Local Girl Liveblogs the Apocalypse

what hurts is knowing what we could have been

Previously… Interrupting Katherine and Tricia’s Mom’s 24hour news cycle is the arrival of their brother, James. James isn’t impressed with Katherine’s plan for a community of women. He decides to stay with friends rather than remain at their childhood home.

Blog Post

I feel like I was living in a dream world until COVID happened – ten years ago now. I thought if a crisis happened, we would pull together, recognize our common humanity, bond over the troubles and grow stronger. And COVID was simple compared to what was to follow. The bird flu, the weather chaos, and now this. I still had the ignorance necessary to blindly believe in humanity. I'd seen small sparks of it, us healing the ozone layer, stopping acid rain, building telescopes to watch for earth-killing asteroids. We came together to protect one another.

Then COVID just brought our most base natures to the surface. We forgot that we needed community to survive, and we divided and sub-divided ourselves until we were at war with each other even within our homes. The first holiday with COVID, we stayed apart because we wanted to keep everyone safe. It was a sacrifice we chose to make for the greater good. Then the second holiday divided those who still wanted to stay safe and those who believed human connection was worth the risk. The third holiday saw those factions divide even further, both sides thinking the other was stupid, selfish, cruel. We never really recovered from that, not in the way we'd need to in order to confront this crisis in unity. Holidays even after the risk of COVID were never the same. Old rules of not discussing certain topics at the dinner table were broken by the very people who'd once enforced them, and suddenly the dinner table was a gladatorial ring, no holds barred.

By the time we recognized how deeply embedded the axis countries were in our social media, our research, our elections, it was far too late. It became impossible to discern what was real and what an underpaid Russian in a warehouse was paid to write in provocative, divisive English. There were more non-real internet users than real ones because no one ran just one bot, no paid actor had only one account from which to sow confusion and lies. For every genuine person on the internet, there were ten, thirty, one hundred accounts set up just to muddy the waters, to lead the way in racism, misogyny, and homophobia so that real people, who kind of believed that stuff but never felt permitted to say it, were given the go-ahead to give that fear-based part of themselves free rein. “If I'm going to be afraid, I'm sure not going to afraid alone,” seemed to be the thought process. And people who didn't believe the bots stayed away, each of them thinking they were outnumbered, not knowing it was just a numbers game.

Experts and peer review and scientific consensus was all seen as corrupt, paid for, part of a scheme to control the populous. In opposition to those voices, people favoured by the algorithm’s indiscriminate adoration for engagement were held up as experts, truthspeakers who just wanted the rest of us to see the light. Little attention was paid to where the 'light' was shining – somewhere watchers were directed to send money, buy something, sign up for something, just keep your eyes on the videos and never skip the ads. The attention war was won by the car crashes. We couldn't get people to look away from what they were scared of long enough to think about what they loved, what they missed, what would sustain them after the fire of ire burnt to ashes.

So, slowly and then all at once, there were two worlds. Little overlap but constant clashes.

And I'm guilty too. I'm not writing from a place of being able to identify bots or AI anymore. I'm sure I've spent precious time arguing with people who are not what they claim to be. I've been an unwitting participant of machinations so remote I couldn't see the bigger picture if I were standing on the moon.

But I have to talk to you like you're real. I have to think there are real people reading my writing, hearing my thoughts, aligning despite all the measures to make sure we never find each other. I've always know patriarchy's most successful move is to keep women apart from one another. To keep us from trusting one another – trusting ourselves. And now I'm asking that we go against all that training, that enforcement, and seek one another out, to, I guess, hold hands and watch the sunset on this planet.

I don't think women are perfect, but fuck I really believe we would have done better than this.