Some Starting Points: We Shall Not be Overwhelmed?
In the aftermath of Trump’s first election, when folks asked me how I was doing, the standard “Alright, not bad, how’re you doing?” response didn’t cut it. Instead, I’d say something like: “The world is fucked, but I’m okay.” Or: “We-e-ell, I’m trying to write a book about climate catastrophe in the middle of a political catastrophe. How are you doin’?”
These days, as we brace ourselves against the first shocks of Trump 2.0, I say something like: “Oy.” Or: “Fucking hell.” Or I just shake my head and lift up my hands in a world-weary so it goes gesture. Or, if it’s over text, I type out something like:
“I’m often sad in the mornings when I seem to be more porous to reality (both personal & global), but once I go about my getting-stuff-done day, I manage to do okay, good even, sometimes even great…” UNTHINKABLE and Andrew Boyd, February 20, 2025. We Shall Not be Overwhelmed: How discerning attention can help us survive Trump 2.0. UNTHINKABLE Substack
This Substack essay/newsletter captures much of what many around the world are struggling with at this time. Not only in terms of the ways in which Trump and his cohort of ‘plutocrats’, and ‘tech-bros’, and far-right fellow travellers in the US and elsewhere are seeking to impose themselves on our lives in ways that are damaging and dangerous. But also, in terms of what strategies might usefully be adopted in response to what we will call the ‘enshittification’ of our lives – public and private (more on this shortly).
This blog – which we plan to be the first in an ongoing series of commentary, suggestions, curation of resources, strategies and responses – is a means for us, and our colleagues who we invite to participate, to not ‘turn away’ from that which confronts us at this time. We will return in a later blog to Andrew Boyd’s essay.
Trump. Authoritarianism. Plutocracy.
Where to start…
The election of Trump is more than a political event; it is an attempt to legitimize a brutal evolution of fascism in America. His rise is not accidental but symptomatic, emerging from the depths of collective fear, dread, and anxiety stoked by a savage form of gangster capitalism—neoliberalism—that thrives on division and despair. This climate, steeped in a culture of hate, misogyny, and racism, has given life to Trump’s authoritarian appeal, drowning out the warning signs of past and present tyranny.
While it’s clear that American society changed dramatically with Reagan’s election and the corrupt rise of the billionaire elite, we must also recognize how liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long legacy of nativism, all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal. Clinton’s racially charged criminalizing policies, Obama’s centrist neoliberalism and unyielding support for the financial elite, and Biden’s death-driven support for genocide in Gaza have contributed to a culture ripe for authoritarianism. In short, this groundwork didn’t just make Trump possible; it made him inevitable.
We are now compelled to rethink the very foundations of culture, politics, power, struggle, and education. The stakes are clear. In mere weeks, as Will Bunch notes, a man who attempted to overturn an election—who espouses overt racism, embraces white supremacy, and boasts about his rancid misogyny, has pledged mass deportations, and threatens military force against political opponents—will once again assume power. This is a historical crossroads that demands a radical reevaluation of our democratic commitments and strategies for real social and economic change.
Chris Hedges aptly warns that “the American dream has become an American nightmare [and that] Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump embodies the cumulative effects of decades of moral and social corrosion. His presidency signals not a departure but an intensification of a deep-seated national crisis. Henry Giroux, November 8, 2024, America’s Descent Into Fascism Can Be Stopped
Henry Giroux is Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, and the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario (CANADA).
Henry has long been an outspoken critic of the ways in which neoliberal capitalism – and the public education systems and forms of knowledge that continue to be reconfigured to meet the demands of this social, cultural, political and economic assemblage – produces the injustice and immiseration of countless millions of people (young and old) around the globe.
He has been a vocal advocate for what we might call a critical public pedagogy, that ‘advocates a democratic public philosophy that embraces the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life’. Pedagogy And The Politics Of Hope: Theory, Culture, And Schooling: A Critical Reader
We want to return to Henry’s work in greater detail over the coming months – in terms of what it offers for the prolonged conversation we have in mind here, but also what we might imagine as some of the limits of the ways in which he proposes that ‘we’ respond to Trump. Authoritarianism. Plutocracy.
At the time of writing this blog, Trump’s posting to Truth Social of an AI generated video – Trump Gaza – is possibly the most telling illustration of the ‘enshittification’ we want to discuss next:
Donald Trump is facing a backlash on his Truth Social platform after sharing an AI-created video of him sipping cocktails with a topless Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, in a future imagining of the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel’s war. (Trump faces Truth Social backlash…)
*‘Enshittification’
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) describes himself as a science fiction author, activist and journalist, and:
Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone). So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. Cory Doctorow FEBRUARY 8 2024, ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything, Financial Times (if you can’t get past the ‘paywall’, Wikipedia has a great page with numerous links – including an archived version of the FT article – and a version can be found on Reddit.
In a commentary in The Guardian on ‘enshittification’ being nominated as Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year, Tory Shepherd provided a useful way of illustrating what Doctorow had in mind in coining this term:
Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.
As she observed:
The dictionary’s committee described enshittification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable”.
Without those affixes – if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit – the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased.
For Doctorow:
We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying. The enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
This last sentence seems to be a productive way to imagine how it is that we might find ways to not look away, to not stay silent, to not be overwhelmed.
The Promise for Regenerative and Just Futures for Young People
In various projects, blogs, journal articles and books our colleagues and the YPSFL community have sought to make some contributions to the ways in which we imagine the relationships between young people, their education, training and employment pathways, their health and well-being, and the promise that we can work with young people and various stakeholders towards what we and others call regenerative and just futures.
The promise of these futures feels – viscerally – to be under attack at this time. Not only by Trump and his cohort of ‘plutocrats’, and ‘tech-bros’, and far-right fellow travellers in the US and elsewhere.
But also by the likes of BP – though it is not alone – as it back tracks on its vision to be a net-zero company:
BP has angered climate groups by abandoning its green ambitions to instead invest about $10bn a year in a string of new oil and gas projects to help reverse its flagging fortunes.
The strategy, put forward by its chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, pulls the plug on BP’s 2020 plan to become a net zero energy company, which he claims was “misplaced” and went “too far, too fast”.
Auchincloss said: “We made some bold strategic changes, accelerating into the energy transition while progressively reducing our hydrocarbon business.
“We then saw Covid, the war in Ukraine, a recession, and the shift in attitudes of markets and governments had a fundamental impact on the energy system.”
Maybe it is a logical response to be Against Optimism!
What is to be done?
What we plan, as a collective group of networked researchers, is an ongoing series of blogs that try to develop a sense, through the forms of writing and curation that are possible here, what it means in these times to do the difficult work of developing critical forms of public pedagogy that can create and address ‘publics’ or audiences – especially those publics that are outside our own ‘progressive’, ‘left’ bubbles.
And to do so in ways that don’t imagine ‘diversity’, ‘equity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘justice’ as dirty words. As words that can no longer be uttered or written in certain places. Particularly as they inform what we can imagine as regenerative and just futures for different groups of young people in different places.