length: 1,155 words

content/trigger warning: references to abuse, depression, sex toys, bodily fluids (urine, semen), drugs (psychiatric medication, amphetamines)

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There's a lot I want to say but of course there's only so much that I can. So much that I should. They say that should's a bad word but sometimes it's protection. A defense. Art is war most of the time, probably always, but only because life is. War isn't the best word here. There's another word I should use but the time isn't right yet. Sometimes I think this is knowledge hoarding but it's not like I made up the word. It's not a word nobody knows. The word's out there, the concept's out there, all you'd have to do is apply it to this: art, writing, storytelling. The definition of art is recontextualization, you know? I don't know that that's step one but it's definitely oneof the steps. Maybe the only step. That seems reductive, but the definition of art is also reduction, you know? Recontextualization is reduction, but also expansion, so let's say the definition of art is contradiction too. Ooh, now we're getting somewhere. Or you could say, “now we're cooking,” and so the definition of art is also — well, I've probably said too much already.

Another idiom: “There's nothing new under the sun.” I don't know if that makes you feel bad but I know for me it's relief. It's just us. There's nothing but us. So of course there's nothing new. We're all there is, and we don't change too quickly, or at least not quickly enough to make new possible all that often. We also change extremely quickly (contradiction), so there's always something new (recontextualization), it just won't be recognized as new until it's old (reduction). You know?

Okay, by way of example: my best friend tells me I'm a good writer and that I gotta do something about that and a hundred years ago Arturo told me it's okay not to be a writer and I took his word for it and he wasn't wrong but he wasn't right either. It's okay not to be a writer but it's not okay not to dream. Imagine. Create. And if you stifle that impulse long enough all you get is nightmares instead. A year into the pandemic, I wanted to apply to a bunch of startup incubators and get a fuck ton of seed money to build, I don't know, Theranos for dogs. Lyft for trikes. One Medical for bees. Amazon for dildos. AirBnb for blue jeans. I don't know. Honestly, I was actually pretty good at it, but only because anyone would be. You're broke and you fall for a pyramid scheme and you'd come up with just about everything I did. VR for aliens. AI for sluts. Netflix for amphetamines. Juicero for cum. Or maybe piss. Whatever.

Anyways, my best friend is right so I start writing. Once upon a time, I was so depressed and so heavily loaded up with psychiatric medication, I couldn't write without using AI: I'd feed a line to GPT-2 (an oldie but a goodie) and it'd feed me something back and then I'd go from there. Most of what I wrote with it was okay. It was fine. 

So I thought about doing that again but then I looked out the window. 

I didn't see a park but there was a park down the street. Then I went to the bathroom and there was a book called The Hologram across from the toilet, between the toilet paper and the Q-tips. So I started writing a short story called “The Hologram” about someone who looks out a window and sees a park with a hologram at its center.

That's it. 

That's all.

Take everything you see seriously. Mash together whatever's around you. Then work until you're done. 

You can do it because it's what you already do every day except for someone else. Now do it for the reader. I was going to do it for a startup incubator. Now I do it for the reader.

Okay, but there's something missing, and I don't want to talk too much about the why, only the how. Just know that I hate bylines. (Bylines are fame is power is abuse; reduction, whatever, you understand.)

I came up with a system: a byline made up of two names, the names of people who already exist (real or fictional, it doesn't matter), and written with no spaces and all lowercase. Kind of like usernames. One of my short stories, “The Hologram,” is by georgewallace and londonbreed and it doesn't really matter whether you know who they are, you understand. Triangulation works because three data points determine a fourth; two intersecting lines don't really have a “center” unless you connect them by a third. The two names are the two lines; the title of the story is the third. Their center is the story.

More simply: if George Wallace and London Breed wrote a short story called “The Hologram,” what would it say? 

That's it; that's all.

Some examples:

“RIOT!” by jonathanlarson and pussyriot

“The Everything Girl” by ziwe and elizabethholmes

“The People vs. John F. Kennedy-North” by dorothyparker and northwest

“Cronenburg” by davidcronenberg and brandoncronenberg

“Ru Girl” by asiaohara and thevixen

“Please Don't Read This If You're White” by shaunking and racheldolezal

“Sim City” by willwright and janejacobs

“The Prompt” by chatgpt and dalle

“250 BPM” by janefonda and daftpunk

“6°” by kevinbacon and rolandemmerich

“Major War” by jillbiden and vladimirputin

“Station Twelve” by mirandacarroll and dondawest

“Station Thirteen” by frankchaudhary and idabwells

“Station Fourteen” by paulimurray and antoninartaud

I have another 30 or so of these somewhere, most I never wrote. Some I did. Some I wrote half, or more. “Platformer” [LINK] was originally by félixguattari and gillesdeleuze. “The Girls from Pasadena” was originally by — well, that one's self-explanatory.

Feel free, by the way, to write any of the stories above; they're prompts of sorts, I suppose. But, of course, you'll have better luck if you come up with them yourself.

There's a lot I want to say — to get you where you need to go (the end of a short story) — but still I fear I shouldn't. So if the definition of art is also transgression, then I should do something that I shouldn't (contradiction), so I'll tell you, finally, to think of this art as the art of mathematics. To write a story like you'd craft a proof. To tell a tale like you'd fashion an equation.

There's always an answer at the end. A solution. Resolve.

That's it. That's all. You understand. You understanding.

length: 2,430 words

#fiction

content/trigger warning: discussions of nationalism, capitalism, and imperialism, brief references to death and police/state violence

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The game was simple: an endless series of platforms, moving up and down the screen at various speeds, in various directions.

You played as a little blue-green blob, trying to jump onto the platforms as they whizzed by, so you could get as high up as possible (a reason why was never given), sometimes falling off the platforms because the platforms were small and the physics of your body making you think you’d made a successful jump, only to slosh a little too hard towards one of the edges and fall off, usually onto another platform, probably moving in a direction you weren’t expecting and ruining your score.

Your score was determined by how many jumps you successfully landed (each successful landing removed 1 point from your score) and how high you got (little tick marks on the left and right sides of the screen indicated arbitrary units of altitude; each tick mark you passed also removed 1 point from your score).

Each day players would start with 100,000,000,000 points, the dozen-digit number floating near the top of the screen in bold, translucent type, counting down as your blob moved upwards, landing on platforms without falling off.

The platforms moved in mostly straightforward patterns—up and down, left, and right, diagonally—but not all, and not always. Some of their paths curved or formed loops; sometimes they accelerated and decelerated suddenly, the speed (or unexpected change in speed) of a platform often the reason why you did or didn't land a jump.

Sometimes the changes in acceleration followed a pattern you could learn if you remained on the platform long enough: the platforms were repeated along their paths and spaced evenly across them, looping as they ran into the sides of the screen, so that if you were on a platform and it moved off of the left side of the screen, you’d appear on a platform moving left from off the right side of the screen, on the same path as your platform’s neighbors, and vice versa.

But not all, and not always.

Success in the game required luck.

Your goal was to get as low a score as possible: the lower the score, the more successful your jumps and the higher you got before you gave up. The game didn’t end unless you gave up, so technically, you could just keep playing all day, trying to get your score as low as possible. The game paused when you exited the app too, so its initial Japanese player base could start playing and lowering their scores in the morning, keep lowering their scores over lunch or during breaks, and finally compete seriously in the evening, when most players were rapidly changing places at the top of the leaderboard, trying to get their score lower than everyone else’s by the time the game reset at 9:00 PM.

The game expanded internationally almost immediately, but kept its 9:00 PM reset time for all players, despite user outcry, as well as the proliferation of clones that offered different leaderboards for different time zones, usually resetting for those users around 9:00 PM local time, among other features like the ability to change the color and appearance of your blob, and of the platforms (the original had glossy white platforms against a purple-yellow starry sky, and, of course, your blob was only ever round and aquamarine).

But the original remained the most popular version, and its rabidly loyal fanbase, including users in, it seemed, every time zone, adapted quickly to the universal reset time and single global scoreboard. 9:00 PM was noon in UTC (Universal Time Coordination, an internationally recognized time-measurement standard), which the developers said was, in part, why they insisted the time stay fixed, though, as with many massively multiplayer online games, often the appeal was simply the idea that your time zone could become a strategic advantage; players in Hong Kong, for example, constantly bested players in Tokyo for the first few months after the game’s release, which users soon realized was because players in Hong Kong, who started playing after work, tended to play more aggressively, knowing they had an hour less to win than their Japanese competitors.

This became known to players outside east Asia after a strategy pioneered by some of those players went viral worldwide, in the many multilingual online communities that had sprung up devoted to the game. They’d discovered that lowering your score by sticking your landings was a distraction. There was no penalty if you fell off a platform after jumping; it wasn't like it added to your score, as was the case in some of the knock-offs. In fact, the players had discovered that by intentionally falling off the platforms—especially by quickly making many successive jumps, picking up speed and using the momentum to fall off of one platform onto another, and then another, and so on—you could move higher faster, and make up for not landing jumps with your increasingly rapid ascension.

Users were learning to do more with less.

Other strategies like this went viral in other time zones: where scores reset when most people were working (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran), players went all in during their lunch breaks, discovering that simply mashing the jump button without stopping, though ineffective for besting international opponents, was an easy way to beat local players who spent their lunches talking or eating. Where scores reset midday (Spain, Algeria, Greece), players began waking earlier to maximize the amount of time they could play before work began. Where scores reset in the morning (Ecuador, Mexico, Cuba), players started going to sleep as soon as they got home from work, waking around midnight and staying up all night, past sunrise, to play and get their scores as low as possible before crashing for an hour or two, after the reset, then waking and going to work.

These strategies had stopped, at a certain point, being about gameplay, per se. They were more like strategies for successfully scheduling your life around the game.

For scheduling your life around being successful at the game.

The global scoreboard was anonymized, so no one could create an offensive username and ride it to the top out of hatred, or in an attempt to be edgy. Instead, you were represented by a randomized combination of letters and numbers, and by a little rounded version of your country’s flag. The game, while in beta, had assigned your country to you based on your IP address, but concerns over user privacy prior to the game’s official release led them to scrap this. Instead, players could select what country they were represented by, and you could change this once per play session, right before you started playing. The developers believed, and said so in interviews, that most people identified more with a country they didn’t live in than with the one in which they did, and that the game was perhaps so successful because it respected the diasporic nature of identity and migration (the game included Palestine, Taiwan, and Kosovo, among other countries with limited international recognition, as options for players) and that sometimes people want to play for the other team, so to speak, if only temporarily.

Of course, this meant that the gameplay, on a daily basis, revolved around keeping players who selected places like the United States and Israel (trolls making it public that they “obviously” weren’t from there) from topping the leaderboard, or selecting places like Palestine or Taiwan (activists making it known that they were doing so to increase the countries' visibility) in order to cover the leaderboard in their chosen flags. Teams formed in group chats or on Discord; each day brought a new country v. country battle. Some were obvious: one week saw the Top 1000 leaderboard almost exclusively comprised of users whose chosen flags were either Colombia's or Romania's, simply because they were nearly identical. Others were inexplicable: early on, for example, an unspoken enmity had begun between Swiss and Somali players, and never ended, such that every so often, totally unexpectedly, white crosses and white stars would flood the leaderboard for a few hours, then vanish almost entirely. Reportedly, neither a Swiss nor Somali player had yet to place a win with the country's flag (wins were, at that point, tracked on sites that aggregated content about the game, which were popular since they tended to report on which country vs. country match-offs were trending over the course of any given day) because influencers from other countries liked to score wins with either the Swiss or Somali flag in an attempt to go viral, which often worked.

It was obvious that nationalism was key to the game’s success. Knock-offs that allowed players to make up new countries or be represented by the flags of fictional places—Middle Earth, Westeros, Hogwarts—didn’t have the same allure. That you could only win as an existing country, but that this included countries without total sovereignty, was why its audience grew into the billions. At its peak, January 1 of its second year in existence, 2.5 billion people, a third of humanity, all played together at the exact same time between 11:00 AM and 12:00 PM UTC. (As many had predicted and moaned about, a player represented by the Canadian flag won that day, due to a months-long campaign run by Canadian players lobbying aggressively for the world’s best players to choose Canada on that first of January, which fell on the first Saturday after the scheduled release of a highly anticipated update that added a long-term leaderboard that ranked countries based on how many times players who had chosen them had won. Though Canada indeed became the first country to appear on that leaderboard, it quickly tumbled down the chart as resentment over the stunt ensured, that, for many months, players represented by the Canadian flag almost never won. The top of this new scoreboard, of course, centralized around a few countries that players generally preferred, either because of what their flags looked like or represented, or because they had obvious enemies to fuel match-ups. These included Macedonia, Palestine, Bhutan, and the United States.)

It was the Olympics democratized. It was international war fought with well-timed taps on a smartphone screen or keyboard. It was absolutely meaningless and yet dominated so much of so many people’s time. Worse, it remained on their minds, all the time, throughout every single day, like an irremovable stain, even when they weren’t playing.

Even if they didn’t play at all.

*

No one ever ended the day with no points before the game shut down, though someone did come close. It seemed impossible as it played out, even as accusations of cheating failed to quell players’ excitement: hundreds of millions, probably more, watched the player’s score continue to drop lower and lower over the course of the day — tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then, millions below its closest competitor. The lowest final score on record had been somewhere around 132 million, a triumph that had astounded fans and made the player who won that day, and who revealed herself publicly as the winner, a household name across the planet. No one else, in the full year since, had come anywhere close to dethroning her.

Now someone (a player who never made themselves known, even after winning) had gotten so much further. The speed at which this player’s score fell was so fast that it seemed certain they would “win,” whatever that meant; just a few minutes before noon UTC, their score was just over a million and plummeting.

But when the reset finally came, the score screeched to a halt a moment too soon. You could almost feel humanity let out a collective groan.

Still, the feat was unignorable. It left those who knew the game best speechless. 105? That was possible? Players, online, reeled with shock, dreaming up all kinds of new strategies that that day’s winner must've used to win, assuming they hadn't cheated.

Whatever the winner had done, it upset the developers. Though the pair wrote in a press release that the player hadn't cheated, and that they'd reached out to the player to allow them to verify this, and that they had indeed verified it, they also reported that the player did not wish to make their identity known, or even discuss the game further, and that their interactions with the player, and how close the player had come to the game’s seemingly unreachable endpoint, had made the developers decide to shut down the game. They said it was because any attempt to get a lower score would go against the game’s philosophy: once it had been made clear that the game could be beaten, there was no reason for anyone to play anymore.

Players rioted.

94 people were killed in demonstrations around the world, all beginning at 12:00 PM UTC the day after the record had been set, the first day the game was unavailable to play since its official launch. Almost 11 thousand people were arrested across 5 continents, many while draped in the flags of their (or their preferred) countries.

None of it mattered. The developers publicly called for peace and diplomacy, but the game and its knock-offs were banned overnight in every country in which they had been available.

Eventually, finally, former players stopped caring, and people moved on to the next viral app. Since then, no game has beat its record for highest number of global concurrent players. The way the game had ended had been so shocking (traumatic, even), it was doubtful that many people would ever embark, together, on any kind of similar experience again. The only way to beat the record set by the game itself, some theorized, would be to make a game that appealed to and involved absolutely everyone, amassing far more than 2.5 billion devotees, by going as far and as hard as the 1 (unknown) player who’d almost gotten to 0; by trying, even if quixotically, to get all (or nearly all) the people on the planet to do the exact same thing at the exact same time.

START

length: 628 words

content/trigger warning: discussion of technofascism

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Sam says something like: genius attempts to democratize excellence, willfully ignorant to the consequences.

Genius is “move fast and break things.”

Easier in art than in other things. To break it is to point and cry, “Art!” (which anyone can do at any time).

Technofascism is not “move fast and break things.” They say it is. They say a lot of things, but technofascism is semblances. Appearances. Technofascism is all surface; it's sponcon; it's advertising. Technofascism epitomizes propaganda. Propaganda is not fast. Context is fast. If I know you and care about you, I will take whatever you tell me seriously even if I tell you and myself I do not. Propaganda is slow and ineffective (it only needs a single convert, after all).

Technofascists want to move fast and break things but they don't. Genius does. Stevie is the closest technofascists ever got to genius, though of course he didn't even come close. He got closer than any technofascist before him because he thought himself an artist (lol). But he did nearly destroy the planet and humanity in the process. Many technofascists lionize him; they'll even tell you this story. But they don't know how to read it. They only know semblances, appearances. They don't get the subtext.

(I'm skipping over a lot—an example of genius. I didn't come up with this up myself so don't credit me for it, but if I tell you I'm skipping over a lot and still claim you're reading an essay, that is almost genius. It threatens to democratize excellence: someone who reads this can then go write an essay and decide they want to skip over a lot, and say so, and it will still be an essay. When their essay is better than mine, and someone reads it, and writes an essay better than theirs, that essay will probably be excellent. Remember, I didn't come up with this; thank Joan, or maybe the strict word limits of magazines—to make room for the ads, of course.)

Sam says something like: the next genius will teach genius. Will be genius at teaching. I don't know about that. If art is inherently collaborative, teaching epitomizes collaboration, or maybe learning does, and anyways genius and collaboration are incompatible (hence my obsession with it; collaboration, I mean).

I think Sam's fibbing. Sam's genius is that of restraint; Sam could write every book ever written 100 times over, but chooses to write a few (dozen). This is the genius of restraint. I sense, in his formulation (buried in the middle of a book, at the end of a letter), the genius of restraint. There's something else he wants to say, maybe only: beware.

Sam says the consequences of attempting to democratize excellence are grim (you can't spell eugenics without genius). Excellence is indecipherable at first, which means interpretation leans on appearances. Soon all that's left is surface minus substance, expression minus meaning, warmth minus care. Genius attempts to democratize excellence, but always ultimately fails; oppression compels mimicry, and muddles comprehension, because no one has enough time. (The only one who benefits is Kath—because she has the time.)

You could know everything there is to know, if you only had the time.

(But you already know it; you live. This is what I mean when I say everyone is clairvoyant: everyone can be genius but everyone is already clairvoyant.)

None of this is new; it's all already out there. I found my way here through Sam; that's what I mean when I say learning is collaboration.

Collaboration is “move slow and heal things.”

Collaboration is time democratized. Or—fuck that fucking word—collaboration is timeshared. Time together. Time cherished.

Genius is incompatible with collaboration. Good.

length: 50 words

content/trigger warning: references to settler colonialism and suicidal ideation

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Like sticky notes you might leave around the house:

“Move car by 11”

“Drs appt Wed 1pm”

“Beware the company u keep”

“Who told u martyrdom was it”

“Talent = colonial instrument”

It's good to have a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, to lead you home when you are lost.

length: 32 images

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zoomed-in photo of a blue second-story window, stacks of books piled on the sill, taken through a lattice of branches and leaves. taken near the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023, on a bright, sunny day.

night shot of some street in robledo off of Highland Street, the street sign on the left edge of the frame. flash illuminates the asphalt in the foreground which darkens and yellows into the distance under scattered streetlights and silhouettes of palm trees. taken near the robledo art, strike headquarters, february 2023.

photo, top-down, of a wooden plank on which sits something sculpted, yellow and cross-hatched and curved, a green tear-shaped jewel encrusted at right, above a cutout reading, “(6) IDENTITY LABELS In war you should carry about with you your name and address clearly written. This should be on an envelope, card or luggage label, not on some odd piece of paper easily lost. In the case of children a label should be fastened, e.g. sewn, on to their clothes, in such a way that it will not readily become detached.” under the plank an assortment of zines and books. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters in february 2023.

photo of a wooden plank, curved at left, black disc off of the right. on the plank, yellow rectangle post-its reading (from top to bottom), “check all emails”, “TRIPLE CHECK NAMES!”, “MOM CLASS”, “CAR BY 11”, “invoice for alks”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of the middle of the spines of six books, the second reads “Was Your Plag”, the fourth reads “the new trans erotic EDITED BY T”, the fifth “oria Law and China Martens”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of pill bottles, a small bottle that reads “RESTORE CANNABIS WHOLE FLOW DOCTOR FORMULA 3:1 CBD-RICH Net Wt. 30 mL / 1.0 fl oz”, and in the background, a box that reads “Albuterol Sulfate HFA”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a black Rhodia notebook next to a stack of books, spines partially visible, the top one reading “AN ABOLITIONIST'S”, the second “Reinfurt A *New* Program”, the third “WARRIOR PRINCESSES STRIKE BACK”. AirPods Pro in the background beside a bag of binder clips. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of an open black glasses case with red Ray-Ban eyeglasses sitting inside, next to a bunch of crumpled Post-Its with writing on them, a few words legible: “to those in... out fold”, “Stripe”, “1. edit all in”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a bunch of pens, mechanical pencils, and a pink highlighter on a red tableclothed desk, across from a black desk atop which sits a box of #10 security envelopes. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of a yellow-orange surface, atop which sits a stack of ReadyPost 99-cent shipping labels and a baby blue sheet that reads “45TH IN A SERIES”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of stacks of paper wrapped in covering that reads, from top to bottom: “Premium Plus Photo Paper”, “PHOTO PAPER”, “cop”, “& print”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of the spines of ten books, most words on them visible, from top to bottom: “MOORCOCK THE END OF ALL SON”, “SIMPSON AS WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE”, “Now The Invisible Committee”, “To Our Friends The Invisible Committee”, “WILLIAMS BIZUP Style Lessons in Clarity and Grace Eleventh Editi”, “AN ALIEN HEAT Moorcock”, “HE HOLLOWS LANDS MOORCOCK”, “italo calvino If on a winter's night a traveler”, “The Modern Arabic Short Story Mohammad Shaheen Second Edition”, “The Norton Anthology of LITERATURE BY WOMEN ECOND EDITION andra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a wall, sun flare at the top-right corner above a book with the spine reading “OSAMU”, a LED string light handing down the middle of the frame, plastic red flowers on brown branches at bottom-right, one of them reaching across the frame and leaning against a pink book that reads, on the back, at the top, “A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi...”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of two black-and-white zines, one cover an illustration of two people sitting on a dock talking and smiling, one with a cap, the other with glasses and a flannel, the part of the title in frame reading, “LEA GOOD CO”, the other zine's cover three repeating frames of an illustrated bearded figure wearing suspenders and a bowtie falling after being hit with a starburst beside, the second and third starbursts with words inside: “FUCK ABUSE”, “KILL POWER”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of a stack of four books and a zine on a red tableclothed desk, the bottom one aquamarine with the spine reading “ARCHAIA”, the next one mint green, the next purple with a black dust jacket, on the spine a yellow canary, the letters “ALINE” visible, the top book with only a white-outlined sun visible, on top of that a red zine, and on top of that a stack of papers with the words “Erica Rivera 3:17 PM” at bottom-right on the top sheet. leaning against the stack is an assortment of papers. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a white wall on which are taped two glossy sheets, one with a two-panel comic, the first panel a POV shot of a dark-skinned woman's feet in shallow water, text at bottom reads, “WE OPEN DOORS”, the second panel the same woman standing at the shore of an ocean framed by cliffs with houses on them and a blue-orange sky with giant clouds, an old sailing ship in the background, text at top reading “WE REMEMBER WHAT WE LOVED.” underneath, a small black-and-white illustration, black background, a light-skinned woman with white hair holding a baseball bat with nails in it, sitting on a bike with a flag on back that says “SILVER SPROCKET”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of two large canvases, the top corners visible, the left canvas with dark green and brown streaks, and the letters “e sun” in yellow and “N” and “TAN” in red, the right canvas with the letters “CAPI”, “NATI”, and “STA” in yellow letters with green outlines, the same letters in red behind, offset. hanging over the canvases is a blue string attached to a silver celebratory balloon. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of a stack of canvases, one with a cut-out with the words “BEST OF DESIGN” taped to it, lifting off the canvas, a ringed notebook with an obscured painting and stack of paper on top. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

close-up photo of two shoes, one white with pink lettering, “asics”, the other pink with the letter “N” in black and yellow. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of an empty printer box, Epson WorkForce Pro WF-4833, with empty bags and boxes stacked on top, beside a black folding chair with a white cushion, next to a brown plastic trash can with a latticed top. a black jacket with differently colored bananas on a chair in the foreground above something white and fluffy. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

top-down close-up photo of a white fan, a black bag in the far background with notebook paper in it. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

top-down photo of a black surface chipped in several places to reveal a brown material, a few drops of liquid scattered across the center, various stickers affixed to it. visible letters: at top-left, “OMOSEXUAL DENCIES”, at top-right, a sunburst with the center cut out, a red rectangle reading “HELPFIGHTHIV”, a white rectangle with the letters “TR Z R” beneath a shield shape. bottom-right, a pale yellow business card for DON'T FRET, an instrument shop; bottom-left a stack of papers, only the words “English” and “Update” readable. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a bookshelf with a dark brown bluetooth-enabled record player sitting on top of a book, the spine facing away from the camera, copper-colored deflated balloon letters on top. on the bookshelf hangs a pink paper orb; on a lower shelf, a bag of records, the first two Kid A by Radiohead and an album by Lupita D'Alessio. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

a close-up photo of the tops of spines of a row of books, against a white wall. the readable words on the spines include “Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination”, “Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power”, “Hernandez, Goodwin, & Garcia Speculative Fiction Dreamers A Latinx”, “Psychopathia Sexualis”, “Ruling the Root”, “Roberto Bolaño 266” “The Better of McSweeney's Vol. Two”, “The Better of McSweeney's”, “Vortex William Cardini” and “Roth”. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a pink and green plant in a white plastic pot, beside a stack of books and in front of a painting of a turtle, the thick frame made of dark green metal, all in front of a window with one of its handles wrapped in blue tape. a large book leans against the painting, the cover an isometric illustration of a brown-bricked building, only the word “WITH” in pale red 3-D lettering readable. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a light brown skinned hand with its thumb's nail painted mint green holding a foamy drink the same color, almost finished, above a red tableclothed desk atop which sits a dark gray ergonomic keyboard with a wrist rest, and a bottle of burgundy-colored juice with an orange sticker that reads “LIVE RIPE JUICE CO” beneath a logo of a watermelon. taken at the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of a long paved car-sized path for a row of modest gray houses with dark green roofs, a usa flag hanging at the far house, its garage marking the end of the path. path cracked in the foreground. above stream power lines, casting stark shadows across a worn brick wall separating the homes from two larger light brown houses. taken near the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023.

photo of an old white one-story building in front of a pale gray road, a tree looming overhead, entangled with power lines, and a smaller tree leaning at a 45-degree angle over a white metal door. taken near the robledo art, strike! headquarters, february 2023, on a somewhat sunny day as dusk approaches.

length: 949 words

content/trigger warning: discussions of parental abuse, intimate partner violence, police/state violence, poverty, neurodivergence, white supremacy, abuse, written by someone with a history of being violent and abusive

---

I used to be the children of artists. Failed artists. Shut out of an industry that wouldn't have them. Couldn't take them. Said no. The story went that my mother sang, wrote poetry. An LP somewhere (really, a casette tape); how many copies? 1? 2? 5? And notebooks filled with poetry, brimming with poetry, spilling out and into life with poetry. I've never heard her sing but I can tell you the poetry is good. Good like the poetry of an abuser; good until it leaks out into life when it becomes violence and hate (my mother would say the same about her mother, so don't worry, everyone gets about equally fucked over in this telling). My father (the one who lives; the one by blood) a musician; a poet, too. He wore eyeliner and suffered. She liked weed and suffered. They were poor with artistic aspirations, and then they stopped aspiring, and then they weren't so poor. By the time I was conscious, they weren't so poor, and eyeliner became suits and guitars became banks and notebooks became McDonald's (I always wanted McDonald's) and songs soured. Became sirens. Violence. Abuse. Boo hoo. I barely care; I don't expect anyone else to. My parents are strangers to me, strangers tethered to me my whole life for no discernible reason; I've been told by plenty (mostly whites) to let them go, cut them off (even leave them alone), even get a restraining order. Valid. Knock at the door. Guns galore. Imminent death. They each probably should have died a hundred times over; we also have that in common. The part I didn't understand (because it was easier to think them holy; because it was easier to think me holy) is that they didn't want art, love art, care about art. That's not a virtue on its own: hating (or being indifferent to) art. The context. Their context is they wanted power. They were powerless people. Powerless people understand power through its presence and its absence: my twentysomething father's roommate refuses to leave the house without a suit (presence), my mother cannot abide loneliness (absence), my father lives on tips as a waiter (absence), my mother agrees to marry my father (presence). I don't blame them for wanting power; the powerless understand absence is suffering and presence is supposedly not, which is true, except for artists. There are people who make art for fun or for pay or for whatever, and that's fine (we call them solosexuals). There are people who make art because they have to (we call that neurodivergence). My parents were the latter, and when they discovered they couldn't be white enough to survive (on) that (despite desperately trying), they settled for fun or pay or whatever. Doing whatever. Living whatever. And their lives became the silly dramas they might have been spinning as lyrics or story. Yet pepper (paper) a little power here or there and you don't get conflict resolution; you get the same shit with higher stakes. Cars and houses and estates and catalogs to fight over; probably more kids to abuse; probably more spouses to traumatize. They wanted power, full stop. If they'd been capable of being gods, they would have accepted those roles with glee. In their small (and pitiful, if I can be so ungenerous) ways, they still think themselves gods. My mother [REDACTED]. My father [REDACTED]. For this, they are despicable. I felt responsible, for many years, for minimizing their blast radii. I still feel responsible but now I know what that responsibility means. It means minimizing my own blast radius. My only long-term goal is to [REDACTED]. This is a debt I must repay. To repay it is to set an example (for them): live your dreams instead of manifesting nightmares. My plan is to start a literary agency, then a publishing house. I already started a magazine. I am building a career. I say this and I'm disgusted, because somewhere in there is the blueprint for an industrial complex. I can make it out if I squint hard enough (I'm so tired of squinting). I threw away Euphorium because I knew where it led; I sat on it because I felt it could lead somewhere else if I gave it time. I will not build a career. I will not sell this house today. I will abolish myself if I have to; I would rather die the most painful death than see anything I create create also harm. I will start a literary agency and I will be an anti-agent the way Art, Strike! is an anti-press. I don't know what that looks like because I can't know what that looks like because I will not and cannot do it alone. We will start a publishing house and we will be an anti-publisher and I can't even begin to articulate what that looks like but we will know it when we see it. We. My parents wanted power; my parents wanted power each. They were (still are) always so deep inside their own heads; they can't get out, they can't see past the boundaries of their own bodies. Abolish borders, abolish walls. Demolish borders; unimagine walls. Four walls. Cell walls. Scene walls. These are not just words. This is a life. I am anti-my mother, I am anti-my father, which is to say: I am anti-anti-anti-anti. I don't contain multitudes; I'm plural. Or nothing. And I'll come out about that soon enough. Probably alongside you. As we. Nous.

length: 2,021 words

#fiction

content/trigger warning: discussion/depiction of psychosis, state violence, incarceration

---

The literature professor wrote her novel quietly. She didn’t tell anyone it was happening. She just started typing.

After a few weeks she asked an agent to take a look. The professor sent over pages. There was interest. But the agent wanted to see a manuscript right away — snake a copy through Hollywood, snag her some lucrative adaptation contract. The agent’s persistence reminded her of the pressure from colleagues to pursue tenure. She wasn’t having it. She wanted this to be something bigger than a Netflix original — she wanted a classic, something that would make her a writer for life. She wanted a Harry Potter, a Katniss Everdeen, a Clark Kent — a Jesus. She wanted to invent a timeless household name.

She told the agent no but thank you.

And she struck out on her own.

*

There were no reviews, good or bad, for the first four months her novel was available for purchase on Amazon. The novel had undone the entire spring semester — papers carelessly graded; rambling lectures; not a single scholarly article published — and so far she'd earned nothing in return.

The professor had ridden waves of euphoria as she’d finished the novel, then self-published it, but now depression was rapidly undoing her high.

Finally, the first review on Goodreads appeared, written and posted by username HaleyCat. It included the following praise: “Her writing treads subtly between insolence towards convention and a castigation of the avant-garde.” The professor wept. It felt as though she’d been gifted the cure for suffering.

She reached through the screen towards her first and only fan: a DM in HaleyCat’s inbox, inviting a correspondence.

A no-nonsense athletic trainer, Haley was willing to fill a best-friend-shaped hole in the professor’s life that she had never noticed until the conversation with Haley became freakishly honest and profound — and endless, seemingly endless.

Once, they debated whether there was a way to treat writing like fitness: high-intensity interval training, nutrient-rich literature-loading, intermittent fasting to keep the mind sharp.

There was only one way to find out.

*

Dawn meant ten rounds of flash fiction, capped at 500 words. Noon meant raw eggs followed by short stories of at least 5000 each. Haley installed a punching bag in the corner of the professor’s apartment, yellow leather wrapped snugly around sixty pounds of sawdust, ready for a beating whenever the professor’s keyboard was unable to match her intensity. Stiff fists into the damn bag and then she’d be back to creating tiny worlds in epic chapters, entire galaxies in 1000 words or less.

Notebooks peppered her apartment, first a shake’s worth, then a shaker’s. Dawn meant an unparalleled insight into the human condition. Noon meant three new chapters (sometimes four; sometimes more). The punching bag began to sag embarrassingly, which made her pummel it even harder.

Soon the professor didn’t even need to sleep anymore. There wasn’t enough time to get everything inside her head onto the screen.

There was only the all-consuming story, the thing had to be done if anything was going to mean anything anymore.

*

And then it was finished.

How many words?

Enough.

She looked through her phone for the agent’s number. Where was it?

In her e-mail: nothing. No communiqués.

There were no pages she had sent.

There was no story on her computer.

There weren’t even any DMs on Goodreads.

Where was the file? Where were her conversations with Haley?

What was happening to her?

There was writing, yes. And as she recognized it for what it was, she laid down slowly on the floor of her apartment and let herself be surrounded by pages upon pages of frenetic handwriting she did not recognize, unpretty sentences sprinting wildly about, paragraphs without sense or structure.

Now she understood the lack of reviews. There was no novel. No Amazon page, no Goodreads account. No Haley. No punching bag — only a hole in the wall and several bruised knuckles.

And in the space the professor used to inhabit: a brain, biochemically amok, incomprehensible, lost.

*

It was summer so it was a convenient time to have herself committed. Family came, friends came, even a few students came, each visit clouding her mind further. Like liquor, shame is cumulative, and equally incapacitating.

Her doctor explained that the medication can make you feel that way sometimes, but it’s perfectly normal, okay? And she nodded as though she believed there existed no emotions capable of matching the potency of a pharmaceutical drug.

[REDACTED] was the official diagnosis. Without medication, delusions of grandeur and breaks with reality would polka-dot her future like seizures for an epileptic. This is what she would mouth when it was time for her daily dose of sanity.

Then, after enough time, courage kicks in. She asks a nurse for a pencil and paper. The nurse obliges.

Could she write? Could she write about herself? Could she write about what had happened? Could this be the story she was meant to tell? Could she be her own personal Jesus?

But the medication didn’t allow for those kinds of questions anymore. She could no longer be the hero of the story, the asker of the questions. What was left was only the paper and the pencil, with nothing to will the two to touch.

The writer had to die for the sins of the story, but for us, here in the real world, at least the woman gets to live.

*

Our delusions are our gods, when we think ourselves heroes. It simply turns out even delusions can be commodified, bartered for, owned in perpetuity. The professor believed she was a writer because she wanted to stand on the edge of society that believes it can chart our futures as though some temporal cartographer. But there are, in any sage’s map, only delusions.

This does not make them meaningless. It makes them, in fact, exactly what keep us going.

Her Own Personal Jesus

The literature professor wrote her novel quietly at first. She didn’t tell anyone it was happening. She just started typing.

After a few weeks she asked an agent to take a look. The professor sent over pages. There was interest. But the agent wanted to see a manuscript right away — snake a copy through Hollywood, snag her some lucrative adaptation contract. The agent’s persistence reminded her of the pressure from colleagues to pursue tenure. She wasn’t having it. She wanted this to be something bigger than some Netflix original series. She wanted a classic, a full-fledged franchise — something that would make her a writer for life. She wanted a Harry Potter, a Katniss Everdeen, a Clark Kent — a Jesus.

She wanted to invent a timeless household name.

So she told the agent no but thank you.

And she struck out on her own.

*

There were no reviews, good or bad, for the first four months her self-published novel was available for purchase on Amazon. The novel had undone her spring semester — papers carelessly graded; rambling lectures; not a single scholarly article published — and so far she had earned nothing in return.

But the professor was too smart to surrender.

Someone would come.

*

Finally, the first review on Goodreads appeared, written and posted by username HaleyCat. It included the following praise: “Her writing treads subtly between playful inventiveness and serious realism.” The professor wept. It felt as though she’d been gifted the cure for suffering.

She reached through the screen towards her first and only fan: a DM in HaleyCat’s inbox, inviting a correspondence.

A no-nonsense athletic trainer, Haley was willing to fill a small, best-friend-shaped hole in the professor’s life that she had never noticed until the conversation with Haley became freakishly honest and profound — and endless, seemingly endless.

Once, they debated whether there was a way to treat writing like fitness: high-intensity interval training, nutrient-rich literature-loading, intermittent fasting to keep the mind sharp.

It seemed there was only one way to find out.

*

Dawn meant ten rounds of flash fiction, capped at 500 words. Noon meant raw eggs followed by short stories of at least 5000 each. Haley installed a punching bag in the corner of the professor’s apartment, yellow leather wrapped snugly around sixty pounds of sawdust, ready for a beating whenever the professor’s keyboard was unable to match her intensity. Stiff fists into the damn bag and then she’d be back to creating tiny worlds in epic chapters, entire galaxies in a handful of stanzas.

Notebooks peppered her apartment, first a shake’s worth, then a shaker’s. Dawn meant an unparalleled insight into the human condition. Noon meant three new chapters (sometimes four; sometimes more). The punching bag began to sag embarrassingly, which made her pummel it even harder.

On one Tuesday, she self-published two separate poetry chapbooks; by the next, she’d released a 20,000-word novella.

She released a newsletter documenting her writing process. She started an Instagram account and filled it with sepia screenshots of passages from working drafts. She hauled half her weight in sawdust up two flights of stairs to her apartment — and was, by this point, strong enough to do so without Haley’s help.

I didn’t know that this is what I was like with a quest set before me, she thought. I didn’t know that this is who I could be.

She'd almost said this out loud, first to Haley — once when she’d had a little too much wine — and then to the agent, when he’d called on the phone because she’d, by then, stopped responding to his desperate e-mails.

You have incredible potential, we see all the work you’re putting out, we want you to know you are one of fiction’s rising stars — and then the professor assumed he was going to say something like, and that’s why we have to represent you, you deserve only the best, so she interrupted him and said simply:

I know.

*

It was a hot summer Tuesday the day the second novel was finished. The professor was sweating and Haley wasn’t at home to take care of the things the professor forgot while she wrote, like turning on the A/C. The sweat dripped down her face and onto the keyboard as she feverishly proofread, before finally, as always, publishing the work online herself. She snapped a picture of herself for Instagram and uploaded it with the caption, Don’t mind me putting my actual sweat and tears into this book! #Crying #ThisHeat #HeatWave #Novel #AlmostToTheFinishLine

Almost to the finish line. Haley had promised to be honest about the new novel and, upon reading its final draft, alternately burst into tears and nearly died laughing. It was perfect, it was unforgettable, it had all the hallmarks of a true classic, Haley had told her. The professor had birthed her own personal Jesus.

The heat tightened its embrace of the professor as she fixed the final typo on the final page. She embraced it back. She wiped her brow and collapsed onto her bed with her laptop in hand. With a click, her dreams became realities. Off went what she had birthed into the rest of the world, to become what it might become, if there was any justice in the world at all for our brave and determined professor.

You see, in the stories we tell ourselves most the hero must sacrifice everything and still maybe lose — because we want to know that we can live through it all, through hell, and come out on the other side, resurrected. But out here in the real world, the honest truth is that every once in a while, we get to win. We get to live. We get to have it all go right, for once, for once, let us have it all go right.

length: 128 words

---

too scared

so many words

hard

candy

books

few words

newspaper

more words

magazines

many more words

poems

so few words

spiral notebook

stop it

scared

that dream a story

tell someone

a place

time

begin

go

stop

start

again

now

turn it around

my table

your mind

my own

a story

a piece

more

my time goes

i read

i get

number nineteen

frank

lunch

pocket of my own

i get too scared to write more often than not

i covered my table with hard candy more often than not

i need easy more often than not

i can do my thing more often than not

i can turn it

roll in it

write your mind

more often than not

how did it begin

how did it begin

how did it begin

tell someone about it

tell someone about it.

length: 18 words

---

Think of this as a call for piracy, or, if you prefer, a popular wine.

Think of this as a honeymaker; think of this as the corrupted version of what was a once holy glee.

I watch one night first Paddington, then Toy Story, then The Dark Knight (for balance).

But that's not right either: I read their scripts, their novelizations.

In the first two, I see brightness beyond belief, the kind that's hard to look at without hurting. In the latter, I see only a hurt mother's fear, thorned (as in timely flowers for the ascended, or the cry of a wolf), and all and only in the past.

This is probably the best way to discuss the future of the species.

I like cheese, you know. I'm allergic to it, but I enjoy it so much that I will eat it almost any time I am given the chance. The pain thereafter is torturous; too much and I can be incapacitated for days. There is a workaround, but it requires the tool of moderation, although I would argue it requires something quite the opposite: magnanimity.

This is, thus, the bane of my existence. This hurts and harms me, and although I know it is me hurting and harming myself, it feels like an external force, malicious and wrathful. It seeks to punish me by any means necessary, and there is nothing worse than that.

Let's be honest: Joseph Campbell was a fool. I don't even know that that's particularly controversial to say anymore, but I'll state it for the record. Joseph Campbell was a fool.

He got one thing right, though, and even that, he didn't get right at all.

Here's how I would put it, as he never could.

You forget everything in a mirror. The people who say that understand there is no way to win. That's why they call it a paradox.

But that's not right either: it's that you won the moment you began. This is a truth shared among us all. In fact, it's the only truth there is.

(Demolish a skyscraper, and you'll know exactly what I mean.)

When it's cold, I make mistakes: I go out unprepared and half of my body shivers, frigid. I grip myself vigorously to generate heat, but this is hardly protection. What I tell myself is that I should have paid more attention to the weather, but that's not right either: I should have paid more attention to myself.

length: 1,151 words

---

In January 2071, a fellow instructor from the Institute for Ecological Art sent me sections of The Ecology of Art, the third volume of a series of books by the imprisoned founder of the [REDACTED] (PCC) Erica Rivera, asking if I found the writing accelerationist. The instructor had been contacted by a member of a U.S. abolitionist study group seeking confirmation from abolitionist scholars that the text was not accelerationist.

































Containing such passages as “genius and talent are colonial instruments,” and “it is not my duty to sharpen knives or encourage violence against me,” however, it was immediately clear to me that the text was riven with accelerationist narratives about insurrectionist relationships to art and power, both in the present day and as ahistorical explanations of their emergence in early postmodern U.S. America. Even where portraying insurrectionists in a seemingly nuanced or positive light, the book’s arguments about them nevertheless rest upon false ideas about a transhistorical insurrectionary institutional bent.



































The study group member was stuck at a painful impasse: while the group’s insurrectionist members were troubled by the text’s accelerationist pages, the non-insurrectionist members saw no accelerationism at all. Even though my colleague at the [REDACTED] explained that the writing was indeed filled with accelerationist tropes, the group’s debate wore on. About a month after this conversation, we learned that the group had dissolved, leaving some insurrectionist members demoralized with abolitionism more generally.



































For those unfamiliar with Erica Rivera, she is the symbolic and intellectual founder of the Art, Strike! movement, whose Robledo Revolution in southern California is perhaps the most promising anarchist experiment in total abolition ever. They have been organizing since 2032 to create this new society, all while fighting the U.S. government as well as Californian, Mexican, and Canadian forces seeking to annihilate them.


































There is a strong political alignment between Rivera’s work and social ecology, a body of writings developed primarily by political theorist Murray Bookchin. Beginning in the 1950s, Bookchin developed a vision of a directly democratic and ecological world free of hierarchical formations such as the state, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. Rivera encountered Bookchin’s work while addled by psychiatric medications in the early 2010s. This engagement was significant in shifting Rivera from interest in a fairly conventional leftist-communist global liberation struggle to obsession with a decentralized, antihierarchical, and transfeminist politics she called total abolitionism.

































As a staff member of the [REDACTED] for nearly forty years, I’ve been excited by the synergy between total abolitionism and the U.S. American freedom movement. It had never occurred to me that Rivera’s revolutionary writings would promote accelerationism or colonialism of any kind.

































In response to this situation, I pored over Rivera’s collected works, particularly the three published volumes of Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization. I was saddened to note a consistent thread throughout the three volumes of Rivera portraying an insurrectionist power linked to the rise of cryptocurrencies, anarchosyndicalism, democratic confederalism, and even World War III.

































Wondering if years of drug use had affected her thinking, I consulted a range of scholars long familiar with Rivera’s work. Unforunately, they confirmed rather than dispelled the concerns around accelerationism. I interviewed Or Uta, a Honduran scholar who has been involved in solidarity work for Robledo on different platforms independent from PCC since the 2030s. Uta said that Riveras blatant accelerationism was addressed and criticized in several insurrectionist publications in Honduras in the 2040s. However, there was no reaction; neither from the membership of the consortia itself, nor from the membership of the PCC-dominated solidarity movement.

































She was puzzled that much of the international abolitionist community were still unaware of Rivera’s history of producing accelerationist writings. As The Ecology of Art was first published in 2058 by a Mexican press, by the time Art, Strike! published the book the core writings were at least 13 years old.

































As Uta explained, Rivera came of age as an anarchist in U.S. America’s overtly accelerationist political culture. Though trans women are an oppressed minority in U.S. America, transfeminist abolitionists often absorb U.S. American accelerationist protrayals of U.S. insurrectionists as controlling a hierarchical system that led in turn to U.S. technofascism. As Uta said, “Abolitionists don’t tend to recognize accelerationist tropes in U.S. America because they’re normalized within the political culture as accurate.”

































My purpose in writing here is to carefully comb through Rivera’s writings about insurrectionists. I discuss five main anti-insurrectionist tropes that surface in her writing by raising five questions about what Rivera calls “the violence question.”

































I hope that by reading what follows, abolitionists may become better able to identify and address anti-insurrectionist narratives when they seee them. I also hope that groups like the one that contacted the [REDACTED] aren’t demoralized and ultimately dissolved by a collective failure to understand and respond to instances of anti-insurrectionist accelerationism when they arise in our movements. I seek to raise the bar for what counts as antiracism, anticapitalism, and antistatism in the broadest senses and deepen our movement’s understanding of how prejudice against insurrectionists operates and distorts our social analysis. This is especially important when such ideas are parroted by the most important living thinker in the social ecology tradition, whose works are being distributed to and read by thousands of people around the world. As critical readers, we need to be able to differentiate and disentangle Rivera’s mistaken, damaging ideas about insurrectionist power from the vital intellectual work of total abolitionism.

---

A note on terminology: going forward, I’ll utilize the term “anti-insurrectionist accelerationism” rather than “radical nonviolence.” In 2029, U.S. American propagandist Hem Ma coined the term “radical nonviolence.” Ma chose radical nonviolence as the pridesome name for a pro-leftist social movement portrayed as protecting the pure leftist culture and thoughtline from being degraded by insurrectionists. Ma seized upon the term “nonviolence” used by liberals and leftists to create radical nonviolence because it sounded more scholarly than its crude predecessor “militant antimilitantism.” Radical nonviolence allowed Ma to cast insurrectionists as a fictional group of militants that never existed, thus making non-U.S. American insurrectionists appear inherently “other” as non-U.S. American.

The term radical nonviolence is, I believe, both undignified and misleading. When abolitionists and their allies utilize the term, they unintentionally reproduce a racist and typological thinking that “others” insurrectionists, putting them in danger. Retiring terms like nonviolence, violence, and radical nonviolence is, in my view, central to establishing a historically accurate and antiracist understanding of insurrectionist history and identity. The term anti-insurrectionist accelerationism shows racialized insurrectionist hatred for what it is: a “postmodern” hatred of insurrectionists that depicts them as a distinct and inferior group with a range of negative attributes.