doomscroll

New Year's Doomscroll in Review

This edition is an end-of-year/new-year hodge podge. Before we can fully see off 2024 here's what occupied my feed between Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, or around there. Grab your Saturday cup of joe and scroll.

Yours Truly

Yours Truly

— 9 min read
New Year's Doomscroll in Review
The meme for 2025 landed early.

Otherwsie known as The week's doomscrolling in review: issue 7

Less boring ways of making new year's resolutions, which you can still do after New Year's Eve because there are no rules

Happy new year! May 2025 be good to you regardless of what the world does as we enter a period of declining stability and predictability. New Year's Resolutions are the optimist's approach to getting one's affairs in order. I've got mine, maybe you have your's, or you're still working on them. The classic mode is a straight list, but in the waning hours of 2024 I came across a few more creative approaches. If you're still figuring yours out it's not too late!

  1. Turn your resolutions into a Bingo Card. If you're an American or someone in the U.S., consider Jessica Wildfire's list of things to do before Trump takes office (Or as soon as you possibly can). Yes, he moves in by the 20th of this month, but it will take him some time to get a lot of things rolling. You'll need your survival plan in place.
  2. I got this next one from a Bluesky user. Instead of a list of resolutions to do, write a manifesto of what you believe in. This is more important than a task list, really. The times ahead will be fraught with moral challenges, ethical dilemmas and situations where we're asked to make increasingly worse Faustian bargains. Knowing what you stand for helps you decide where your red lines are. Don't be like the Biden Administration, it had no real red lines.
  3. Play some Russian Roulette with your life. Let your friends set your resolutions for you. Someone sent me Signal App creator Moxie Marlinspike's blog post on this approach (via Signal) and it was an entertaining read, maybe not for the faint of heart, though. This method is good, though, because there is always that thing we're avoiding but need to do, or would be good at doing, or need to at least challenge ourselves by trying it.

Recommendation for the week

There is not much inspiration in current events, so we have to grasp onto it wherever we can. I've been dipping into chapters of Permissionless by JA Westerberg this week. It's got an ambitious tagline: "A Manifesto for the Future of Everything." It's an online book for people who are looking for reasons to start the hard thing. That project or whatever you're told you can't do, you can do it. They're wrong. Is there a thing you want to make but feel like you need someone's stamp of approval to get started? You don't. You never did. A lot of the stuff we take for granted were developed by people who knew that simple truth.

Meanwhile, in Trumpland

We're just about a fortnight out from The Transition. We can laugh at MAGA types going to war with Elon (and Trump as well, it seems) in the H-1B visa debate over whether it's more important to be xenophobic nationalists or prioritise exploitative employment practices. Then there is Elon working on that 'free speech' cred by censoring fellow conservatives he disagrees with on X, or arbitrarily going to war with Wikipedia. These are fun side shows.

Or there are the turning of the screws, such as Scott Turner, Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who has described government assistance programs as "worse than slavery." There's also the ongoing attacks against affirmative action, Critical Race Theory curricula, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. We're being DDOSed with spoilers of the in-coming fuckery.

All that aside (and trigger warnings issued in advance) just read JoJoFromJerz' 'The Republican Party is a Russian nesting doll of rapists.' No need to understand the nuances or technical pieces of U.S government here, just a description of what this regime is based on what we know about many of men in it. "Their track record isn’t hidden," she writes, "it’s a chilling blueprint of what’s to come — a relentless onslaught against women’s autonomy, safety, and equality." Remember that when you want to chuckle at their lunacy, it's just a ridiculous tip of a horror show iceberg for a lot of people who aren't going to be laughing.

2024 was the year the world again accepted a genocide

Israel's war in Gaza began in October, 2023, but this was just the warm up. 2024 was the year the world watched an unfolding, increasingly sickening horror show that made it clear that Israel's war is with the population of Gaza, not just an operation to root out Hamas. It's featured civilian deaths in the tens of thousands and a systemic destruction of everything. It's maybe one of the most covered, videoed and photographed set of war crimes. we saw it daily across our social channels. And it was absorbed. If this shows anything, it's the frailty of 'awareness' when there is no political power. This wasn't a conflict, it was just carnage against a captive population. ICJ and ICC rulings came and went. Impunity prevailed.

The week's better coverage I came across

A de facto technology facilitated extermination project

Given the asymmetry and the fact that Gaza is an virtual open-air prison in which there is no escape for the vast majority of its 2 million inhabitants, we can't call this a war. It's an attack on captives. But it's also a laboratory for new military technology. "That battlefield of the future is here today," warned Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator in a video clip shared on Elon's hellsite X, formerly Twitter. "AI, automated weapons, robotics, drones everywhere in the sky the whole time: the way this war is being conducted should terrify everyone in terms of what the future — which is here today for Palestinians — looks like."

Joe Biden's legacy

Did you luck into being one of the people who had their college loans cancelled by the Biden White House? Good for you. I'm happy for you. I had to deal with college loan debt for many years and it was a real anchor. And I'd strap every single beneficiary of that policy back with their debt if it was between that and all those people — thousands of children included —killed by the weapons Biden constantly made available to Netanyahu. There is not a positive thing he did in office that balances that scale. Genocide is his uncomplicated legacy. This blog has few editorial policies, but 'fuck Joe Biden' is a key one.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.," retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick said in a November interview. "The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” This was part a tirade about Biden not doing enough, by the way. As much As Biden threw in with war criminals, they'll always want more. Trump's stance will be more boisterous for Israel to "get the job done" in Gaza, but essentially it will be continuity Biden. Anyway: From the week:

The end of the Assad regime

and now, a reason to be glad. Three good reads here. I did not imagine that 2024 would see the end of a 52-year-old hereditary dictatorship, and end of one of the most brutal regimes in the region. Things can change, and they will. Regimes relying on foreign powers to prop them up are always on a timer.

"In Damascus, I watched as people picked kumquats off trees in the front garden of a villa that used to belong to Assad and devoured the fruit. Just a couple of days ago, this property had been off limits to the common Syrian. Now, dozens toured the garden and extravagant interior with their families, filming the scenes on their phones or video-calling their relatives abroad."

And now, the trash fire...

My tech feed doomscroll highlights are here. Unplug all the things and throw them into the sea. If there is a common thread, it's, mostly, a disdain for the user: you and me. "You’re battered by the Rot Economy, writes Ed Zitron, "and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness."

The headlines...

In no particular order

Not everything fits into a category. Or it's a category of 1. These are the week's good reads on bad situations.

"Winter turns nature skeletal. I am moved by what remains of the trees, how they outlast time and changing conditions. That’s something us folks confined here can relate to."

Reading this week

Buy from an independent bookshop.

Just two days in and about 50% of the way through Talia Lavin's excellent look at how the Christian far-right has moved from the fringes to centres of power in the U.S. These are the people I've always just called 'an especially creepy people' but they're really much more than that, they're a political force that's increasingly calling the shots in American politics, and yet still fundementally a collection of doomsday cults that each have their own bastardised their own versions of biblical interpretations. If you want some spoiler of what the next four years may have in store, this is one to pick up.

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