The human brain is a truly amazing thing. Nowhere in the Nexus are we encouraged to say: I don’t know but maybe we could figure it out together. To hold righteous rage or performative supplication. I know I did.Įverything I learned in the Nexus taught me that my job was to memorize the right things and call out the wrong things. At least it feels like we are doing something and we can stay caught up in that for years and years. I think a great many people caught up in this stuff genuinely have the best intentions, genuinely want some kind of change, genuinely care about people and the earth and are just doing what other ‘political’ people around them are doing: performing and avoiding punishment. I’m not saying this to be mean, or flippant, or cruel.
We are too busy with our periodic purges of the scapegoats within our already tiny, identity based and subcultural communities. But banding together to make massive change seems impossible for a lot of reasons, and anyway, we don’t even try to do that. It’s an elaborate performance of correct politics aimed at each other, the people on the bottom who have no material power to change things unless we band together in unprecedented ways. Most of the Left as it stands today is like this.
And doing my very best not to say the wrong things. Saying the right things at the right times. Displaying my knowledge of the ever changing rules. So much of what I learned to do inside the Nexus boils down to performance pure and simple. Being political meant studying the rules, making the right caveats, avoiding saying certain things, agreeing with people more marginalized, owning my privilege, knowing when to step back, and knowing when to hit hard with my ‘superior knowledge’. Being political meant being critical of everything everyone said, going over it with a fine tooth comb and finding and naming the problems. What I learned in these spaces and relationships was that being political meant simply knowing and repeating the correct takes. As a queer person I’ve spent a long time in the Nexus, from my queer alternative high school I went to as a teenager, to the iumblr years, to my women and gender studies degree, to instagram infographics, to watching cancellations play out in real time, to all the media I’ve been immersed in for more than a decade, to my entire friend group up until recently. I remember getting what I thought was a political education inside what Jay and I call the Nexus, a social phenomenon that combines social media, identitarianism, and cancel culture. But what exactly that work will be? I don’t know. And I know, more than anything that we will have to find a way to work together. I know we will have to sacrifice and be brave and be massively creative. I know we will have to do things we have never done before, and draw on things people have done, and combine things in new ways. It’s not that I don’t think it’s possible. And yet, when I look inside myself, it’s not that I have resigned. I don’t know what we would need to do to make the necessary changes on a global scale. And as usual, on whatever is left of the Left, there’s a lot of finger pointing, recrimination, symbolic action, posting, making empty demands of powers who ignore us, and taking down each other because we can.
There’s a lot of numbing going on, a lot of scapegoating, a lot of pushing on like nothing is happening. I think a lot of us are coping with grief and terror and overwhelm in whatever ways we know how. It is easy and understandable to fall into despair. Change couldn’t be more necessary and nothing changes. We are bombarded with horror and atrocity after horror and atrocity and the governments and capitalists go on as usual. Climate change is undeniably here, with various parts of the world literally on fire, and more horrifying suffering (human and nonhuman) than I could list. That has not resulted in the abolition of medicine for profit or the recognition of our shared vulnerability that crosses our borders. There’s a pandemic that has stretched on and on, that has been poorly managed on a global scale.
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