1. I want to sincerely thank everyone who made a pledge in response to my long and rambling mission statement. We are still officially in “subscription drive” phase, but a number of generous people have put us well on the way to our goal. I read each comment that came in with the pledges, and they were really encouraging.
   
   At the same time, I apologize if you had problems using the “Subscribe” buttons to make a pledge. I got a few complaints of this type. You can use this link instead if you wish to offer support.

   
   For the moment, nothing has been officially launched. No one is paying for anything yet, and certainly not for this little email. As a result of the initial appeal, we have about 60-70% of what we need to begin. We thank you for your further consideration.
   
   

2. In the new London Review of Books, I have an article on the protest movement in Serbia. Who are “the students,” could they win, and: what would it mean if they actually do? It is in the paper’s classic “Diary” format.

   
   

3. Our friends at Marjin Kiri, in Indonesia, would like to announce that “If We Burn” is coming out in Bahasa Indonesia next month. Marjin Kiri is Indonesian for “Left Margin,” and their edition of Metode Jakarta has made a real impact. Back when they decided to translate it, we had no idea if the book would even be allowed in the country. The next cover:

   

4. Donald Trump has gone to war with Iran, and he is losing. Back in January I wrote that I wanted to conceive of the events of early 2026 as an attempt at an “autogolpe imperial” — the world’s hegemonic power was trying to replace the mediating structures of an effective imperialist system with more direct exploitation, in a manner analogous to a national leader carrying out a domestic “self-coup.” Autogolpe imperial would be Spanish or Portuguese imported by necessity into the English language. While a prime minister might try to abolish parliament and bring the judiciary or police under the direct control of the executive, the President of the United States was setting up a loyalist “Board of Peace” to bypass the United Nations, and replacing a complex system of indirect threats and secret coercion with spectacular invasions and the proud extortion of allies.

   
   I said that an “autogolpe” attempt can be opportunistic, or it can be the result of desperation: a last, reckless attempt to hold on to power that is slipping away.
   
   I still think this is what is happening, and I think it is not working.
   
   Thanks again,

   Vincent
   

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Dear subscribers and sympathetic readers,

After five months of experimentation, we have decided we should go forward with a version of North South Notes that regularly publishes serious writing. The response has been very encouraging. We want to continue to pay contributors around the world, and pay them well; I want to keep using this platform to write about global developments.

To do this, we need to raise the funds. If I can garner the sufficient amount of “pledges,” I will activate paid subscriptions and go forward, and we will found a magazine together. If it turns out there is not enough support, that’s fine. If it can’t be done, I will step away from Substack. But I think it can be done.

Let’s get this over with

I will write a lot more, below, on our thinking and planning for this publication. But if you are already on board, you don’t even need to read it. The point of this post is to get people to pledge a small amount of money, and launch a publication. If 5% of the current subscribers decide to pledge five dollars per month, we will have everything we need for now. If a few generous people become “Founders” — I will send them signed books to say thank you — we will be on our way very quickly.

That is: I reckon that if we got a pledge from everyone that can easily spare the money and has a genuine interest in founding this publication, we would be done. I will launch North South Notes, start discussing ideas with the subscribers, and we can avoid the tricks and strategic use of paywalls customarily employed to produce revenue here.

If that describes you then please, offer a pledge, and we can get this over with.

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Edit: if you have a problem offering a pledge with the Subscribe buttons, use this link instead.

But if you do not have the resources, or you are not sure the project has value, do not pledge. A free subscription is deeply appreciated; you could also send this publication to someone who might be interested in subscribing and supporting. The idea is to use my platform here to re-direct some funds to writers around the world, not to suck money out of the periphery.

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The plan and the promise

The most prominent format for a Substack newsletter — and there is nothing wrong with this — is that an established writer uses this platform to post their takes on the news. They read a bit of the internet and write their thoughts about that internet back onto the internet. I would not ask you to fund that.

The proposition here is different. We will use this platform to create a little global affairs magazine. We pay people around the world to do real, original work and contribute meaningfully to human knowledge. In a small way, of course.

At first, at least, we will privilege quality over quantity. In the ideal month a contributor from say, Mongolia or Chile will write a report from their country, and I will also write something. The next month, it might be an essay from Albania and a book review. The focus of the magazine will be the capitalist world system. So — we could write about almost anything; but the guiding theoretical approach presumes that there is a world system. It can be changed, and it is already changing. Pieces may go deep into the details of a given nation or city or individual, but there will usually be some attempt to relate those details to the global context. There is no geographic focus and we do not privilege the “South” over the “North” or vice-versa, but we do believe that North / South is a relevant distinction. We send you notes from each.

In the ideal year, a subscriber will have read a number of reports from around the world, and about as many from me. Or, you can skip everything that doesn’t interest you, and still know you have supported their publication. Each contribution will seek to be truly original, but also allow the casual reader to catch up on events in that part of the world for the year.

Our imagined audience is someone who is interested to learn about, say, union organizing in Korea or protests in Morocco, but is not likely to read about those countries on a regular basis. We seek to publish serious, edited, and accurate writing that stands the test of time. The three international contributions so far — from an Indonesian journalist, a Romanian academic, and a Mexican art critic — are just as relevant now as the day they were published. I hope North South Notes can be cited in books and peer-reviewed journals, and that interviews and reviews can contribute something to political and literary culture. In addition to the three contributors we have had so far, four editors contributed fact-checking, additional feedback, and copy editing. All of them and more are rearing to go, if we can get the money.

At the very least, we promise to publish eighteen pieces per year that require real work. I might also throw some little blogs in here and there, and the publication could potentially grow much larger. I write something, then something comes in from far away, and so on.

Get it? North / South Notes. That’s the idea. We are creating the most important publication in the world. We are launching a fun little Third Worldist blog run by a Californian. We are going to create The Free Press but in Maoist Standard English. Please join us.

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Subscription levels

1. Anyone generous enough to sign up as a Founder gets both of my books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn, signed and sent to wherever, if you want them.1

2. All Paid subscribers at any level can: comment; participate in “editorial” discussions (threads in the chat), ask questions, and offer input; take part in periodic book giveaways, with stylish translated editions included.

3. We will try to keep as much as possible available to everyone. Free subscribers get all the open notes. And, as I have done the past two years, I will sometimes give things away to this type of supporter, too.

It should be clear by now that we are seeking patrons more than customers.2 If need be, I may experiment down the line with putting some things behind a paywall, to gently nudge people to do what they may want to do anyway. Or, we could just get this over with right now.

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Defense! Defense! Defense!

Journalism is dying. Substack is not the solution. The business model that this platform relies upon will not and cannot be sufficient to the task of providing crucial information to the world’s citizens and rebuilding a public sphere.

That does not mean, however, that defensive measures are worthless. We have to do what we can to weather the storm. In theory, I support large newsrooms with public support, and do not believe that decentralization is synonymous with democratization. In practice, I believe that creating a new Substack publication that commissions new writing can make things less bad in the short term. Paid subscriptions can help create a small, private space in which we can advocate for the nationalization of the internet. In the long term, we need structural solutions to the epistemic crisis, not just voluntarism; but right now, today, we need some volunteers. In the short term, I see this as a war of position.

By the same token — there are a lot of great, under-employed writers around the world, both experienced and up-and-coming. I have gotten to know a lot of people like this over twenty years of traveling and reporting. North South Notes is not about to employ thousands of them, but I think that paying first-world magazine rates to people in São Paulo or Kathmandu can make a very small contribution to keeping these communities alive.

Because finally, I believe that creating a base of reader support for this kind of writing is the best way to survive the crises comprising this very strange global moment. When talking with contributors, I sometimes bring up other publications that do publish the kind of work I want to host here. But I will say that I know from experience that they rely on one of a couple business models. While recognizing that there is nothing wrong with employing them, and that they all produce vital work, I think they have limitations:

One option is to rely on the generosity of an individual heir, oligarch or business man who uses the publication to further their own ideological project. You are subject to this person’s whims and veto power. Another move is to pay so little you can only publish grad students or academics with some other income stream. God bless them — without this coterie of writers, left-wing publishing in the English language would be in trouble. But there are more people out there. I want to work with them, and I want to publish things that might not be allowed by the owners of NYC clout rags or the Open Society Foundation. At the very least, I don’t want us to have to worry about them.

Moreover, I will admit that some part of me hopes this publication can become a semi-profitable small business, and therefore give myself some kind of an insurance policy. So far, I am in the hole — I have only lost money on North South Notes.3 But if I can be paid to edit this little publication as well, I myself would be less dependent on the whims of powerful individuals.

I have signed a new book deal — more on that later — with great people and am very excited by what I am working on. I consider my full-time job to be “author,” and I have given myself some protective armor by proving that I can sell books. The world of publishing — compared to whatever the hell was going on in journalism — has proved to be reassuringly capitalist and predictable. If you bring money in, they are not inclined to kick you out. But it remains true that a single person could decide that I opposed the wrong war, posted the wrong thing, or protested the wrong genocide, and render me immediately precarious. That could come in the form of an attack from the state, or a decision made by some corporate bureaucrat looking over his or her shoulder. Basically, I am trying to use this period of relative calm to move eggs into more than one basket, both for myself and quality media in general. Resist the NGO-ization of media. War of position.

I have done this before

In Brazil, from 2012 to 2016, I ran a small blog for Folha de S. Paulo. I only published a few things a month, but I liked doing it. I liked commissioning, and I liked editing. As it happens, the two primary contributors have sadly passed away. First, we lost Claire Rigby; then, in 2022, Dom Phillips was killed in the Amazon rainforest. I loved working with them, and I love looking back on the things we did together. We published Brazilians and gringos and serious reporting and I also snuck in some weird little bloggy things.

Back then, editing that publication was not my full-time job. I spent about 20% of my time on it, and 80% on my primary work. In addition to my own reporting, I could commission travel and far-flung research from a desk. I’d like to do that again.

What with everything what is going on right now

History, unfortunately, keeps happening. I came up with the name North South Notes, bought a domain, and opened an account here in 2022. From the beginning, this was the idea I had for the publication. But I went back and forth on whether to execute.

What finally tipped the scales, I think, is a desire to remain engaged with geopolitics. My current book research is wildly captivating for me, and it is a bit different than what I have done previously. I really look forward to sharing more. But I did not want to disappear into the topic, with no good reason to even read the daily news, as the United States seeks to violently re-make the imperial order in a more crude and vicious form. Even if I am not doing weeks of reporting for each post, there are things that I have learned and contacts I have accumulated over the years that might be relevant.

I am glad, for example, that I was in this “experimental” period as it became clear that the United States may seek to attack Venezuela, and made sure to write something about it. In January, I wrote that parts of the Israeli and U.S. government “want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.” I want to continue to comment on world affairs, and have a concrete reason to do so. I want to keep learning from contributors.

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The output and the ideas

Since October, I have tried to offer a sense of what we might do here. In Jakarta, Hanna Samosir did extensive reporting to offer an account of unexpected mass protests in Indonesia. From Bucharest, Romanian scholar Florin Poenaru wrote a captivating account of a network of neoliberalized spies and the “Russian interference” that no one can seem to find. Last month, Gaby Cepeda used the world of contemporary art to examine Mexico’s strange relationship to the United States and a new global content regime.

Along the way, I myself warned that Donald Trump had nefarious designs on Venezuela, and that they had nothing to do with “regime change.” Then, I tried to write a history of the verticalization of the public sphere, before returning to Trump’s designs on the Americas and attempting to coin the term “autogolpe imperial.”

Check out any of these pieces out now, if you like. But even if you missed them the first time and don’t care about them now, you might appreciate that they have made an impact. Hanna’s story was translated into German; Florin went on podcasts to explain his work; Gaby’s report was passed around the Mexican art world (on Instagram stories, of course) and re-shared and discussed by its Gen-Z practitioners. My little concept of “regime collapse” operations was translated and published by Boitempo in Brazil. Previously, I have done book reviews and a well-performing movie review and dumb little personal essays.

What else might we do? Part of the idea is that this will emerge through conversations with contributors and subscribers, but here are some other ideas, potentially: the situation in Bahrain during the war on Iran; what does the Albanian left think about Hoxha?; an interview with the publishing house run by Brazil’s MST; the first time I thought, “I wish I had already launched North South Notes” was the outbreak of ‘Gen Z’ protests in Kenya in 2024 — in retrospect, I wish I had commissioned something anyway — we could look at the consequences two years later; a report on the New People’s Army in the Philippines; a map of the party form in the Arab world; literary fiction in lusophone Africa; and so on.

And then finally, I could more things myself that include travel or reporting. For example: in December, I went to Liverpool to cover the founding conference of Your Party UK. In the end, I decided not to write anything. If I had been on the hook to deliver one or two real things a month for money, I might have done.

More promises

These promises, I admit, are largely made for my own sake: I will resist the internalization of this platform’s algorithm and the tendency to do whatever it is that will maximize subs and revenue. There is evil lurking in this place, but I am comforted by the fact that if it all goes wrong, you can take an email list elsewhere.

I will not try to compete with other newsletters or care about the “ranking” and “rising” nonsense they push on you. I am not trying to win at Substack; I have set out how I actually plan to use this platform. At the same time, if demand in the form of subscriptions significantly outstrips what I can do on my own, I promise to expand by working with more editors and writers.

Truly, thank you —
Vincent

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It is an unfortunate fact that humanity is living through the content-ification of nearly everything. Until relatively recently, we might argue, “content” did not exist at all. But now: politics, art, journalism, culture and life itself is content, too. We feel this here in Mexico, of course. Indeed, we may feel it more intensely, and in a unique way, as a result of our special relationship to the country north of the border. The process of content-ification is intrinsically related to the power of the United States, its inescapable media production, and the internet that its firms control.

As the famous national lament puts it: Mexico suffers because it is “so far from God, and so close to the United States.” And yet, it is perhaps that knotty relationship that has created a special place for us in this strange new global system. In some ways, Mexico appears to be an exception to some of its rules, even as reality here seems violently overdetermined by others.

For example, on one hand: bucking a trend in the hemisphere, we have not experienced a shift to the right or the victory of neo-fascism. We can call ourselves lucky to have Claudia Sheinbaum who, for all her faults, is a democratically elected and popular president, with a plausible claim to being left of center and a solid record of standing up to Donald Trump. On the other hand, our opposition has morphed into a formless, uninspired set of culture warriors attempting to replicate their counterparts north of the border by copying fragments of the United States and pasting them into Mexican politics. These are mad oligarchs and influencer psychos raving that Washington should invade Latin America to save it from ourselves, apparently unworried about the obvious contradictions for their own class. They grab at signifiers and the aesthetics of campaigns which seem to have worked elsewhere, railing against trans people, a “stolen” election (in reality, Sheinbaum won more votes than any candidate in recent history), or decry the censorship of their own yapper class that is somehow always imminent.

And, at the same time, it is woefully obvious that daily life in much of the country is shaped by insatiable US American demand for drugs, and by its endless supply of guns.

I work in contemporary art, as a critic and curator, and trying to read and explain trends in my field in relation to the world-system requires confronting another set of contradictions. Most everyone I know in the world of left-leaning cultural workers came out to vote for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s predecessor and the founder of the ruling Morena party, only for him to turn around and call us all “fifí” or posh. While disheartening, one can admit it was a pretty funny move. It was clear we were not—and are not—the focus of Morena’s political project, and we must recognize just how popular that project has been. At the same time, AMLO, Morena, and Sheinbaum’s choice to further cut funding for the arts left a void that is being filled by the private sector. As institutional support for culture slowly deteriorates, international capital has taken center stage in the Mexican art world.

While those working in public museums, reliant on government art grants, or running state-funded cultural spaces have long had to tighten their belts due to cuts imposed by previous governments, some of us held out hope for a left-leaning movement that viewed culture as a plausible defense against influencer slop and the kind of corporate propaganda that can only push us to the right. This has sadly not materialized, and the tradition of cultural workers protesting for basic provisions carries on in the Morena era.

A century ago, the now-famous muralistas reshaped national culture with ample public support. Artists like José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros forged indelible images of national identity and revolutionary spirit before the Mexican Revolution began the oxymoronic process of institutionalization. After the “Ruptura” generation broke with the “Mexican School of Painting,” no group of artists has enjoyed public support in the same way. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were persecuted for their leftwing politics during the so-called “Dirty War.” But cuts to the cultural budget did not become really drastic until the victory of the right-wing PAN, in 2000.

Once more, we are in an especially tricky situation. Of course, artists, curators, and writers like me do not want to respond to Sheinbaum on the basis of narrow self-interest – even though many people in the field struggle to get by. But I am also increasingly worried about indirect effects: a competitive professionalization of culture which is deeply conservative.

In the arts, the response to all of this has been schizophrenic. The scene is divided between those that are highly politicized and those that are not at all. One fraction discusses how class shapes the ways that art is produced, consumed, and circulated in the increasingly gentrified city; to be politicized in this sense includes looking into the sources of funding for events and institutions; this group challenges Zionism and imperialism; and you might have guessed by now that this is my tribe. Along with a few friends I run 333, an art criticism magazine, and we are on that side of the spectrum. The other team is perhaps happier: They simply ignore most politics, picking instead at the juicy morsels of art-market gossip. Somewhere in the middle is the new influencer class. They hail the arrival of my worst nightmare: art and commentary that is merely fun, ahistorical, apolitical content; what I see as the antithesis of art, of critique.

It might be naïve to believe that the arts could be a fruitful space for thoughtful critique of the existing order, as well as a bulwark against fire-breathing attacks from the right. But given the danger of the moment, most members of the weakened cultural class are too scared of catching strays from either side. It is safer to avoid any criticism that could be confused with the insanity of the national oligarchy’s attacks on Morena. This traditional owner class— whose most recognizable ideology was, until recently, being anti-poor and vaguely Catholic—has been acting ridiculously, but this does not mean they are not a threat.

I grew up in Veracruz but now I am, of course, based in Mexico City, the principal node in an extremely centralized cultural structure. And as everyone knows, this city has recently been transformed by its special role in the art world. This is not the only international capital to experience this kind of gentrification this century, but it might be the most jarring case.

It used to be easy to predict where gringos could be found in Mexico City. What I referred to as Gringo Season started some time in fall, usually late November, and extended to a few days after Mexico’s art week in early February; then, our city would once more be clear of the telltale loudness and rudeness of a certain kind of visitor by the beginning of March, when weather in New York started to improve. These flows used to be restricted to Condesa, and then also to Colonia Roma. But they spread to Roma Sur, and then Juárez and Cuauhtémoc; more recently, they have flooded San Rafael and Santa María la Ribera, Centro Histórico, Tabacalera, Narvarte, as well as Coyoacán in the south.

But Condesa wasn’t always the stomping grounds of curiously barefoot US Americans. Just a few decades ago, it was abandoned by the middle-class families that had moved into the area in the 1930s, and it was quickly repopulated by a working class that needed homes after the 1985 earthquake. The story of its recent gentrification can be mapped onto NAFTA, the spread of contemporary art, and a few Gen Xers: Right around the signing of the fatefully destructive 1994 “North American Free Trade Agreement,” a handful of upper-class kids discovered contemporary art and its nascent globalizing potential. The entire world was to be re-made in its non-specific non-image, rendered into its many indeterminate but easily recognizable tropes. This was the era of post-conceptual art, and Gabriel Orozco was the first young Mexican contemporary artist to show at MoMA, in 1991. Back in those days he famously rejected the “Mexican Artist” label, preferring a multi-culti, citizen of the world vibe that was very appropriate for the era.

A pair of entrepreneurial kids, Yoshua Okón and Miguel Calderón, both of whom had studied abroad, were looking, in their own telling, to crack the city open and bring in people from the United States and Europe. They set up shop in Condesa, and opened La Panadería (The Bakery), an artist-run space that from 1994 to 2002 hosted innumerable art shows, punk bands, installations and performances, all broadly rebelling against what they perceived as the too-solemn and self-serious art of then-existing galleries and museums. Two of my favorites were Okón’s Cuarto Enchilado (1994), in which the artist painted a room with glue and then powdered it with Takis-red chili; and Dermis (1996) at which the collective SEMEFO showed real tattoos cut off from the skin of corpses at the morgue (the cops shut it down). Okón and Calderón went on to have significant international careers; you can spot Calderón’s early paintings behind Owen Wilson in a few of his scenes in The Royal Tenenbaums, and he just premiered a theater play a few weeks ago. Okón made a few film installations mocking Mexican Nazi-cosplayers and the excesses of the American lower class; he also founded SOMA, a sort of extra-official two-year art program in the city that has hosted some well-respected artists.

But perhaps their most interesting feat was to make Condesa into a desirable location for artists and ambitious entrepreneurs at the turn of the millennium. Many of those artists came from the affluent families that bought property in the area when it was first developed in the ‘20s and ‘30s. During the art boom, their Gen-X heirs promptly became landlords in an area that they themselves worked to make “cool.”

Until she became Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum was the capital’s Jefa de Gobierno (something like a mayor). As jefa, she faced COVID and the tragedy of an overhead subway line collapsing and killing 22 people. Many have forgotten that she partnered with UNESCO and Airbnb in 2022, to lure digital nomads to the city—right at the peak of the Great Gringo Invasion.

During the pandemic, a handful of American galleries opened branches in Mexico City, only for them to shutter by 2024. By that time many local galleries and project spaces were suffering as well, and most independent spaces that relied on grants (national and international) were disappearing.

The intensity of all this movement has had a profound effect on the young and not-so-young artists and art workers; it has re-wired their subjectivities, making it feel like the only reasonable option is an extreme version of neoliberal professionalization: if you think of your very self as a firm, why would you run an artist’s space when you could open a commercial gallery?

Art has become much more homogeneous, with risk carefully managed. Many artists started painting or using traditional materials like fine woods and bronze, believing that those costly elements will make their market value clear. Color palettes and formats echo each other across a depressed market. Last year, at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, I was excited to see Manual Intuitivo: No usar saliva ni soplar sobre las piezas, an exhibition curated by Petra, a curatorial collective from a newer generation, showcasing an intergenerational slice of artists. The show was built on an experimental premise: an intuitive manual, opposed to a museum’s conservation manual, was supposed to bring the contours of the curatorial project into focus. That was, sadly, not the case, but beyond any qualms I had with its conceptual failures, I was mostly struck by the acquiescent conformism of the whole ordeal. Not only were there no new readings on current and older art, but the curators locked in on the exact same things as their predecessors, the themes millennials have explored now for a decade, and that were themselves already a kind of hand-me-downs: art meets technology, urban-flavored pictorial experiments, a flair for mysticism, and idealizations of neo-materialisms. I was especially struck by the evident anxiety that presided, as a younger generation sought to perform a specific local professionalism, discarding their better (perhaps more daring) instincts in order to fulfill a predetermined image of what art should look like.

I want to stress that the artists featured are not bad. This generation has the talent to confront the contradictions of our time; but sometimes, they appear to be hobbled by context and curation. Juni Aranda, one of the artists in the show, recently put up Polen, a small exhibition at the city’s orchidarium. With simple, well-deployed gestures, Aranda was able to conjure earnest and genuine connections with viewers.

By characterizing the whole guild as fifí, AMLO cast a self-fulfilling curse: as the budgets and grants are diminished, it is only the wealthy and the well-to-do who can afford to risk choosing such a precarious field. Few can afford to take any formal or discursive risks. As in most parts of the world, the cuts deepened during the pandemic, but AMLO also earmarked 20 percent of the national culture budget and for the remodeling of the Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, which he bestowed on Gabriel Orozco – an important figure, but definitely not an architect or an urbanist.

Grants were slashed, theaters closed. Some of us were working at state museums at the time, and it was a bloodbath. We were operating with a tiny percentage of the budget that was routine before the pandemic.

Of course, removing public support for the arts makes us more like the United States, and less like prominent neighbors to the South. In the largest country in Latin America, for example, President Lula made the Ministry of Culture central to the face of the first two Workers’ Party administrations, and famously reversed Jair Bolsonaro’s slash-and-burn policy after winning his third election in 2022.

In Mexico, we hoped President Sheinbaum would turn the ship around, but her government justified cuts in 2025 by claiming that the Chapultepec money sink and the Tren Maya were now completed. Meanwhile, the local state museums are in shambles. Galleries are closed for weeks or months because security guards’ checks won’t clear and payments are delayed endlessly, while most of the very young people hired are told to think of this as normal. We can’t help noticing that they spend the budget on PEMEX debt and on the further militarization of the country, or when the real effects of their domestic policies are frequently indistinguishable from the neoliberal spoliation of their predecessors. On the Fourth of July last year, Condesa finally exploded, in anti-gentrification protests so pointedly aimed at gringos that the international press took quick notice.

Luckily for Morena, nobody can stomach the alternative. Sheinbaum’s most prominent enemies are the lunatics who stand in Congress and—speaking English with their revolting papa-en-la-boca whitexican accent—ask for Trump to come “Make México Safe Again.” You can side with the reasonable-sounding Sheinbaum or you can go with the miserable usurer, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who owns TV Azteca and refuses to pay the 48.3 billion pesos he owes in taxes. That is the billionaire clown that the right-wing is considering running for president after Sheinbaum’s term ends. It is hard not to support her when she called them out like this at the end of last year: “Their vision is money, accumulation, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate wealth on the backs of everyone else.”

The opposition now also boasts a class of Instagrammable politicians like Sandra Cuevas and Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, both mayors of Cuauhtémoc. The first is a full-blown buchona, who ran the streets in tight black fits and RZR ATVs, while terrorizing the elderly who dared to dance salsa on Sundays in front of her building; the second loves shoulder pads, paranoid rants performed to her front-facing camera, the infinite patting of her own back and making unhinged posts about removing the Che Guevara and Fidel Castro statues installed by the neighbors of Tabacalera in “defiance of dictators everywhere.”

The supporters of all of the above were out in something like ‘full force’ on November 15th for what the media bafflingly called a “Gen-Z” protest: in reality, it was an Astroturfed appropriation of the aesthetics and signifiers of uprisings in places like Nepal, also previously re-enacted in Madagascar and Morocco. Posts with the One Piece logo – the anime symbol first employed in Indonesia last year, before it spread to other protests around the world – popped up all over social media in mid-October; but after Carlos Manzo, an independent mayor in Michoacán, was gunned down in a public Día de Muertos event, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram were flooded with new accounts asking their fellow kids to join in the movement. Some reporting claimed over 8 million bots, mostly from Argentina and Colombia, were heavily promoting the gathering — explaining the frequent slang gaffes.

On the day of the event, the same crowd of boomers and Gen Xers who have been consistently marching every two years since Morena got elected filled up a few blocks of the city they swear is a war-torn, crime-ridden cesspool. Emerging from hysterical Whatsapp groups into the sunlight they screamed: “Trump! Come and get the shit out of Mexico! Come and get Claudia fucking Sheinbaum.”

Like most protests in Mexico City, this one ended in a bit of violence. The feminists and the leftists were promptly teargassed, kettled and beat up by the police. The right-wing aunties were accompanied by a set of thugs of their own, equipped with angle grinders to hack their way into the Palacio de Gobierno. For a moment, it got scary. Alex Jones was tweeting “Mexico Is Full Revolt Against The Communist Chinese Backed President!” as a few dozen guys in masks broke through the barricades in what started to look like an attempt at January 6 in local vernacular. Latin American history flashed before my eyes: Was this a coup? US intervention? Both? Worse? A few minutes later, it was all over. I watched the TV Azteca Twitter stream, as a breathless pseudo-journalist yelled about censorship and tyrannical repression at a woman in a wheelchair.

Like all imagery in our relentlessly spectacular political era, this content came and went. So did the invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president. First, our reactionaries tried to exploit the attack as a win for the righteous forces of the worldwide right; but after Trump hung Corina Machado out to dry, left other Chavistas in power, and threatened the rest of the hemisphere, their praise trailed off into silence.

In 1970, before democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende had even taken office, the CIA and President Richard Nixon planned to strangle the economy, and hoped that that this would force the Chilean government to become authoritarian. It is easy to demonize and isolate a “police state” that is cracking down on real or perceived counter-revolutionary forces.1 Nixon admitted, in secret, that the nightmare scenario for Washington would be a socialist project in the hemisphere that was both truly democratic and obviously successful. This would only lead the rest of the hemisphere to try to imitate them.

In 2007, I accidentally became a journalist, while living in Caracas. I arrived in the country five years after the first time the United States backed a coup in order to derail and destroy the Chavista project. That attempted golpe de estado, which saw Hugo Chávez arrested and business leader Pedro Carmona briefly installed as president, immediately received the backing of George W. Bush and the New York Times. Even though Chávez had clearly won election in 2000, the coup was (obviously) justified on pro-democratic grounds. Embarrassingly, Chávez quickly returned to power and easily won another election in 2006.

I was just one year out of university when I arrived in Venezuela, and thought I would be doing some work abroad (first in Berlin, then in Caracas) before going back to school (to do a PhD in Political Theory). I didn’t really have much interest in journalism, until a friend of a friend randomly connected me with an English-language newspaper that needed someone who could report in Spanish and write in English, and that would actually pay me enough to live there for a while.

Over 2007 and 2008, I got to know a lot of different Venezuelans, with a lot of very different opinions on the Chavista movement. Many loved him, some hated him, but it was pretty clear to most everyone that he had very solid support in the country, especially among the working class.

Three months ago in October 2025 I wrote that there was no plan for “regime change” in Venezuela — either the government would survive, or Trump would simply destroy the country. I still believe this to be the case, but at the beginning of this year we saw the addition of a spectacular third element that I certainly did not expect. This phenomenon, a bombastic piece of imperial theater, is strangely compatible with either of the two outcomes I outlined last year. The Donald Trump regime bombed three locations in Caracas, killing dozens of people, and kidnapped the acting president of Venezuela along with his wife. This time, they did all of this in the most public way possible.

Two more things were stunning about the operation. First, Donald Trump did not pretend that this was about democracy; he said we were going to take the oil. How much of this is classic Trump, in that he says out loud what everyone else sought to hide, and how much is a qualitatively new phase in U.S. empire? We do not know. Second, the President of the United States turned around and threatened the rest of the hemisphere: not just Cuba, but Colombia and Mexico. Look what we can do to you; you better get in line. If the goal was to intimidate and coerce everyone else, then perhaps all that was needed was the spectacular humiliation and decapitation of a rival state. Was the decision to avoid the “regime change” stage — pretending to try to give the country to María Corina Machado, which would have been a disaster — based on those strategic considerations? Or was it simply the preference of a man who loves producing great entertainment but hates long-term commitments, and holds a serious grudge against anyone who gets between him and a fancy award? We do not know. Seemingly invigorated by the success in Caracas, the Trump administration turned its attention to Greenland, Iran, and Minnesota.

In the case of Venezuela, we can imagine two scenarios that bookend a range of possibilities. It could be that nothing really changes, except that people in Caracas are scared and traumatized. Trump tells his base he “got the oil,” whatever that means or to whatever extent it is true, but Venezuela proceeds with a different Chavista in charge and the government intact. On the other end of the spectrum, you have state collapse, which might come as a result of the January 3 attack or something else. I don’t know if Trump really cares. I think that Marco Rubio wants state collapse in Cuba, and that parts of the U.S. government — and Israel — want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.

In South America everyone knows there are many types of coup d'état, and there are words for all the different flavors. When it comes to state overthrow, Iberian languages are like that thing that they say about Inuit languages and snow that is not really true: Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, being so familiar with the phenomena, have a bunch of words for them. The United States has traditionally subjected other countries to the coup, rather than experiencing it at home; the English language doesn’t even have one word for it — thus the italicized import from French. In Spanish and Portuguese, however:

First, there is the golpe militar, the classic military coup that is most prominent in the anglophone imagination, and which describes well what happened in Chile in 1973. There is the golpe parlamentar, in which parliamentary action is decisive; this is often the term used to describe the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. I bet you can guess what a golpe judicial is. (After the 2020 election, some of us noticed that Donald Trump had attempted all three, without much commitment or knowledge of how they work). You can have an intentona or a quartelada or a golpe de oficiais that might even push the country to the left, or closer to democracy than it had been. I could go on.

But there is also the autogolpe, or “self-coup.” To carry out an autogolpe, you must already be in power. Traditionally, there are two reasons that you might destroy, ignore, or violate the infrastructure of a state you already control. You might think that your true power is limited by the structures that exist, and you can grab more. Or, you might be desperate, and afraid that you are about to lose your power. So you strike first, seeking to neutralize the forces that threaten you.

When Donald Trump this month attempted an autogolpe at the level of the capitalist world-system, what was the reason? Whatever his motivation, this truly shocked European allies who had gone along with imperialist adventures in places like Iraq. The man threatened to wage economic warfare against Western Europe to steal a piece of land; the man threatened to invade NATO. I am pretty sure I have never seen a self-coup tried internationally; but MAGA has seemingly embarked on a torturous and confusing attempt to replace U.S global hegemony with naked domination.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful state in human history. In the years after 1945, Washington oversaw the creation of a set of institutions and relationships that cemented its position at the top of the global system. I am not the only one to argue that this world order has greatly benefited the country that shaped it, and that much blood was shed in its construction and maintenance. I view the coups of Guatemala 1954 (as well as Iran 1953) and the mass murder of Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973 — I could go on forever — as part of this story. But Donald Trump seems to believe that the capitalist world-system is a scam perpetrated against the United States of America? That it sucks money out of our nation, instead of pouring super-profits into the coffers of our corporations? I think he really believes this? Even if he could successfully use threats and violence to extract more benefits for the United States in the short term, what are the long-term consequences? Can you actually pull off an autogolpe imperial?

In the days after the attack on Caracas and throughout January, I got in touch with most of my Venezuelan friends. Some live in Caracas; some left the country over the last ten years and are now elsewhere in South America; some left the country in the really bad years, but then moved back. I had a lot of questions: first, "how are you?” but I would then quickly ask, what do you think happened, what do you think of the attack and the arrest, what do you think will happen next? Across the board, regardless of their views on Maduro, I got a very similar type of response. Even when I thought it was clear I was asking about geopolitics, they spoke about something else. “I can’t sleep at night,” and “we are afraid of an another invasion” or, “my family back in Caracas is safe for now, thank God, but they are considering leaving for Colombia,” or (in three ways, from three different people): is there any way you could send some money to me or a relative? One friend, who still lives in the same Caracas apartment we shared in 2007, told me: “I was sure, that night, that I was going to die.”

What I learned was not really anything about Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, Donald Trump, or the future of Venezuela. The overwhelming sense that I got, from these conversations, is how terrifying it is to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of bombs, to see that the power has been wiped out but that the sky is on fire; just how shocking and traumatizing it is to have your city attacked from above. For a long time, we didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen in the Americas.

“To the extent that non-bourgeois strata penetrated the public sphere in the political realm and took possession of its institutions, participated in press, parties, and parliament, the weapons of publicity forged by the bourgeoisie were pointed against itself…. [For liberal theorists,] the public itself had taken the place of princely power, and the accusation of intolerance was now leveled against the public opinion that had become prevalent.” — Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, describing changes between the 17th and 19th centuries.

“Each child in NYC basically costs an extra $100k per year minimum...brutal...” — user taobanker on X, the everything app, describing a screenshot of a lady reporting in 2025 that she cannot survive on 850,000 dollars a year.

In the first years after the invention of the printing press and the formation of a reading and writing community in Europe, the “public sphere” was open-ended and horizontally structured. If you could read books and newspapers, if you could compose a letter, you could participate. Within this new sphere, participants were treated as equals. Reason would prevail, regardless of your status in the old feudal order. “The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end can carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ‘common humanity,’” wrote Jürgen Habermas in 1962.

The emphasis is mine. This was the self-conception of the participants in the early public sphere. The Marxist response, which no one really disputes anymore, is that this was actually a very limited and particular class of people with quite a lot of shared interests. It was very easy for them to believe that the public sphere was universal, and for them to relate to each other as equals, because there were all kinds of (invisible) barriers to entry. A tiny minority of people could read, and afford to buy newspapers or books, and walk into Button’s Coffee House in central London and stuff a letter into the fantastical lion’s head that served as a receptacle for letters to the editor. You might be allowed to win an argument against a Duke, if you were both invited to a literary salon. But there were no workers there. There were no Irish people, no peasants, and certainly no Indians. Thus Habermas explains, quite uncontroversially, that in its early days “the public” was actually the bourgeois reading public.

When more and more people began to read, write, organize, criticize, and otherwise enter the “public sphere,” this proved to be a real problem for the European bourgeoisie. A lot of these new entrants wanted to take their property away. Instead of constituting a bulwark against the power of the Crown, “the public” was now the real threat, as far as they were concerned.1

As a class, the bourgeoisie moved to impose hierarchy upon a sphere that had initially been egalitarian. You couldn’t let just anyone control the press. They worked together to impose visible barriers to entry on a previously open community once the old invisible barriers fell away. This happened in concrete history, not in abstract theory, and took a number of interesting forms — stamp duties, state monopolies, outright prohibition of the radical press, complex licensing systems, “philanthropy” with ideological conditions attached, endless lawsuits, and so on.2 But I don’t want to get into all that. Obviously, what I am trying to say here is that over the last twenty-five years, our ruling class has done something very similar to the internet.

There are numerous examples, but the first one I want to highlight is the way that Twitter has changed since Elon Musk purchased it. About a decade ago, I would have said that English-language discourse on the website was dominated by left-leaning downwardly mobile millennials, Bernie supporters and Gawker writers and rudely funny alumni of older message boards. I think Musk felt that way too, and convinced himself that these people were being unfairly mean to him and destroying Western civilization — to his mind, these were basically the same things. And that is why he bought the company.

If you log onto X right now, you can see that he has somehow succeeded. The timeline is dominated by business psychos and crypto scammers and serial founders and people who either make thousands of dollars a week in “passive income” or pretend to do so in order to trick people that believe they can. The character that dominates the “global public square” (Elon’s words) is now, unquestionably, a rich guy. They did not need to criminalize radical speech (though some other people are certainly doing that); it was enough to give wealthy people the pre-eminent status that they enjoy in the offline world.

It’s not like Hegelian grad students or Vice bloggers were exactly the global proletariat; despite some of our pretensions a decade ago, this very specific class, with our own particular interests, was much better off than the average human being. The platforms were not dominated by Filipino taxi drivers or Nigerian pensioners (if a couple of them were funny enough and posted all day, they might rise to the top). But that cohort has been replaced by a really special group. The tweet above this post is an extra-stupid example, but it is trivially easy to find people who consider “<$100k” to be the lowest income bracket imaginable, with $250k required to feel that “life is good.” In the United States of America, the richest country in the history of mankind, the average individual income is $39,000 / year. In the People’s Republic of China, the workers assembling the iPhone make about three dollars an hour, and that is not a poor country. The people who ripped the materials out of the earth make much less.

Or take Meta, the company run by millennial ad salesman Mark Zuckerberg. On his platforms, we used to look directly at our peers. Now, we look up to our superiors. Instagram is obviously structured as a kind of pyramid, with a rich person in Los Angeles — probably Kylie Jenner these days, having replaced her older half-sister Kim Kardashian — sitting at the top. It used to be that “social media” meant you looked at what your friends were posting, and you posted for your friends. Now, you can still post an Instagram story, but you will be competing with celebrities and the professional producers of short-form content. Instead of participants in a conversation, everyone is now a broadcaster, and some broadcasters are obviously more important than others. A few regular people might win at this game, and move up the ranks — but the fact that I use the word “up” there is the point. Once more, hierarchy has been imposed; concrete horizontality has given way to vertical structure.

Once upon a time, anyone could go online and argue in a chat room, post on message boards, or make a website. This was the era of libertarian techno-optimism, the days before elite counter-attack. After all, who was on the internet in the very early days? At first, it was just members of the US military, trading messages;3 then, a small network of academics; then, a smattering of well-off families in the United States. Few powerful people understood what was going on, but what did they have to worry about? In the early 2010s when “social media” began to take off, those new spaces were dominated by the young, highly-educated and well-connected. This cohort tended to be urban and progressive. This was the era of left-leaning techno-optimism, still anchored in some of the anarcho-liberal assumptions that permeated the early internet. These were the years of Obama and Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street and then, Euromaidan, which led to a horrible war which has not ended, which is killing people as I type.

Should we be surprised that the era of 1999 to 2013 was the high point of “horizontalist” ideology and praxis in the world of politics?4 This was the moment in which the new digital world was still open and egalitarian, horizontally structured. As I wrote in my second book, I came to the conclusion that “elective affinity” between a few pre-existing ideological currents and material developments in the 2010s helps to explain a recent era of mass protests. Obviously, there were not that many fully committed horizontalists as the era began (and they were still a minority in the demonstrations themselves), but quite a lot of people believed in the potential of the form of resistance that has been possible in our age, or all those people would not have participated. If enough of us get out onto the streets, we will surely push the world in a progressive direction — wait, where did all these reactionaries come from?

I don’t want to overstate my case here. We are talking about three distinct phenomena; the rise of commercial media and mass culture is different than the rise of the digital platforms, and, as we have seen, the “2011” form of protest remains with us, even as ideas and the internet have changed. The most important material basis for the apparently spontaneous, leaderless mass protest is a society which is atomized, precarious, and individualized, and I don’t expect unplanned street demonstrations to become “vertical” (how would that work?) just because digital life now has a different shape. You could, if you like, wonder airily if the new structure of the internet (rigidly ordered, with some people obviously more valuable than others) helps explain why so many kids these days find fascism such a natural fit, while every anglophone radical in 2000 claimed to either be an anarchist or libertarian, but this might be stretching the interpretive frame. We are working at the level of analogy here, not strict correlation.5 I confess I am still working out how exactly I conceive of these relationships. But I think there is something there.

The arrival of the printing press re-shaped society, and then real power relations in society imposed themselves on the world of letters. The internet was born in a world with pre-existing elites and the internet created new elites; initially, its shape was flat, and then both types of elites used their strength to seize it and re-shape it in a way that reflect power relations in society.

In the case of Facebook and Instagram, it was not the ideology of the owner that led to the imposition of its current structure. These services, like TikTok and YouTube, were transformed by the logic of the maximization of advertising revenue, just like so many media were in the 20th century. The "algorithms” (computer programs) restructured the experience of online life in such a way that you are now just supposed to watch little TV clips, whether they are actually paid advertisements or just resemble them in form, tone, and preoccupation. A decade ago, a “keyboard warrior” was someone who spent too much time speaking back to the internet in the form of text; the term was pejorative, but it was true that social media programs were soliciting that kind of engagement. Now you aren’t supposed to use your keyboard at all.6 That is valuable time you could be using to view an advertisement.

In the last fifteen years, we have also seen the state getting involved in more direct ways. We had a couple years before political and economic elites knew how to deal with the internet, but they are long gone. The Trump administration is making sure that TikTok USA can be controlled by Larry Ellison, the ardent supporter of Israel and MAGA. That same family acquired The Free Press, a Substack with a decent audience, and paid much, much more than it would be worth if Bari Weiss did not further the ideological project of the Ellisons. They’re going to be reading your social media if you ever want to come to the United States ever again. Might as well stop posting — just keep scrolling and watching.

The obvious exception to this now is “AI,” the conversation you can have with a large language model. In this window, most everyone is invited to bang away all day on the keyboard. For now, that is. My bet is that if any of these firms come up with a working business model, it will mean restricting access and treating different users very differently. But even in this early moment, you are all by yourself, and you are talking to a computer program, so this will never be part of the public sphere.

7

This month marks one year since that cataclysmic event. What happened to the claim that it was actually Moscow that rocked Romanian politics and society, and what happened to the country after the discarded ballot?

Nicușor Dan is now president. He is the fifth man to hold this office since the dramatic fall and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, which marked the end of an erratic version of state socialism in Romania and the beginning of its turbulent transition to capitalism. Dan, the former mayor of Bucharest, beat far-right candidate George Simion in a new contest in May 2025. Simion enjoyed the endorsement of Georgescu, who was banned from running again and was put on trial following his surprise victory. In Romania there is a folk theory that those who lose elections go to jail. In Georgescu’s case, it seems it was his success that got him into trouble.

Dan won comfortably against Simion in a contest that was billed as a referendum: Vote for Dan and stay in the EU, or vote for his rival, and open the door to Russian dominance. Pro-EU sentiment won the day, and the docile pupil behaved once more. This happy story, depicting the endurance of democracy in the face of extremism at home and Putin abroad, was offered by mainstream Western publications as well as the dominant commentariat in Romania. I want to suggest something very different: that both the cancellation of Georgescu’s victory and Dan’s ascendance represent the most recent instantiation of a long history of secret state agencies encroaching on Romanian public life.

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After assuming office, President Dan seems to have made peace with the forces he so adamantly opposed during the campaign. Dan, who was simply called a “pro-European centrist” during the second election, was always actually more of a right-wing politician, and had risen to prominence by pushing for the privatization of public services. Simion and Georgescu, in addition to being described as Russian assets, were labeled fascists for their sympathy (extremely open, in the case of Georgescu) for the Romanian Iron Guard, the sui generis interwar fascist movement that blended Orthodox mysticism with political assassinations and anti-Jewish pogroms.

Once in power Dan cozied up to the extreme right when he made a pilgrimage to Sâmbăta de Jos, the monastery complex in the Carpathian foothills that functions as a shrine to Romania’s interwar legionary movement. Anticommunism, the dominant ideology of the transition period that has served to justify neoliberal transformation and keep any leftist forces in check, offered the discursive space for this rapprochement: since the right-wing Legionnaires were imprisoned by the Communists, they should be celebrated.

Dan’s presidency so far has been defined by a harsh austerity program. Ilie Bolojan, his prime minister, introduced a series of brutal cuts in social spending which, predictably, impacted the poor and the vulnerable the most.

Last year Marcel Ciolacu, prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party, was expected to win the first round of the November elections. George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romania (AUR), was expected to come in second place. A contest between Ciolacu and Simion would give the powerful Social Democrats a clear path to victory, the thinking went. It appeared that Elena Lasconi, the president of the liberal Save Romania Union, also had a decent shot at making the second round.

Georgescu, an agronomist, nationalist, and former member of the AUR, was polling at 6% one week week before the election. Nicolae Ciuca, former prime minister and leader of the National Liberals, was polling at about 8%. Apparently the well-established National Liberals, seeing that their candidate had zero chance of entering the second round, diverted support to Georgescu to prevent Simion from qualifying for the run-off. Lasconi, the thinking went, had a better chance of beating the Social Democrats, the traditional rivals of the National Liberals. Later investigations revealed that the National Liberals paid a firm to recruit TikTok influencers to campaign for Georgescu. He himself had zero campaign infrastructure. But outside the country, where citizens vote two days early, polling stations were flooded with Georgescu voters. He won the first round with 23% of the vote. Lasconi came in second.

Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of voting, claiming that it was a necessary step to safeguard Romanian democracy and sovereignty from foreign interference. Declassified documents from the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) seen by the Supreme Defense Council and made public on December 4th painted an alarming picture: coordinated Russian hybrid warfare had allegedly propelled Georgescu to first place through the use of TikTok bot networks and secret finance mechanisms. Through annulment, the court declared, democracy had been saved from an unprecedented assault.1

Yet a year on, evidence of foreign interference has failed to materialize. No Russian operatives have been identified. No financial trails have been traced to Moscow. Georgescu himself was put on trial for alleged attempt of a coup d’état, though the evidence presented so far on this count is thin. The European Commission launched its own investigation. Dan’s administration issued its own report in October, which repeated the previous findings of the intelligence services but did not offer any additional revelations. No prosecutions have been launched, and no independent parliamentary panel was convened. Over twelve months later, convincing evidence of Russian involvement is nowhere to be found.

All of this raises a very uncomfortable question: If the Russian interference narrative cannot be substantiated based on available evidence, what are we to believe actually happened last year?

North South Notes sent a set of written questions to the European Commission, asking if Russia had interfered in Romania’s election, and inquiring as to the results of investigations into the matter. The European Commission confirmed it had sent two requests for information to TikTok, in October 2024 and November 2024, and “opened proceedings against TikTok for a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA)” last December. According to a Commission Spokesperson, “The investigation is ongoing and the Commission is in touch with TikTok, who is responsive to the Commission’s requests.”

So far the most prominent story has presented Georgescu as an outsider: a mystic pushing Orthodox nationalism mixed with strident anti-EU rhetoric, a social media prophet who emerged from nowhere to channel popular anti-establishment rage. But Georgescu was never the outsider he and others claimed that he was. He came of age in late Ceaușescu-era Romania and navigated the transition by inserting himself into networks of still-influential former Communist apparatchiks. Trained as a pedologist, he pivoted to environmental policy in the 1990s, securing positions within the Ministry of Environment and later with various UN agencies. By the 2000s, he had become a consultant moving between government ministries, international organizations, and the private sector, often interviewed by mainstream journalists on prime-time television.

And he had deep connections to the security and defense apparatus. Georgescu’s long-standing relationship with Horatiu Potra is particularly instructive. Potra, who financed Georgescu’s 2024 campaign, is a Romanian-French citizen who fought in the French Foreign Legion and has ties to the Ministry of National Defense. Potra’s professional network extends throughout Romania’s defense establishment. If we scan the disrupted terrain of global politics over the last 15 years, Georgescu is certainly not the first well-connected political actor with a fiery personality well-suited to social media, an insider posing as an outsider, that did far better than anyone expected.

Georgescu may have campaigned against the “parallel state,” but he was supported by individuals deeply embedded in its military-intelligence wing. His bid for power was ultimately blocked by a more powerful faction of the state, represented by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) and its allied institutions (including the judiciary). They used the constitutional mechanisms at their disposal to end his campaign after its unexpected success. In this clash, both sides were apparently willing to disregard democratic norms. Instead, I believe they were interested in power and the perpetuation of a system in which unelected secret institutions carve out zones of autonomy and extract significant economic and political advantages.

Romania maintains a very large security apparatus relative to its population. Though the numbers remain classified, unofficial headcounts indicate several times more secret agents per capita than in most of Europe. Recent calculations put total Romanian spending on intelligence services at roughly €1.6 billion, around 0.5% of GDP. No matter how you calculate it, the same figure in Germany is much lower.

What is particularly striking here is that – as anyone who has read about the end of the Ceaușescu period knows – the legacy of the Securitate, one of the largest secret police forces in the world of European Communism, has been vehemently and obsessively rejected since 1989. We have a new intelligence apparatus, built through collaboration with Washington and Brussels. When that vast network acts with different goals – not to preserve the immortal leadership of the Party, but to ensure the privileges of elites created in the transition to capitalism - few public figures seem to care.

The archives of the Securitate, opened after being vetted by SRI in the mid-2000s, have become a national fixation. Rather than providing transparency, the opening of the archive created what I call a “cult for the occult” – a passion for revealing that which has been hidden about others; searching through files for evidence of collaboration; using the archive as a weapon in political and personal disputes; and trading secrets from the archive for money. More troublesome, the contents of the archive are unreliable.

For 25 years, no evidence existed that Traian Băsescu, the former president, had been a Securitate collaborator, something that would have legally barred him from office. But shortly after he finished his second term, marked by a conflict with the intelligence apparatus, incriminating documents suddenly appeared in the archive, and he was officially declared a collaborator. He lost all the privileges granted to former presidents as a result of this revelation. After vocally campaigning for Nicușor Dan, his appeal was accepted by the Constitutional Court and his privileges were restored.

The resources lavished on the intelligence institutions have translated into domains of control that extend far beyond traditional intelligence work and are uncomfortably reminiscent of the 20^th century. Since the 2000s, Romania’s intelligence services have systematically expanded their competencies into areas that would, in most democracies, fall under civilian oversight. This expansion was legitimized through the requirements for NATO and EU accession and through direct participation in the covert and extra-judiciary detention programs organized by the CIA in the Global War on Terror. Moreover, a revolving door between active service and civilian life, particularly in law, consulting, and business, creates a class of individuals whose power derives from their institutional connections and their access to classified information.2

Former officers populate boardrooms, law offices, government ministries, and private security firms. They form an informal network of shared interests and mutual benefits that operates according to rules different from those governing ordinary citizens. However, despite the lack of official public interest in the workings of the state’s security apparatus, the reference to the “parallel state” has become commonplace in Romania. Many politicians have denounced it (especially after they lose power and end up in jail). Journalists discuss it sotto voce and citizens reference it in casual conversations. It even has a folk name: “the forest.” The headquarters of SRI are close to the remains of a vast forest on the outskirts of Bucharest.

Unsurprisingly, when regular people are presented with the knowledge that powerful forces really might be making plans in secret, they often turn to conspiracy theories. This kind of frenzied guesswork, as we all know, corrodes trust in institutions and warps the public sphere - ironically, this is exactly the atmosphere in which someone like Georgescu thrives - and it is the secret agents themselves who must be blamed for this, not the hapless citizens trying to make sense of their world.

I suggest that it is productive to analyze Romania’s intelligence and security services as a salaried bourgeoisie - that is, a class faction that has used its institutional position to carve out extraordinary advantages for itself. These are not omnipotent puppet-masters, controlling politicians from the shadows, but, rather, bureaucrats extracting rents from privileged access to state resources, information, and decision-making processes. They enjoy generous salaries and pensions, a parallel healthcare system, housing estates, and, as explained above, pathways to lucrative careers in business and politics. Entry into this world offers economic security increasingly rare in contemporary Romania.

No wonder that when I recently asked my sociology students what they want to do after finishing their BA program, a large majority confessed that they would try to do an MA in intelligence studies, and thus join the SRI.

We know that it was the SRI that provided the evidence justifying the cancellation of the election in 2024, carried out by the Constitutional Court. We cannot know why, exactly, these actors chose to do so, unless they simply tell us. But it is helpful to understand who would have been impacted by their results.

The Romanian president appoints the head of the secret services, including SRI. The new president was also due to appoint a judge in the Constitutional Court. Clearly, these actors had skin in the game. After the first-round elections of 2024, no candidate from Romania’s traditional two-party establishment had any chance of being in charge of these decisions. Dan himself was an “outsider” of a sort, hailing from outside this bipartisan establishment, but he was also a continuity candidate.

On another level, EU bureaucrats surely care about our elections. They already have to deal with Orbán in Hungary, and the victory of someone like Georgescu would have placed a troublesome Euroskeptic president in a position to make important decisions.

Is Moscow above interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries? Of course not. Maybe the Russians saw an opportunity and tried to get involved. Maybe not. I do not have any evidence either way. This is what we know: The story of a Russian plot was used to justify the cancellation of an already completed election, by well-connected actors, as it appeared that someone inimical to the establishment could win.

Media and sympathetic commentators did the rest, by elevating the superficial narrative that dominated the 2024 contest: Russia as the villain, responsible for everything bad within the country; the EU as the savior, and the security services as local heroes ensuring that Mr. Putin would be foiled this time. These schematic oppositions offer moral clarity and a convenient mobilizing platform.

But they cannot replace structural analysis in which domestic class struggle and political factionalism within and between the secret services is salient. Both Georgescu’s shocking rise and dramatic fall are symptoms of a society in which secret services have too much power. Nicușor Dan’s victory ensured this will not change.

Florin Poenaru is a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Bucharest. His work revolves around class, post-socialism, and the global history of Eastern Europe. Poenaru is a founding member of LeftEast, co-editor of CriticAtac, and has monitored over a dozen elections across Europe and Asia. His latest book is Locuri comune: clasă, anti-comunism, stânga, Tact, 2017. Photos by Vincent Bevins3

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“When I saw it, I stopped and cried by the side of the road,” said Raffi, 20, a university student and fellow gig worker. He was resting between shifts, idly scrolling Instagram, he told me, when he saw the video of what happened to Affan. “Maybe he became an online motorcycle taxi driver, like my older brother, because he couldn’t find decent work, which is a consequence of government policies that don’t favor the people.” That night, August 28, Raffi decided to join the protests.

After Affan Kurniawan’s death, a set of small, loosely coordinated demonstrations against bonuses for Congresspersons and immiseration for workers swelled into a much larger and even more diverse movement. Affan’s death provided the spark that ignited a powder keg. In the days that followed, protests erupted across more than 100 locations in 36 of Indonesia’s 38 provinces. In the city of Makassar, Sulawesi, a city council building burned to the ground, and three civil servants died inside.

Thus the Indonesian protests of August and September – the largest in the country since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 – followed the same script as many unexpected explosive mobilizations in the era of social media. A visible act of state repression or police brutality transforms a small movement into something much larger and qualitatively different. Unpredictable mass protests shaped much of the history of the 2010s, and have rocked places like Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar, Serbia, and Morocco over the last few months.

In Indonesia, had that powder keg been primed by months, or even years, of simmering public anger? Or was it called into being much more quickly, by a spectacular and shocking death that took place amid elite in-fighting and tone-deaf politicians badly failing to read the national mood? Participants in the protests, scholars and activists say that to understand the events of the last few months, it is important to understand the state of Indonesian politics well before October 24, 2024 – the date that Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of former dictator Suharto, took office as president. More difficult to answer is the question of how the movement has changed the country.

Unlike in Nepal or Madagascar, where rapid-fire increases in protest intensity led to the removal of the executive, the Indonesian demonstrations did not lead to structural change. Prabowo survived, simply reshuffling his cabinet in ways that serve his interests well, and the government arrested more than 6,000 protesters. Meanwhile, a new generation is energized and eager to pressure the government from below, and is desperately looking around for the tools to do so.

The dictatorship that began with the 1965-1966 mass murder of approximately one million leftists and citizens accused of being leftists ended with the 1998 “Reformasi” uprising. Indonesia became a democracy, though it remained a poor country with a powerful military. Then, in 2014, the election of former furniture dealer Joko “Jokowi” Widodo electrified progressives and democrats. As the first president since Suharto’s downfall who came from outside the pre-existing political or military elite, he was hailed as the “true son of Reformasi.”

Soon, it became clear that he was constrained by the power of the old elites; or, at least, that he was willing to make peace with them when it served his interests. While in power, he enjoyed solid approval ratings, and Indonesia experienced modest growth. But the shape of the society remained the same; and just as it had for centuries, economic expansion depended upon the extraction and export of raw materials and low wages for Indonesian workers.

After Jokowi’s easy re-election in 2019, students and citizens protested a package of laws they said fostered corruption and curtailed individual liberties. One month later, he shocked his base by appointing Prabowo Subianto, his longtime rival, as defense minister. Prabowo has been widely accused of crimes against humanity, committed both against the people of East Timor and the students pushing for “Reformasi.” But wider support for his government remained solid to the end, even as Jokowi engineered a shocking legal change that allowed his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run as Prabowo’s vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Tens of thousands protested, but it worked. With the two dynasties united, Prabowo had a clear path to power.

After the transition to democracy it became legal, at least on paper, to organize the citizenry and pressure the state from below. But after 30 years of scorched-earth policies, Indonesia is bereft of any significant left-wing political force. None survived the dictatorship, and efforts to launch a new Labor Party have been complicated by a difficult political environment. It has usually fallen to foreign-backed liberal NGOs, weak unions, and loose student confederations to push back against elites.

To secure the votes to win the 2024 election, Prabowo relied on a savvy social media campaign that portrayed Prabowo as a “cuddly grandpa,” rather than a ruthless general who married into the family of one of the most murderous dictators of the 20^th century. Something very similar had happened two years earlier in the Philippines, when TikTok influencers were enlisted to launder the reputation of Bongbong, the son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, so he could be elected president (with self-interested support from the new dynasty in that country, the Duterte clan).

But Prabowo has not governed with cute memes: His growth strategy has relied on budget cuts and capital-intensive commodities, leaving workers jobless or forcing them to flee to the informal sector. In February, anti-austerity protests with the slogan “Indonesia Gelap” – that is, Dark Indonesia – erupted across the country. Prabowo brushed off the demonstrations: “Indonesia is bright. You are the dark one!” This further enraged protesters. But Prabowo, a popular elected leader with solid support in the police and the military, faced no organized force capable of challenging institutional power.

In early August, residents of Pati, Central Java, began planning a street protest against a rapid hike in property taxes. In response, the local regent said: “Who wants to protest? Go ahead. Don’t stop at 5,000, bring 50,000 people if you like.” This was a mistake.

Farmers, fishermen, and other locals came out in force. Without help from established NGOs or student groups, an estimated 100,000 protesters forced the government to revoke the tax hike and investigate the local regent. One banner hoisted high over Pati went viral: “Pati: Where the Revolution Begins.”

Later that month, the government confirmed the approval of a new housing allowance for members of Parliament. They would each receive 50 million rupiah, or about $3,000 per month. The minimum wage in Indonesia is two million ($129) per month. Messages spread on social media and WhatsApp urging people to take to the streets on August 25. But it was not just established organizations that thought some of these calls were suspicious – they had no clear origin, and they called for the abolition of the House of Representatives. In the context of the Indonesian system, weakening the legislature would only make Prabowo stronger.

Citizens did pour into the streets, even if they felt that elites may have been trying to control events for their own benefit. Among them was filmmaker Adhito “Dhito” Harinugroho, a veteran of Reformasi-era protests, who immediately felt that something was off. First, there were no clear or unified demands. Second, the traffic appeared to have been deliberately engineered to funnel crowds into specific areas—where clashes later broke out, allegedly involving paid agents provocateurs. But as limited and strange as this opportunity was, he found earnest citizens using it to direct frustration at the government and police. “We were all angry,” he told me. “If the government is afraid of elite manipulation, then they shouldn’t be passing bizarre laws in the first place. That way, there would be no protests to exploit.”

Demonstrations continued over the next few days, with established organizations adding more concrete demands, until August 28, the day Affan died. That night, gig worker associations gathered outside police headquarters demanding justice, and demonstrations spiraled out of control. The next day, Prabowo broke his silence, urging the public to trust his administration and accusing foreign actors of trying to sow division in the country. This did not work.

Irwansyah, a lecturer in politics at the University of Indonesia who also lived through the days of Reformasi, joined his students in a protest outside police headquarters. Like Dhito, he couldn’t quite understand what was happening. “We were just sitting, waiting for our food order, when suddenly an armored vehicle opened fire on us,” he said. “It was bizarre. What was the point?”

To this day, it remains unclear who was behind calls for the August 25 demonstration. Later, a Tempo magazine investigation revealed that some impetus for the protests may have arisen from power struggles within the government, and that members of the military may have attempted to provoke chaos after August 28.

By August 31, rumors were spreading that the government would impose martial law. On social media, calls emerged urging protesters to disperse, rather than give the government a pretext for such an action. By September 1, the situation had stabilized, with protests continuing at several locations. This time, several banners appeared bearing a new slogan: “17+8 People’s Demands.”

Where did these demands come from? Who had risen to speak for the people? In post-Reformasi (and, post-true-son-of-Reformasi) Indonesia, who attempted to assert leadership of the mass movement?

Turns out it was some Instagram influencers. The day before, as rumors of martial law began to spread, several of them had cobbled together some of the demands circulating on social media and incorporated some of the analysis being offered by major NGOs. As a class, Indonesia’s influencers usually stay out of politics; for breaking their usual silence, they garnered praise. The list spread rapidly, though few on the streets actually knew what it contained. “When I looked closer, even the demand to dismiss the police chief wasn’t there,” Dhito told me. “But that was one of the loudest calls we heard on the ground.” On September 4, the influencers submitted the demands to parliament, and two lawmakers pledged to review them. More than generating any concrete changes, the presentation of their demands led to accusations that the influencers had stolen the spotlight, and given the government an excuse to simply move on.

Everything indicates that many Indonesians have been fired up by the protests. Is there a now a movement to join, or must they wait for another unexpected wave of riots that may or may not have been inadvertently spurred by elite scheming? In Nepal, and Madagascar, it is far from clear that all protesters are glad their explosion grew large and fast enough to bring down governments. Here in Indonesia, were the goals of this protest wave clear?

Irwansyah thinks they were not; the lack of coherent demands, and the lack of clear leadership, led to widespread confusion. But what else was possible?

Olle Törnquist, a professor of political science at the University of Oslo, argues that the victories of 1998 created a web of elite political parties entangled with pre-existing economic relations. Other heroes of that era turned to populist, religious, and ethnically driven shortcuts to mobilize mass support.

Meanwhile, their friends in the NGO sector compete over funding, focus on single issues, and remain focused on Indonesia’s bit cities. “The attempts to build popularly based organisations such as trade unions and parties with roots in different ideas and interests and firm local presence are scattered and weak,” he wrote,” and they “are not very popular among middle class activists and foreign donors.”

The NGOs, the unions, and the student groups all have their own limitations, their own members admit. The NGOs are dependent on donor funding and agendas, and their approach is highly technocratic. Most labor associations focus narrowly on short-term member concerns. This has left protest movements in Indonesia dependent on students. But the universities are making it harder to organize, and leadership is tied to the academic calendar—each new school year brings new leaders, and with them, shifting agendas.

“That’s what makes it hard for students to mobilize today. That’s why Indonesia really needs a strong grassroots movement built by the people themselves,” Attan Zayid Sulthan, the head of the University of Indonesia’s student executive board, told me.

Amalinda Savirani, a professor of politics and governance at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said Indonesia already has many small, vocal, citizen-led initiatives addressing local issues across the country. “Numerous initiatives have begun to emerge, even if they may not have formal names — and let’s not forget, grassroots movements like the one in Pati are also beginning to gain momentum,” said the professor, who has written several papers on organizing.

Irwansyah said that these movements need to engage directly with communities, setting up posts in villages to listen to people’s concerns. “This isn’t about ideology or party, but that’s exactly how the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) built such a strong base in the 1960s—by starting from the grassroots. That’s where real strength begins, and today it can be amplified through digital power,” Irwansyah said.

Both Irwansyah and Amalinda remain optimistic. “Since August, the sense of solidarity has definitely grown stronger — especially as the government keeps giving us reasons to be angry,” said Anggita, 20, one of many students who continue to protest. On October 6^th, she spoke to me about that feeling, just outside the Parliament building. “In a way, this anger nurtures the people’s movement.”

A note from the editor: North South Notes has entered an “experimental phase,” in which we pay contributors around the world, to see if we can use this platform to create a global mini-magazine. A little more information is here, but for now: pledges are deeply appreciated, and payments will not be activated unless we can actually go forward with the plan.

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This is a handy guide to the driving forces behind U.S. interventions abroad. First, straightforward economic concerns. Second, geopolitical contcerns and the question of U.S. power. Third, a commitment to a liberal economic system and opposition to socialism.

Now, U.S. officials are also motivated by the commitment to democracy and human rights that is the official justification for everything the state does abroad, and indeed constitutes something like a civic religion in the country. But any serious historical analysis demonstrates that this fourth goal is easily dropped when it gets in the way of the first three. It’s like a bonus that they hope they can get. In a sense they are only pretending to hope for it, but I find they are often pretending to themselves, too.

Then, I was even more impressed by the following statement, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

“It’s clear that the mission is evolving to become more of a regime collapse or regime change operation,” said Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme.

Emphasis mine. This I think is a crucial way to understand U.S. foreign policy over the last twenty years. Donald Trump is not pursuing regime change in Venezuela. He is pursuing something much worse. It would be enough if Maduro’s government were replaced by a smoking crater, and if the entire northern third of South America became a gaping, horrifying wound, making real governance of the region impossible for a generation. If there are any sane actors in the U.S. government, they know that this is one of the most likely outcomes of military action.

In 2002, the U.S.-backed coup installed Pedro Carmona, President of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce. This might have worked; he could have actually governed. This time, the U.S. President is just talking about punishment and elimination. That is a classically Trumpian move: he is revealing dynamics that everyone else had sought to hide.

Now, I believe that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believed that they were trying to advance the cause of democracy when NATO began bombing Libya in 2011. Somewhere in their heart of hearts, they hoped that somehow the country would become Singapore or Finland after its leader was tortured and murdered on YouTube. There was no plan for this of course, no credible account of how it might happen, but I bet they were rooting for it. We can only speculate. It is, however, incredibly easy to demonstrate that state collapse was an acceptable outcome: they accepted it.

The FT piece notes that Venezuela is not Libya, which it is not. Things would go differently. Every happy state is the same, but every collapsing state collapses in its own way. What is U.S. policy towards Iran? Is it to facilitate transition, or destruction? The upside of pursuing destruction, for contemporary imperialists, is that if you fail to engender collapse, at least you weaken.1

I am not saying that Trump is going to try this in Venezuela. They may kick the tires on the Maduro government and back away. I am not saying they would necessarily succeed. I am saying that the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government; it is to destroy one.

State collapse creates some problems for the United States, of course. It “destabilizes” the region, and accelerates the flows of migrants and drugs that Trump and Rubio say they care about. But it’s pretty easy to see how it helps to advance the three causes listed above. As Ali Kadri has demonstrated, the wholescale destruction of a society pushes down the costs of raw materials and labor. With no sovereign power, there are no barriers to extraction. Desperate people are easier to exploit. And there is no government left to be in alliance with your enemies (like Cuba) or challenge your power.

As a phrase, I think “regime change” gives too much credence to what George W. Bush said he was doing back in 2003. More often, what we are talking about is the pursuit of regime collapse.

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Great, that is helpful. I am right and wrong. I then asked, “Am I going crazy?” The answer is unequivocal. Gemini says: “you're definitely not going crazy!” Thank you! Still, for some reason, I do not trust him.

But then I spent Sunday night in the manner that is my wont, especially if I have consumed any alcohol on Saturday. I watched some half-decent movie, just because the Netflix algorithm offered it to me as suggested entertainment. This was a godsend. God sent it to me. Now, I know that I am not crazy.

The plot of the film, Missing, relies on two pieces of ideological infrastructure for its forward propulsion. First, we all live on the internet. Second, the internet is functional.

It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that in this film, an eighteen-year-old girl searches for her mother, who is missing. The ending doesn’t make any sense, but that’s not the point. The point was to keep you glued to the screen until you get there. Since the protagonist is a teenager, and her mom disappears after traveling to Colombia, she spends a lot of time on the computer. She googles things, she makes contact with a man in Cartagena, she looks through news reports. She is young and smart. She googles a lot of things.

Over and over, during the film, two thoughts occurred to me with simultaneous intensity. 1. That would have worked 2. That would not work today. As she uses the computer to do something, there is a moment of blessed confirmation — yes! The functional internet that I remember was real. And — no! It does not exist anymore. In one scene, she puts several names into the search bar (using quotation marks to indicate exact searches) and finds a court document showing they are the aliases of a convicted conman. If she tried that in 2025, she might find a bunch of sponsored links to services that charge you to access public information, and don’t even work. In another scene, she looks up a specific official in Colombia by his job title — today, she would get an “AI Overview” (I tried) explaining where the position came from, that ends with this phrase: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” I could go on, but you get it. You have tried to use Google recently.

A very brief investigation reveals they wrote the film in 2021. It also reveals that if it is not exactly a sequel, it “takes place in the universe of” Searching (2018). So, perhaps they were using the idea of the internet they had back then, or were working from their own memories. The fact remains — only four years ago, a functional internet was accepted by screenwriters as the baseline reality upon which to construct a story. Nostalgia always entails a distortion of the past, because all memory relies upon a process of discarding what is unimportant or cannot be integrated and endlessly re-remembering what is cherished or cannot be overcome. I don’t really have memories of Google working, because I too accepted its functionality as baseline reality. I have memories of the things I found. Come to think of it, it was Google that initially convinced me that I no longer really need to remember things. It is well understood that two individuals may have wildly differing recollections of what life was like in 1982 in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, for example. But I don’t think I was supposed to find a film from 2023 to be so jarring.

In 1998, the founders of Google famously wrote that any search engine powered by advertising revenues would be “inherently biased” and contrary to the interests of the user. Twenty-seven years and approximately $1.9 trillion dollars1 in advertising revenue later, it is clear that the maximization of search engine effectiveness is a distinct goal from the maximization of profits. They don’t need it to be as good as it can be. It stands to reason that they just need to be slightly better than the top competitor for home page of the internet — really, they just need to remain a more cost-effective destination for ad placement than anywhere else.

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Amusingly, a major piece of character development in Missing is that the mother, a hapless Boomer, uses Siri for everything and frequently screws up using technology. Of course Siri, launched in 2011, is just as much “artificial intelligence” as the large language models ChatGPT and Gemini and “Grok,” in that they are all computer programs that you have to address in the second person. In the film, talking to your little computer like it is a person is for babies, while the tech-savvy protagonist fires off keyword searches and efficient little commands. You can do more with ChatGPT than you could with Siri, of course (I have never used Siri), just as you could do more with Siri than you could with Jeeves. But all of these are nifty little computer programs with access to the rest of the internet. To the extent that I find ChatGPT useful right now, it is for searching for things I used to look up on Google — because I try first on Google, and then remember that Google does not work. ChatGPT will almost always get it wrong, but you can correct it (training the program for free) a few times until it comes close.

In the film, the protagonist uses Google Translate to speak to a man in Colombia, quickly typing and reading while on the phone. That is plausible if you know more or less how Spanish is pronounced. These scenes caused no cognitive dissonance for me, because Google Translate still works, because there is no reason to break it. The more useful Translate is, the more time you will spend on the service. In the case of Search, it is precisely the opposite. The movie was pretty good.

I have a big (long) cover story in this month’s edition of The Nation, on Brazil’s much-beloved Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). It is now online, here. It is long.

The nice people at Capitán Swing in Madrid will be publishing the Spanish-language edition of If We Burn on May 19. Here’s the cover:

Back to the MST story. I began working on it in 2023, and it covers a period from roughly 2017 to 2025 in the history of the organization. So I don’t think it matters too much that I am two weeks late in sending this out; it is the kind of thing that you can read whenever you have time (it is long).

I did conceive of the article, in a way, as a follow-up to If We Burn. I will explain that a little bit now, so feel free to stop here if you didn’t read that book. At the end of this post I’m including some links (mostly in Portuguese) for those that want to learn even more about the MST.

My editors cut a couple of paragraphs from the conclusion to If We Burn that discussed the MST in relation to the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL). They were right to do so; it was too much new stuff to introduce too late in the game. The book focuses on actors that change during the decade; those that move from horizontalism to a kind of post-horizontalism, or from a belief that spontaneity and structurelessness are inherently positive to an appreciation of coordination and structure, and so on; we also speak to horizontalists and anarchists who stick to their guns; but the book does not spend a lot of time on the groups (like the MST, or PCdoB, or KPU) that never believed in those types of explosive mass protests in the first place. I figured they weren’t really part of the main story in a book about these revolts; but they were there.

Three things are worth mentioning in this context. First, the MST knew the MPL back from the days of the “Veggiefest” punk shows. In June 2013, the MST told the MPL to negotiate with the government and offered to intermediate. The MST leadership told me that they, obviously, employ protest and direct action to pressure the government, but are wary of unpredictable explosions that can amount to destabilization.1 Secondly, as its members are proud of pointing out, in the dark years of reaction in Brazil (2015 to 2022) it was well-structured groups like the MST that stepped up to oppose Lula’s imprisonment and to provide emergency assistance to starving Brazilians (the piece covers much of this). No apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated uprising appeared to stop Bolsonaro.2 It was the Workers’ Party, and unions, and social movements, and the rest of civil society, they say, that (barely) constructed an effective frente ampla, a broad-based pro-democratic united front, in 2022.

And third: the MST manages to thread the needle through a number of very tricky dyads. They combine approaches that are sometimes seen as diametrically opposed, resolving apparent contradictions (or, if you like: staring these organizational contradictions squarely in the face, realizing that they cannot simply be wished away).

They have clear leadership, but it is collective; they have a long-term, revolutionary project, but put food on the table for working-class Brazilians every day; they are a mass social movement that reads Lenin; they aim to make decisions through consensus at the local level, but employ democratic centralism on the big questions (Neuri Rossetto told me they employ a “hybrid mode between democratic centralism and decentralization”)3; they have a big, complicated hierarchy, but are relatively porous at the margins; they consider internal discipline to be paramount, but have any easygoing relationship with the rest of civil society; they fought to get Lula elected, but do not fall in line behind governments they support; they are both pragmatic and fiercely anti-imperialist; they organize both vertically and horizontally, etc. I think all of that is interesting, even if we set aside the question of land reform in Brazil (or the relevance of that focus outside the country).

***

More on the MST:

• Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (official page)

• Expressão Popular, the MST publishing house

• The Political Organisation of Brazil’s MST - Tricontinental (English)

• A long interview with João Pedro Stédile (2024)

• Brasil de Fato

• Brava Gente, a very long interview with João Pedro Stédile (1999)

• Armazém do Campo shop - Accessories
  

The Young Socialist League meets to discuss its position on a major geopolitical question. Reading If I Had a Hammer, by Maurice Isserman, I came across this remarkable passage:

In his memoirs [Michael] Harrington self-mockingly described a debate on Indochina at the first “plenum” of YSL in 1954.

"What, precisely should we say to the workers in Saigon and Hanoi? Should we advise them to create a new movement which would fight both the French colonialists and the Stalinists within the Viet Minh? Or should they enter into the Viet Minh and contest with Ho Chi Minh for leadership?”

Appropriate questions from the Bolshevik classics were brandished by both sides and in the end, late at night, the YSL resolved that “the Indochinese proletariat should organize independently.”

Whether Harrington was engaged in a bit of self-mockery or not, this was indeed the YSL position: “We must declare that this is a reactionary war on both sides, this war between French imperialism and the Vietminh.” It must be remembered that this was not the late 1950s, when you could pretend that independent Vietnam was split on the direction it should take; nor was it the 1960s, when you had to deal with the politically explosive reality that Vietnamese fighters were killing American soldiers. In 1954, they were using esoteric left-wing theorizations to draw moral equivalency between a national liberation movement and the European colonizer trying to reconquer its territory in Asia. The Vietnamese people had to create a secret third thing if they wanted the support of (this faction of) the US left. As James Miller points out, this was a “sophisticated Marxist variant of conservative Cold War dogmatics.”1

At the beginning of Bullshit Jobs David Graeber briefly introduces what he calls “anti-conspiracy theory,” which I always found to be an intriguing formulation. Anti-conspiracy theory is not the opposite of conspiracy theory; it does not assert that conspiracies do not exist, or that powerful elites do not shape outcomes. It deals with a different way that they can shape outcomes. While a conspiracy theory might posit that a group of actors got together in secret to plan something specific, anti-conspiracy theory claims that powerful forces have made everything impossible except for a small range of outcomes. When problems appear for the rich and powerful, Graeber writes, “the rich and powerful will step in and do something about the matter.” What you end up seeing in the real world, as a result of this dynamic, is whatever can make it through the gauntlet. Maybe elites were hoping for one particular outcome; maybe they don’t care what happens at all, as long as their interests are not threatened. You might also call it negative conspiracy theory, since it deals with the things that do not occur.

So, conspiracies exist. In 1954 the CIA secretly planned a coup d’etat in Guatemala. If you had speculated this was happening at the time you would have been, narrowly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. But when it comes to the position on Vietnam cited above, the “conspiracy theory” explanation might go something like this: the FBI created a domestic version of leftism that did not threaten US geopolitical interests. In addition to being very simplistic, this would just be wrong. The “Shachtmanite” tendency had existed for years, and they believed sincerely in this interpretation of history. What is unique in the United States is not that a little group like this exists; the difference is that these people end up playing a serious role in the history of the national left. Why? Because everything else was destroyed. The very next sentence in If I Had a Hammer is illustrative: “Despite its deeply inbred sectarianism, the YSL began to grow—slowly, to be sure—but that it grew at all made it stand out on the campus Left in the 1950s.”

To complete the story, we do have to return to the world of conspiracy. The groups that made it through the gauntlet were not simply tolerated. In secret, the CIA provided funding to magazines with a left-wing but anti-Soviet orientation, and most of the writers and editors had no idea. And the FBI monitored everyone anyway.

I brought up the quoted passage above with a Brazilian friend, as we compared political vocabularies in North and South America (in Latin America, she said, a left that is geopolitically aligned with the United States government is a contradiction in terms). In addition to the Cold War context, she added, “surely all of this is related to American exceptionalism.” If you are the most powerful society on Earth and believe that God has imbued your nation with unique moral qualities, you might only feel the need to offer support to movements that are more perfect than anything that has ever existed. Objectively speaking, most students in the US in the 1950s could look forward to very comfortable lives if they stayed out of trouble. Why take a risky and morally complicated position? Conversely, there may also be a specifically US American tendency (left, liberal, right and center) to pretend that every foreign movement we do support is flawless. If it were not, how could we be supporting it?

Ainda Estou Aqui (I’m Still Here) — Directed by Walter Salles, 2024

If you set a film in early 1970s Brazil, you have an excuse to use some of the best songs of all time. If the action takes place in Ipanema, you can point the camera at some of the most stunning beauty surrounding any city ever built. If you tell a story from the point of view of a sweet young boy, looking back on a time of bliss that was taken away from him, you can fill the screen with euphoric and exuberant love, and exclude the kinds of inevitable domestic problems that he may not have noticed, or may have scrubbed from his memory in the years after the tragedy.

And if your subject is the family of democratically elected congressman Rubens Paiva, you can dispense with difficult moral questions, since your protagonists are unambiguously and canonically innocent.

I went to the cinema the other day in São Paulo. I was ready to roll my eyes at a billionaire director re-telling the only story that Brazil’s elite center-left ever seems to tell about the dictatorship. Instead, I found them flooded with tears. Rubens Paiva is one of the most famous victims of the military regime, and his family heroically fought for his memory after the generals took him away. In less capable hands, Ainda Estou Aqui could have been an exercise in cheap point-scoring for the pro-democracy crowd (admittedly, we could use the points) in a moment of global authoritarian retrenchment. Instead, they made a deeply beautiful film that bathes luxuriously in its simplicity and its purity. After the film, I sat there stunned until the end of the credits. (For what it’s worth, I saw it on Rua Augusta, just down the road from the bar where they snatched Dilma Rousseff, back when she actually was part of the armed resistance to the dictatorship). I will be spending more money to see it again in the theater, and suggest you do the same.

I would venture to say that the movie is not really political at all, unless a breathtaking painting of Christ on the cross is a theology text. All you need to know is that a US-backed right-wing dictatorship snatches a man from his home, tortures him to death, and leaves his family to flail in the aftermath. They must deal not only with his disappearance, but with the fact that the military regime has made up a nonsense story that he was freed from captivity by Marxist guerrillas, refusing to admit they killed him and thus making him into a desaparecido.

But — and this is the heart of the film — his wife Eunice does not flail. “I’m Still Here” is a masterful and truly moving depiction of happiness in a large family and strength in a single woman. Personally I don’t care much about acting. But thinking back on the performance delivered by Fernanda Torres, I start to tear up once more. The depth of emotion in her face provides all the nuance any film could need. This is a movie about quiet determination and the celebration of life, not the politics of the Cold War in the Global South. But since the latter is my thing, I will try to offer some context.

The Brazilian dictatorship did not begin, like its counterparts in Chile or Indonesia or Argentina, with a homicidal purge of the left from the body politic. After the 1964 coup, quite a few people in the political establishment, including deposed president João “Jango” Goulart, thought things might soon return to normal.

Jango took power in 1961, with fractured support in the political establishment and a plan to implement moderate reforms. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy told his ambassador to prepare the ground for a possible military coup. Jango was certainly no Marxist revolutionary — at best, he was a liberal reformist who wanted to extend the right to vote to poor and black Brazilians excluded from the franchise, and put forth a moderate land reform program. But these changes posed a real, if relatively small, challenge to the privileges of the ruling class. Brazil’s O Globo newspaper implied the national literacy program was a secret Communist plot.

In 1964, the coup went off without a hitch. With “Operation Brother Sam,” the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration secretly made tankers, ammunition, and aircraft carriers available to the golpistas. None of that was needed, since the putsch was supported by so much of the country’s establishment, along with nearly all of its media.

In its first “Institutional Act,” the junta nullified the positions of a number of democratically elected lawmakers. That included Rubens Paiva, a member of Jango’s Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) who, like the ousted president, hailed from Brazil’s landowning elite. Paiva fled to Europe. But soon, he came home. It seemed that he could set formal politics aside, return to work as an engineer, and live peacefully in Rio de Janeiro. As the film demonstrates with chilling patience, he was wrong.

The years of lead, the anos de chumbo, began in 1968 as the regime unleashed a fifth “Institutional Act” (AI-5) and cracked down on a small guerrilla movement. Someone like Rubens Paiva, who remained in contact with the exile community, could be swept up in the repression. This would not be a short break from democracy. In the eyes of the US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, the coup had stopped Brazil from becoming “the China of the 1960s” and would serve as a model for Chile a few years later. Brazil’s dictatorship would last until the end of the 1980s, and it would take another two decades to reveal the truth of what happened to Rubens Paiva.

In 2012, I interviewed his daughter, Vera, as well as Caetano Veloso, (who is also heavily featured in the film, graças a deus) as Dilma Rousseff’s government unveiled the findings of the Truth Commission. They were still fighting to get the military to admit they had lied. That piece of closure came in 2014, and Marcelo Rubens Paiva published the book about his parents, Ainda Estou Aqui, in 2015.

Brazil’s military dictatorship colonized the Amazon, wrought death and destruction on its indigenous peoples, and — this was the major point — preserved the structure of the wildly unequal society that Jango’s reforms (and more radically, the left) sought to reorganize. But as a macabre numbers game, when it comes to the direct murders of its perceived political opponents, the regime disappeared less people than Argentina, Chile, or Guatemala. Rubens Paiva was taken away in 1971. A few years later, the death of another well-connected citizen, Vladimir Herzog, helped galvanize the process that culminated in democratization.

For pro-democracy and left-of-center Brazilians, the stories of Paiva and Herzog are about as well-known and important as Pearl Harbor is to patriots in the United States. In 2018, I wrote about the 1964 coup and the first “Institutional Act” in an essay for the New York Review of Books, in which I warned that extreme-right president Jair Bolsonaro would try to carry out a coup of his own. I wrote about the murder of Vladimir Herzog, and its repercussions for the dictatorship, in my first book, The Jakarta Method.

Fifteen years ago, there was perhaps no political truth more universally acknowledged in Brazil than Rubens Paiva and Vladimir Herzog did not deserve to die. This assertion undergirds the transition to democracy and the establishment of the 1988 Constitution. If you asked the high command of the Armed Forces themselves, they would have agreed with this interpretation. So then, why is there a need to re-assert it now, as Salles does with this film?

The hegemony of that assertion, the fact that it became a nearly universal truth for the political establishment, is a big part of the origin story of Bolsonaro, who grew up near property owned by the Paiva family. As the story goes, he seethed with rage at the privileges enjoyed by a wealthy clan that he believed had conspired against the fatherland. He despised the “politically correct” civil society that united in holding these men up as martyrs. In 2014, he spit on a bust of Rubens Paiva unveiled in Rio de Janeiro. In 2016, he declared war on the entire political edifice by dedicating his vote for Rousseff’s impeachment to her torturer. An unthinkable thought — they deserved it — entered the mainstream.

On the one hand, Ainda Estou Aqui plays it safe. There is arguably more complex terrain to explore, such as the social consequences of the dictatorship outside elite urban circles, or the thorny questions of the ethics and strategies of resistance under authoritarianism. In the film, the question of class is basically absent, except for one moment in which the family maid politely indicates she has not been paid since Rubens disappeared, and another in which Eunice breaks the news to the kids that they have to move out of their giant house. But it is how they play on this terrain that is so powerful. The execution is magisterial, and this matters both aesthetically and politically.

The film and its well-deserved success place Brazil’s dominant culture industry squarely on the side of opposition to Bolsonaro’s reactionary counter-revolution, just as cultural elites in the U.S. flirt with a “vibe shift” after Trump’s election. As the events of 1964 (and 2014-2018) demonstrate, the well-heeled Globo set can really go either way on these kinds of things.

A friend said, half-jokingly, that she hoped the film might launch a new genre, that it could inaugurate a Brazilian tradition of creating a new anti-dictatorship film every year, in the way the US seems to make a movie about World War II every month. If the film continues to win major awards in Hollywood, as it should, it will do the work of forcing the anglophone culture industry to pay homage to a man (and a movement) the US government helped to kill, whether anyone in the United States knows the history or not.

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Because it is true that the eye can only see so far. Hundreds of miles away on the horizon, no matter which way you look, you see the same thing. At the very limit of what you can perceive, you simply see a single line — separating the land from the sky. What you see as a line might really be a desert, or a shopping mall, or the scene of a horrific battle. Across 360° it must contain as much beauty and suffering and diversity as the world in front of you. You see a line. The further something is from a human being, the harder it is to see, and in extremis, everything looks the same.

Now imagine you are staring at your own two feet. You carefully study your shoes. You focus on them intensely, for an hour, then a day, then a month. You do this for decades, without interruption. Two things will happen. You will become wonderfully knowledgeable about every small difference between your left and right shoe, and every single way that both have changed throughout the years. And secondly, your eyes will adjust. Everything outside of the main attraction — your human shoes — will become blurry, appearing as nothing more as than an undifferentiated mass the color of concrete. Should something happen to enter your narrow field of vision, it will simply appear as a ripple in the uninteresting world outside of your shoes. A ladybug? Not shoe. A leaf? Not shoe. A piece of trash? Not shoe. Raindrops? Not shoe!

My contention here is that people who fall for the seductive allure of “horseshoe theory” are engaged in the second activity. Horseshoe theory is the conceptualization of the world carried out by people obsessed with themselves. Because, obviously, everything in the world is not you. If you look around for the ways that things are not you, it is fantastically easy to place everything into a single category. Allow me to unveil humanshoe theory: if you spend your life staring at your own two feet, then everything else will look the same.

To review: “horseshoe theory” is the idea that the further you get from the center of the political spectrum (left ↔ right) the two extremes start to converge. You might have heard some version of it that goes, like “if you go far enough to the left, you come out on the other side.” Or: “the far left and far right have more in common than there are differences between them.” But the apparent similarity is usually a shared deviation from the beliefs of the speaker; this is obviously a question of perspective.

For example: in 2016 it was correct to say that “both the radical left and the far right do not support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.” If you worked in the Clinton campaign, this difference is going to matter a whole lot to you. You spent all of your time carefully studying a contest between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and everything else was reduced to noise. For you. But for the rest of Planet Earth, not supporting Hillary Clinton is not only a bad way to categorize human beings — this is something that describes almost everyone. Buddhist monks in Myanmar, monarchists in Portugal, and pink dolphins in the Amazon River also did not vote for Hillary Clinton, but if you use this negative characteristic as a way to describe them all, instead of appreciating the diverse qualities that are actually present, you are really obsessed with Hillary Clinton. From the perspective of an Iraqi Communist, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might have “more things in common with each other” than they do with her comrades, but most Iraqi Communists are not self-centered enough to define the entire world in relation to themselves (this tendency is most common among North Atlantic liberals, for reasons we will soon discuss).

Here’s another one: “both the extreme-left and the extreme-right believe in the use of violence to achieve political ends.” Well, so did the Sumerians, and King David and Catherine the Great, and Mao, and the Suffragettes, and — well, almost everyone, except for radical pacifists. President Joe Biden is commander-in-chief of the largest military in human history, the “most lethal” killing machine ever assembled. What unites Gilgamesh and Che Guevara is that they would use violence differently than Barack Obama; what they have “in common” is that their worldviews are not hegemonic in the West.

Over the last few decades North Atlantic liberals (that is, liberal in the broad sense that includes George W. Bush and Emmanuel Macron) have felt so confident in the victory and universality of this ideological system that everything else started to look like one big, blurry, deviation. Might be time to broaden our horizons.

Ok I’m stretching these spatial metaphors to their limit now but um, you can look up from your feet and uh, use them to climb the mountain of knowledge, if you want to perceive more of the beauty and possibility of the world.

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In recent weeks when someone asks me what I am working on, I say “nothing” (celebratory). The more accurate answer is that I continue to promote my second book, as it begins to come out in translation (Italian was first, next comes Brazil), while I finish up some magazine pieces and figure out what I will do next.

If We Burn came out a year ago, and I have been incredibly grateful for the response. It is nice to get praise, and to see sales numbers, but it is truly gratifying to see a work like this generate real discussion. For many people, a year spent discussing a title and participating in these conversations might be enough. But I have a habit of putting a lot into my books, and into their promotion, and working to see if they might stand the test of time. And the next step for If We Burn is the preparation of the paperback edition. So I have a favor to ask.

If you found an error in IF WE BURN, please email me and let me know? The address is listed here. We have already corrected some small mistakes, mostly typos, before the second printing. But the paperback allows for more substantive revisions. We are not going to rewrite the book, but I want to know about anything that is wrong. The manuscript was professionally fact-checked, and reviewed by five scholar experts, but that is no match for the power of thousands of readers around the world. As I did with The Jakarta Method, I will publish a list of all the changes, and I always try to thank everyone that has helped.

Speaking of that, if you are subscribed to this newsletter, or reading this, I probably owe you my thanks too for supporting this work in one way or another. Unfortunately, the paperback won’t come out for a while (not my choice), so I wouldn’t recommend waiting. We will be selling the hardcover (and looking for things to change, including maybe the cover) for several more months, at least.

What else? In early editions of the book, I had it opening with epigraphs. I decided to drop the quotes, because I thought they were simultaneously too cute and too on the nose. But for what it’s worth, this is what I had:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

- The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

“No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative! It gets the people going.”

— Line from Blades of Glory, delivered by actor Will Ferrell, sampled in Watch the Throne by musicians Kanye West and Jay Z (2011)

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In advanced capitalist societies, if you want to stay alive, you have two options. If you are lucky, you can live in a house that you own. In the United States, property owners benefit from a range of direct and indirect government subsidies virtually ensuring that, even if they do nothing, they can count on rising property values. In 2021 in that country, simply owning property was a better way to accumulate wealth than actually doing any work. Owners with more house than they need — or more likely these days, a profit-maximizing firm that bought property so that it can do precisely this — may charge tenants whatever the market will allow, and supplement long-term asset appreciation with cash income.

The other option is to pay rent, to a landlord, on pain of expulsion and ultimately, death. Walk around San Francisco or New York City, and you will be confronted with the terrible reality of what happens if you fail to do so. You will be assaulted by the elements, and by police. Your risk of incarceration will rise exponentially, as your life expectancy plummets.

The old story, the official narrative, is that you spend part of your life on one side of the equation (being exploited), work hard and save, and then graduate to the other side (exploiting). That did sorta work out, for approximately one generation (of white, college-educated citizens) in the United States. Now, renters find themselves shelling out monthly payments that rise faster than inflation or any normal person’s salary, only looking forward to the prospect that they will rise even higher. It does not take a radical to see that the state is far more responsive to the demands of homeowners, and major real estate concerns, than it is to everyone else. And, “it benefits landlords for housing to be cheaply produced, rarely maintained, scarce and expensive,” write Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis.

Abolish Rent (Haymarket, 2024) is a fantastic little book that does two things. First, it reveals these contradictions at the heart of the political economy of the contemporary United States. And second, it provides an exhilarating guide to real-life organizing over the last decade. The authors, co-founders of the LA Tenants Union, provide elegant resolutions to — or ways around — apparent contradictions that overlap with many reflections offered by interviewees in my second book. They have spent years fighting and learning in the age of atomization, neoliberal individualization, and social media; moreover, Vilchis comes from the tradition of liberation theology and also works with Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra, an organization I have gotten to know well over the years. They organize both “vertically and horizontally.” They quote Martin Luther King (also a tenant organizer) on the need to move beyond just “spectacular actions and legislative focus” to building “durable organizations” that can both impose costs on bad actors and “transform underlying property relations.” When there is no easy way around the contradictions, they say so, and tie the book together with lively stories from contemporary California.

Recommended reading before you watch “The Curse,” or anything on HGTV. Visitors to the United States are often surprised we have an entire television channel (and so, so many social media influencers) dedicated to being on the “property ladder.” But of course, that metaphor is flawed. You have to use your own strength to climb a ladder. In the US, if you can get on, you are pulled up — by income tax deductions, by public investments in the neighborhood (schools, parks, transportation infrastructure) and by increasingly desperate demand for housing. It is an elevator, powered by taxpayers and tenants.

Rosenthal and Vilchis do make the case for imagining a world without rent, and recount how withholding payment (a rent strike) reveals the true nature of the relationship. That house is already built; the landlord needs something from you, not the other way around, and has little to offer but the threat of state violence. But concretely, their immediate goal is summarized better on page 119 than it is in the title: “Our aim is to eliminate the conditions that bind tenancy to insecurity, impermanence, predation, and price gouging.” How can that be done? With concerted, truly collective action.

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Last month, I attended the fifth instalment of CPAC Brasil, in the city of Balneário Camboriú. This is an import from US American political culture, and those letters stand for “Conservative Political Action Conference,” rather than anything in Portuguese. I covered the event as part of a long New York Times Magazine investigation, which was published yesterday.

But — I hear you asking — what can you buy there? What is the gear like. What do Bolsonaristas purchase to take home, or to wear over the long weekend? I would say that, by far, the most popular item was an Israeli flag — either alongside or mixed together with the more obvious Brazilian flag. Attendees wrapped them around their bodies, like capes, throughout the conference. There was a popular version (pictured above) with a mix of Brazil, Israel, and a big lion.

The affinity is not new; this is not a post-October-7th phenomenon. From 2016 to 2020 in Brazil, the easiest way to tell that you were approaching an extreme-right rally was to see, in the distance, a crowd waving US flags, Brazilian flags, and Israeli flags. Biden’s election made automatic association with the United States a little more complicated, but Bolsonarismo’s love for Israel is deep and enduring.

First, there is the evangelical Christian belief — as there is in the United States — that Israel will play an important role in the end of the world. Jair Bolsonaro was baptized there in 2016. But more importantly, I think, is that the Bolsonaros love Israel for being a heavily armed, militant, nationalist project. They love the unapologetically right-wing government and the commitment to the violent settlement of all the territory it controls. Stretching the analogy a bit, the Bolsonaros view the Amazon the way that Israeli settlers view Palestine.

You could get an Elon Musk t-shirt! This is new, and I think the logic should be clear. Bolsonaristas see Musk as a right-wing business man who has clawed Twitter back from the woke mafia and is willing to fight the persecution of the right in Brazil.

Unsure about the quality of Bolsonaro Reserve wine. Note that they believe in gender— the pink rosé is named after First Lady Michelle, rather than President Jair.

“Nada Easy — Step by step, how I combined management, innovation, and creativity to bring my company to 35 countries in four years.” Mostly, the books on sale at CPAC 2024 were written by Olavo de Carvalho, but this one checks a lot of Bolsonarista boxes. First, they love entrepreneurship. Secondly, the incorporation of English into Portuguese is widely associated with the right, unless it is deployed with carefully calibrated irony. Whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House, only the right likes the United States in Brazil. And third, the author of this book famously declared that he does not hire leftists.

Speakers at CPAC Brasil 2024 included right-wing figures from Chile, Hungary, El Salvador, Portugal, the Netherlands and of course, the United States of America. Argentine President Javier Milei showed up and put on his usual show. But the weekend opened and closed with the Bolsonaro family.

Coming back one day I found that someone, apparently the União da Juventude Comunista — Partido Comunista Revolucionário had spray-painted “FORA NAZI” or “GET OUT NAZI” on a wall outside the convention center. They quickly covered it up.

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Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers
by Andrey Mir (2020)

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff (Verso, 2022)

In Postjournalism, Andrey Mir’s best points are sometimes a bit overstated, but one feels that the emphasis is justified. Given just how smug and uncurious his implicit targets can be, it feels right. His book offers a fascinating history of journalism, what it does, who pays for it, and why they have done so since avvisi first appeared in Early Modern Venice. Along the way, he often takes aim at the self-serving myths of the Trump presidency (2016-2020), at the kind of the people who put “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the masthead of the Washington Post (where I worked at the time), and the class of professionals that insist that our work is both timelessly suprahistorical and urgently essential at the very moment that regular people have never trusted us less.

One of his powerful simplifications resonated with me, given my recent work. The people doing social-media-fueled insurgencies in the first half of the 2010s (Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, Gezi Park) and those doing them in the second half (culminating in Jair Bolsonaro’s election and then January 6) were doing the same thing. It’s just that urban millennials got on the internet first. At first, young and progressive people were using Facebook, so we thought the resulting paroxysms were good. Then more conservative baby boomers got on there, so we thought they were bad. Again, I think it’s more complicated than that, but Mir’s book is full of sharp little daggers like this.

For about ten years now I have been saying that journalism is at risk of disappearing. Not just that it’s getting worse, but that the very human activity as we know it may soon cease. When it does people will say they are doing journalism, sure, but it will really be marketing or propaganda. Mir focuses on the historic conditions that have made professional newsgathering possible. At some points, the public has paid for the news; the customer needs to buy the paper to find out what happened. At other moments, a political party or wealthy donor has paid for it in order to push their message into the world. During the 20th-century “golden age” of journalism, it was advertisers who primarily paid, so that they could get out their messages (to people who were also paying, a bit, for the news). The rise of digital advertising and social media destroyed this model. Brands find other, cheaper ways to reach us and trick us into buying their products, and no one is really paying for the news — you know what happened as soon as you log on to your timelines. If you elect to subscribe to a journalism outlet and legally jump the paywall, it is so you can read someone talk about the news in a certain way and, very likely, this decision is tied up with your ideological support for the publication. Whether we recognize it or not, this warps the incentives faced by reporters and editors at even the most proudly “objective” outlets, creating a vicious cycle. If you back a podcast on Patreon or pay for a Substack, you are now back in the role of medieval patron, making sure that work you value is produced for society or, increasingly, we find ourselves in the condition of the hyper-atomized contemporary subject paying for the illusion of friendship.

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It is remarkable that there are so few books like Ben Tarnoff’s, and that this one did not get more attention. We have seen a sudden reversal in the popular understanding of what the internet has done to us. Fifteen years ago nearly everyone thought the networks would make the world more democratic and free. Now you can ask just about anyone — a teenage girl in Malaysia, your MAGA Facebook uncle, a renowned critical theorist in France — and they are likely to agree that the internet has made us all insane. I would place Internet for the People alongside Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley as crucial guides to what happened to us. Tarnoff rightly centers privatization in this story. The internet is the product of thousands of years of collective knowledge-building and technological advancements; more concretely, it was created by several decades of public-sector investment. Then in the 1990s, US politicians simply handed it over to private individuals, who use the networks to maximize their profits.

This is oddly similar to what happened in the former USSR during the same period. Over decades of struggle and sacrifice, Soviet workers built the industry and collective achievements that gave them the world’s second-largest economy. When their political system collapsed, a group of well-connected men simply seized the assets for themselves and began to exert profound influence over what was left of society. We now call those men “oligarchs.” If Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were Russian, we would call them oligarchs, too.

Both Mir and Tarnoff point to the least-undemocratic powerful institution available, the state, as the only feasible solution. We need publicly funded journalism and public control over the internet. Mir thinks this simply is not going to happen. Tarnoff wants us to imagine that it could.

Ten years ago, more or less, I realized that I had forgotten how to read. This was an embarrassing surprise, for a number of reasons.

First, I had loved books since I was a little kid, devouring some of the big classics before they were ever assigned in class, and always wondered if I could become a writer. Second, I was actually a writer. I was working as a journalist, producing newspaper reports about South America rather than weighty tomes, but it was my business to know things and produce language. And third, I was having lunch with a colleague who put me in touch with literary agents in New York, who was helping to see if maybe I could write a book of my own.

He asked what books I had liked recently, and I had to admit to myself (and to him) that I had basically stopped reading them. Scrambling, I came up with a bunch of excuses. Of course I was reading other things; I was constantly ingesting all kinds of journalistic content, in several languages. Sometimes I was reading long magazine articles. But that was all nonsense. Obviously, what had really happened is that the internet scrambled my brain and made me unable to pay attention to anything much longer than a tweet.

I wanted to be very intentional about fixing this. I decided that I would read at least one book a month. And I set up a Google Doc, where I would make a list of every book I finish. It is subdivided by years, and by months, and I keep it updated every time I complete a new volume. Obviously this was a crude kind of “gamification,” an employment of the actually existing internet’s tools against myself. But I also made sure to get away from it. That was not hard. I would just take a physical book, or maybe a tablet, to a café or library or a park bench for an hour or two. I left my phone at home, and did not connect the tablet to any wi-fi network. I found this very rewarding, and incredibly easy. Very quickly I doubled the goal.

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(Now, I make sure to read four books a month at least, though this can go up if I am doing full-time research, or down if I am working hard on something else like interviews, or writing. But I reckon that is pretty high for a person who is not lucky enough to read and write for a living. This is not a self-help post - I think ? - but my instinct is that one book a month is very respectable and achievable for someone with a normal job, and twelve books a year is really significant. Personally I was amazed how much I could get done by carving out an hour here and there, and how quickly I re-connected with a world of knowledge and mode of thinking I had lost entirely, so I immediately wanted more.)

I am still adding to the list. I admit that I remain somehow trapped in the arbitrary logic of the digital system I created. I might find that it is the end of the month and I am “behind,” so I read more furiously to avoid leaving a given month incomplete, which is not exactly ideal. But I also find the actual list to be very useful. I can look back over nine years and remember what I learned, or what I want to re-read, or which book I loved so much that I need to have a physical copy on the shelf. (I also take notes on every book, and then transcribe them into the cloud a few weeks later, as a way to build a kind of double memory system — but that’s probably not too relevant here). At the bottom of the doc I list books I want to read in the future.

I treat my phone as if it is infused with black magic, as if it contains demonic forces which leap out and destroy any life force that comes near it. I act this way because it is literally true. Thousands upon thousands of years of human scientific progress, mountains of capital accumulated over centuries of brutal accumulation, and the world’s most brilliant living minds have all conspired to make this thing capable of tricking and cajoling and flattering and insulting you to get your attention for as long as possible, so that you will cast your eyes over as much advertising content as your body can take. Sometimes you must wrestle with these demons, but you are also allowed to walk away from the battle.

I never bring my phone into my bedroom under any circumstances. I never pretend that I am going to get some reading done with a cellular device on my person. Those people that arrive at a coffee shop, and then place a phone and a book together on the table, are trying to beat Satan in a game that he has devised. It might be possible to win, but I have never seen it done. They are scrolling within a minute.

I don’t read anything on my laptop. I might skim an article quickly to get the gist, but that’s not reading. I may download the FT and a bunch of PDFs onto a tablet, and take it with me for the time I set aside for reading, and for reading alone. After a few minutes (physically) away from the internet, I find I can think again. I like to do this in the morning. But anyways, that’s just me. I thought that story might be interesting.