Bracing for the next 4 Years

Trump’s win November 6 was devastating.

My good friend Vio on Reddit and I unpacked things a little bit together, the news fresh, hot off the presses. It’s difficult to reconcile. People will struggle without recourse or aid for the next four years. We are going to be hurting, truly. There will be choices made during this presidency (just as his last) that will impact the rest of our lives.

Trump feeds people's unhealthy coping mechanisms. For every new Democratic policy that'll help anyone of low income in a data-informed, measurable way, Trump gives them a scapegoat, groups they can feel superior to, a conspiracy theory, false reasons to distrust honorable, educated institutions.

Embracing all those elements is much easier and more attractive than doing the enormous work it takes to genuinely improve one’s lot in life. Even with all the democrat programs & policies, it's difficult to do, but without them and with a president that cooks up rambling narratives of hate and suspicion towards all people, politics, and research that strive to improve quality of life for all, welp.

I’ve appreciated how many of us have pivoted: “now more than ever, support and strengthen your local community.” I imagine that’s pretty tough though when your local community is an ever-present oppressive threat to you as an individual while you’re living in it.

I’ve heard people on the verge of coming out (as anything other than conservative perceptions’ on the ‘right way to live’ which apparently includes being a convicted felon and assaulting women but not ::checks notes:: drag queens) are overriding their freedom to live authentically and choosing instead to stay in the closet (in whatever ways they can) for the foreseeable future. These are casual anecdotes I’ve read on social media, not data. I bring it up though because it’s not an irrational decision, and that’s the horror of it.

Feels like we’re at the gates of hell, y'all. So, on November 6 when there was no doubt, I cracked open my Gustave Dore tarot deck for guidance along these themes and posted to Insta about it. I love Gustave Doré 's art, in particular from Dante Aligheri 's Divine Comedy.

Today's tarot spread for "what should I keep in mind to cope for the next 3 weeks, 3 months, 3 years?" (Or 4) First card: 3 of swords, the tarot guide book translates to just "pain & despair" 🥺 makes sense tho; 3 months question rendered the 10 of cups: acknowledge how amazing your partnerships & friendships are; 3 years card is the only major arcana card I got, and it's the one I'm having the most difficulty reading: The Lovers: personal crossroads that lead to a major commitment of the heart. Perhaps my best coping mechanism will be in 3 years' time 🫠

Then, November 11, I was listening to Dana & Greg’s Fireside Chat (shoutout Newkirk Museum of the Paranormal) and they spent some time being real and grappling with the election’s outcome. It was a meaningful talk that’s helped me cope. I don’t feel as alone, and they had just toured the states for about two months and based on what they saw, various experiences, they provided a lot of context. They also began talking about the social media landscape, and for those of us chronically online^TM I am very into this.

DECENTRALIZING THE INTERNET

So anyway, Dana and Greg were talking about social media, right? How they’re finding BlueSky or Threads, or whether we’re in a post-Twitter era altogether. I felt the need to comment: Global communication is so important right now and for the next four years. We need news & information to surface & exist without fear of censorship or data mining from government/FAANG/top 1% agendas. To do this, we gotta decentralize our social media & rely on a ton of little platforms (instances) using the same protocol. Y'all pls consider ActivityPub softwares & Mastodon. It'll be the best way to communicate safely for the next four years

There's a lot that I've read that's led me to these conclusions. My two favorite articles/essays are below.

BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow. “Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there.”

Christine Lemmer-Webber’s How decentralized is Bluesky really? This started getting really interesting and enlightening for me starting at the section “Self-hosting resources: ActivityPub and ATProto comparison” and then “’Message passing’ vs ‘shared heap’ architectures” gave me such a solid understanding of why the indie web just won’t be able to exist on bsky’s AT protocol.

Okay. All this said, I do have a BlueSky account. Still, I’m in my heart era with Mastodon, and in particular, the glammr.us instance right now, an instance for those of us in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, memory work and records. And the cool part is that if suddenly I didn’t like https://glammr.us/@joshuatj, the admin of this instance and how they’re running things (or if he loses the ability to run it any more), I could leave for another instance. I’ve dwelled on hachyderm.io, fandom.ink, and corteximplant.com instances and loved exploring each community environment. While I can’t take all my content with me (yet), I still take all my followers with me everywhere I go. Being able to do this is critical to our freedom to move about and connect with people socially online.

Another sidenote shout-out to all the other emerging ActivityPub protocol software like PeerTube (alternate to YouTube created by Framasoft, a very awesome French tech nonprofit; I found the instance MakerTube and that’s where I keep and share my videos now), Pixelfed (Instagram dupe), and Loops (a budding Tiktok dupe).

PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Moving on from social media now and turning to privacy and security for the next four years. I think we all know why. I won’t belabor the point. Instead, we can get excited to look what cool tools are out there that we hadn’t prioritized learning about before.

Consider using Tor browser for sensitive transactions on the internet (not regular browsing though, as Tor doesn't support any browser extensions), Signal to replace WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, and Protonmail email (it also offers a Drive, VPN, Calendar, etc.), Framadate (also created by Framasoft) for scheduling get-togethers. These organizations offer secure, encrypted experiences. Visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation for news and tips on the hottest new cool privacy- and security-minded apps and services on the web. Also, I gotta mention em on Mastodon began a great 🧵 full of tools that’ll help protect your communications and online activities. Read users’ replies to it too because there’s a lot of additional information and context provided.

SECURITY AND AI

Trump has been elected during an era we’re all still grappling with Artificial Intelligence at commercial and individual consumer levels. Bad actors can use it to replicate trustworthy voices like your family members, to gain trust and finagle an address, an email password or even a social security number over the phone. To prevent this, in person, craft security pass phrases between you and your people to use for when anything sensitive (identity or financial information) needs to be shared over an electronic or digital medium.

Trump in the AI era also begs us to educate ourselves on AI capabilities and how it relates to mis- and dis-information in particular. I recommend LACONI’s AI Ethics & Uses panel, especially the second and third speakers which start 24 minutes in. This presentation is an inside look at how librarians are working with each other and discussing AI and society, especially as it pertains to AI enabling rapid content creation of false and misleading information. The third speaker covers AI content creation and copyright, which was fascinating, especially because her slides actually included fanfiction as a thing that exists legally in the U.S. that we can think about while noodling on the implications of AI works. As someone who’s attended a lot of AI professional development panels looking for real information about it, this panel’s the best I’ve found.

SUPPORT PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL KNOWLEDGEBASES

Consider gifting people bookshop.org gift certificates for this holiday season.

Use your local libraries, museums, galleries, cultural heritage and history sites as much as you can. Attend programs, ask us questions, check out both physical and digital content, take advantage of our resources. Driving traffic and usage stats up like that ensures these institutions’ survival and impacts their funding.

Fight the bill H.R. 9495 with the ACLU. “In a clear reaction to pro-Palestine protests, the Senate might pass legislation that would hand the government a dangerous tool to stifle free speech and punish disfavored groups.”

IN CONCLUSION

Tonight is a new moon, and I was going to do a thought-out ritual for it but I feel like this entire afternoon crafting this blog post has been the ritual. I'm summarizing and connecting everything that's hit me this month, and I'm going to let it go. And I'm going to move on into focusing on my own agency and what I can do to protect and help myself and others in both online spaces and IRL. I welcome anyone/everyone to join me in that New Moon ritual if it resonates with you too.

I love this kind of content and I want to learn more so if you have more reading material or super cool points to make along the lines in this post, please leave a comment!