HOW TO BE A SOCIALIST

SHIT IS REAL

More than anything else, it came as a harsh confirmation of the ethic that Lionel had always lived but never talked about…the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules. Like his Basque anarchist father in Chicago, he died without making much of a dent. I don’t even know where he’s buried, but what the hell? The important thing is where he lived.
—Hunter S. Thompson

At the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, protagonist Guy Montag comes to in the wilderness. He falls in with a gang of vagabonds, each with a literary work, tome and even author memorized. With the city leveled and “flat. . .a heap of baking-powder” before them, they start walking. They carry their essays and bible verses down the railroad tracks, past the silos, and toward the city to share what they’ve memorized with the book-less generations to come.

My search online for quotes I’ve memorized inevitably brings me back to Meta. I logged off for good in February, or so I’d thought, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t get sucked in, yea Zuckered—and find myself scrolling like a monkey until I can break from the hypnotizing technologies of our corporate curators. It breaks my heart that my heroes’ work should live in a digital wasteland alongside cultural appropriation and beneath a shakin’ ass. I shudder to think what’ll happen to their legacy in the hands of a bro-cum-brownshirt like Mark Zuckerberg, and last week zero of my students, from 10-14 years of age, could be dragged to the library at school.

I think people, it’s like they’re living in a movie. They just don’t think anything is real. But shit is real.
—Ian MacKaye

Social media is full of Chicken Littles and wannabe slobs like me, trying to get our arms around the extinction events of 2025 and gaming the algorithm to make some dollars by scaring the shit out of you. But there’s a bad side. I don’t want any part of the proxy activism and creepy surveillance, the brain-rot and narcissism overwrought of what Chris Baker calls “the outrage machine.” And I’ll be goddamned again if I find myself subsidizing a billionaire’s platform with my work, but unable to utilize it as an archive (lest I want to suffer the amateurization of everything and wade through wads of white people demurring I don’t know who needs to hear this but only talking to themselves).

The World's Largest Search Engine Doesn't Want You to Search

While searching for “The Ultimate Freelancer,” Hunter Thompson’s brilliant sendoff of Lionel Olay, I came across this Grade-A asshole peddling Gonzo memorabilia and platforming misogyny on Instagram. I told him how much Thompson would’ve hated him, and anyway how much I do, pulled The Great Shark Hunt off the shelf and Fahrenheit 451 while I was at it.

“And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark Age, when we might have to do the whole damn thing over again. But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.”
—Ray Bradbury

There is hope Good Subscriber, meager as it is, but there is no future. Why suffer the blue light of amateur hour when you can waft in bibliosmia, and sink into yourself, without having to say a word to anyone except your cat? This is Jim Trainer reporting that books are only inconvenient until all sources of information are a business or you need something heavy to bounce off the face of a Nazi.

Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne…