still here

January 23, 2025

Three days since the inauguration. I don't know why I'm writing this now. I didn't write when it happened the first time. I thought about it but there was nothing to say that wasn't already being said louder by everyone else. This time is different. This time the quiet is the thing that scares me.

I've been thinking about 1999 lately. Twenty-six years. I was young and I believed in things in a way that I can't fully recover now, not because I'm old (I am getting old) but because the specific flavor of that optimism requires a specific kind of ignorance that can't be restored once lost.

the specific flavor of that optimism requires a specific kind of ignorance that can't be restored once

We genuinely believed the internet would make things better. I remember believing this. Not ironically. As a real conviction. That connecting people would, on balance, produce something good. That information would produce better decisions. That the technology was on the side of progress. We thought we were building the future together and then the future arrived and it belonged to about six people.

It happened slowly and then all at once. The platforms ate everything. The town squares became shopping malls and then the shopping malls became surveillance systems and then the guys who owned the surveillance systems started buying governments. And we all watched it happen on the little glowing rectangles we carry everywhere and we couldn't look away because the rectangles were designed by people whose entire job was making sure we couldn't look away.

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My brother still works in tech. He's doing well. Senior now, stock options, the whole thing. He's genuinely enthusiastic about his work and I love him for it. But he has a weariness around the eyes that wasn't there five years ago. I think the industry changed on him without asking permission. The AI stuff. The layoffs dressed up as efficiency. The billionaire with the rockets who turned out to be exactly the kind of person your gut told you he was ten years ago. My brother still believes in what he's building. I think. But he talks about it differently than he used to. Less "we're going to change the world" and more "I'm trying to do good work inside a system that doesn't want good work."

There's a man giving a salute on television. You know the one I mean. And half the country says it didn't mean what it looked like and the other half says it meant exactly what it looked like and both halves are talking past each other on platforms that profit from the disagreement. I watched the clip three times. I don't know what I expected to feel. What I actually felt was tired. A tiredness that goes all the way down.

I've been reading back through some old things I wrote in the late 90s. A journal I kept on paper, with a pen. In early 1999 I wrote a long entry about how excited I was about the coming decade. What the 2000s would be like. The list of things I expected: peace, basically. More of the 90s. Less poverty, more connection, gradual reasonable progress on the usual fronts.

Reading it now is a strange experience. Not because I was naive, though I was. The interesting part is how specific the wrongness is. Things aren't simply worse. They're worse in ways I couldn't have invented. And better in ways I couldn't have invented either. Both at once. The texture of the wrongness was unimaginable from where I stood then. I had a vocabulary for certain kinds of bad futures. Not this one. Not the one where the richest man in the world buys a social network and breaks it on purpose. Not the one where the machines learn to talk and the first thing we do is use them to replace the people who make things. I didn't have the imagination for this specific flavor of disappointment.

the texture of the wrongness was unimaginable from where I stood then the texture of the wrongness was un

The city is different. I know this is something everyone says about their city. But New York is different in a specific way. It got expensive and then it got cruel about it. The places where I used to eat are banks now. The places where I used to drink are luxury condos that nobody lives in. The skyline keeps growing taller and the streets keep feeling emptier. There's more money here than ever and less life.

I don't want to be maudlin about it. Things are okay. I'm okay. There is an ugliness in the politics right now that I don't have the energy to describe. The word "oligarch" is in the newspaper every morning like it's a weather report. But there are things to look forward to. There are always things to look forward to. The world continues. It is not the world I expected from where I stood in 1999 but it is the world I have.

I just wish I could reach back to whoever I was in 1999 and tell them something. Not "it will be fine," because that would be a lie. Not "it will be terrible," because that's not quite right either. Something more specific. Something about how to use the time well while they have it. How to be more present in the ordinary days because the ordinary days don't last. How to hold on to the people, because some of them won't always be there and you won't get to choose which ones.

How to be more present in the ordinary days because the ordinary days don't last. I just wish I could reach back. I just wish I could reach

I don't know how you'd get a message like that back there. But if I could, I would.

- M.

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