Sometimes I think about the fact that I was a weekly listener of a podcast about the 2020 election called Worst Year Ever. It outlasted the election by some time, but it clearly took its toll on its hosts. I don’t really do journalism in anything but the broadest – broadest, most pseudo-intellectual, and amateurish – sense. However, one thing that definitely seems to be a pattern is that each year is experienced by those living through it as the worst yet. This has definitely been true since 2012, and I’d argue that none of the ones since the financial crisis have been that good.

So, I’m not looking forward to 2025, but mostly, I’m focused now on how 2024 is about to get a lot stranger.

I turned in my grades earlier this week. Now that the mad dash to the finish line can continue, I’m able to take things in with a breadth that just isn’t really an option during the school year. In all honesty, I find what I see to be a bit…overwhelming?

There’s been an ongoing genocide since October 7th of last year. I refer here, explicitly and directly, to the ongoing killing of the inhabitants of Gaza by the state of Israel. We have mentioned that regularly, and I still feel guilty for not saying more on this platform. There is a genocide. It should never have started. It’s insane that it’s gone on as long as it has. What I wrote about Israeli-Palestinian relations in the past still holds true and, if we had a sane government, Israel would not receive support from us. We do not, and so it does.

And of course, this is only the most public genocide — other such killings are going on in Myanmar, Sudan, and ongoing wars in the Congo and elsewhere.

Public domain image of surviving Kent State shooting victim Alan Canfora waving a flag before the Ohio National Guard, as pictured in the 15 May 1970 edition of *LIFE* magazine. There have been a lot of references to the Kent State shooting lately — I suggested that my students revisit “White Protests, Black Riots” by Heather Yarrish, a reading that we had done earlier in the semester.

I am encouraged by the fact that campus protests cropped up – and I am somewhat discouraged by the fact that they received the crackdown that they did. Not to provide advice to the other side of the argument, but part of why I haven’t gotten deep into the protests is that the semester was ending. Campuses are going to be veritable ghost towns until August. The smart administrators let the protests happen, knowing that a lack of response would lead to them becoming mere gestures. By resisting them, the protests cease to be gestures: they transform from a virtual action to an actual one.

Okay, look – prediction is a foolish game to play. I tend to be wrong. I hope that I am wrong.

With the semester ending, though, this leads to another issue: many of these students are going to disperse into broader communities. This leads to the near-term issue – since it is impossible for the forces of the status quo to let this shit go, apparently – that this summer is going to have protests resembling, but most likely of lesser magnitude than, those of 2020. Given that these protests will have benefited from the knowledge gained over the course of 2020 and the network building over the past four years, this doesn’t mean that a lesser magnitude would be less disruptive. Something that activists have noted is that, while the police can easily contain a 1,000 person protest, ten 100 people protests (if you live in a larger city, increase these numbers by a factor of 10 and come back to me) might lead to their resources being sapped and response times slowing.

I mean, the former President didn’t come out of it looking good. He didn’t go into it looking good, but he certainly didn’t come out of it looking good. We all remember the photo op at St. John’s Church, where he proved he knew how to hold a book.

The anger here is also much more personally directed at the sitting President. While the former President was subjected to a certain amount of ire in 2020, the situation in 2024 is different insofar as the sitting President has been identified as the problem in a much more substantive way: the ongoing genocide is occurring because he is an avowed supporter of Israel, and he seems to think that he can use PR to get out of this situation, when the past four years have proven that his administration will lose any PR battle they find themselves in. Hence the number of progressive liberals who have written documents or recorded podcasts and videos aimed at communicating what the administration has done well. The fact that the administration can’t make the case for itself is a problem.

The 2024 Democratic Convention is in mid-late August. That’s right around the time all of these students are supposed to head back to class. They’ll have the whole summer to get ready for things.

Now, do I think that the 2024 Democratic Convention is going to play out like the 1968 convention?

Not necessarily.

But, 56 years later, it’s going back to Chicago, amidst waves of campus protests, following a term from a president whose political bona fides involve being the older vice president of a younger, more charismatic politician from a historically underrepresented group and whose promise failed to materialize.

Illinois National Guard in Chicago in 1968. Image used under a CC0 license.

2024 isn’t 1968. The situation was better in ‘68.

I don’t know the particulars, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that it’s going to be a rough summer.

Longer term, though, I can’t see how taking the students of Columbia and UCLA and any number of top-tier schools – the prospective future members of the social elite – and threatening them with repression and permanent outsider status would be that good of an idea for long-term stability. The coming decade is not going to be a smooth one, and creating the conditions for a vanguard-type opposition seems to be just a way to ensure that whatever exists on the other side of this has a more authoritarian character than would be present otherwise.

Since I’ve already broken the seal, though, here’s another prediction: so-called AI technology, which I’ve complained about in the past and which we’ve touched upon here a few times, will be pretty much out of the picture by the end of the year.

Given the struggles that larger tech companies are experiencing – the waves of layoffs, the unfinished products hustled out the door – this might lead to a small recession. I could be wrong here: like I said, most of my predictions have been wrong in the past, but the fact of the matter is that most of the banner companies in the tech sector have been struggling, at least partially due to the fact that they’ve been actively making their products and services worse for quite a while, whether you want to call it enshittification or the rot economy.

A graph of Moore’s Law, used under a CC BY 1.0 license. It was originally taken from the Wikipedia page for “Technological Singularity”. Some experts believe that this growth will peter out around 2025.

All of this is leading me to speculate that, far from the singularity that has been the hallmark of a lot of futurological predictions, we’re coming to a Great Leveling-Off of computational development. Sure, we might be able to push it further by burning more fuel or sending more children down into coltan mines, but I’m not sure that computers ten years from now are going to have radically different hardware than computers now. Smart phone developments have been largely static for several years now, with merely geometric improvement in some key components and none in others (ask yourself, how different is the phone in your pocket from the one you had in 2019?)

My own field is struggling, too. There’s a lot of discussion of the demographic cliff that’s going to hit higher education in the 2025 because of the drop off in births at the end of Generation Z around the time of the financial crisis. Right now, we’re struggling to plan for things because FAFSA has been buggy for some time now and many people simply couldn’t get their forms through: we don’t even really know how many students are going to be coming in next year, and this problem most likely won’t be fixed any time soon.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other fields suffer from similar issues.

Since I’m on a tear here with regard to predictions, I might as well turn my attention to the big one: who’s going to win the Presidential election?

It scarcely matters. I’d be willing to bet that the person who becomes President in January of next year hasn’t even really been floated to the public yet. However, between the unrest looming on the horizon, the economic drop-off and the general trend towards things simply not being good, I don’t really care if there’s a D or an R by the name of whoever goes into the white house.

Now, the point of all of this isn’t to communicate despair or cry for help. The fact of the matter is that, during the semester, my attention has been largely eaten up by my job. As the semester ends, I find myself coming up for breath and looking around. The tunnel vision that characterizes my thinking during the semester comes to an end, and I see that everything is at least a little bit on fire.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been wrestling with the question of how I’m supposed to respond if my students are threatened. I hope this never comes up, but if there’s an incident on campus involving a firearm, and my students are threatened, I think it’s fairly clear that I have a duty to interpose myself. How does this duty change if the threatening party has a badge? I know that I view the situation as unchanged, but how am I expected to behave?

And my thoughts spiral out further: why are we being placed in a situation where these things are thoughts that we have to grapple with?

To paraphrase Trashfuture – god I listen to a lot of podcasts, perhaps I should worry about that – there is a (metaphorical) fence. On one side of it is the people that the system protects and serves, on the other side of it are those that it simply binds. This isn’t only a matter of policing: this is a matter of any interaction with the bureaucratic systems that underpin society. On the outside you have people who say “maybe we shouldn’t commit genocide” and on the inside you have the people threatened by calls to not commit genocide. On the outside, you have people who are looking at a future where all of the culture they will have access to are the product of LLMS, and those on the inside have human-made works. On the outside, you have people who want to be inside, and on the inside you have people who worry that the area encircled by the fence only ever seems to get smaller.

I am reminded – as I often am, by things that normal people don’t tend to pay attention to – of the difference, in Deleuzoguattarian thought, between striated space and smooth space. Striated space is that of law, order, and civilization, within it you find the state apparatus. Smooth space is that of chaos, transformation, and wilderness, within it you find the nomad war-machine. Striated space smooths out as law fails; smooth space becomes striated when chaos fails. The state apparatus wants to co-opt the war-machine as a dynamic source of power and potential weapon (not all war-machines are necessarily martial in nature; the masons who constructed European cathedrals are characterized in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing as constituting a war machine.) The War-Machine wants to co-opt the state apparatus as a source of wealth and a stable point from which to gain leverage. Neither one is necessarily superior to or inferior to the other. Neither one is “good” or “bad”: both can be violent, both can provide for those within it. I’m going to guess, though, that the transition from one to another is never exactly pleasant.

At the present moment, a lot of long-term trends are hitting an inflection point. You may have noticed that I mentioned the financial crisis several times: that came as I was finishing my undergraduate degree, so it looms larger in my mind. I think, though, that we’re also seeing the Post-1970s consensus – the neo-liberal world order, and its arrangement around the contemporary (and post-1991, only) great power, with the importance of international law and the US dollar – just sort of run out of steam. Instead of a violent break, we’re seeing the paint that marks the striations begin to flake off.

To be completely honest, I’m of two minds about this: I don’t like the direction the world’s going in, but I’m not exactly built for Mad Max, as much as I love those movies.

What seems incredibly clear to me, though, is that meeting this transition with the violent assertion of power – as with the genocide and the campus protests – or with a univocal assertion of one potential future – as with the tech industry – or with the passive assertion that things are going to be as they have “always been”, without acknowledging that the current situation (the “always” in this equation) is a historical aberration that no one expected – as with education – is the wrong way to go about this.

How can anyone look at this present situation and not see a building pressure? As anyone with any amount of technical knowledge will tell you, you can’t simply allow pressure to build and build and build with no outlet. Over the years, the United States has grown more and more repressive and the reward for going along with the social order has grown less and less. Perhaps, at one point, the promise of material reward would be enough to prevent the moral outrages that people are now responding to. Maybe if a college degree guaranteed you anything people would be less tempted to do the right thing.

Or maybe it would all be easier if the students weren’t called upon to do the right thing. Maybe we could just...not support genocide?

Or both? We could both make things better here and not actively make them worse over there?

Why is that not an option, again?

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