Important, hopeful message to end the year on. In my most optimistic days I like to believe people are waking up the mess we’ve made and starting to do what you’re describing, one step at a time. The reaction to AI is evidence - people want something better.
Excellent. Have you read "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas? Chris Hedges just interviewed him. Very helpful in understanding how we got to this moment. Rock on,Scarlet!
I have so many thoughts about this, you speak to the things most disturbing to me about AI but also about how much people place unnecessary and imaginary blocks and baffles and imprison themselves when they could grow and learn instead. It's especially interesting and tbh confusing when you've experienced real, significant systemic obstacles yourself and had to learn the majority of your knowledge independently. No one has ever prevented me from going to the library and so in many ways there has never been a limit to my learning about anything I felt motivated to learn. This was why I was so excited about the possibilities of the internet when it was first available to me in high school and it's why I spent a chunk of time volunteering for Project Gutenberg what feels like an entire life ago. I haven't benefited to any meaningful degree in material wealth from the decades of reading everything worthwhile I can get my hands on. Without the right documents it's all without value to management. It's been more of a hindrance because I seem overqualified apparently but on paper I'm definitely not, hiring managers don't like that at all. But I couldn't do things any differently than I have, I'm so curious about so many things and one fact leads to another always. Why are so many people not at all curious? Or they're curious but cold-hearted and want to believe in whatever makes them feel superior without examination of veracity?
This piece is honestly the wake-up call and reminder that so many folks need, so thank you for writing this Scarlet - especially as we prepare to cap off this horrifying year and plunge ourselves into the depths of everything that 2026 has in store. Your thesis here hits home for me on a truly profound level, and I imagine I may not be the only one who feels that way after reading this. It wasn't all that long ago that my focus and attention (especially online) was devoted to that mindless and numbing emptiness machine that you perfectly detailed, and it eventually reached the point where I started being unable to derive any genuine meaning in what I was spending my time doing. That's precisely what they want us to be like (mindless expendable cogs powering the profit machine), which is why change needed to happen. Once you allow for that personal revolution to take place, it only grows and expands from there to the point where you begin to see that water that's always been all around us. Pieces like these will be incredibly valuable for folks to have in their back pockets as something they can always reference whenever that feeling of mindless offloading feels like it's becoming ever present again. I also love the numerous re-invocations of "we owe each other everything" throughout this piece, because it helps emphasize what's at stake and why it's important for capitalist realism (and capitalism as a whole) to be thoroughly dismantled. "To see the water is to see the reality of our situation and refuse to accept it." We all must take that first step if we are to find our way back to ourselves and each other again - to rediscover that "divine, extraordinary, flawed - but fully ensouled" humanity - and this piece will help folks realize and remember that. Thank you again for putting this out Scarlet, and for all the time and effort that you put into your work. Never stop proclaiming loudly what is happening.
This post appeared at a very synchronistic moment for me. Thank you!
Important, hopeful message to end the year on. In my most optimistic days I like to believe people are waking up the mess we’ve made and starting to do what you’re describing, one step at a time. The reaction to AI is evidence - people want something better.
Excellent. Have you read "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas? Chris Hedges just interviewed him. Very helpful in understanding how we got to this moment. Rock on,Scarlet!
Yes I love that book!
I have so many thoughts about this, you speak to the things most disturbing to me about AI but also about how much people place unnecessary and imaginary blocks and baffles and imprison themselves when they could grow and learn instead. It's especially interesting and tbh confusing when you've experienced real, significant systemic obstacles yourself and had to learn the majority of your knowledge independently. No one has ever prevented me from going to the library and so in many ways there has never been a limit to my learning about anything I felt motivated to learn. This was why I was so excited about the possibilities of the internet when it was first available to me in high school and it's why I spent a chunk of time volunteering for Project Gutenberg what feels like an entire life ago. I haven't benefited to any meaningful degree in material wealth from the decades of reading everything worthwhile I can get my hands on. Without the right documents it's all without value to management. It's been more of a hindrance because I seem overqualified apparently but on paper I'm definitely not, hiring managers don't like that at all. But I couldn't do things any differently than I have, I'm so curious about so many things and one fact leads to another always. Why are so many people not at all curious? Or they're curious but cold-hearted and want to believe in whatever makes them feel superior without examination of veracity?
This piece is honestly the wake-up call and reminder that so many folks need, so thank you for writing this Scarlet - especially as we prepare to cap off this horrifying year and plunge ourselves into the depths of everything that 2026 has in store. Your thesis here hits home for me on a truly profound level, and I imagine I may not be the only one who feels that way after reading this. It wasn't all that long ago that my focus and attention (especially online) was devoted to that mindless and numbing emptiness machine that you perfectly detailed, and it eventually reached the point where I started being unable to derive any genuine meaning in what I was spending my time doing. That's precisely what they want us to be like (mindless expendable cogs powering the profit machine), which is why change needed to happen. Once you allow for that personal revolution to take place, it only grows and expands from there to the point where you begin to see that water that's always been all around us. Pieces like these will be incredibly valuable for folks to have in their back pockets as something they can always reference whenever that feeling of mindless offloading feels like it's becoming ever present again. I also love the numerous re-invocations of "we owe each other everything" throughout this piece, because it helps emphasize what's at stake and why it's important for capitalist realism (and capitalism as a whole) to be thoroughly dismantled. "To see the water is to see the reality of our situation and refuse to accept it." We all must take that first step if we are to find our way back to ourselves and each other again - to rediscover that "divine, extraordinary, flawed - but fully ensouled" humanity - and this piece will help folks realize and remember that. Thank you again for putting this out Scarlet, and for all the time and effort that you put into your work. Never stop proclaiming loudly what is happening.