, singing along to Beyoncé, tuning in to Oprah, and pining for the presidency of Obama be … racist? But alas, “Black faces in high places” is not an aberration but a key feature of a society structured by White supremacy.

4. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Timothy Snyder): this book became topical down the stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign and, unfortunately, looks only to be more salient in its aftermath. i am very much not a fan of Snyder's other work and his apparent tendency to treat the Soviets as a comparable political evil to Nazi Germany, but there is probably a place for this book on your shelf. for the most part, i think this book also offers reasonable advice. for example: "When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading." is a good way to put a good piece of advice. you should make an effort to broaden your horizons, challenge your worldview, refine what you believe, and investigate the things on which you intend to speak. this is a big reason i read so many books on so many subjects.
5. Tyranny of the Minority (Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky): a timely book by Ziblatt and Levitsky, authors of another book i quite like that was ominously called How Democracies Die and was quite pessimistic about the future of the United States. this book continues that trend by exploring the issue of minoritarianism in democracies, and how things are uniquely bad in the United States thanks to our aging Constitution. they do provide some prescriptions for how we might make things better, though, so it's not all doom and gloom. also has a lot of fun details about how our system came to suck so badly—and how many of the systems that are so defended today by conservatives are compromises and not reflective of what the Founding Fathers really "wanted".
6. Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis (Alice Bell): as indicated by the title this is a book which is a rather detailed history of climate change; but simultaneously—and what makes this book a particularly interesting pick-up—is its lengthy discussion of the social and technological developments that have accompanied and facilitated climate change. kind of the perfect book if you're the sort of person who wants to go down rabbit holes on the subject.

November

1. I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs, Meegan Lee Ochs, and David Cohen): Phil Ochs is mostly known for his musical talent, but he did do a lot of writing in his spare time. this is the first (and only?) book to collect most of that writing; it ranges from his amateur journalism in high school and college to his album liner notes and private poetry. overall quite a niche book, but if you're a real Ochs-head like i am this is a fairly indispensable addition to the bookshelf.
2. Coyote Settles the South (John Lane): a delightful little book by someone whose encounter with a coyote inspired them to travel the landscape of the American South and get a sense for how this unfamiliar creature is being received. this book includes one chapter on noted coyote celebrity Scooter, if you need an additional selling point.
3. Abolish Rent (Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal): one of the best and most important books of the year in my view, and a book that makes an incredibly compelling case for the eventual abolition of rent. i wrote at some length about how i think this book should inform the left and its broader political strategy—in short, it underscores the importance of organizing tenant unions and winning new rights for renters. and given that homelessness increased by 18% in 2024, this book is likely to be even more salient this year.

December

1. The Deluge (Stephen Markley): an epic novel (clocking in at nearly 900 pages) of politics, climate change, and eco-terrorism that i can only really compare to The Mandibles in how i feel about it. i continue to think about it over a month after beginning my reading, which is unusual for a fiction book. i would frankly not recommend this book if you're angsty about climate change and our current political situation; it is in many respects photorealistic and disturbingly plausible in its speculation of what the future holds. needless to say i can only hope that our real-world future is not the future that this book entails.
2. How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Andreas Malm): even if you disagree with its political conclusions, i would probably read this book. Andreas Malm looks to be one of the influential thinkers in the climate philosophy space and it's easy to see why—this is a rather hard to argue with dismantling of the nonviolent status quo that prevails in environmentalism (see also Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State).
3. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Antony Loewenstein): this book seems pretty straightforward to pitch to you: your government (local, state, or federal) probably uses some sort of military or surveillance technology that was developed in Israel, and probably used on Palestinians. it's good business for Israeli companies to have a permanent, live warzone in which these kinds of hardware can be tested, and it's even better business to export that hardware to both sympathetic and unsympathetic governments for use on their civilian populations. consider this book a peek behind the curtain of what might await you at your next protest.
4. Nuclear War : A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen): perhaps contrived, but chilling in a way few books can be. nuclear proliferation is a nightmare and in an ideal world everyone would swiftly dismantle their nuclear stockpiles.
5. Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky): i have very little to say of this book except that it is magisterial, and you can see why the STALKER series takes after it.
6. Thinking with Type (Ellen Lupton): i am skeptical you need my opinion on a book about typography, but i do endorse this one. the latest edition has a lot of neat additions.
7. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Angie Schmitt): when you read this book, you'll really get a sense for why it is that U.S. cities (and to a lesser extent Canadian ones) are so bad at accomplishing Vision Zero. pedestrian (and alternative transit) infrastructure is a combination of nonexistent and disastrous, and pedestrians are mostly treated as a second class of citizens. luckily, this book isn't all doomerism. it rovides a lot of hope and optimism for how cities can fix their infrastructure—after all, some of the best cities for pedestrians in Europe today were previously some of the most car-brained—and how cities in the U.S. have begun to take up some of the changes to built infrastructure commonplace in European cities.
8. Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It (Daniel Knowles): finally, and rounding out the year, is Daniel Knowles' treatise on the harm done by cars and the necessity of a world far less reliant on it for transportation. this book should be in one sense cathartic, and in another sense infuriating—certainly in some ways it's quite a depressing book (such as in its descriptors of the developing world adopting car-centric urban infrastructure) but in others it is very hopeful (in explaining the many common-sense and easy changes we can make to incentivize alternative transportation and make things safer for pedestrians). and, for the road, one point in his conclusion that bears repeating:

   If we did not need [cars] as much, we could have a lot more left over to spend on whatever we want. And not needing as many cars is not some lofty, unrealistic goal. It is frankly bonkers to think that every family spending $5,000 to $10,000 a year on their own individual vehicle is the most efficient way of getting people around. We do not have to be so reliant on gasoline, cooking the planet to be able to live decent lifestyles. The important thing is not moving metal, it is moving people.

mediations on getting sick + East Germany musings

welcome to 2025. i came down with a rather nasty sinus infection approximately a month ago, which derailed what had previously been plans to talk about a large number of subjects. instead, to start the year you'll get to hear me talk about being painfully ill in a way that precluded serious work on anything and which generally ruins your month. don't worry, we'll eventually get back to some of the stuff i intended to talk about last month on this blog.

don't get sick: or, how it feels to be sick for literally an entire month

i don't generally get sick in the way most people seem to—my pandemic sickness of "choice" was getting the flu randomly. i have never knowingly had COVID, and the closest thing to sickness i usually experience is seasonal allergies. unfortunately, i also seem to develop sinus infections rather easily—and after dodging serious illness for the duration of the year, being stricken by an infection finally happened to me at the beginning of this month.

if you've never had a sinus infection: i do not recommend getting one. after a day of stuffy nose and sleeping weirdly, i woke up one morning at approximately 4am to feelings of being unable to breathe; i had approximately ten seconds between this and standing over our bathroom sink, painfully coughing up what is best described as a mixture of brown-red bile with the consistency of non-fresh caramel. if this sounds deeply unpleasant: yes, it is. it does not get better from here.

the subsequent six or seven days were spent in what i can only call a stupor; approximately 23 hours of these days were spent in various states of lucidity and (hard to catch) sleep. to not choke in my sleep or drown in a frankly unimaginable amount of mucus, i was obliged to sit upright at basically all times (not so bad) and sleep upright (horrible). this completely ruined my sleep schedule, which i am still recovering from. eating was non-pleasurable, but more importantly something i barely did at all—i think on at least two of the days in question i just drank water and juice and the bulk of my calories were from cough drops. at one point i coughed in a way that hurt so badly i thought i might have broken a rib or damaged a lung. this did not happen, luckily, but it's not ideal to feel that way.

the weeks to follow have been better: a number of hot showers and copious coughing has cleared up the worst of it, and for the past while i've been coughing up white stuff. unfortunately, i have been unable to cough up the remainder. as a result i have what feels in essence like a throat infection (even though it's not one), and protracted bouts of coughing can still be quite painful and lead to a sort of vomiting. this is not ideal, and i would also not recommend this.

what i'm reading (1/50)

i started this year off by finishing the fascinating book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (Katja Hoyer); if you're looking for a good account of East Germany's existence and what life was like for many people there this is a book to pick up. the relationship between the country and the Soviet Union is a particularly curious facet: i came away from this one feeling like much of the "blame" for the country's demise can be given to the Soviets. despite Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker taking strongly after the Soviet line, the Soviets were frequently distant or outright cold to the East German state. even from the beginning, the Soviets seem to have been dubiously interested in a partitioned Germany and were eager to push for reunification; when this became impossible, the Soviets consistently held East Germany to the standards of a disposable client state. regardless of its own desires or needs, the expectation was that East Germany would consistently and unquestioningly follow Soviet policy. thus, even the reform-minded Gorbachev was apparently oppositional to Honecker's efforts to establish a less antagonistic relationship with West Germany—at least without the Soviets being in charge of it.

the distance in relations was perhaps exemplified most heavily by economics between the two countries; Hoyer notes a particular moment in 1981 where relations essentially broke down after the Soviet Union refused to guarantee oil supplies to East Germany, which had by then become extremely dependent on the Soviet supply:

[Erich] Honecker found [Leonid] Brezhnev’s inability to engage with his concerns extremely frustrating. Brezhnev mechanically recited his brief: the Soviet Union needed to look after its own economic affairs for the foreseeable future and the GDR would no longer be able to rely on Soviet credit. Worse still, he could not guarantee that the supply of oil would remain stable. This was a huge blow to Honecker. His country had banked on the annual delivery of 19 million tonnes of oil contractually agreed with the Soviet Union.

[...]Energy consumption in the GDR had also begun to lean on imports from Soviet Russia. In 1960, coal still accounted for 97 per cent of domestic energy use; by 1980, oil had taken over 17.3 per cent and gas 9.1 per cent.3 As oil is five times as effective as brown coal in terms of energy production, the economy was shifting towards the deliveries from the Soviet Union while investment in domestic brown coal had begun to slump. The oil crises of the 1970s had made this an increasingly expensive undertaking – by 1980, the GDR was paying the equivalent of $15 a barrel of crude oil compared to $2–$3 in 19724 – and as a result local brown coal once again had to be sourced in higher quantities. Nonetheless, crude oil from the Soviet Union could still be turned into hard cash in the GDR’s refineries. Their oil-based products were sold to many non-socialist countries on the world market, including West Germany. So successful was this that, among the non-producing nations, East Germany had become one of the biggest exporters of fossil fuels. By the time Honecker received the worrying news from Brezhnev under the palm trees of Crimea, oil-based products accounted for 28 per cent of its exports to non-socialist states.

despite these difficulties (and the 1981 situation bringing the state perilously close to immediate economic collapse, which was averted only through prompt new trade relations with Bavaria, of all places), East Germany was able to consistently deliver a high standard of living. Hoyer notes that by the end of the 1970s:

Rents were so heavily subsidized that GDR citizens did not have to worry about affordability once they had found a suitable flat. From 1971, the rates paid were means-tested, allowing working class families with children privileged access. A four-person household in West Germany spent around 21 per cent of their net income on rental costs while a similar household in the East only needed 4.4 per cent. While this focus on newly built housing meant that older buildings were left to decay in town centres up and down the country, which made for very unsightly impressions on foreign observers, the prefab blocks came with central heating, insulation, bathrooms and plenty of space. Honecker was also able to oversee rapid progress in supplying the population with consumer goods. By 1975, more than a quarter of households had a car, compared to only 15 per cent in 1970, and the figure would rise to 38 per cent by the end of the decade. By 1980, almost every household had a fridge, a TV and a washing machine.

East Germany also had a remarkable amount of gender parity; from 1981 onwards, more than 90% of women were employed and the country had the highest rate of female employment in the world. half of all university students were women, a remarkable accomplishment given the pre-Cold War state of higher education. for the most part—and although their representation lagged within the Socialist Unity Party itself relative to the rest of East German society—women were financially autonomous and politically independent, and their concerns were well represented in politics. women were even integrating into the military by the late 1980s—something that was constitutionally illegal in West Germany (and led to virtually all of these women becoming unemployed after reunification). in many respects it is remarkable the state was so stable given its inability to be self-sufficient and its troubled relationship with the Soviets. i'll definitely have more to say about this in subsequent blog posts, especially since i have other books about East Germany to eventually read.