...In the last few months, I’ve been thinking more about an under-specified sense that’s hard to pinpoint and put into words. It’s a feeling, something beyond the clarity of rational apprehension. It’s a feeling that something is off. That feeling is insecurity... 

We are now living at a time of prolonged and overlapping crises at home and abroad, domestic and geopolitical. The pandemic, climate change, war, unaffordability, and runaway housing costs meet us at every turn — them and other challenges, too. And we’ve buried our best hope, collective action through state intervention. We’ve landed on a dangerous island and burned our ships. 

It’s hard to imagine a time in the foreseeable future where things are going to be better. The affordability crisis will linger. So will the housing crisis. Covid-19 is surging. Climate change will continue to produce extreme weather, crop failure, refugees, and conflict. The free market will exploit workers and the rise of high-tech automation and artificial intelligence will undermine labour power, putting us at high-risk of even lower-paying, precarious jobs. Our world is a world of insecurity. 

The feeling that something is “off” comes in part an expression of anxiety, recognition that we are in deep, deep trouble and that we’ve been abandoned, without sufficient resources, to sort it out for ourselves. 

As our communities collapse under the weight of exploitation and life moves further online — where we can be lonely together — it will become harder to shake that feeling. 

 To the extent that there is to be hope of something better, there must commitments to community-building, social movement building, and state capacity building...