I feel objectively worse than I did in 2016. We have so much more information about how bad things are going to get now, and the fascists have had eight more years to prepare for how to roll out cruelty en masse on day one. We have so much less slack in ameliorating the worst impacts of climate change, after yet another eight years of inaction. I’m terrified.

I also feel much less destabilized and paralyzed by my fear than I did in 2016. Part of it is that I’m eight years older and more resilient than I was. A bigger part is that the past eight years have more or less entirely eroded any lingering trust I still had in our institutions. This isn’t to say that we don’t hold our institutions to account. It is simply to say that they cannot be relied on. They are the tools we wield, not the shields we hide behind. The only care we have is the care we provide each other; that was true on Tuesday morning and it is still true now. The work is still here.

I’ve realized that the thing that burned me out so hard last time writing a daily newsletter keeping up on everything that was going wrong is the thing that I actively deplore in modern life: scale. I wanted to have a big impact, I wanted to reach a lot of people and change hearts and minds and push them to act. But as much as my work may have been momentarily soothing or galvanizing for people who largely already agreed with me, it stretched me incredibly thin, didn’t actually move the needle, and most importantly, didn’t build community. It is an amateur mistake to want your efforts to scale before your efforts have done anything at all. It is hubris to think one person changes anything by themselves. If this were an engineering problem I would have known to throw it out for premature optimization. All engineering problems are, at their heart, social problems.

Scale and unchecked growth ruin things. A lot of effort, both technical and social, is spent on trying to figure out how to prevent the dehumanizing effects of scale. Not a lot of effort is spent on unlearning the desire for scale. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, I am not thinking clearly enough for that. But wherever my searching takes me I’m pretty sure it’s going to be something small, something local, something with my neighbours, something offline. Start with a thing I can actually influence in my immediate geographical surroundings, and find others who have already been doing this work and show up to help.

This feels entirely irrational to say because the fascists are so good at scale. They radicalize at scale, enact control at scale, mete out violence at scale. They have the techno-oligarchs on their side, the surveillance apparatuses that seem increasingly inescapable. But there’s a little voice inside of me that says that this is precisely why we have to start small, because what else is left to trust but the things we say to one another’s face, without the disintermediation of technology? How else do we build the competing centers of power to move towards a better world except by seeing where our small personal loci of power lie and putting them together, with care and joy and compassion? If we protect even one person from the fascists, is that not an entire world?

I could very well be wrong. I’ve been wrong before and will continue to be wrong in the future. This is simply the bet I am making for today, this week, this year. You might have a different theory of change than me, which is wonderful, too. Fascism is a many-headed beast and we will need a diversity of tactics to fight it. The only thing we cannot indulge in is resignation and despair. Do not obey in advance. Do not give up in advance.

I know the stakes seem impossibly high, like the death tolls of the genocides our governments fund against our will and the gauges of our themermoters and the levels of our seas. I’m not saying everything will be okay. Many people won’t be. But the stakes have always been high, and we have always only had each other, whether we were aware of it or not. We still do.