The internet emerged from the defense research establishment, but as it was breaking out of those constraints in the 1990s to be unleashed onto the wider world, it had to be given a new story — and libertarian capitalists wrote it. Picking up on the melding of libertarianism, technological optimism, and neoliberal economics over the previous couple decades, they deployed a narrative that changed the way we thought about the emerging network and laid the groundwork for the commercial opportunity that followed its privatization in 1995.

The following year, Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow released a manifesto from the World Economic Forum in Davos — a fact that should’ve immediately set off alarm bells — that became a defining narrative for the era. Cyberspace was to be a virgin frontier, divorced from the realities of the material world it depended on, where people would interact with each other as equals, free from the burdens of race, sex, or wealth, and it was those users who would construct it free from the dictates of the big, bad government. The new virtual world was to be “an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions,” he wrote.

Those utopian libertarian visions may have been relatively easy to believe in the web’s more anarchic years, where even though companies were having cash shoveled at them as investors and founders sought to cash in on that new frontier, it was still easy for people to spin up their own websites and stake a claim, so to speak, beyond the growing digital towns of the nascent tech capitalists. But as the boom went bust with the turn of the new millennium and the companies that remained sought to solidify their positions, the enclosure of the digital commons became a far greater priority.

While Barlow had plenty of scorn to heap on governments, he didn’t have the same disdain for corporations that saw the cyberspace he proclaimed as a libertarian paradise to be a great means to make a lot of money — something that should’ve been clear from the site where he made his so-called declaration of independence. As the investment flooded in, lawmakers prioritized the economic value (and geopolitical power) that could be wrung from the internet, while new media like Wired Magazine sprang up to advocate for the new industry. The public was kept at the center of the narrative, but in reality the wider benefits became a lesser concern as long as the money kept flowing.

Early benefits of the internet age

While greater commercialization brought more drawbacks to virtual life, there can be no denying that there were clear benefits to be had from the global connection the internet enabled. Suddenly the information of the world was at users’ fingertips, and communities on virtually any subject could easily be sought out as the network of websites, chat rooms, and forums kept expanding. While there was some technical skill needed for certain forms of engagement, it wasn’t so hard to customize your own web page to represent your identity to fellow netizens and participate alongside everyone else.

Even as the enclosure into platforms sped up in the 2000s (and certainly annoyed the more tech-savvy early adopters), it wasn’t entirely bad: the simplicity that came with platformization made it much easier for billions more people to get online and start finding reasons to keep coming back, especially since the commercialization was still at an early stage and had done little to compromise the user experience.

For a time, everything seemed to be heading in the right direction: internet access expanded and speeds increased, our access to it moved from the desk into our pockets, whatever information we sought would be served up in milliseconds, high-quality entertainment was easily accessible without advertising at an affordable price — if it cost anything at all — and you never had to lose touch with anyone. When things seemed to be going well, it was easier to overlook the occasional stories that should’ve been a warning for what was to come.

The erosion of the web’s promise

We now look back on those times as the good old days, before the ambitions of tech companies vastly expanded and the pressure for profit accelerated the degradation of what they’d built. Our relationship with the tech industry has changed and the broad consensus on its impact on the world has been souring for years as the benefits of the digital revolution slowed while the drawbacks began to escalate through the 2010s as greed became too strong a force to contain.

These days the finger is often pointed to Facebook as the standard bearer of the turn against tech, but Google seems far more illustrative. It began as a university research project where creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page openly acknowledged how advertising would compromise the search engine’s quality. But once they spun it out as a private company and later listed on public markets, Google began its slow slide toward what it is today: embracing advertising paired with a “Don’t Be Evil” slogan that would eventually be abandoned as the pressure to keep growing the ad profits increased. Now when you turn to it for the information it claims to deliver, you’re more likely to get a bunch of listicles optimized for its search algorithms that are stuffed with affiliate links and terrible ads, if not just a bunch of AI-generated trash.

And Google’s not the only one. Facebook has never been a darling, but any commitment to promoting positive engagement among users went out the window ages ago with the need to juice ad profits, even if that meant spreading right-wing extremism and false information, abetting genocide, and even blocking the spread of real news if it meant having to share a pittance of its massive profits with struggling publishers. The greed of those two companies has sent news media spiraling, with lower ad revenue leading to successive layoffs that reduce the quality of the journalism they publish while their websites are stuffed with poor quality ads if not locked behind a paywall altogether.

Meanwhile, the promise of streaming entertainment has turned into a nightmare after corporate consolidation and the sidelining of competition. Subscription prices keep going higher, ads are increasingly part of the deal, and the old promise of unlimited access is gone as they keep yanking down programming for tax breaks and cost savings. Ecommerce hasn’t been spared either. Amazon feels like it’s taken over, but in the meantime it pulled back from being the main seller to turn itself into a poorly governed marketplace where deceptively presented low-quality goods proliferate and everyone has to pay more to pad the company’s bottom line. Don’t even get me started on the trends Shein and Temu are pioneering.

Generative AI closes off a better future

Ursula Le Guin said we must be able to imagine freedom. AI traps us in the past.

DisconnectParis Marx

But it doesn’t end there. As tech companies sought to escape the confines of the web and move into the wider world, they’ve left a trail of disaster in their wake. The gig economy pretended app-based mediation was worthy of tearing hard-won workers’ rights to shreds, while data-hungry companies stuck surveillance devices anywhere they could get away with. The promise of algorithmic efficiency caused discriminatory systems to proliferate through society with little consideration for the wider repercussions. The effort to route as many interactions as possible through apps and make our smartphones as addictive as possible has spawned an epidemic of loneliness and even social disconnection.

Add to all that how the effort to stick screens, connectivity, and voice commands in as many places as possible has not only created a steady wave of devices that quickly become e-waste, but a wider problem where our appliances don’t last nearly as long in part because that tech fails so easily and our cars are less safe because key functions were shifted onto large touchscreens in anticipation of a driverless revolution that never arrived. And just as those issues were piling up, generative AI arrived on scene to make it even worse.

Enter the AI-generated swamp

The models behind the chatbots and visual generators that have taken the tech industry by storm over the past year were made by ingesting as much data as these companies could capture online as possible. That included whatever images and text they could find, including copyrighted books, works of art, news articles, and even the user-generated content and data billions of people have been spreading across the web for the past three decades. They took that collectively produced trove of information and communication as the foundation of their own businesses.

The tools they unleashed onto the world have only accelerated the trajectory of the web, filling social media feeds with AI-generated videos and text (some of it even produced by artificial users), tempting declining news media to try to pass AI-generated stories off as real, and worsening the quality of Google search results with the new wave of AI-generated garbage taking the web by storm. There’s a conspiracy theory that the web is effectively dead, and made up primarily of bots and generated content. While that may not already be true, the AI companies seem determined to make it a reality.

If you listen to CEOs like Sam Altman or venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen, they want us to believe that these tools are the beginning of a vast expansion in human potential, but that’s incredibly hard to believe for anyone who knows the history of Silicon Valley’s deception and can see through the hype to understand how these tools actually work. They’re not intelligent or prescient; they’re just churning out synthetic material that aligns with all the connections they’ve made between the training data they pulled from the open web.

Once again, the push to adopt these AI technologies isn’t about making our lives better, it’s about reducing the cost of producing ever more content to keep people engaged, to serve ads against, and keep people subscribed to struggling streaming services. The public doesn’t want the quality of news, entertainment, and human interactions to further decline because of the demands of investors for even greater profits, but that doesn’t matter. Everything must be sacrificed on the altar of tech capitalism.

AI is fueling a data center boom. It must be stopped.

Silicon Valley believes more computation is essential for progress. But they ignore the resource burden and don’t care if the benefits materialize.

DisconnectParis Marx

Probably the most perverse aspect of it all is that making all of that (often quite poor quality) synthetic media has such an enormous cost. On the one hand you have the labor impact, where the people doing some of the jobs we’d most want done by fellow humans and maybe even to have more people engaging in — the creative work of writing and art that enriches human society — are the first to be targeted by people who seem most divorced from the human condition. But then layer on top of that the energy, water, and mineral cost of running all the data centers behind those tools, along with Altman’s comments about the potential need for geoengineering to make his dystopian future a reality, and it shows how little the proliferation of AI tools has to offer us.

Another internet is possible

There can only be one conclusion from all of this: the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.

The time for tinkering around the edges has passed, and like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the only hope to be found today is in seeking to tear down the edifice the tech industry has erected and to build new foundations for a different kind of internet that isn’t poisoned by the requirement to produce obscene and ever-increasing profits to fill the overflowing coffers of a narrow segment of the population.

There were many networks before the internet, and there can be new networks that follow it. We don’t have to be locked into the digital dystopia Silicon Valley has created in a network where there was once so much hope for something else entirely. The ongoing erosion already seems to be sending people fleeing by ditching smartphones (or at least trying to reduce how much they use them), pulling back from the mess that social media has become, and ditching the algorithmic soup of streaming services.

Personal rejection is a welcome development, but as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within. We also can’t fall for any attempt to cast a libertarian “declaration of independence” as a truly liberatory future for everyone.

The all-electric Genesis GV60 is due for an upgrade. In a video announcing new brand ambassador Jack Ickx, the updated Genesis GV60 design appears to have leaked in the background.

Tesla told employees today that it will do another pay adjustment, a second in a few weeks, after employees expressed disappointment with the last one.

But the automaker has now delayed the second pay increase, which is happening amid the CEO, Elon Musk, asking for a historic compensation package.

South Africa has filed a case at the main judicial body for the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. “I believe South Africa will win an order against Israel to cease and desist from committing all acts of genocide against the Palestinians,” says Francis Boyle, an international human rights lawyer who won two requests at...

Source

Thanks to Joe Biden’s administration, measuring virus levels in sewer sheds is the closest approximation of accurate COVID case counts you’re going to find in the US. The below COVID all-time case estimates are derived from wastewater data, put together by infectious disease modeler JP Weiland. What do you see?

A little over two years ago, on November 16, 2021, CNBC reported on Dr. Fauci’s assessment of what successfully ‘living with the virus’ would look like: “Covid cases must fall below 10,000 a day for U.S. to get to 'degree of normality'”. He went on to say that truly getting the virus under control would probably mean no more than 3,300 cases a day- this would be a reasonable rate that wouldn’t create major disruptions to overall social functioning. He made this projection, notably, nearly a year after the initial vaccine rollout. As of December 18, 2023, the infectious disease modeler’s projection of new daily cases in the US? 964,184 new cases per day. This is, quite factually, not the ‘new normal’ anyone was promised.

Why does it matter if new daily COVID cases are nearly one million instead of three thousand? For one, despite constant media headlines about COVID “becoming like the flu,” yet another new study this week found COVID to be 43% deadlier than flu. But to confine COVID outcomes to “death” or “you’re just fine” would be to co-sign another false media narrative: that the only poor outcome of COVID is death. Instead, Dr. Al-Aly’s study finds a myriad of follow-on health problems associated with COVID at a high rate. As WSWS reported:

over the 18-month period, COVID-19 was associated with “significant increased risk” in 64 of the 94 measured health outcomes that encompassed nearly every organ system in the human body…

As just one example of a measured health outcome, those with COVID-19 had a 2.4 times higher risk of heart attack in the first 30 days than those with the flu. This risk factor remained elevated throughout the 18-month period. Those who had COVID-19 also faced an increased risk of pulmonary embolism and many other potentially lethal conditions throughout the study period.

It’s difficult to fully catalogue the extent of the damage COVID can do to the heart, lung, kidneys, liver, brain, and immune system. Viral persistence- meaning chronic infection that carries unknown long-term risks- is now being documented and looking like a probable culprit for many cases of Long COVID. Earlier this year, Dr. Tedros of the WHO publicly stated, “An estimated 1 in 10 infections results in post #COVID19 condition, suggesting that hundreds of millions of people will need longer-term care.” Studies consistently find Long COVID prevalence at double-digit rates, generally ranging from 10-20%. Over a year ago- that is, tens of millions of infections ago- Brookings Institute estimated 16 million Americans living with Long COVID. Even more concerningly, a new Canadian study found that Long COVID risk increases with each infection. The figure below is from that study.

It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could see this data- which finds the rate of Long COVID after 3 infections to be a whopping 38%- and not understand why “let it rip” is an unsustainable approach to COVID. But let me spell it out: people are catching COVID frequently, between 1-2 times a year. Each infection carries a high risk of long-term illness, which does not decrease, but compounds with reinfection. Immunity is short-term, and often circumvented by the fast pace of COVID variant evolution. Add these factors together: how do you run a society with a constantly, rapidly increasing subset of the population long-term ill? Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it’s wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again. But it’s also just practically unfeasible to operate a functional economy while rapidly disabling the workforce.

How did we get here? When we were first vaccinated, many of us in early 2021, was this the future we were promised? Constant reinfections that will surely disable many of us, but hopefully it won’t be you, so go about your day?

No, as a matter of fact. In 2021, we never would’ve accepted such a state of affairs. Let’s review the never-ending media spin that won’t stop spinning, that disorienting cascade of normalizing bullshit, or what I like to call: the Boiling Frogs timeline.

• March 2021: VACCINES WILL END THE PANDEMIC

On March 29, 2021, on the Rachel Maddow show, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky describes how COVID-19 vaccines will end the pandemic:

…the other thing that we have all, I think, been waiting for in terms of vaccines is how much vaccinating everybody gets us closer to the end of there being a coronavirus epidemic in this country… It’s a piece of information that we have needed. Today we got it. We all know already if you get vaccinated, that vaccine will basically prevent you from getting sick with COVID, it will prevent you from going to the hospital with COVID symptoms, prevent you from dying with COVID. Great, good for you.

But there`s a scientific gray area about whether once you’re vaccinated you can still get infected…Well, today, the CDC reported new data that shows that under real world conditions…not only are the vaccines for those folks, thousands of them, keeping those people from getting sick from COVID themselves, those vaccines are also highly effective at preventing those people from getting infected, even with non-symptomatic infection. And if you are not infected, you can’t give it to anybody else.…. What this means is that we can get there with vaccines. We can end this thing…now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.

A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus. The virus does not infect them. The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people.

That means the vaccines will get us to the end of this.

The full context of this quote is important. Although the CDC did walk back some of her comments fairly quickly, it’s not fair to say that this is the CDC Director openly lying to the public, exactly. At the time- before unmitigated spread enabled the virus to mutate rapidly around the vaccines- there was a scientific lack of clarity around whether or not vaccinated people would become infected and spread COVID. Of course, this is where communicating a lack of clarity- and embracing the precautionary principle, i.e. acting as if the worst-case scenario were true- would’ve been critical. That unmitigated spread which led to rapid mutation, which in turn led to vaccine resistance? A direct result of this kind of messaging.

But we should also think about how the argument made within this statement- that vaccines alone would end the pandemic- was predicated on the as-yet-unproven and then later disproven assessment that vaccines could prevent transmission. Looking at the boiling-frog timeline, we need to examine how far the goalposts have moved since March 2021, and this is a great example. The CDC under the Biden administration explicitly stated that “ending the pandemic” would result from sterilizing immunity vaccines. When it turned out our vaccines weren’t sterilizing… let the great spin begin.

• Summer 2021: “BREAKTHROUGH INFECTIONS ARE RARE”

7/26/2021: Symptomatic breakthrough COVID-19 infections rare, CDC data estimates --ABC News

9/7/2021: One in 5,000: The real chances of a breakthrough infection. - NYTimes

7/19/2021: ‘Breakthrough' COVID Cases After Vaccines Are Rare and Expected. What You Need to Know - NBC

Within a few months it’s clear the vaccines aren’t sterilizing. Post-vaccine infections are called “breakthrough” and nearly always described as “rare” or “very rare”. These should be the first entries in our Manufactured Consent glossary.

Already, we start to see retconning in the media narrative. NBC describes the breakthrough cases as, not only ‘rare’ but ‘expected’. Yet months earlier, CDC Director Walensky had delighted on national TV that breakthrough cases were not expected. In fact, she explicitly stated that it was the lack of breakthrough infections itself that meant an end to the pandemic.

This is the first, slight narrative change Americans have to swallow. Ok, vaccines aren’t going to prevent every infection, 100% of the time. But as of summer 2021, they are going to prevent most infections. Most fully vaccinated people will never be infected with COVID-19; those who are infected will have a very mild case. The implications of the lack of sterilizing immunity- that vaccines alone can’t end the pandemic- aren’t named.

Keep in mind that this narrative shift and the following ones are not about bald-faced lying about the capabilities of the vaccines. They come from overly optimistic projections which exclude the less back-to-normal friendly possibilities from public view. Once the first breakthrough cases were catalogued, a serious interpretation would’ve been that NPIs like masks and clean air are more important than ever to slow the spread and halt the developing vaccine resistance of the virus. Instead, the most optimistic interpretation: breakthrough cases aren’t common yet, so that means they’re uncommon- was continually communicated as a certainty.

• Fall 2021: DELTA. ONLY “HIGH RISK” PEOPLE SHOULD WORRY

The beginning of the Delta wave should’ve been the last stand for the “vaccine only” strategy. The Delta variant was highly mutated from the original virus; the more genetic dissimilarity, the more difficult it is for the body to recognize and produce antibodies, even if previously infected or vaccinated. Delta was the inevitable child of an uncontrolled, rapidly mutating virus and a non-sterilizing vaccine; we put evolutionary pressure on COVID to evolve around our defenses, so it did.

The Biden administration (and the world) had gambled on the vaccine-only strategy. Delta was us losing our bet. Unfortunately, telling people that COVID was not, in fact, ‘over’ would certainly have been political suicide for anyone who’d presided over these decisions; therefore, none of this was well-communicated to the public. Years later, much of the public is still confused by what variants are, how they resist vaccines, why they develop, and why mitigations are critical to slow viral evolution.

This fear of political consequences has led major health institutions and political actors around the world to correct their mistakes quietly, and the hushed nature of these corrections compounds the damage of the original mistake. Take the WHO’s initial, confident assessment that COVID was not airborne. Nearly three years after COVID was demonstrated to be fully airborne, there is still no public understanding of what airborne means, why surgical masks are suboptimal, what airborne infection control would look like in healthcare, or why “social distancing” is outdated guidance. There is little public awareness that the WHO’s initial assessment of COVID as “droplet” spread was incorrect, that this was a major error that carried major implications for every single intervention adopted during the so-called “lockdown” period. Frankly, we ran a droplet playbook on an airborne virus. The result- a failure of elimination- was inevitable.

During Delta, a major change is observable in the press narrative about COVID. Society is henceforth divided into two groups. One group is the group that is inevitably going to die or be harmed by COVID, the “vulnerable”. The other group, everyone else, does not need to worry.

Unlike the tenor of coverage during the Trump administration, which continually scolded people who dared to suggest that we should just let “the weak” die, major liberal press outlets now adopted this framing. Often, liberal outlets implied or explicitly stated that only unvaccinated people were at serious risk. This schism- between “vulnerable” people who are in danger and “normal” people who should ignore them, will be widened and cemented in the public view over the course of the next two years, but the type of people who fall into the “vulnerable” bucket continues to expand. The important thing is to get the main body of the public seeing those who will be harmed by COVID as an outgroup.

[It should be noted that liberals who subscribe to this worldview very rarely conceptualize themselves as a member of the “vulnerable,” even if they are statistically, due to age, size, or underlying conditions, very much a member.]

Threat to vulnerable Americans rises as Delta variant spreads - The Guardian

The Delta Variant Could Create “Two Americas” Of COVID, Experts Warn - Buzzfeed News

Unvaccinated States Feel Brunt of Delta-Led Covid Uptick - The New York Times

If you’re updating your glossary, it’s here we first begin to encounter the famous COVID “upticks.” Under Trump, we had COVID surges. But as daily COVID cases rise precipitously in that third large spike in our wastewater graph, large liberal news outlets adopt the word “uptick” and hang on to it for dear life through surge after surge.

Winter 2021-22: OMICRON AKA ‘THE MILD VARIANT’

If Delta was COVID’s shot across the bow, Omicron was its full-frontal assault. 150,000 people died in 8 weeks in the US, 40% of them vaccinated. Omicron was highly genetically different from Delta, with over 30 mutations on the spike protein. Beyond a doubt, COVID could not be controlled with vaccination; beyond a doubt, it continued to represent a significant threat to human health.

There could be no more hiding behind “rare” breakthroughs.

Enter the newest spin: COVID is mild now.

It may shock you to know that the claim that Omicron was significantly milder came from a single study in South Africa, which found outcomes to be less severe than during the Delta variant. The Delta variant, however, was more severe than the original virus, and later analysis found Omicron to be equivalent in severity to earlier strains when controlling for vaccination status. To take this single study and blow it up into a world-spanning, policy-driving, constantly-cited narrative would be, well, the height of irresponsibility. But that didn’t stop the New York Times’ Dave Leonhardt from going on a two-month bender of hopium-laced half-truths, informing Boomers (by their age alone, definitionally vulnerable) that COVID was now mild and concern about the virus was “irrational”.

Leonhardt’s “The Morning” Newsletter brought COVID updates directly to the inbox of millions of Americans that winter, so let’s see what they were hearing.

• 12/17/2021: “Morning: Omicron Threatens Red America”

Here we see this early dichotomy being reinforced, with a typical emphasis on how vulnerable groups maybe, probably, deserved to be harmed. Vaccine status is framed as the main determinant of poor outcomes; as stated above, 40% of Americans who went on to die during Omicron were vaccinated.

• 12/21/2021: “Omicron already accounts for about 75 percent of new cases in the U.S., the C.D.C. said yesterday, and experts expect cases to soar over the next month. The vast majority will be mild because the vast majority of Americans have some degree of immune protection.”

Again, over 150,000 Americans died in this wave in the following two months, nearly half of them vaccinated.

• 01/04/2022: “Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.”

In a typically hysterical missive about how horrible school closures are for children, Leonhardt continues to push the idea that this vascular virus, known to drastically increase the risk of heart problems and organ damage, responsible for high rates of disabling illness, and already demonstrated to damage the immune system, is harmless for kids. As of winter 2023, after repeated infections with the mild virus, one in three students are chronically absent in the US, and a recent review found that the risk of Long COVID in children after a single infection is 16%.

Out of control RSV, scarlet fever, pneumonia, Strep A, and more are all hallmarks of this “new normal” we’ve been kind enough to bequeath our kids. As we enter yet another winter of notably high illness, many news outlets fail to discuss COVID’s known immune system harms and instead spread the anti-vaxxer claim that wearing masks too much is what hurt kids (many of whom were not yet born in 2020). And as a result of their desperate framing of all this as merely a small case of the ol’ reopening fever, we’ve also had zero discussion of the very easy, very affordable interventions like HEPA filtration that would drastically reduce viral spread in schools.

• 01/05/2022: “The data is telling a consistent story: Omicron is significantly milder.”

Once again, this turned out to be completely untrue. In a piece titled “Has COVID become milder” experts via the BMJ assert bluntly, “the short answer is no.” But the bold-faced certainty and drumbeat repetition of this narrative planted it firmly in the minds of Americans. More observant readers might notice that throughout the months of the Omicron surge, Leonhardt continues to cite and link the same, single study- the one from South Africa- as his evidence for this world-shifting claim repeated ‘round the world. Outlets like the Times like to use language like “the data” to make their political convictions sound like facts. The data did not show any such thing.

This newsletter also marks another entry into the COVID minimizing glossary: “mild hospitalizations.”

• 01/14/2022: “For now, the available evidence suggests that Omicron is less threatening to a vaccinated person than a normal flu…. The Covid situation in the U.S. remains fairly grim, with overwhelmed hospitals and nearly 2,000 deaths a day…But the full picture is less grim than the current moment. Omicron appears to be in retreat, even if the official national data doesn’t yet reflect that reality. Omicron also appears to be mild in a vast majority of cases, especially for the vaccinated. This combination means that the U.S. may be only a few weeks away from the most encouraging Covid situation since early last summer, before the Delta variant emerged.”

Do you see how the “COVID situation” went from, in March 2021, being an assessment of how society was collectively protected long-term to being a measure of how fully vaccinated people without risk factors might fare in the near term?

• 01/25/2022: “Many Democrats say that they feel unsafe in their communities; are worried about getting sick from Covid; and believe the virus poses a significant risk to their children, parents and friends. Republicans are less worried about each of these issues. Who’s right? There is no one answer to that question, because different people have different attitudes toward risk.”

This paragraph really underscores the point at which nominally liberal outlets like the New York Times began subtly shaming people who accurately observed that many people were still in danger of significant harm from COVID infection, and that many long-term and follow-on effects of COVID had the potential to significantly damage quality of life for anyone infected. They state here that, of the two claims “the virus poses a significant risk” and “no it doesn’t”, there is no right answer, going on to explain that some people simply tolerate risk better than others. At this point, the mainstream narrative has officially adopted a Trump era claim: if you’re avoiding the virus, it’s not because you value collective care, it’s because you’re more scared.

The same newsletter goes on to call those who still worry about COVID- again, this is in the middle of one of the deadliest waves of the pandemic during which over two thousand Americans are dying daily- “irrational” because of “partisanship”.

SEPTEMBER 2022 - PRESENT: “THE PANDEMIC IS OVER”

Cases were consistently high throughout 2022, with two significant waves that peaked in July and January 2023. As of right now, we’re entering a massive winter surge spurred on by the immune-evasive JN.1 variant and lack of interest in vaccine boosters. Where the Biden administration’s pandemic strategy failed, the ideological work of the press succeeded in reshaping the public’s expectations about what the end of the pandemic would look like. We went from celebrating in March 2021 because we would not be infected, to celebrating the rarity of infection, to celebrating the mildness of infection, to celebrating that those harmed by COVID are ‘not us’.

The media, in order to prop up the incompetent Biden administration, successfully cast those who continue to be harmed as an out-group that exists outside the social contract of community care. The genius of this out-group is that it expands to accommodate all comers; you can be a mask-hating COVID-denialist in June; if you’ve got Long COVID by December, your days being featured as an expert or making policy decisions are over. Now you’re just another whiny patient who should get more exercise.

I’ve known government workers, political staffers, CNN and Washington Post employees who’ve entered the ranks of the out-group. Their choices are to continue pushing the “COVID is over narrative” at extreme risk to their health or be ostracized, potentially at the cost of their career.

The key to the success of the “new normal” narrative was in burying, denying, and othering Long COVID patients and post-COVID health effects, creating significant public doubt about whether Long COVID existed at all. Leftish outlets like The New Republic even got in on the game, publishing a long meandering “just asking questions” piece about whether tens of millions of patients reporting significant post-COVID health issues are suffering from psychological problems. Jacobin recently posited that Sweden’s notoriously cruel COVID response was the better pandemic approach; Sweden euthanized elderly people with COVID instead of treating them when their hospitals were overwhelmed.

The political project of normalizing transmitting COVID and casting basic, scientific mitigations as bad, weird, mean, stupid, and impossible is a fantastic coup for the right. It is the utter rejection of state responsibility for public welfare, paired with the complete shredding of an early-pandemic solidarity that bound those at risk (everyone) together. That solidarity was replaced with a poisonous “us vs them” worldview whereby those who have been and are harmed are weak, lying, lame, unlucky, unusual, uncool, rare, stupid, bad, mean, aggressive, psychologically disturbed and/or crazy. This schism seeps into the bloodstream of leftist organizing and splinters our coalition, shattering our incipient power as, unsurprisingly, the popularity of the fascists surges globally. I would argue it is the most thorough victory of the far-right in living memory, and it has embedded its eugenicist logic into the very foundation of public beliefs about health, disability, and who deserves safety.

Whereas HIV, malaria, TB and polio elimination are long-term acknowledged goals of public health, “elimination” became a dirty word in the COVID era. Despite having the technical know-how to drastically reduce airborne virus spread in indoor spaces- ventilation, filtration, and new tools like Far UVC- we do nothing and sneer that action is impossible and naive. This kneejerk violent reaction toward the mere suggestion of any preventative measures carries drastic implications for the future of public health generally, as does the now-mainstreamed anti-vaxxer claim that getting sick makes people healthy. (It doesn’t).

Generations of parents are being inculcated with the idea that making their children sick as often as possible will lead to a strong immune system and a healthy kid- tragically, this couldn’t be farther from the truth, and continual COVID reinfection carries myriad risks that will impact their kids’ long-term health. You don’t give a child cholera so that future cholera infections will be milder; you clean the water source. We already know what happens when children are not protected from infectious diseases. It’s what happened during all of human history prior to modern medicine.

The Biden era has normalized illness and demonized mitigations for the sake of “back to normal”. We now live in a country where educated liberals genuinely think it’s okay-and in fact good- that their kids are constantly ill (to be expected given the immune system-damaging nature of COVID). Where leftists argue that killing old people is less harmful than wearing masks. Where concern for community health is painted as cowardly and using the modern scientific tools we are lucky enough to have is portrayed as rude and stupid. And terribly, this liberal political project under Joe Biden has come down like a hammer on community solidarity, leaving “the vulnerable” squabbling with their mocking former comrades. It’s hard to overstate just how much damage the normalization of COVID has done to the very concepts of public health and community.

My beliefs throughout the pandemic have never changed: that vulnerable people deserve access to society, that mitigation must be prioritized, that great progress is possible with great effort, that community care is most critical in times of state abandonment. It’s hard to know where to go from here, at the nadir of a COVID response that vilifies and mocks any gesture toward prevention and care. But for those of us who are still here, education must start from a place of unpacking several years-worth of propaganda, while learning from disability justice activists who have reckoned with their social marginalization for decades.

Despite the multitude of falsehoods that continue to be poured over the heads of our comrades by outlets that can’t or won’t reckon with Biden’s failure, the truth has the advantage of being obvious, and patient. So we’ll continue to repeat it, until the people are ready to hear it: COVID is not mild. COVID is not harmless. COVID is not inevitable. COVID is not over. Stay safe out there.

I don't remember exactly when it happened for me, but the thought arose with surprising clarity: something is deeply wrong with the United States, and I don't want to live here anymore. 

When I tell people this, they nod knowingly and say something about the 2016 election. While that critical turning point sped up my timetable, the realization that something fundamental was off in the country of my birth actually began years before that.

When I met Robert (now my husband) in 2015, I became a beneficiary of his love affair with Italy. Though I was well-traveled and had been to Italy a few times, I had never really gotten to know people who lived there. Through many visits and conversations with Robert's friends in Italy, who became my friends, my nascent belief that it might be time to leave the U.S. slowly solidified until it became almost the only thing I could think about.

I began to notice a learned helplessness in the United States, where people don't revolt at the notion of a college education costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. I wondered why so many people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to help people pay for life-saving medical care that their health insurance won't cover.

I watched as people on social media claimed it was "pro-labor" to tip a person for ringing up your order at a food or coffee chain rather than demanding the multi-millionaire (or billionaire) owner of that company pay their employees a living wage (as is the norm in Europe, where tipping is not expected and the owners of the restaurants and stores are typically not among the uber-wealthy).

I realized there are other places in the world (not just Italy) where life isn't about conspicuous consumption and "crushing" and "killing" your life goals, where people aren't drowning in debt just to pay for basic life necessities. There are places where people have free time and where that free time is used to do things they love — not to start a side hustle.

I started to have a dawning awareness that we don't have to live this way.

I also began to notice how calm I felt in Italy for extended periods, even when working from there, so it wasn't due to being on vacation. I could feel my nervous system settle. I noticed how I began to find the famous Italian inefficiency charming. It was a kind of quiet rebuke to the productivity fetish in the United States, where businesses are forever trying to "optimize" and "streamline" to please their shareholders and enrich their CEOs while making life increasingly miserable for their employees.

One turning point was a dinner with our friends Frances and Ed, who have lived in Italy for half the year for decades. They brought along an American friend who had moved from Brooklyn to Tuscany to open a hotel a decade prior. I asked if she ever considered returning to the United States.

She said no—she would never raise her son in the United States unless they changed the gun laws. She didn't want her child to be slaughtered at school by a lunatic gunman and listen to people chalk it up to the price you pay for “freedom,” as though people in other countries are not free because they can’t own an assault rifle.

Oh, right, this is not normal. We don't have to live like this.

She felt safe in Italy and didn't worry about her child going out to play the way parents in the U.S. do these days. She enjoyed the easy pace of life and connecting with the town's community, which gathered nightly to walk in the town square and casually socialize.

It sounded like a fairy tale.

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Another clarifying moment occurred on a flight home from the 2016 New Hampshire primary. I was seated next to a Danish woman, a former mayor who was part of an international contingent observing American democracy in action.

People in Denmark are often ranked the happiest in the world. I asked her if this was true. She said she didn't know if they were the happiest, but that they were happy. She ascribed this to the fact that their basic needs were met. Nobody worried about running out of money for retirement or whether they could attend college or afford health care. Because education was free and life was affordable, people chose careers based on their passions rather than on earning potential. Yes, they paid 50% in taxes but didn't worry about having what they needed. Nobody graduated from college, saddled with the debt of a small nation.

"To show you how much the government thinks about how to serve the people, right now they are debating whether they should pay for women in nursing homes to have their hair done since it is part of their dignity," she told me. Older people are respected and cared for in Denmark in a way they are not in the United States.

Sounds so humane, I thought.

I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not worry about many of the things on her list.

While Denmark's government is more functional than some other European governments (including Italy), the view that people should have their basic needs taken care of is typical of the continent. What are considered "entitlements" in the United States are rightly understood as human rights in these countries.

I should note that there are other countries and continents to check out if Italy or Europe isn’t your flavor. My therapist moved to Panama after she found a group for Black expats on Facebook and discovered Panama would be a healthier and safer place to raise her son. I recently listened to the ‘Quitted’ podcast by + Holly Whitaker at about an American Black woman moving to Grenada and found it extremely inspiring.

Why Is Everything So Hard In the US?

In October 2019, Robert and I spent a month in Trieste, Italy, while he worked on an article for National Geographic featuring the storied Northern Italian port city.

I was extremely burnt out. I was in the thick of it at CNN, coming off two years of utter insanity in the US political world. It was exhausting and also frightening to contemplate what was becoming of the US.

On a more personal level, I was frustrated by the lack of meaningful friendships in Washington, DC, where we live. Everyone was hyper-busy, overworked, and stretched so thin that it was hard to find the energy and the time to have the kind of regular, causal connection that used to be commonplace, even in cities.

While in Trieste, I signed up to take one-on-one Pilates classes from an Italian woman in her late 30s. As I shared my frustrations about life in America, particularly how lonely it could feel, she asked me how often I saw my friends. "About once a week," I said, even though as I said it, I realized it was much less.

She was shocked. "This is not normal," she said. "I see my friends every day." She explained that when she left that evening, she would stop to see her friends as she walked home—a glass of wine with one, perhaps dinner with another.

None of this was planned in advance.

If you showed up at someone's house in Washington, DC, unannounced, you would be considered a sociopath. I am not exaggerating. Perhaps you could do this once, but if you did it more than once, people would think you were a problem.

In major US cities (where I’ve spent my adult life), getting time on the calendar to get together with friends resembles something akin to scheduling a space shuttle launch. I was very much feeling what shared last week in The Friendship Problem: Why friendships have started to feel strikingly similar to admin. She writes:

[I]t seems normal now that plans are made far in advance — scheduled around myriad travel and wedding weekends and kids and work commitments —  and then canceled right before. Someone doesn't follow up or cancels and then never proposes an alternative plan. Similarly, promising new adult friendships never seem to blossom into the kind of quotidian check-ins and week-to-week ephemera that the friendship of our younger years is based on. Life-long friends make new life choices, drift apart. The friendship fizzles into WhatsApp volleys back and forth, and then someone doesn't answer the last message, and then it's a year before you ever talk again. 

Perhaps people in smaller U.S. towns can still drop in on friends and don’t spend half their lives planning get togethers. (Let me know in the comments).

But Trieste is not a small town in either size or demeanor. It's a sophisticated, literary, and cultured city of around 200,000 people, filled with ancient architecture and fine dining. It's a stone's throw from Venice to the west and is the capital of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, one of the best white wine regions in the world.

No city like this in the United States exists where people—including Pilates teachers—are not hyper-busy and burnt out. Actually, there is no city in the U.S. like Trieste, period, but that's for another essay.

A few days before we flew back to the U.S. from Italy, we saw our friends Frances and Ed for dinner. I was not much fun, as I had I developed a throbbing pain in my jaw. I found out when I got home a few days later that I needed a root canal and was unceremoniously handed a bill for $5000. It would be hard to overstate my shock. Insurance didn't cover this, so I had to pay out of pocket.

This was a big financial hit, and I was well paid. How could the average person afford this? They can't, which is why so many people get trapped in medical debt after being forced to put critical care on a credit card.

Ed told me later that he had the best root canal of his life in Italy, costing $500. On our most recent visit to Puglia, we met a very successful Italian dentist at a dinner party, and he said he would charge around 250 Euros for that service. I have heard many stories like this about other types of medical care in Italy.

There is no reason there should be such a wide discrepancy between prices for the same service in Italy and the United States. The same is true of health insurance—I could buy a year's worth of health insurance in Italy that would be lower than my monthly premium in the United States.

And no, the U.S. is not more expensive because it has a better system. There are many things that Americans have been brainwashed about, but nothing comes close to the sacred delusion that the U.S. has "the best health care system in the world" ™ and that Western Europe is some backwater of substandard care.

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But it's more than just that health care and education are affordable in Italy. It's that everything is more affordable than in the U.S.. Life in the United States keeps getting increasingly expensive to a point that simply doesn't make sense.

On the trip we just took to Puglia, produce from the grocery store and farmers markets—which was vastly superior to anything you get in the U.S.—was a third of the price of what we pay in Washington, DC.

Then there is cost of owning a home in the United States. As The Atlantic noted this week: It Will Never Be a Good Time to Buy a House:

The Case-Shiller index of home prices sits near its highest-ever inflation-adjusted level; houses are unaffordable for middle-class families across the country. Rural areas are expensive. Suburbs are expensive. Cities are absurdly expensive. Nowhere is cheap. That's in part thanks to mortgage rates. The monthly payment on a new home has increased by more than 50 percent in the past three years, as 30-year mortgage rates have climbed from less than 3 percent to nearly 8 percent.

We experienced this firsthand when we considered where we might move in the United States to find a more sane and affordable life so that we could work less and have more time for friends, family, and life in general.

Any place remotely desirable to us was out of our price range, and we are two successful professionals with no children. It’s not just that houses everywhere are expensive and interest rates are high. It’s that these houses are delusionally overpriced. Even if I had the money, I would not pay a million dollars (or more) to live in homes that pre-COVID were selling for $450,000.

Capitalism Has Gone Off The Rails

When I was growing up, the United States was a capitalistic country, but there were guardrails. They were not necessarily explicit, but they were understood to exist. Those guardrails are gone.

Call it hyper-capitalism or late-stage capitalism, or whatever you want: there is no longer even the slightest sense of decency.

Now there is no shame in making 800 million times more than your average worker at your company, who you would lay off in a heartbeat if it were to your financial benefit—in fact, these people are often glorified as the epitome of the American Dream.

While American workers have become more productive, none of the benefits of this productively accrue to them. In theory, increased productivity due to technological advances was supposed to lead to less work because work could be done more efficiently. But in the United States, the opposite has happened. Americans work more than they ever have—and more than their peers in other industrialized countries—and with less employer support than in the past.

The only people working less are the super wealthy, who live in a way almost comically disconnected from the average American’s existence. The New York Times ran a story recently about super-rich New Yorkers:

Although everyday life has become increasingly unaffordable for almost everyone, a new class of private, members-only and concierge services is emerging [in New York City].

Ultraexclusive clubs, laundry specialists, on-demand helicopter rides and services that allow users to bid hundreds of dollars for a restaurant reservation are transforming how those with lots of disposable income eat dinner, work out, see the doctor, look after their children, walk their dogs and get around — all without really having to interact with hoi polloi.

Meanwhile, the rest of America is drowning in credit card debt and running their bodies into the ground, chasing success and stability. Because everything is so expensive and our hyper-capitalist culture tells you your value and happiness are derived from your level of career accomplishment and acquisition of material goods, it starts to almost make sense that people would work so hard to achieve this identity for themselves.

Even if a person is enlightened enough to reject the consumerist rat race, they still live in a country with almost no social safety net and a Hunger Games mentality, which means they are going to have to work a lot just to survive, especially because the days of jobs with great benefits from pensions to health care are pretty much over. (Again, the lack of decency).

This kind of pressure inevitably leads people to overwork and eventually burn out.  breaks it down:

In short, burnout is caused by 1) problems on the societal level (lack of social safety net, precarity, dealing with being a person in your particular body with your particular identity in the world); 2) problems at the level of the workplace (policies, norms, work culture, productivity expectations); but also 3) problems on the level of the individual (self-value derived exclusively through work, inability to adhere to guardrails against overwork set by yourself and others, obsession with micro-management).

On the other side of burnout, you discover you got the opposite of what you were promised. The more we acquire, the more we achieve, the less happy we are. Only now, you also have the problem of cratering mental health and often some sort of chronic illness. We are not designed to live this way, and our bodies are here to remind us of this fact. (If you doubt this, I highly recommend Gabor Mate's latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture)

Eventually, all your "hustle and grinding" leads you to the land of "self-care."

Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the "solution" is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.

A whole industry has sprung up to patch up your broken body, mind, and soul just enough for you to keep playing this sick game where you never get to rest, have a hobby or spend unscheduled time with friends or family, or just live an everyday life.

Self-care does not fundamentally change anything; it is a band-aid. A bath bomb, essential oils, a meditation app or a Thai massage will not fix your problems. This is not to say that they can't bring temporary relief. But as says, “You can’t meditate your way out of a 40-hour-workweek with no childcare.”

We need something radically different. What most of us need is healing—and a completely different way of living. We need structural changes to how we live in the United States.

Until then, I’ll be healing in Italy.

Robert and I always joke about how hard it is to find a good massage in Italy unless you are in a major city. By that, I mean a massage the way the average American thinks of massage: a person beating the crap out of you to break up the snarl of stress that has made a home in your body. In Italy, they still treat massages the way we used to: as a luxury, not essential health care. I'll often come back from getting a massage there to report that the person basically just rubbed lotion on my body, which is apparently all the average Italian body needs.

This is not to say that chronic stress has not found its way to Italy—I think that, like all American inventions, the hyper-capitalist mindset that drives so much of our misery is currently being exported around the world. I recently spoke with an Italian woman who experienced extreme burnout while working in Milan.

The part of Italy we have settled on is not near one of Italy's major metropolitan cities, so it will be a long while before burnout culture reaches it (if it ever does). It's called Puglia, which is in the south in the heel of the boot. We made an offer (that was accepted!) on 10 acres of land close to a cluster of lovely historic towns and about an hour from the bigger city of Lecce. It's a 25-minute drive to world-class beaches with clear blue water and white sand.

The land is covered in olive trees alongside almond, chestnut, pear, pomegranate, and apricot trees. Wild tomatoes, artichokes, rosemary, bay leaves, and capers grow there. You can have a vegetable garden year-round.

Our plan is to build a small house with a one-bedroom guest house and enough outdoor space to host retreats. I can't imagine how we could ever afford anything like this in the United States.

Even if we could, I would still choose Italy because it's not just a place but a way of life.

I want to learn how to live differently.

I want our land to be a place of healing and becoming whole. I want it to be not just a place that patches people up and sends them back on the field to get beat up again, but helps people see that life can be different and they deserve more than the thin gruel currently served up as the “American Dream.”

Still: I Can’t Quit You, America

While it may seem I have given up on the United States, I have not.

Partly, I am still tethered to living here at least part of the time because my husband's job requires him to live in DC. But even if we eventually were able to live in Italy year-round (a big "if" due to the US policy of taxing citizens even if they never set foot on American soil, which would mean double taxation for us), what happens to and in the United States will always matter to me.

It's not just important to me personally that the US survives and thrives. It's essential to the world that this young (and incredibly immature) nation grows up and lives up to its claims and promises about what it is.

I have not stopped believing this is possible, and I never will.

The thing I love the most about the US is the one thing I can think of that is missing in Italy: diversity. I believe that everything that is good and right about the United States is a direct result of our culture being not just the culture of one people but of many.

I'll end with this quote from Barack Obama in his 2020 book A Promised Land that I think says it all:

“And so the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work. To see if we can do what no other nation has ever done. To see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed.”

Articles That Caught My Eye This Week

The Art of Hibernation ()

Life Really Is Better Without The Internet (The Atlantic)

Joyce Carol Oates's Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self (The New Yorker)

How to Fail the Right Way, According to a Psychologist Who Studies the World's Biggest Flops (INC)