October Update: The Last Four Years

Hey team.

A Moment to be Serious

The next video is written. The audio is recorded and edited. The relevant footage is on my computer, and the edit has begun. But it won't be out before November.

I am burnt out. All the tweaks to content, work schedule, and leisure time in the world cannot keep it away forever. The election is in less than a week. COVID cases in Massachusetts are back up to the levels they were in April because we reopened the goddamn schools, and there hasn't been any sunlight in days. I won't list all the ways Republicans have openly, unapologetically suppressed votes and stolen court appointments, or how many people have died needlessly from a virus that could have been contained. I am stressed and panicky, but I don't need you to be as well.

I asked my therapist the other day: how are people supposed to keep functioning during all this? How are we supposed to keep going to our jobs? Having mundane phone calls with our parents? Cooking meals? You can't stop living, but every moment of normal, mundane existence seems absurd when you don't know whether your democracy will still exist in four days.

These times have me reflecting on the last four years. On how much has changed, how much we've endured, how exhausted we are but also how much hope has been gained, tested, lost, and rebuilt. I think about how The Alt-Right Playbook didn't exist before the last election, how impossible being a full-time video essayist seemed. I was still a part-time student at the time.  I'd never made a video that wasn't about games. I think about what my plans were for this year, how I was going to finished ARP before the election and be ready for whatever's next. And then how the pandemic made working on these complex political videos impossible, and now how even the lower-stress, freewheeling stuff I shifted focus to now seems impossible.

I remember all the videos that came out when Trump first got elected, YouTubers saying "whatever happens, you are not alone." Pledging to fight. Pledging to care for each other. Ready to do the work, even if we weren't sure yet what the work was.

It is with a degree of despair I ready to make those same promises again. But also... a sense of resilience? I don't want that to sound empty in the way it sometimes does, like the people who say "we survived Reagan, we can survive Trump," because a lot of people didn't survive Reagan and a lot haven't survived Trump. I suppose what I mean is: those of us who've made it haven't given up.

The idea of another four years of this, or more, is staggering. The idea of four years of Biden, the vacuous old man who still thinks the solution to literal fascism is bipartisanship, doesn't bring much relief. But, if you're reading this, you made it this far. And you're still not alone. And I'm tired down to my very bones but I'm not giving up. I don't know what's going to happen, what needs to be done, or if we'll win. But I know we'll face it together.

Things Will Be Different

Reflecting also means trying to plot the future. That's hard to do when there are so many variables, and who knows what will or won't change. But I've been thinking about the channel, and my relationship to it, and coming to some decisions.

First and foremost: The Alt-Right Playbook is going to end, and soon. For some time I've been saying there are five-ish episodes left, not counting a conclusion and some "how to counter the Alt-Right" videos. I've looked that list of topics over and I'm cutting it down. As of now, there are two proper ARP videos remaining. One is a fairly traditional video, and one is a long-planned lightning round video, where I tackle a lot of conservative techniques that are worth discussing but don't warrant a full video. I've realized that many of the planned 5 videos would work better in the lightning round, and several planned subjects in the lightning round aren't really that important/can be asides in other videos.

I've also finally figured out how to end the series - with three (hopefully) short videos, one discussing how to debunk a reactionary argument, one about how to persuade a reactionary to change their mind, and one listing a number of axioms I've come away with for how to understand and predict the conservative mindset.

So, in the end, it's still five-ish videos, but it's no longer "plus conclusion" but "including conclusion." And, somehow, I'm going to get back to them soon. I'm not sure how fast I can work on these topics, and there are some books I still want to get through, but it's time.

This is a very hard decision to make. ARP has not only been the central work of my life for over three years, it's also my bread & butter. I don't know what happens to the channel once it's complete. I don't know how many people will stick around when the series is done. But I have to confess: it is bringing me more stress than satisfaction lately. And it seems, on the eve of either Trump exiting office or US democracy failing, it's time to start whatever the next thing is.

As to what the next thing is, I'll talk about that in greater detail soon. But I have two projects I've been kicking around lately:

One, an involved series on leftist revolutions throughout history, trying to understand what makes one succeed or fail, and which ones resulted in something approximating the kind of socialist/communist/anarchist state leftists aspire to, and which ones turned into Stalin-esque authoritarian regimes leftist in name only. I want to know what conditions make revolution possible, and what conditions keep it from turning into something ugly.

The other, a truly ridiculous idea to follow in Errant Signal's footsteps and do a series mapping the history of the adventure game chronologically, starting in 1984 with King's Quest. I had the idea a couple weeks ago, immediately wrote down what games I thought I should cover for each year, and now it's become one of those things where I open up the document and poke around, adding and subtracting things, getting more and more excited about the prospect. This would be too much of an undertaking to do alone - the way I work, it would take three years to get from 1984 to the present and that's doing literally no other videos - so I'll be looking to do the writing and footage capture and then work with an editor for the videos themselves. Not a lot brings me joy these days, so I'm latching onto the idea that does.

So that's where we are. The new video will come out sometime next month, though I'm gonna have to move at the pace that works for me.

When next we speak, the election will be over, and we'll have some idea of where things are headed.

Take care of yourselves,

-I