Unreal Bird #9: Polycrisis

The evening sky with pink clouds over a body of water seen from inside an Amtrak train.
The view from Amtrak.

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In this issue:

  • I'm helping curate a second newsletter, the Gaming and Governance Brief (don't be jealous, you can sub to that one for free, too).
  • Doesn't it feel like we crammed a decade's worth of news into two weeks (edition four thousand)? Taking stock of an attempted assassination, Louisiana v. Callais, and the cancellation of the world's largest digital rights conference.
  • Field Notes:
  • Scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

What I'm up to

I've been helping curate the Gaming and Governance Brief, a newsletter from the NYU Stern Center's working group on video games and regulation. It comes out monthly, and if this topic interests you even a little, I encourage you to subscribe.

I promise I will have a piece about the transatlantic far-right soon. There will also be more on data centers and video games. My machine is not well-oiled, but it is moving.

Polycrisis

Since my last newsletter, someone tried to kill the President (again), the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (again), and the world's largest digital rights conference was canceled (I believe for the first time, unless you count the shift to digital-only during peak COVID). I'm probably forgetting some things.

These things all felt like crises, but their consequences operate at different scales on different timelines. Each has an immediate consequence which is newsworthy in its own right but masks a larger trend.

Take the attempted shooting at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.

Obviously any such event carries a whiff of crisis. Like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, this event also raised fears of a political crackdown against liberal and left-wing causes. Zoom out, though, and other problems are apparent. Certainly the number of guns and unstable young men in America—and the ease with which those two things are so frequently united—deserve a mention.

Rachel Kleinfeld has a helpful bulletin recontextualizing this instance of political violence. Rather than organized violence or attacks clearly aligned with the left or the right, Kleinfeld draws on data showing that today's acts are committed by young people who are often mentally ill and politically alienated, and they are supported by politically engaged people "who are angry about our politics, but do not see a path to resolve issues through normal means."

Meanwhile, John Ganz at Unpopular Front has a piece on "The Shooting that Wasn't," arguing that:

"Cole Tomas Allen—classic three-part assassin name—is... an extremely angry liberal, the kind of Democrat who would fume about Bernie bros spoiling an election. What does this tell us? The normies are furious... Allen viewed himself as a protector of American liberalism attacked by the revolutionary Trump regime. He would do by the gun what Comey and Mueller couldn’t do by law.

Yet Ken Klippenstein reminds us that, far from being a mere partisan warrior, "Cole Allen Hated the Democratic Party, Too."

Taken together, these pieces suggest that hopelessness has become mainstream, a situation which invites spontaneous violence in lieu of institutionalized dissent. Ganz suggests that Americans will grow used to this, as we have with mass shootings. Our casual acceptance of political violence is the kind of slow-moving crisis we have never been good at solving.

That takes me to our second crisis, the Supreme Court decision to neutralize Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais.

Many pundits reflexively considered the fallout—the decimation of Black political representation in the South—in the context of the upcoming midterm elections. This is a terrible impulse. With gas at $5 a gallon and a two-seat Republican majority in the House, the only uncertainty about the midterms is how large the Democratic victory will be.

The better questions are about the reversal of civil rights and reconstruction era victories by a neo-Confederate Republican party, and the endless redistricting wars this will unleash. The entire premise of representation in the federal legislature has changed for the worse. The consequences of our calcified politics, from violence to governance failures, will only deepen as a result. In more optimistic times, observers might hope that bipartisan, scorched-earth redistricting could encourage a truce in the form of a federal anti-gerrymandering law. But the recent history of American government suggests we will blow past that possibility and instead normalize non-competitive elections to an unrepresentative legislature.

Supreme Court reform may be a long shot, but it may also be our only shot. Following the ruling, the Congressional Black Caucus announced it will be their mission to "aggressively advance" Supreme Court reform. The know the history, and they understand what they're up against.

The third crisis is the cancellation of RightsCon, the world's largest digital rights conference.

The conference was supposed to take place this week in Zambia; the Zambian government pulled the rug out from under organizers at the last minute, when some participants were already in the air on their way.

I spent the day gossiping with colleagues and contacts, trying to find the reason why. Wired reported out the rumors I was hearing: The Chinese government learned that Taiwanese activists would attend in person, and pressured Zambia to pump the brakes. Zambia—which owes China kind of a lot of money—delivered a series of demands to Access Now, the organization which puts Rights Con together. In a statement, Access Now said that if RightsCon was to go on, the Zambian government would require them to "moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation." That was a no-go.

This is a disaster for Access Now, and possibly for the wider digital rights community. The last conference, in Costa Rica, was criticized because visa restrictions made it difficult for many African participants to attend. Zambia was selected to host this year's conference in part because of its liberal visa regime. My sympathies are with the organizing team, whose jobs are not easy. Planning a large conference is essentially an unending series of compromises. This outcome is not their fault, and now they are left with nothing to show for their work but hard questions about the sustainability of large, inclusive gatherings of the digital rights community.

Like the other two crises, this one is also a long-term problem in an immediate-term wrapper. Beijing's influence isn't going away and it allowed China to assume the colonial position of dictating Zambian visa policy.

But Beijing is not the only threat to global digital rights activism. In the past, US diplomats might have counted as allies to counter China's clout, but today's Washington has abdicated global leadership (and this administration only pantomimes support for digital rights, anyway). The current administration is so hostile that on news of RightsCon's cancellation, some digital rights professionals worried that pressure from the United States was the reason. Moreover, the tech sector has also backtracked on its commitment to digital rights, a fatal blow to any theory of change that relies on industry collaboration with third-party experts.

The digital rights community is on its back foot, but its importance and centrality to democratic activism has never been more obvious. Nathalie Marechal makes this point better than most in a new piece for Tech Policy Press, calling on tech policy advocates (very possibly like you, reader!) to "pick a side" in the fight between fascism and democracy. Marechal's overarching point is that the politics of tech policy in 2026 are fundamentally different than the past: Big Tech is no longer a domesticated animal which can be constructively coaxed and cajoled. Instead, it is a wild beast whose appetite is a danger to the system—liberal democracy—which made productive relationships between civil society and industry possible.

Now, digital rights activists must adapt.

Field notes

Snoot watch

Two greyhounds walking out of the shadow into the sunlight, panting slightly.
To me this photo has real "Blues Brothers" energy.

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