Welcome to the Resistance
Even if you have been here all along
“The rain smeared neon across the cracked city streets, painting the night in washed-out pinks and humming electric blues. America was a struggle we couldn’t win but just couldn’t quit—a puzzle locked in the algorithm grip of pasty oligarchs and shadowy corporations, their glass towers reflecting a darkening sky full of static, like a television turned to a dead channel. Down below, faces, cold and pale in the glow of a thousand screens, shuffled past, all of them hooked on curated feeds and synthetic dreams—afraid to vote. Afraid to even speak out. Content on their couches and cubicles. Drones prowled the skyline, eyes for hire, while driverless cars whispered through puddles slick with oil and broken promises. In the alleys and behind locked doors, the outliers—a network of hackers, idealists, the dirty fingered—worked the angles, searching for a semblance of truth in a world gone digital and cold. These days, the line between reality and illusion blurred, and freedom was as rare as a bonsai hidden in a closet in a world where plants were contraband.”
—opening paragraph of Pioneer Punk, an imagined noir cyberpunk novel
To help set the stage for the next chapter of our work saving Democracy, I asked AI: “How would we know if we were in a cyberpunk dystopia?”
You’d know you’re in a cyberpunk dystopia if:
Tech Overload: Neon-lit cities pulse with holographic ads, cybernetic implants are as common as smartphones, and AI runs everything from traffic to your coffee maker. Data streams are visible in augmented reality, but privacy is a myth—corporations or governments track every move.
Corporate Rule: Mega-corporations dwarf governments, controlling resources, laws, and even personal lives. Wealth gaps are obscene; the elite live in sky-high arcologies while the masses scrape by in sprawling, crime-ridden slums.
Cybercrime & Hackers: Digital black markets thrive. Hackers, rogue AIs, and cybernetically enhanced gangs battle for control of data and tech. Your identity can be stolen, rewritten, or erased in seconds.
Environmental Decay: Pollution chokes the air, clean water is a luxury, and climate collapse has reshaped the world. Urban sprawl suffocates nature, and biotech is a desperate bandage on a dying planet.
Social Alienation: People are hyper-connected yet isolated, jacked into virtual realities or neural nets, prioritizing digital escapism over real relationships. Trust is scarce; betrayal is currency.
Aesthetic & Culture: Neon aesthetics, cybernetic body mods, and a mix of high-tech grit with retro vibes (think synthwave meets urban decay). Society fetishizes tech while grappling with its dehumanizing cost.
If you’re living in a world where your brain’s wired to the net, corporations own your data (and maybe your body), and the line between human and machine is blurry—all while the city glows in endless neon and despair—you’re probably there. Check your surroundings: are you in a grimy alley with a neural implant buzzing? That’s a clue.
“You best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias, you’re in one.”—popular meme
It is meaningful to talk about the social and political landscape around us in terms of cyberpunk, since that dystopic future is the leading edge, but we are not really talking about a new paradigm—just a new version of it. The struggle between those who think it is OK to control other human beings— to use them as nothing more than tools and work animals for the sake of power and profit—and those who do not stretches back past the edges of recorded history. (Yes, some of you may well see the ghost of Immanuel Kant turn to look at the audience here.)
Currently, the dark paradigm is being championed by the extremist MAGA right, spearheaded from on-stage and behind the scenes by tech-soaked oligarchs with vast amounts of money and influence. People like Thiel, Yarvin, Musk, and others want to replace the egalitarian, democratic ideals toward which we have been working so long in this country. They consider that a failed experiment, and they want to return to an extremely authoritarian model. Think feudalism. Think fascism.
Every bit of policy they shove through, and every bit of police-state they assemble is geared toward controlling people to treat them like livestock, factory drones, and as sex-bot incubators to fulfill their sad sexuality and to turn out future worker drones. Only the rulers are fully human, everyone else is less. Their shallow economic models do not want the arc of the universe bending toward justice or anywhere else; they want a straight upward slope toward more profit.
At the heart of that fever-dream is the flawed belief that people CAN be controlled. That each unit can be isolated and alienated from the others to prevent creative interactions and ideas, that the ambition for something more out of life than the factory drudge can be stifled, and that the random variables can be un-randomized—that everything can be made predictable and therefore controlled. Friends, in their dream, we will all be Roy Batty, from Blade Runner, less than fully human, crying tears lost in the rain.
But that also means they have to rigidly control our access to math, to science, and underneath those, they have to carefully control our opportunities to engage with nature. Those constantly reveal that there are not stable, closed systems—something new comes in from outside or springs up from inside. Change happens. That will always get in the way of perfect optimization, flawless efficiency, maximum profit.
The human spirit is the prime example. We can dream. We can imagine. When math or science or nature show us unexpected change can happen, our minds start to wonder about what other things might change. Then, danger of dangers, imagination sparks hope for more. And I am hard-pressed to come up with a better avatar for that, a better mascot or symbol, than pioneers.
That is the spirit of those who came before and those who will come after, who simply could not be fenced in. Not by rules. Not by unfinished maps. Not by landlords or kings or priests or fear, and certainly not by ignorance. And, fittingly enough, in most cases—America maybe most of all—that also meant escaping the squalid city with all its noise and stench to reconnect with nature. To scrape a hard living from the dirt in the free sunlight and wind rather than live a life of ease squeezed into buildings and under someone else’s thumb. To live a life measured by the sun and the seasons rather than by a little mechanical timeclock. To bump into things we have not seen before and surprises we never suspected.
This substack on politics, like my poetry, my teaching career, my work in the arts . . . even my lifelong study of Zen and religion, will center on the continuing fight to help everyone be seen and to live as fully human. To push back against being confined and defined. To keep being more than a predictable, controllable machine. Sometimes that will be sharing tools and ideas to fight smarter or harder, sometimes it will be highlighting the triumphs of those fighting on the side of light against the dark. And all along the way it will be about keeping us connected—to each other and to nature, because those are the two things they can never get a fence or a prison cell all the way around.
That also means the substack will mostly focus on the concrete, the practical. Shared vision and values are essential, but no one ever won a resistance sitting in a philosophy circle. So, thanks for being here and for being kindred spirits in this Pioneer Punk resistance. Let us get dirty, literally and figuratively, digging into the soil and planting seeds of hope in voters everywhere, so that we can hold onto sunlight and avoid that pale, screen-glow fate in the opening scene above.