Month: March 2025

It’s known that there was a moment on move-in weekend in August 1994 when I turned from 21st Avenue onto Wedgewood Avenue in Hillsboro Village, and before turning onto 18th to my new apartment, looked past Belmont Mansion and suddenly had the premonition “I’m never going to know what’s on the other side of that hill.” And sure enough, when I left for the last time, it was under a cloud and with the Oxford-style consolation MA instead of the PhD I’d been accepted to earn. My career as I had known it was over. There was no idea what might be coming next.

But the thing I also remember is the end of that first year, May 1995. I remember hearing the Cranberries singing on Lightning 100 on my way down Blakemore. “Ode To My Family” was a different song before I was Irish, when my parents were both alive and I hadn’t been alienated from my relatives, before the blindside letter that summer that would be the warning shot for the future. It sounded like the end of the movie. Like I’d battled through and finally had that fifth year of college in a super-senior setting where I finally had what I’d dreamed of: friends, football, walkable campus with stuff to do, Internet access, a new city with new radio stations and new TV channels and new places to learn. In retrospect, it was the end of one movie, I just didn’t realize it.

And last weekend, for the first time since before I was in high school, I went to Nashville and didn’t set foot on campus once.

I was busy. I was spending time with the last blood family I have before they make the escape I wish I could. We went out to dinner like in days of yore: four adults in a cool place enjoying the comfort of company that knows its history together. We saw friends we rarely get to see. And I saw a city that is a funhouse mirror of what it was thirty years ago, one that steered hard into becoming Baptist Vegas and remade itself into the cultural capital of White America. Nashville was always a blue dot sort of town, but when your business is hospitality for the kind of people who think having to see brown people is woke, it’s hard to see it working out as a retirement option.

I never wanted to need a blue dot. I just wanted to be. There is another edit where I stay in Nashville, or Birmingham, or find myself in New Orleans or something, and have the crew of people around me that makes it possible to survive or even thrive. But everyone in high school moved away, and there was no one there in college or by the time I crashed out of Vandy, and as I’ve said so often of Birmingham, I didn’t have twenty years to wait.

I don’t know what happens next. The world is in far worse shape than it was in 1995, or 1997, or any of the other times in my life where I didn’t know what happens next. It’s impossible to think about a future further away than June right now, and retirement feels like it’s off the cards without moving somewhere else. And then where do you move where you don’t need a dot, or can find the people who can make you one at age 60 or worse?

The dream is being pared down to what is really important. We’re inching our way down Maslow’s pyramid. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, but that’s the course we were put on 25 years ago by people who assumed things would just work out and the floor couldn’t collapse. Now when people say it’s going to be okay, I have two questions:

when? And how?

A series of circumstances forced me to create a new user account for myself on my work laptop, and in the course of trying to replicate my data, I inadvertently loaded my browser with all my old bookmarks going back to around 2007 and running through 2011 or so. So I’ve gotten lost trying to look through them lately.

The first thing that stands out is that 90% of them are dead links. Blogs, vendors, just the passage of time. Links to shows on Virgin Radio, or the Sports Junkies, or old Gawker Media articles are all 404s at best. More frequently, there’s a warning because the bookmarked domain now redirected to a Chinese gambling site or a domain reseller. So in a lot of ways, all that remains is the stored page title in the list.

Going through and looking at the topics from days gone by, it’s not hard to tell what had my interest: Android devices (still unsure who was going to prevail), steampunk (as an aesthetic generally), Maker Faire and its adjacents, things of interest in San Francisco, the netbook and its possibilities…it was a time when I was still interested in technology writ large, an era when the same five companies didn’t have everything in the world by the nuts. New players could still emerge, things like Foursquare or Instagram could catch fire and run wild without the presumption that they would be immediately eaten, smartphone time was just arriving – the confluence of finding out what was possible with a camera, a GPS and an internet connection all in your pocket with a 4-inch screen.

But there were other things there too. American-made clothing and footwear, the beginnings of what would eventually take over my entire wardrobe. Two different links to the Wikipedia article on the Episcopal Church, part of that first fumbling exploration that eventually led to 2023. And looming through all of it, articles and commentary on the Tea Party and the increasing Confederate radicalization of the Republican Party. Which, of course, went on to bear toxic fruit in the years to come. But it’s not like anyone can plausibly claim no one saw it coming or what the risk was.

It was a different era. There was still possibility. It still felt like the future could somehow get better. It certainly didn’t feel like the world was a decade away from going to the point of no return.

But what really stands out are the blogs. Mostly untouched for fifteen years or so. Personal blogs from friends who moved away, who gave them up, who aren’t even friends anymore in some cases. There was a whole life there, and it feels like William Gibson’s remark about being the last survivor of Atlantis: there is a whole world there and no one knows.

Things foundered and died, or turned to slop and silage. Vox, the first one. LiveJournal and Tumblr. Yahoo and ultimately Twitter. Gawker Media in its necessary form, especially Deadspin and Valleywag. Facebook choked social networking and blogging to death and became the AOL of the 21st century. Twitter became a symbiote that poisoned journalism to death. Amazon became yuppie Wal-Mart. Microsoft crumbled into a business than made the stuff you use at work with a gaming console as a side hustle. Google…Google became a tax on everything, the boss you had to pay a vig to if you wanted to be known or found by anyone else. And Apple was content to sit back and make the finest tools for infecting yourself.

The greatest scam Silicon Valley ever pulled was convincing the Obama administration that just because some of them were gay, they were fundamentally Democrats. When in fact the VC culture of libertarian greed was underpinning the whole thing and eventually empowered the worst people in the world, because they weren’t taxed into submission when we had the chance. Tech convinced us that Uber wasn’t a cab company, that AirBnB wasn’t an unlicensed hotelier, that Facebook wasn’t an advertising company, and that apps meant you weren’t an employer, just matching people up as if DoorDash was actually Tinder.

The title of this blog is fitting. Gibson and Stephenson and Ridley Scott and all the others led me to believe that living in a corporatist cyberpunk dystopia would be a Hell of a lot cooler than it is.

I was misinformed.

It’s so fucking dumb. It’s the inevitable result of impeachments without conviction, and filibuster without having to show up, and blocking appointments without consequence – the MAGA movement has decided that since nothing has consequences, rules and laws mean nothing. We’ve basically fed Article I of the Constitution into a chipper shredder and allowed the President to allow a drug-addled shaved monkey billionaire to stage a leveraged buyout of the federal government.

It’s not even a proper reduction in the size of government, executed by passing laws through a Congress that the GOP ostensibly controls. It’s more like going through a person and saying “you don’t need an appendix, you don’t need toes, you definitely don’t need TWO kidneys, look at all this small intestine, nobody needs a small AND a large intestine, it’s woke to give women separate holes for pooping AND giving birth when it’s all pushing stuff out” – there is absolutely no actual knowledge behind the decision-making.

The more frustrating bit is this: Trump got 49% of the vote. His margin of victory in the popular vote was smaller this time than the margin Hillary Clinton beat him by in 2016. And yet, the press treats this as the Mandate of Heaven and a sweeping triumph, and the Democrats flop around as if 48% of the electorate didn’t vote against this exact thing. The Democrats cannot muster a tenth of the pushback against Trump that the Republicans did against Obama in 2009, and that is an absolute disgrace. They need a wartime consigliere, too young to remember black and white TV, who has actually fought a competitive election since the invention of the World Wide Web and isn’t living in trauma of Reagan in 1984.

Democrats can’t fix this. They can’t even appreciably ameliorate this. What they can do is make sure everyone knows whose fault it is and give the appearance that they’re strewing glass in the path. They need to get on that right now, or find someone who will, because otherwise we are done for my lifetime.

If I could obtain a job and citizenship in some other EU-or-equivalent country right now, I’d be off like a shot. But that’s not on offer. After all those years, I’m back in Alabama without ever leaving California, and help isn’t coming.