The Work

Sleepless Planet

I had the first of my four Comix Activism classes on Saturday. This class is being taught by Maureen Burdock, author of Sleepless Planet (and Queen of Snails) and this first session was on Health Justice and Graphic Medicine, a topic I’m particularly interested in since it intersects with my work on End-of-Life Issues.

Comics work well for activism: they are democratic, inexpensive, widely accessible, and can operate happily outside capitalist consumer culture. Maureen called the “portable empathy machines.”

I particularly like her take on insomnia since she’s suffered from it since she was a child and has tried just about everything to address it — and there’s no one quick fix, bur rather, it must be approached holistically. (It’s also very common for post-menopausal women to suffer from it, which has certainly been my experience.)

The comic at right was drawn during our initial warm-up exercise, whose prompt was “draw your day” — Maureen is in Europe so her day was coming to a close, but mine had just started!

White Rose

I was curious to read about the white rose as a symbol of Russian feminist resistance this morning on the profile of a man in Germany to whom I was about to mail a postcard. Not knowing its history, I assumed it was a new Russian symbol. (I knew it as a symbol of Yorkshire vs. the red rose of Lancashire, from the Wars of the Roses, and of course as a symbol of the need for beauty in the lives of working people in the anthem Bread and Roses.) Imagine my surprise, though, at hearing the white rose mentioned again in my German class later on today by a Russian who now lives in Austria, talking about the resistance movement in Germany during World War II. One group of five dissidents in Munich called itself Weiße Rose and was captured in 1942 by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and executed. The anthem “Die Gedanken Sind Frei” was written a century earlier and was required to be invoked over the decades as repression and authoritarianism took their successive places in German history.

I am about to embark on a course tomorrow, Comix Activism, taught by an artist who was born to German parents and who has now moved back to Europe. The United States is no longer a safe place for her. It’s time to wield symbols and pens to resist oppression…

ETA Saturday morning: I forgot. I also caught a reference to the White Rose on Feli from Germany’s YouTube video from several years ago. Google is watching me… White roses to you, Google.

Patterns of Liberation

About four years I was doing some literature research on information and communications technology for sustainable development and came across the writings of Douglas Schuler, a computer scientist now retired from Evergreen State College in Washington, who works on democratic technology. He is most noted for the 2008 book Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution, published by MIT Press. I revisited this book today and it seems a good work to share in our present moment. As the title suggests, it is inspired by the highly influential 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by architect Christopher Alexander. Liberating Voices takes a similar approach to the latter book and provides a catalogs of patterns helpful for positive social change.

The physical book for Liberating Voices seems hard to find but much of the content is replicated in the website the Public Sphere Project. In particular, there is a section specifically on the Liberating Voices pattern language. Several examples of these patterns include Linguistic Diversity, Participatory Design, Intermediate Technology, and Voices of the Unheard. There are 136 patterns listed in the original Liberating Voices publication and these are summarized in a set of cards here. Patterns which others have submitted are also listed here.

It looks like the Public Sphere Project has gone dormant for now but many of the patterns described there for social change are timeless, and it is well worth reviewing the set for ideas on how to act.

Elections With Cuban White Beans

I am quite heartened by the results of yesterday’s elections — the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral election in New York City stands out but Democratic candidates did spectacularly across the board. It was sad to see the high level of racism and Islamophobia in the mayoral race from sectors I’m supposedly in alignment with, but the voters of New York City as a collective got past that.

I first heard about Zohran Mamdani last spring leading up to the June primary, and soon discovered a fact about him that made me like him a lot. Six or so years ago as an aspiring rapper he made a rap video with the actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey that was a tribute to grandmothers. Madhur Jaffrey is in high esteem in our household and every week we cook between one and three recipes from her cookbooks. This week’s recipes are the following:

• Aromatic Cuban White Beans and Pumpkin Stew (Tuesday’s soup)
• Green Beans with Mushrooms (tomorrow’s dish)
• Bean Curd with Fresh Coriander (our standard Friday night fare — we simply call it tofu-cilantro).

I wish that the Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa had managed to push past Andrew Cuomo and come in second, but it was not to be. Sliwa is a cat person and currently has six kitties: at the height of the pandemic he was rescuing abandoned cats and one point had 17 living in his apartment. Trump disparaged him for his plans if elected to turn the mayoral mansion into a cat rescue site.

Three months ago independent journalist Marisa Kabas summed up the race this way:

why is this mayoral election different than all other mayoral elections?

in all other mayoral elections, we get to see andrew cuomo lose but once. but in this mayoral elections, we get to see him lose twice.

Mamdani will have many powerful people against him trying to thwart his agenda, but he has already done something quite significant. Today he named Lina Khan to be the co-chair of his transition committee. Khan is a brilliant young legal scholar who was the chair of the Federal Trade Commission during the Biden administration and was one of Biden’s most leftwing appointees. As an antitrust regulator, she was the terror of many of the large tech firms including Amazon and Meta. Naming her is a great choice by Mamdani.

Stammtisch

Last night I rewatched Downfall (Der Untergang in German), which chronicles Hitler’s final few days in his Berlin bunker. A tour de force by actor Bruno Ganz, the film draws heavily on material from survivors, especially Traudl Junge, who was one of Hitler’s secretaries. The spectacle of not just Hitler’s, but of many minds unravelling as the Soviet army advanced on the German capital, is something I find particularly interesting in light of where we are in the world.

The term “malignant narcissism” was coined by social psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Erich Fromm to describe the type of grandiose sadistic paranoid pathology displayed by Hitler. It is a term that has also been leveled at various dictators or would-be dictators such as Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Trump, and whether or not the armchair diagnosis is an actual pathological condition, there are certainly traits in common to all of them. “Becoming unhinged” is a fate most of them will face.

I have been very remiss in my German study since before Mum died but wanted to do some preparation for today’s Stammtisch, a monthly gathering for my German conversation group where we get together and speak German for an hour or two. Given that we often end up talking about politics, this seemed a good entry point. I am not sure about the usefulness of the “No Kings” rallying cry since most kings nowadays have little more than a ceremonial role and exert little to no power, unlike the characters mentioned above, but it does have resonance in the American context and certainly brought people out in their millions last week.

Pondering Neo-feudalism

As I remarked in the notes on my imagined board game, I am drawn to the term “neo-feudalism” to describe the set of transitions that are underway now. This is despite “feudalism” not being a term very much in vogue among medievalists these days. (David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele discuss this here, referring to a classic article from 1974 by Elizabeth AR Brown that reviews how the concept of “feudalism” has never been very well defined and does not account for the great variety of medieval social systems across time and space.)

I think my use of the term “neo-feudalism” refers more to economics rather than a social system. It’s not the relationship of mutual obligations between lords, nobles, and vassals that is being replicated now. Rather it is much more akin to land ownership by nobles who capture the wealth of serfs..

In short, I believe that capitalism as an economic system is coming to an end now or has already ended. (When people write about “late capitalism” they don’t seem to mean this, rather their usage is more like “the system in its current incarnation”) One writer who believes this is the economist Yanis Varoufakis, who has come up with the concept of technofeudalism. In his view, tech companies function like modern feudal lords. They make their money via rents rather than producing goods. For instance, Apple makes 30% profit (or something like that) from producers and consumers just for the monopoly privilege of selling apps on their app store.

A second argument is not one that Varoufakis makes, but seems clear to an environmental scientist. One of the oldest sayings in environmental science is that “you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet”. The upcoming decades will be the ones where we hit profound limits to growth. Tom Murphy discusses the physical limits in a 2022 paper in Nature Physics. For instance, our energy use has been increasing at a tenfold rate over the past century, and this rate simply cannot continue (in four hundred years we’d be boiling due to waste heat). There is also a limit to which economic activity can be decoupled from physical activity.

But a capitalist economic system is primarily about one thing: return on investment. If growth is no longer to be had, the financial system will necessarily start to break down. To be replaced by some other economic system that no longer is demanding returns of 3, 4, 5, 8 percent and so on. I don’t know what this new system will look like, but it seems it will be a lot more static than what we have now. An economic system based on capturing rents rather than producing goods. “Neo-feudalism” seems evocative, if nothing else.

Perceptual Crisis - The Board Game

I am not a board game designer and the thoughts below do not constitute an intent to design such a game, but I am wondering what a board game about the current political situation in the United States might be like — let’s name the game for now Perpetual Crisis.

There are lots of board game antecedents to draw upon, even in the fairly limited space of United States political history. One example is This Guilty Land, designed by Amabel Holland, which is about the political struggle over slavery in the antebellum United States. One player’s role is “Justice”, and the other player’s role is “Oppression”. Another game of note is Votes For Women, which is about the campaign for women’s suffrage starting in 1848 and running until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment. A much more tightly defined game is 1960: The Making of the President, about the presidential election of 1960 (Kennedy vs. Nixon).

Also of interest are COIN games (short for COunter-INsurgency), which are a series of simulation games covering asymmetrical conflicts such as insurgencies and often featuring up to four factions. (An example of a COIN game is Cuba Libre, about the 1956-1959 Cuban revolution, with four factions being the Batista government dictatorship, the syndicate aka the mob, the student protestors aka the Directorio, and the Fidel Castro-led guerillas.) A lot of the mechanics I’m imagining for Perpetual Crisis comes from COIN games.

I think Perpetual Crisis would be a two-player game though. One side would be those striving for a liberal multicultural democracy, the other side would be the white supremacist neo-feudalists. (I recognize that feudalism is a concept very much in disfavor with actual medievalists these days, but neo-feudalism does seem to capture both the rural power base of far-right farmland owners as well as the technofeudalism of the Silicon Valley types.) The sketch map shown at right for the board is very much inspired by COIN games. This would be an area control game with the areas being a combination of culture regions of the United States as well as major cities. (Here I am drawing from the 11 culture regions put forth by Colin Woodard in his book American Nations; the regions on the sketch map are the Left Coast, El Norte, and the Far West). Having major cities as separate areas to control in addition to the culture regions helps capture the rural-urban political split.

The horizontal five-box tracks on the sketch map hold a token to track the sentiment of each region or city. This ranges from +2 (strong democratic sentiment) to -2 (strong neo-feudalism). As players take actions in the game, the sentiment tokens will shift left and right on the tracks. I could also keep the COIN mechanism of players pulling cards from an event/action deck during each turn. Shuffled into the deck would also be cards representing special election turns, with the outcome of the election causing changes in the abilities of either side. The result of the election would depend in part on summing up the sentiment of the populations of both the culture regions and the major cities. (The numbers 6 and 4 on the sketch map indicate the population of Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively).

COIN games feature a quite asymmetric palette of actions to take depending upon the faction, and that works well in this framework. For instance Vote Suppression or Political Violence would be a couple of the actions the neo-feudalists could take, whereas the democracy side might have Rally or Get Out The Vote as two possible actions.

So what is happening right now in game terms? The neo-feudalists are carrying out Terror actions in Chicago and in Portland. I don’t think those actions are degrading democratic sentiment in either of those cities, but it may be strengthening neo-feudalist sentiment in other culture regions. The actions are also reducing capacity on a resource track, due to the negative economic impacts of deportations and suppressing immigration. Meanwhile, No Kings 2.0 could be represented by the play of a Nationwide Rally event card. This might increase democratic sentiment by a point in several regions or cities.

That is just a start in imagining this game. There is probably a place in the game for several resource tracks that work at a nationwide scale e.g. one tracking propaganda levels, another economic health, and another being quality of governance. So in each turn players could take actions that affect the nationwide resource tracks or those that impact specific regions or cities on the board.

No Kings 2.0

We went to our county’s No Kings 2.0 protest which conveniently took place within walking distance for us. I am still getting over COVID so I participated wearing an N95, and didn’t do the entire march. It was a very good crowd; I saw an estimate of 4,500 people.

The goofy-eyed inflatable frog has become an icon of the resistance in the past several weeks, and I saw several of them at today’s protest. Going after Portland might have been a strategic mistake by the administration, as Portland’s penchant for weirdness has generated a lot of good resistance iconography for everyone to use. Sarah Jeong wrote an interesting essay several days ago about the significance of the frog, and how it has been an effective counter to the aura farming of the militarized federal agents.

The Frog is ludicrous. The Frog makes no sense. The Frog is a viral symbol of resistance against the Trump regime, and the key to understanding what has happened to discourse in the second Trump presidency.

Save Our Signs

I went to a Zoom session yesterday for the Data Rescue Project that featured a presentation by organizers of an effort entitled Save Our Signs. On 27 March 2025 Trump issued an executive order (“Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History”) that directed the National Park Service and other land management agencies to remove and replace content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), or, with respect to content describing natural features, that emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur of said natural feature.” A subsequent order gave the park administrators 120 days to remove and replace such content, which worked out to the date of 17 September 2025.

The organizers of Save Our Signs, who are librarians and public historians at the University of Minnesota, realized something had to be done, and launched a crowdsourced effort to photograph as many of the signs in the National Park System possible. By September 15 they have received 8070 photographs from well over 300 parks. They have already documented some alterations for instance to signage in Muir Woods.

I am appalled and horrified by the wholesale erasure of history that is underway, but at the same time I am inspired by Save Our Signs and related efforts to keep history and memory alive, and hope to find my own niche in this domain.

Footnote: in my YouTube feed there just appeared a news story from WBOY 12 in West Virginia entitled Certain exhibits being removed from Harpers Ferry under Trump administration order which says that they “are removing references to slavery” in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Harpers Ferry is the site of John Brown’s famous raid: it’s kind of hard to tell its story without mentioning slavery!