Jen Sorensen: Your New Order Has Arrived
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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Correct! One of the most important tools we need to obtain, the most important weapon we need to arm yourself, isn't obvious, or simple, or easy.
It's Messaging.
Want to spend your time bitter? Apathetic? "I-told-you-so"?
I don't blame you.
But you're not actually working towards a solution. If all you have to say is "I told you so," or "what's the point?" or "everything's fucked" - I get it. But you're not contributing to the conversation any more than the people in this comic have been for the last how many years. You're not helping any more than they were.
We need messaging. We need to be willing to fight these battles. Not fighting the embittered trolls, but spreading truth. Sharing solutions. Making plans. Fighting this. Apathy. Pointlessness. Accelerationism.
Spread free platforms. Spread free ideas. Have meaningful conversations with your friends and families and coworkers. Try again, and keep trying. In little steps, in great acts. Don't let the shock paralyze you, the size overwhelm you. Don't get washed away by the flood of hate. This is the second best time to act. Your opportunities are growing by the minute.
Life is about to get very, very hard for many people. Many of the obvious targets will suffer, but it's pretty clear that nobody is "safe". Even the poster boys are under threat of retribution for stepping out of line. And everyone, everyone is facing the inevitable economic downturn that is speeding toward us.
But hardship shakes beliefs. It changes minds. Things will become personal for even the most detached, apathetic, or privileged. And when politics become personal all bets are off.
But don't bother if you're not going to try. Really, really try. Think about yourself, and the world, and the person you're talking to, and really try to make them see.
Take - and make - your opportunities to change minds. Don't be afraid, but be careful. Don't be polite for the sake of politeness, but be kind, be considerate, even be gentle when you think it will help, but don't be polite.
Whatever they can say to you can't compare to what is being done to you or about to be done to everybody. Whatever they say can't be worse than their complacency.
Your one and only goal: stay on message. This is bad and it needs to stop. Here is how it affects you. Here is how it affects your family. Here is how things are going wrong, and why.
More than anything else, we need each other. We need solidarity, community. We need to genuinely start asking ourselves: how do we win? And then make the answer happen.
We kneel beneath the weight of wealth and tradition and fear. But despite the growth of AI, at the end of the day the people we kneel beneath are people. Humans decide what happens next. They are human. We are all human. We can decide what happens next.
I oy wish i were actually capable of that. But my autistic ass is inherently alienating for some reason. Best thing I could do is shut up
Please don't feel that the best thing you can do is shut up! You deserve a voice in the matter, even if it is much harder for you to use it the way others can use theirs.
Besides, not everyone can always be or even needs to always be the person who spreads the message. We need people to help figure out what the problems and solutions are just as much as we need people to share those problems and solutions with the world.
It is usually a necessary evil that we have marketers to sell the things that wouldn't exist without the engineers to produce them.
People tend not to like the solutions I come up with. Something something collateral damage, violence is always bad (except when it helps found the country for some reason?), no 2024 totally wasnt stolen, ect ect.
I like you. Keep spreading the message.
Well said, my friend.
The only people we need to be messaging are the DNC. Policy that improves people's material condition is louder than any of us can hope to be. Same goes for genocide.
There is nothing you can say to someone who sees people just like them getting massacred by American bombs that will make them vote for you. I spent over a year screaming this, but I was drown out by people saying "no, actually because the republicans will do it worse, all the anti-genocide voters are still gonna vote so the democrats don't need to change course". And now those same people are saying the voters learned their lesson and will vote blue no matter who next time or that democrats issue is messaging.
Not to put too fine a point on it: No.
The horses have been led to the water many times. They are welcome to drink whenever they choose. The time for talking is over.
Then you're not actually advocating for change. If you have no interest in changing minds then you have no interest in any meaningful difference in the future. Besides, the consent has been manufactured and the horses have been lead to a poisoned pool.
The apathetic dismissal of people as helpless - the belief that they are, individually and as a whole, incapable of change or redemption or worse, unworthy of it - is a small but meaningful part of the machine that has altered reality in front of our very eyes.
We appear to be in one of many pivotal moments in history, where economics and politics and technology all tip the dominoes that are human lives toward an entirely new and irreversible state.
Hard times tend to meet demagogues and easy answers, but they also tend to force people to come together and face hard truths. I'm not saying you personally can save or change them all - perhaps not even save any. But there are plenty of good, ignorant people that will have opportunities to learn some terrible lessons very soon.