A Gift From Your Enemy

If there's a theme emerging in the second quarter of this century, it's the re-emergence of the robber barrons and oligarchs. Rich industrialists and untouchable politicians who have unprecedented control over our lives.

And they're a bunch of cunts.

At least Rockefeller and Carnegie realised that their legacies would be dependent on some gesture of social goodwill, and poured money into projects that might benefit more than just themselves. The current lot just seem determined to make as many people around them as fucking miserable as they are.

Right now, they're succeeding.

We're seeing global corporations reducing the rest of us into impotent wage slaves - turn up, do your job and then fuck off. (We'll let you know if you can come back tomorrow). Or they're renting our own posessions back to us through a convenient monthly subscription. Or they're destroying any form of creative expression by letting AI sick up a shitty knock-off of someone else's work. Yours for half the price.

It's pretty clear they know this is a alternate timeline none of us want to be in, even if the promise of instant-on everything, a hosepipe of news and vague nostalgic references to progress and saving the planet make it easy to sign up. The thing is, these toxic business models are the ones that they've discovered run the money machine. They're not about to switch them off - their shareholders would kill them.

As a result, one of two things seem to happen. Either they're so thick skinned that they simply don't care, or they turn to some half baked philosophy or faith that lets them be the good guys in their heads.

In the first case, the answer is to pull up the drawbridge and protect their interests. Get involved with politics, buy influence and fight regulation or oversight, neuter the media and point to a convenient external enemy to distract the miserable masses (if you're trans, disabled or an immigrant, raise your hand).

In the second case, it seems that sudden endless riches aren't quite as fulfilling as they expected. There isn't a great fanfare and instant of enlightenment when you make your first billion. No-one tells you the secret to life. The world doesnt respect you. There's a certain type of ultra-wealthy person what just reeks of desperation as they try to justify their immense good fortune. The fall-out is sub-Scientology level philosophy, badly recycled and self-serving religion and an overwhelming need to tell people how they should live.

The common ground between these groups is a visceral dislike of the masses (usually very deeply disguised - PR isn't dead), and a need for an enemy. Whilst it's easy for much of these feelings to congeal around far-right politics, it's not actually a left v's right battle. It's a battle for social control. Understanding this is to understand why nominally left-wing governments can go along with horribly intolerant policies, and why the church (and particularly fundamental religious groups) is suddenly but not quite openly advising everyone from politicians to media moguls.

In short: the rich want to keep their money and feel good about it. If you become the enemy as a result, what the hell do you think you can do? You're no-one. Cannon fodder in someone else's battle.

Caught up yet? It's not personal, and it's not really a great conspiracy. It's just a bunch of dumb apes trying to keep all the bananas they've unexpectedly been gifted with. It's drawn a huge part of the population into the fight simply by being asked to pick a side. Are you woke or not? Are you right or left? Are you for freedom or.. freedom? (That last one is confusing, everyone is apparently on the side of freedom, but define it completely differently).

So... so what?

The reason for writing this isn't to ask you to pick a side, or to join battle. In the recent losses of rights and protections, the losses of jobs and creative freedom, the apparent immunity of our ruling classes to law and basic social decency we can see that we're consistently heading in the wrong direction. The question I want to ask is: if this is a battle, why are we losing so badly?

What are we believing that is making us fail?

One belief that drains a lot of energy from us all is that there are white hats and black hats, and people have to chose which to wear. Pick a side. Countless hours are wasted on trying to prove the other person wrong - though it's very well known that no-one ever, ever changed their mind after an argument on the internet. Countless more hours (and a lot of goodwill) is lost drawing lines in the sand and declaring everyone on the other side is inherently evil. This all takes us away from the questions we should be asking, and which far more people are able to agree on: what sort of society do we want? How could our lives be improved? Instead we embed the idea of blame and fault. That avoids making constructive change and just encourages the politics of censure and exclusion. Accepting polarised debate does not help us reach an answer - it just perpetuates arguments.

Another belief is that opposing changes that we dislike will roll back those changes. It won't. For legislation to reach the front benches of parliament, it must already be widely agreed amongst those proposing it - and has often gone though layers of think-tanks, debate and polishing before it reached them. For people to violently attack minorities, they must have already been taken step by step from personal discomfort, to blaming an enemy and on to the normalisation of physical assault. For corporations to deliver us AI slop and rent-your-own-music subscriptions, they must have already taken ownership of music production and endless back catalogues. What we're witnessing now is the punchline, not the setup for a sick joke. The setup started years ago.

And finally, instinctively, we believe we must not be like "them" - that the opposite of corporate greed and dense political hatred is hippy individualism, fierce intellectual debate and begging bowl charity. I'm a friendly, smart person - please will you pay my rent this month? I am not like my enemy.

It's true, you're not like the enemy. The enemy is winning.

But here is the gift. If this is not an evil masterplan, but the outcome of a lot of selfish and amoral people gaining a toe hold, we can see how it all works. The mechanisms for propaganda, for social control, for coordination and networks of support are all laid bare. So much so that there is a small industry on YouTube explaining what these groups are doing, and how they interact. It's not news.

The way to change the news, that brings relentless stories of loss and harm, is to change how we use this information. If we're to stop the enemy, we must change our tactics. That starts by understanding tactics that have worked against us.

The people who are supporting intolerance and greed did not make it their life goal to be assholes. Most of them first set out to be successful and influential, and did so with the aid of support networks and mentors. They are able to be assholes because those networks and mentors, and their obsession with success put them in a position where they can have hobbies. We react with shock that they go to conferences where they discuss how to be assholes - but that's the whole point. They collaborate, support and grow their networks, share knowledge and share common goals. It turns out this tends to work. We need to enable and formalise success and influence not just within individual groups but across a wider community with common cause.

They also achieved unreasonable influence by stepping outside of their immediate personal needs and establishing common cause, even with people who they might despise. Every successful campaign to embed corporate control or remove rights starts with a lofty mission that is universal, not aimed at a specific group. Frictionless access to your music, right there in your pocket! More jobs for all of us! Save the planet with endless consumption! Protect all women! The small print, that this is intended to harm you, comes later. On our part, we rail against individual injustices, but never coalesce around a clear message. The failed attempt at a "Don't be a monster" campaign for trans rights shows how poorly we articulate the needs of a minority to gain the support of the majority.

And finally, the triumph of bigotry and selfishness has been enabled by a lot of groundwork. If the system is rigged against us, it has taken decades of small legislative changes, financial transaction and organisational shift to reach this point. So long as we retain that system, we're allowing the fact of our existence to be a debate. We're spending fortunes litigating the same points again and again and again, against an enemy with bottomless pockets. We're stepping into the ring when the fight was already decided by the bookies hours earlier. We're spending money on AI slop because the original company was bought out years ago.

Changing that involves seeding organisations and networks that will take years to evolve. It involves figuring out ways to do business and support each other that won't give instant returns, but can grow into healthy ecosystems. It involves creating meaningful alternatives to embedded platforms and politics - not as gestures of defiance, but engines of growth. More than anything, it involves creating a common vision of what we want the world to look like so we can start the foundations - rather than expending all our energy trying to tear down something that has already been built.