The Digital Sky is Falling

December 11, 2025

A Fiction by Cylon2036. we/us

(Fused to the underbelly of time. Pseudopod-certified.)︎

The first hint that something was wrong came at 6:57 a.m., when Nora Brighton’s rooster stopped competing with the chime of new emails.

Morning on Denman Island was normally a quiet duet of nature and notifications: wind in the forest, clucks from the chicken run, and the steady ping of Hunterson Dynamics overnight messages arriving from the city. But today, no pings. Just the rooster, who seemed altogether too pleased about the interruption.

Nora tapped her laptop. The cursor blinked patiently in an offline document she’d opened the night before. No network. She frowned, toggled her router and waited for the usual green constellation of indicator lights. Instead she got one sullen, blinking red star.

She sighed. Living on a semi-rural island meant treating the internet like a temperamental deity, capricious, prone to moods. But this felt different. The outage didn’t have the usual signature, no sputtering reconnections, no half-loaded pages, no brief flashes of normalcy. Just… absence.

Her phone buzzed once, then died mid-notification. A moment later, even her cell signal bars dropped to nothing. She held the phone up like an offering to the kitchen window. Nothing. “Fantastic,” she muttered. “A technology meltdown before coffee.”

By 7:15, she’d tried everything: rebooting the router, switching hot spots, even walking down her gravel driveway to see if elevation would coax the cell tower gods into cooperation. The island was peaceful, unbothered, and profoundly unhelpful.

Returning inside, she found her cat perched smugly on her keyboard, which at this point was about as useful as a brick. Her mid-morning video meeting with her Project Integration Team was officially doomed.

At 7:30, her landline rang. Nora stared at it. The landline never rang. It was there mostly to appease storms and power outages and the occasional elderly neighbour who believed cell phones were a passing fad. She answered. “Hello?”

It was Chris from IT, speaking at the speed of someone trying not to panic. “Nora! It’s not you. It’s not us either. Actually….” he inhaled sharply. “it’s everyone. The entire internet is down. Global, we think. Or continental. Hard to tell with all our tools offline.”

Nora blinked. “Global, like… the entire internet? That seems… unlikely. Are we sure this isn’t another case of raccoons in the data centre wiring?”

“Not unless the raccoons unionized internationally. Leadership is trying to put out a statement, but no one can send anything except landline calls. And half our executives don’t even have landlines. So for now… we wait. Stay put. Don’t reboot anything important. And, uh, maybe find a hobby that doesn’t require cloud syncing.” He hung up before she could ask for clarification. Classic Chris.

Nora set the phone down slowly, feeling the unreal quiet settle in. Her entire workday, her entire job, existed on servers she could no longer reach. Documents, project roadmaps, messaging channels, dashboards. All evaporated.

She opened her front door. The valley spread beneath a soft fog, farms and ridgelines fading into white. It looked exactly the same as always, which made the collapse of the digital world feel even stranger, like a silent catastrophe no one here could see.

Across the road, her neighbor, Mrs. Priestly, waved from her porch. “Internet down at your place too? My granddaughter can’t watch her cooking shows. World’s ending.” Nora offered a nod and a weak laugh. It didn’t feel entirely like a joke.

By 9:00, she’d brewed a second pot of coffee, stared at her dead laptop, and rediscovered three notebooks she’d forgotten she owned. The quiet was unnerving. No messages. No meeting alerts. No relentless parade of digital urgency. It was almost peaceful. Almost.

But beneath that quiet, Nora felt something else creeping in. Uncertainty. She worked hundreds of miles from the nearest Hunterson Dynamics office, reliant on invisible threads that now lay severed. In the city, there would be teams, protocols, co-workers gathering in worried clusters. Out here, it was just her, a rooster, and the creeping realization that the world had changed without making a sound.

She stepped onto her porch, coffee in hand, and listened to the wind moving through the forest. For the first time, she realized she could hear her own heartbeat. And for the first time, she wondered, not about when the internet would return, but what the world might look like if it didn’t.

Phoenix Riting! – December 11th, 2025

December 11, 2025

More about the campground, after lots of conversations, thank you! I’m biased. I grew up in the wilderness, camping on remote lakes. Summers, we spent the weekends and some weeks at a particular remote lake. We had a folding camp table, a Coleman stove, a cooler and a tent. The tent lasted until the day a bear shredded it with its claws while we were on the other side of the lake. We had taken the food with us, which naturally annoyed the bear.

The grownups erected a makeshift shelter: a pole tied between two trees with a large sheet of plastic staked down over it like an oversized pup tent. Open on the long ends, tall enough for an adult to stand in. Beds were laid side by side, kids in the middle. That is how the family slept for the rest of the summer. Nobody was mad at the bear. When you go into bear country, they own the place. You are in their living room. You keep your food secure, hope for the best, and adapt as the situation unfolds. I grew up hearing that nature is smarter than people, and that we do best to adapt.

We understood, without needing to be told that people are built to handle a bit of privation, it’s good for us. We walked miles through mosquito and blackfly filled woods carrying heavy loads, adults and children alike (ours were lighter), all to sleep on the ground, live outdoors and catch and forage many of our meals. My family were descended from pioneers. They looked condescendingly down on what they called “civilization.” City folk were tenderfeet. Greenhorns. The coast was Lotus Land. Too easy. Boring.

That is where I am from. I am adaptable, and I do a decent job managing my current level of comfort. I live here because I like air that does not bite, I love the sea and you don’t have to shovel rain. I see nothing wrong with how we did it back then. I miss it. The rewards were priceless: deep and constant immersion in the natural world, a sense of belonging on the ground, on equal terms with wild creatures, facing challenges that were fun and practical.

Hornby Island is wild enough. I’m okay living without bears and blackflies, and mosquitoes are few, a bonus. We have nature without the danger. No large predators, no poisonous anything. Here, humans are the danger. Hornby is being slowly swallowed by the massive internet-fueled monoculture eating the world right now.

I see the same conversation everywhere online. The same opinions dominate, swinging between polarized ends of the same continuum. Nowhere can we live as we choose. We are everywhere managed and controlled. It is a global smoothing over of the collective cerebral cortex. As a species, we are getting dumber, as technology gets smarter.

Society values convenience and expedience over the real wild world. Challenges have narrowed to the realms of intellect and technology. Nature is paved over, extracted and managed to death. Instead of losing ourselves in the woods, we obsess over others’ opinions, posting to socials from the beach. Campgrounds should be safe, clean and tidy as a living room.

To these folks, it makes sense to have it bulldozed, drained, wired and landscaped. It was a mess before, everything higgledy piggledy, trees randomly situated, and so muddy in winter. If we manage things right, one day the whole island can be a park with neat gravel pathways, safely fenced and labeled, especially on all the cliffs for safety, with lights everywhere so nobody has to fear the dark.

Some say those old trees were dangerous, every one of them. It is safer now that they are gone. Others say, oh great, now the winds can howl freely through that new wind tunnel, and in summer there will be nothing to shade the gravel from the hot sun. Better. Safer. Sure.

“It will be so much prettier once it is landscaped, pruned and planted. Those little new trees will provide shade someday. Nobody uses tents anymore, and RVs are air conditioned so who cares if it is hot. Gravel pathways make it cleaner. Less mud. Who lets kids go barefoot nowadays.”

I will never stop resisting that attitude. If the campground needs improving, we should use minimal interventions. Look at how nature works. Model our publicly owned campground on it. Leave trees standing with other trees; their roots and branches support each other. Let sites blend into the forest. Encourage undergrowth. Let trails be packed dirt, perfect for barefoot children to scamper on, or barefoot adults, or barefoot elders. Earthing is a thing. Touching ground helps us all.

Camping is, or should be, an opportunity to touch the ground. If Hornby must be a tourist destination, let it be the most natural version of one. That is our brand, after all. So damn the province for deciding unilaterally what sort of tourism we must attract. Forget the wilderness experience. New visitors are funnelled into RV sites, shoes mandatory because of gravel, everything accessible and wired. Tribune Bay Campground will no longer be a respite from the civilized world, but an extension of it.

I protest. I do not blame the contractors doing their jobs as assigned. I blame the government, the officials, the planners and deciders who did not consult our community and simply do not care.

That is what I think. What do you think? Email me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com

How To Heal When The World Is On Fire

December 11, 2025

How To Heal When The World Is On Fire

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

DEC 09, 2025

Reading by Tim Foley:

Chloe writes the following via email regarding my recent piece “Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless”:

“What you said about what to do when you feel powerless really stuck with me…that externally you can always help wake up more people to the truth and internally you can heal. I guess I just have a question more with the latter. How do you heal in the midst of a world on fire? How do you feel safe and secure when you realize that the world is anything but those two things? That any form of comfort you feel is currently costing untold numbers of people’s blood and pain? How do you heal and feel safe when everything is just…grind…precarity and feeling on the edge of oblivion? Waking up to those realizations is terrifying…and it just feels like a full antitheis to being able to start your healing. Like things can only be safe when the monsters and the hell is defeated which won’t likely occur within the span of our lifetimes? It seems like thats something you’ve figured out and I’m curious how to start that.”

Dear Chloe,

I think first we need to be clear that healing and feeling secure are two different things. Healing isn’t about getting away from uncomfortable feelings, it’s about moving right into them and feeling them fully. After we have done our work and healing has occurred we tend to notice that we feel better, but the actual work of healing begins in discomfort. That’s where the rubber meets the road on this path.

Healing is when you find a part of yourself that has been acting out unconsciously over and over again throughout your life, by getting annoyed or upset or collapsing into helplessness, or by freezing up, freezing out, or freaking out. You start paying attention to how these unconscious behaviors play in yourself (either in your outward behavior or privately in your internal suffering), and you get real curious about how that is happening.

Healing is when you track that defense mechanism back to its first instance, the very first time you felt this feeling, usually in childhood, where you were small and vulnerable and you came up with this way of defending yourself in that moment and have stuck with it ever since. Our inner dysfunctions are generally just old strategies for dealing with perceived threats that we set in motion much earlier in our lives and then forgot about, which then went on to continue pulling the strings of our psychology from the depths of our subconscious long after they became maladaptive and unhelpful.

Healing is when you listen to that small part of you that has just been doing its very best to defend you all these years from the perceived threat that is no longer there because you are no longer a small child. You are an adult now, and you don’t face the same threats you faced (or more likely imagined you faced but didn’t understand) back when you were a kid. But a part of your brain has not caught up with that yet.

So you let that part of yourself talk to you, and you listen, and you love it, and you thank it for defending you all these years, but you let it know that you’re all good now. It can go. Compassion for your tiny self that didn’t know any better floods your system and in all that love, you forgive yourself for the first instance, and for all the instances after where you were punching at shadows that were no longer there.

In that flood of compassion, the mechanism dissolves. Sometimes the energy of it will literally up and leave, out your mouth in the form of a burp or a dry retch, or in a shudder or chattering of teeth, but other times it will simply melt into your whole self. You’ll just feel better, and you’ll know it’s gone because you won’t be able to find the feeling again if you attempt to return to it.

The thing about healing is that it leaves only an absence of something, so it doesn’t make a big deal about itself. You might not even notice that you’ve done anything much for a while. The more you do this though, the more the noise in your head dies down, and the real world begins to emerge.

You become less reactive and less likely to inadvertently cause drama in your world, and in yourself you become generally happier and lighter.

But you also see — and this goes back to the nub of your question — that in this new light the world becomes a much less scary place. You can see that the monsters who rule our world aren’t so much monsters as just little kids with far too much power unconsciously acting out their defense mechanisms. The suffering they cause is real and horrifying, but at the root of it, they are humans playing out a very human pattern. In this context, it’s comprehensible. You’ve found similar things in yourself, so it’s not an alien threat which defies understanding.

You also see how predictable people are when they are stuck in their reactive patterns. You can see that in our leaders. They are not surprising or inspired in any way at all; they are monotonously boring and beholden to the patterning of their psychological conditioning, and their behavior is predictable. Evil, yes, but also predictable.

Predictability is also a marker of the imperial core as a whole. You can see how incapable it is of changing tack, even when it no longer serves the empire to continue the pattern. The empire managers think they’re so slick, but they are stuck with repeating the same plays over and over. That’s a major weakness. They are telegraphing their next moves to us years in advance, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

The other thing that happens is that in this newfound clarity, you can interact with the world as it is. You are no longer expending energy fighting shadows of the past. Your healthy anger is re-ignited, ready to animate you into inspired action that responds to the present moment. You get your intuition back, unencumbered by neurosis and paranoia, so you can move more efficiently in the world. You get your healthy wants back, your “fuck yeah” and your “hell no”, and you can make good decisions quickly, and deftly course-correct if you need.

Imperial propaganda uses our fears, our tribal loyalties, our insecurities, and our learned helplessness to control us as efficiently as if they installed levers in our brain. If you dissolve those levers, you become a very dangerous entity to the machine. You become a free human being no longer acting in patterned and predictable ways, but moving with the needs of the moment. That is empowering.

So we definitely don’t need to wait until the bastards have been defeated and we’re feeling safe and secure in order to begin our healing journey. In fact, beginning the work of true healing makes us much more effective at fighting the empire, and the work begins right here in the big sloppy uncomfortable thick of it all. All it takes is the sincerity, vulnerability, humility, and courage to begin taking those first steps.

_________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Angled – December 11th, 2025

December 11, 2025

see you soon

December 11, 2025

Free Palestine: An Interview With Suspended Student Activist, Sara Kishawi

December 4, 2025

On November 13th I attended a screening of the Academy Award winning film “No Other Land” at the Denman Island Community Hall, hosted by the Denman Palestine Solidarity Group. The evening opened with a talk by Sara Kishawi, a student and community organizer, and spokesperson for the Palestinian Solidarity Encampment at Vancouver Island University (VIU).

Kishawi, a sociology graduate, was born in Gaza and is a student leader in support of Palestinian human rights and liberation. VIU has suspended Kishawi for her activism, and she has taken the university to Court for violating her rights, with a pending ruling that may take several more months to obtain. The following are the answers I received to my questions for her.

Question: Given that the United Nations has declared that Canada is complicit with the U.S. and 61 other countries in funding, arming, and giving diplomatic cover to Israel’s atrocities in Palestine and Gaza specifically, can you comment on Canada’s “conditional recognition” of Palestine?

Kishawi: This so-called recognition is a deliberate attempt to absolve Canada of its complicity in ongoing genocide, offering a superficial solution designed to pacify protesters, deflect boycotts, and relieve international pressure on Israel. Its conditional nature exposes it as a performance and an empty gesture masquerading as meaningful action. The conditions themselves are deeply problematic, reinforcing the two-state solution that demands Palestinians abandon their right of return and coexist with the very entity responsible for their ethnic cleansing. The same entity that refuses this recognition and refuses the two state solution.

Critically, this recognition does nothing to stop the violence, alleviate suffering, or confront the ongoing genocide. It is the epitome of symbolic politics: a gesture crafted to ease the conscience of the privileged while leaving oppression intact, masking injustice under the illusion of progress. With all that said, the recognition does have some pros as well. It shows us that Canada’s hands are not tied in terms of the demands protestors across the country are asking for. And so it should serve as encouragement to keep protesting and fighting for the end of the genocide and for the liberation of Palestinians.

Question: Can you comment on the public statements by the Canadian government vs the reality, and how corporate media has reported on the Gaza genocide, Palestine, and the Israeli occupation, settlements, and apartheid policies?

Kishawi: In short, the Canadian government and corporate media not only enabled Israel’s actions but actively manufactured public consent for the genocide of Palestinians, rendering them equally responsible and complicit in the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Question: Can you comment on the possible parallels between the symbolic gestures aimed at “justice” for the citizens of Palestine and First Nations people in Canada?

Kishawi: In systems built on colonialism, like in Canada, or on apartheid and occupation, like in Palestine, there are groups of people who benefit directly from these structures of oppression. This unequal distribution of power and privilege makes the fight against such violent systems less likely, as those who benefit are often unwilling to surrender the advantages they enjoy. It is within this context that symbolic actions arise, gestures that create the illusion of change while leaving the underlying harm untouched, akin to placing a bandage on a gunshot wound.

An example of such acts is the recognition of Palestine by Canada or Land Acknowledgments as a “solution” in Canada. These acts serve a dual purpose: they ease the conscience of the privileged while allowing them to continue benefiting from the system, and they stage a performance of justice for the oppressed, subtly discouraging resistance and maintaining the status quo.

Question: Can you tell us when you expect the Court’s ruling on your suspension from VIU?

Kishawi: I think regardless of the ruling, VIU has shown its true colours and set itself back. Please see this statement from the Students for Palestine Committee:

“We want to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who showed up and filled the courtroom for two full days Your presence and support mean everything, and they remind us that we are not alone in this struggle. We also want to thank our legal team for their incredible work and tireless commitment throughout this process. More statements will be released addressing VIU’s court submissions in detail, and we recognize that a decision from the court may take up to six months. Regardless of the timeline, our commitment remains unwavering: to stand firmly with Palestine and against racism, colonialism, and genocide.”

The Heart Beneath the Glass

December 4, 2025

Gabriel Jeroschewitz, November 16th^, 2025, Inspired by Mary Shelley

The Heart Beneath the Glass

I first saw her in the winter of 1792.
Florence was shrouded in the kind of cold that makes the air taste of stone dust and the Arno’s water run sluggish, like oil. I had come for paintings—Titian’s Venus, Botticelli’s mother of seas—and stayed, as so many did, for the whispers of a new marvel housed in the Museum for Physics and Natural History. They called her La Venere Anatomica—the Anatomical Venus.

She lay beneath a windowed dome, as if in a coffin from which she might awaken at any moment. Her skin, pale as candle wax yet somehow warm in hue, gleamed beneath the morning light filtered through high windows. A chain of pearls encircled her throat, its lustre faint against the uncanny smoothness of her flesh. Her hair—real human hair, it was said—tumbled in loose coils across her bare shoulders, arranged artfully yet with the disobedience of something that once belonged to a living head. She was beautiful in the way marble statues are lovely—perfect, immutable, and wholly indifferent to the trembling mortal heart.

Tourists muttered around me, shuffling in devotion or curiosity, but I did not hear them. My attention was fixed on the delicate rise and fall carved into her breastplate, the illusion of breath held just long enough to fool the eye. I knew, even then, that it was not only beauty on display. It was something else—a test, perhaps, in how far beauty could be stretched over truth before the mind recoils.

The docent, a thin man whose voice carried like dry parchment, made his way through the crowd. He spoke of Clemente Susini and Felice Fontana, masters of their strange art, describing the seven removable layers of the Venus as if recounting the petals of a divine flower. The words “odour-free,” “incorruptible” rose in the cold air, oddly clerical in tone, as though holiness were now a matter of preservation rather than faith.

And then, deftly, almost reverently, the man removed her wax breastplate.

The room seemed to tilt.

Beneath the smooth ivory of her outer form was a nest of organs sculpted with obsessive care: heart, liver, pancreas, each painted to the precise shade of living tissue. Across them, silk threads and linen fibres webbed delicately, imitating veins, nerves—an entire universe of sensation frozen in place. No seam was crude, no accent rushed. What Susini had made was not mockery, nor horror—it was the body as a cathedral.

But it was the last layer that undid me.

Nestled deep within her waxen womb, like a puzzle piece never meant to be displaced, lay a perfect fetus. Eternal, untouched by the decay of time. It curled in repose, and I felt—perhaps for the first time in my life—the full gravity of human stillness. She was not merely a Venus; she was the memory of life interrupted before it began.

I had been standing beside a young physician when that final layer was revealed. He inhaled sharply, eyes wide, though not in shock, in longing. We exchanged no words then, but later—outside, on the marble steps—he confessed he had studied medicine under Fontana’s direction. “I dreamed,” he said, “once, of opening the womb of a woman who had died in childbirth. She was beautiful—too beautiful for the hands of the living to defile. This Venus… she is that dream, preserved without sin.”

His name was Lorenzo. His voice carried sadness, but not shame. I told myself I ought to be disturbed by his yearning, but there was something in it that mirrored my own—the way we both saw her not as an object, but as someone caught between states: woman and sculpture, saint and specimen. Death and desire held her equally.

We met again in the museum a week later. We stood before the Venus longer than was polite, watching tourists shuffle past in quick gulps of sensation. He told me bits of her making—how some of her organs had been modelled before science could name them, how Fontana believed this would end dissections altogether. “She is incorruptible,” he whispered. “Imagine such faith in a thing of wax.”

In those weeks, I learned the truth about the museum: it was not science alone, nor art alone, but something more profound. Florence, after three centuries under the Medici, now wore Enlightenment like a fresh robe—and yet in this room, beauty was not separated from death. The Venus did not need to breathe; she inspired breath in others.

It was Lorenzo who quietly suggested that we see her in private. A request, when made to the right attendants, was possible for scholars—though I was no scholar, only a man capable of convincing others I was. We paid in coin, waited for dusk, and entered the hall alone.

Shadows swam across the walls, thrown by the oil lamps. The lustre of her skin was deeper now, her hair blacker against the pale curve of her cheek. Lorenzo touched the glass of her case, as if to wake her.

“Do you think she feels it?” he asked.

I did not laugh. “She feels what we give her,” I said.

We removed the dome and the layers in silence. His hands were steady, unafraid. Mine trembled—not in fear, but in something older, stranger. When her heart lay revealed, I thought of the strange symmetry of its shape, how it seemed to wait for a pulse that would never come.

And yet in that room, lit by lamplight and the scent of melting wax, I swear she was alive. Not in the sense of breathing, but in presence—like the Venus of Botticelli’s canvas stepping from her painted sea, or the goddess from Titian’s bed turning her eyes to meet yours.

We lingered over the seventh layer. The fetus seemed smaller in the dim light, impossibly fragile. Lorenzo’s voice was low: “I think she dreams. Of a shore she will never see. Of a child she will never bear.”

He closed her again, piece by piece, until the final breastplate came to rest over her immaculate torso. We stood, heads bowed, as if at mass.

Outside, the night had dropped upon Florence with its quiet procession of lamps and shadowy alleys. We walked together, and I found I could not speak of what we had seen. It was not an experience in need of telling; it was one meant to be carried, like a relic in the pocket of the mind.

Lorenzo left the city months later. War had spread its claws across the continent, and physicians were in demand. I returned to the museum alone, more than once, always stopping before her case.

Years passed. The Enlightenment gave way to other ages—each drawing its own lines between art and science, beauty and truth. And yet, even now, she lies there. Supine in her coffin, pearls at her throat, hair flowing like a river across the slope of her shoulder. Seven layers between the world and the quiet unborn at her core.

I believe Lorenzo was right: she dreams.

Not of us, who come and go with our own fragile hearts, but of the moment her creator’s hands gave her form. In that instant, she was both an offering to God and a mirror to man—a work of love, sharpened by death.

And for those of us who have stood before her—alone, or in the hush of another’s company—there is a sense that she keeps something of us as well. A touch against glass. A mouth that almost spoke. The shadow of a longing that will never be returned, yet will never fade.

She remains. And beneath her perfect surface, the heart still waits.

Phoenix Riting!

December 4, 2025

In 1970, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was published. The book addressed the psychological paralysis induced by too much, too swift societal and technological change.

To most of us now, 1970 seems a far simpler, more innocent time. Yes, massive upheavals were underway, such as civil rights, feminism, anti-war movements, psychedelics, peace, love, revolution, with innovations arriving at breakneck speed. In fact, pollution was worse then than today. Smog blanketed cities; people died on bad smog days. Acid rain was a big problem.

It was an unprecedented time. Yet, compared to life at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, it seems slow, measured, almost pastoral.

What do we call what’s happening now? Technology is eating the planet. Suffering, human and animal, is off the scale. Social changes move too fast to track. AI is being rolled out—pushed out—without restraint.

Nearly as many data centres are under construction as already exist in the U.S., many in residential areas. The Trump administration is forbidding all regulation on AI development and rollout, and European countries are adopting this stance to imitate (and placate) the Americans.

The speed of change today feels light years beyond that of even three or four years ago. It keeps accelerating. There seems no way to slow the train, let alone get off. It’s dizzying, worse than dizzying. It’s numbing, hypnotizing, mentally enslaving us. We did not evolve to navigate these conditions. Our brains can’t keep up.

As always, it’s hardest on the young. Growing up in this world is turning many children into tired, cynical veterans of change. Young people now face a choice.

Some ride the train, play by the rules, invest everything they are in the pursuit of advancement and, let’s face it, survival. Others feel forced to choose hedonism and a virtual existence.

It’s too hard to make friends as an adult. Dating apps are a nightmare, and there’s no other way to meet people because everyone is either constantly busy or staying home, waiting for the end of the world.

These young people live online, joining subcultures, adopting a virtual existence not because they don’t want real life but because, for so many embedded in urban internet land, there is no real life left.

It’s a disheartening view of modern culture, but a common one. And it makes me hyper-aware of two things: God, we are so lucky here! Hornby kids are still kids, immersed in nature. And God, we are so endangered. We are a vanishing breed. The bulldozers are chewing up the world, and we are in the way.

Do we sit back and enjoy our blessed existence until the changes eat our island too? Shrug and say, oh well, you can’t stand in the way of progress? Give up, sigh, shrink, pretend it’s okay or quietly hate what’s happening?

What else is there to do? Everyone has a voice, a pulpit, a medium, yet nobody gets a real say. Democracy isn’t a thing anymore, if it ever was. We can say whatever we want, and none of it affects those in power. Will the world change because I want it to? Not likely. Will it change if everyone here bands together, stands firm and demands it? On a global scale, also not likely.

The bulldozers are inexorable. Yes, we can slow them, stop some, direct the changes to minimize damage, if we stand firmly together. But one community standing apart can have little greater effect on the whole than a single individual.

First, we need to come together to take a stand, then band with other communities doing the same. In that way, we might organically grow a true grassroots revolution to change society’s priorities from the ground up. If enough of us say no, perhaps we’ll buy time to find more sustainable, earth-loving technologies, a way forward to a future that includes nature and the wild world. We need that.

So many discoveries are emerging to teach us a better way. Science has made it undeniable that Earth is a living, interdependent, cooperative community—not an inert ball of resources. Animals are sentient beings that should not, in any world, be treated as products. Evidence is growing that the universe itself is an interconnected field of consciousness. As a species, we are committing appalling crimes against nature, life, consciousness, and the planet that made us.

What’s being done in the name of our appetites is monstrous, perverse, impossible to conceive. It hurts my brain to think about it.

And yet, I must think about it. It’s the least I can do. Denial will dig our grave. We have to break out of it, one brain at a time. I’m doing my part in my way.

Small things can have a great result if enough people participate. We don’t need to give everything up or return to a hunter-gatherer life (though, if we continue down this path, we may be forced to!).

For instance, if I don’t upgrade my phone until I actually need to, that has a tiny effect. If more and more of us choose to make things last instead of racing for the newest, bestest thing—well, as long as there’s demand, there will be supply. There are so many small changes we could each choose.

Yes, the biggest things are out of our control. I don’t know what to do about them. But it can start small. What underlying human needs drive our desire for the newest thing? What can we do differently? It’s something to think about. I think about it constantly.

That’s what I think. What do you think? Email me at phoenixonhornby@gmail.com

A Number of Words on My Heroic Crusade Against Unapproved Thoughts

December 4, 2025

*Satire*

A Number of Words on My Heroic Crusade Against Unapproved Thoughts

By Englebert Vigilante, Denman Island’s Guardian of Acceptable Opinions

Citizens of Denman, gather close, I bring tidings of victory. This week, I personally saved the island from ideological chaos by exercising the noble, delicate art of silencing others, a skill for which I am, admittedly, naturally gifted.

It began when someone posted an opinion about slow internet service that was not on the Officially Approved List. (“A bit slow”, he said. Incorrect. The sanctioned phrase was “refreshingly deliberate.”) Naturally, I sprang into action. Within minutes, a hastily assembled Tribunal of Concerned Islanders (me plus two passersby who thought they were signing a petition for better ferry service) officially canceled the author of the offending comment.

Some say I “overreacted.” Others say I “invented the Tribunal.” But history, which I plan to personally edit before publication, will remember this as the moment Denman was saved from free-range thinking. Since then, requests have poured in, well, one request, from myself, to expand my influence. I am considering mandatory pre-approval for all island conversations, facial expressions, and wistful sighs. Am I a hero? I don’t like to say it out loud. I prefer to print it in the newspaper.

These are a number of MY words. Naturally.

Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless

December 4, 2025

Don’t Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

NOV 26, 2025

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Don’t let the empire gaslight you into believing you are powerless and helpless. There are always things you can do to fight the bastards, and there are always things you can do to improve your own life.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of believing there’s nothing we can do. Nothing we can do to fight the machine because it’s too large and entrenched, and nothing we can do to change our own personal circumstances because the deck is stacked so unfairly against ordinary people.

It’s a strong illusion because at a surface glance it appears to be true. Our political systems are locked down by the rich and powerful to ensure that our votes don’t inconvenience them in any way, and any new political movement which challenges establishment power structures will find itself facing sabotage from the outside and from within. Our voices are kept marginalized and our countrymen have been turned into mindless empire automatons by a lifetime of propaganda indoctrination.

And at first glance we appear to be just as powerless in our personal lives as well. Unless you’re lucky enough to have obtained some capital which you can use to extract labor from the working class or to possess some special aptitude that our system happens to value, you can spend your whole life struggling in poverty. The life of a worker is getting harder and harder, and it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing you can do about your own unhappiness and psychological dysfunction because you’re laboring under a system that’s so abusive and unfair.

So while it is true that there are many doors that are closed to a denizen of our dystopia, that doesn’t mean you are powerless to change things. Believing that you are powerless serves no one but the powerful.

We are never truly powerless because we always have the ability to help foment a revolutionary zeitgeist, and because we always have the ability to heal ourselves. As a collective we have the power to inform and educate the public to help them understand that they’ve been deceived their whole lives about our society, and that a better world is both needed and possible. As individuals we have the ability to do inner work to heal our trauma and liberate ourselves from the delusion of ego, which will have radically transformative effects on our quality of life in a whole host of ways.

There is nothing our rulers can do to take these abilities away from us. We will always have the ability to do something to help awaken the people to the need for revolution, and we will always have the ability to heal our inner wounds. Every single day there are concrete actions we can take toward both of these ends.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe there’s nothing we can do to change things. Too many socialists are content to just sit around smugly knowing better than everyone else and having all the correct opinions about things while expressing distain for everyone who tries to expand awareness or make the world a better place. Get active in your community. Produce dissident media. Make revolutionary art. Have conversations. Change minds. Open some eyes. Wake people up so that one day there will be enough of us to force real change.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe you are doomed to a life of misery. Too many socialists are content to blame all their internal dysfunction on the abuses of capitalism and just spend their days masturbating their inner wounds in meetings and online without doing the rigorous inner work necessary to come to inner peace. Get curious about your internal processes. Research the many modalities for inner healing that are available online. Listen to the brilliant minds who’ve been sharing groundbreaking new insights about trauma and inner work lately. Investigate the possibility that spiritual enlightenment is a real phenomenon that is entirely achievable in this life. Take responsibility for your own inner wellbeing, and start doing something about it.

We don’t need to sit around paralyzed by power-serving learned helplessness. We don’t need to sit idly by waiting for some deus ex machina resolution to our plight. We don’t need to resign ourselves to a life of suffering and making the same mistakes over and over again because we’re being whipped about by unconscious forces within us that we’ve never taken the time to investigate.

There is always something we can do. We can never do everything, but we can always do something. There’s no good reason not to do that something we can do, every single day of our lives.

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