In Theory is a new semi-regular column in which Andy Cush takes a close look at the compositional underpinnings of songs new and old in search of a deeper understanding of how and why they move us.

Back in January, I published a piece I’d had on my mind for awhile about the Diana Ross disco anthem “Upside Down,” which involved a bit of analysis of the song’s unusual chords. “Upside Down” has always seemed to me a little stranger, spookier even, than its dancefloor-filling jubilance initially lets on, and I wanted to talk about why.

The Psychological Horror of Diana Ross’ “Upside Down”

A close look at the mysterious underpinnings of a disco classic.

Hearing ThingsAndy Cush

I didn’t intend to make this sort of writing a regular thing, but the response to the Diana Ross piece was so enthusiastic that I decided to keep at it. For days after I published it, people were responding on Twitter to say they’ve always wanted to read this sort of criticism, in which concepts from music theory are presented in terms that non-musicians can understand, and used to raise questions and possible answers about how and why songs make us feel the way they do. Or else they were writing to quibble with aspects of my analysis, usually with well-reasoned arguments, but with a few insults to my musical intelligence thrown in. All of these responses seemed encouraging. 

Next up in this newly inaugurated column, which I'm calling In Theory, is Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” prompted by the late Texas songwriting legend’s birthday last weekend. As with “Upside Down,” I’m interested in the way “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” uses its harmony to create emotional subtext that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from the words on the page. I don’t know exactly what else I’ll get into as the column progresses, but I suspect this will be an ongoing theme: looking at how words and music interact to create effects more powerful and richly complex than either could convey on its own. And though, as with "Upside Down," I’m using harmonic analysis to suggest a somewhat counterintuitive reading of the song, I truly believe a listener without a musical background might come to the same conclusions, just based on how the music feels. This is important: For me, this sort of analysis is only meaningful if it is descriptive rather than prescriptive—that is, if it helps to elucidate some aspect of the music that is already apparent from simply hearing it, rather than lording the theory over you as a way of telling you what to think. 

“I’ll Be Here in the Morning” first appeared on For the Sake of the Song, Van Zandt’s 1968 debut, but its best-known version came out a year later on his self-titled third album, which featured several re-recordings of songs that he felt had been overproduced in their earlier renditions. The 1969 recording is sparser, slower, rougher around the edges, stripping away the swooning strings and jaunty backing vocals that adorn the original. I’ll be focusing on that version, both because it’s the more familiar one and because its lonesome arrangement further brings out the painfully ambiguous quality of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning”  that I want to discuss, which for me is what elevates the song to masterpiece status. 

On its face, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is a straightforward inversion of one of country music’s trustiest archetypes. The genre’s history is full of ramblin’ men too drawn to the call of the open road to be tied down by the women who love them: Hank Williams, Marty Robbins, Glen Campbell, Merle Haggard, and many, many others have recorded songs in this vein. At first, Townes’s take seems like just another contribution to the ramblin’ man’s enduring myth, albeit one with an especially poetic rendering of the road’s appeal. “There’s no stronger wind than the one that blows down a lonesome railroad line/No prettier sight than lookin’ back on a town you left behind,” he sings wistfully in the song’s first lines. But then, in the third line of each verse, his tone changes: Sure, he’d like to be out there roaming, but there’s a woman he loves at home who keeps him there. The choruses take the form of reassurances to her: “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning/Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while.”

If that were the whole of it, “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” would still be a sweet love song, one that finds unexpected tenderness beneath the tough masculine exterior of a time-worn country trope. (For a song that does more or less that, without pressing on the wound like this one does, see Jerry Reed’s delightful “You Took All the Ramblin’ Out of Me.”) But Van Zandt, a deeply troubled guy and a brilliant observer of subtleties of feeling, was not much for uncomplicated sweetness. Though he never lets on as much, I think his narrator is telling his companion to hush and not worry while he plans his escape in the night. Or maybe he will stay, but he’ll never be all the way there, with some part of his heart always yearning to ramble.

My sense of the unspoken sadness in “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” comes largely from its chords. For much of its runtime, it cycles through four or five of them, depending on how precise you want to get. These are E Major, A Major, B Major, B7, and F#7. For the purpose of simplicity, let’s focus for now on E, A, and B7, a trio of chords that firmly situates us in the key of E Major. (F#7, the one chord from outside the key, is what’s known as a “secondary dominant” chord—a concept that’s probably too complicated to explain here, and not especially pertinent to the point I hope to make.) In the context of the key of E Major, E is what’s known as the I chord; A is the IV chord; and B7 is the V7 chord. That’s one, four, and five-seven, if you’re saying them out loud.

These chords are important building blocks of almost all Western music, and they each have their own color and feeling, sonic qualities you might recognize even if you can’t name them. The I chord feels like home: when a song seems to be coming to a satisfying rest, whether literally at the end or just the end of a phrase, that’s often because it’s landing on the I. The IV feels like a departure, or a lift: You hear it and you feel like you’re setting off from home, going somewhere else. The V7 is even further away, but it also has a tension in it that pulls your ear back toward the I, letting you know you’re about to return home. You can make a compelling musical journey by just repeating these three chords, and maybe varying their order from time to time. Home→departure→the feeling of wanting to return→home again. Repeat as necessary. This pattern, with some built-in variations, is the basic underlying structure of the blues, and from there it migrated to all sorts of other American music, including country. With its cycles coming and going, this sort of chord progression has obvious resonance with the subject matter of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning.”

Van Zandt’s composition is evocative of a classic blues form, but without replicating it exactly. One element he does pick up from the blues is a little flourish that comes toward the end of the cycle, before it repeats: You’re sitting on the V7 chord, waiting to be pulled to the comfort of the I, but you travel back through the IV before you get there, as if retracing your steps around a big circle to get home instead of just finishing the loop. This is where “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” gets a little tricky: It pulls this bluesy V7-IV move, setting you up for a leisurely return home to the I—E Major, remember—but it lands instead on C# minor, the first minor chord in the song.

Even if you never got past grade school music education, you might remember that minor chords tend to sound sadder than major ones. C# minor, in this context, is the vi chord (minor chords get lower-case roman numerals), otherwise known as the relative minor. It’s sort of like the shadow self of the I chord: It has all the same notes in common except for one, but that one change makes it dark and heavy instead of light and airy. Home, but a sad version of home. 

Van Zandt lets this unexpected shadow drift over right at the end of the chorus. “Close your eyes, I’ll be here in the morning”—everything’s still fine, we’re making our leisurely way from V back to IV—“Close your eyes, I’ll be here for a while”—right on while is where the vi chord hits. Compared with the chordal gymnastics of “Upside Down,” going to the vi here is not especially daring from a purely musical perspective, but its simplicity is part of its power: There is no mistaking the ominous note that Van Zandt strikes just as his lyrics offer these words of comfort. It’s enough to make you wonder how comforting they really are. “I’ll be here in the morning.” OK, but what about the morning after that? “I’ll be here for a while.” And then what?

I’d always thought of “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” as being a dark twist on the very archetype it seems to undermine: the song of a guy who runs off even as he promises to stay. But as I listened carefully and repeatedly to prepare for this piece, the answer became less and less clear. If he leaves, he’ll miss her; if he stays, he’ll miss the road. The C# minor chord starts to feel like a symbol of the regret he will inevitably feel, whichever choice he makes. Van Zandt’s songs often have an allegorical or philosophical quality: a hand of cards becomes a battleground of fate and free will; a tale of two bandits a meditation on sin and redemption. “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is not just about one man’s wanderlust, it’s about the way any major decision can feel like a sort of death: The death of the person who took the other path, the snuffing out of the love or adventure that he might have found there. 

Van Zandt’s writing is characteristically beautiful. I especially love the second verse: “There's lots of things along the road I'd surely like to see/I'd like to lean into the wind and tell myself I'm free/But your softest whisper's louder than the highway's call to me.” There are little seeds of doubt that the lyrics may plant in your mind, but the song’s painful ambiguity really comes almost entirely from that single C# minor chord. If you were to change it to E Major, the more expected move, you’d get got a much happier song, and a much less powerful one. 

Humans have told stories to each other for as long as there have been stories to tell. Stories predate language, even humans, appearing on caves, as shadows, or in gestures by a fire. The human mind is great at receiving stories, too. A handful of words in a brutal, inefficient language, can still conjure pictures in our minds.

Stories have power even in the modern world. Beyond creative works like films, novels, or poetry, we use our stories to inspire and persuade. In the working world, we use stories to make data tangible and meaningful. We frame people's personal narratives through the hardships they've faced. Service providers tell people's stories in an arc familiar to epic poems. They faced hardship, they overcame, they succeeded, they thrived.

Organizations often use these stories to describe a program and the impact it's had. Numbers are great when they're large. "Oh wow, we helped 1 million puppy children." or "These puppy children earned 300,000 bones for their families." But for most people the numbers are meaningless. What's the context? A former employer claimed to distribute millions of pounds of food each year. But what kind of food was it? Was some of it rotten? Were some of those pounds industrial-sized cans of baby corn? While numbers are great, they don't convey impact like a person's story does. Donors know this too. Storytelling activates a person's imagination in ways that dry reports can't do alone. A person in need makes a compelling recipient of a donor's so-called largesse. Donating to an organization, not a person, is a request to keep doing whatever work they were doing.

Stories can also come at a cost. I've written before about how hard it is to unlace the trauma in some people's stories. Beyond that, a person's story as told by a nonprofit rarely brings them a direct benefit. It's sometimes twisted or repackaged into a different story altogether. That story's loyalty risks lying more with the donor class, less with the person who lived it.

how do we know?

We're now decades out from the era that coined the term "poverty porn." What has changed since then? I am in the business of telling other people's stories. I run focus groups and listening sessions to hear what real people have to say. Here are some of the things I try to watch out for.

What's our editorial bias here?

• What development process do stories go through?
• Who is the primary audience for the story that we're telling?
• If we use a storytelling template, how was it made?
• What role does the original storyteller play in its retelling?

What's the goal of this story?

• Are we shaping it for donor impact or community benefit?
• How did we choose this story to tell?
• Are we describing a person's own agency in their story, or are we the heroes?

Are we treating these stories with care?

• Do we have metrics around story generation?
• What does one individual story mean to us?
• For how long will we use a person's story or likeness?

making better stories

How can we tell people's stories without bringing more harm to them? It comes down to agency. Who has it? Who gets the final word on how we portray the stories we tell? Is the storyteller better off having told us that story? What else can we do to limit the negative impacts we may have on a person?

Help people tell their stories in their own way. People with limited power face exploitation when they have no other options available. Our noble intentions aren't enough to continue that exploitation for our own gain.

Include storytellers in the full development process. Describe the goal of your stories to people you're soliciting stories from. Explain how you plan to use the stories. People's experiences are unique—we don't have the right to tell their story in perpetuity. Set a length of time that you want to share their story.

Include storytellers in your profit sharing. Compensate them according to the amount of time you'll use their story and the income you will earn from it.

Challenge the systems that created the conditions your storytellers endure. Instead of manipulating a person's story, add context to their experience. Explain to your audience the change we need to keep others from going through what they went through.

I see storytelling as a collaborative process. The people who interact with us are more than outputs. Their lives extend well beyond that of a recipient of our services. In systems of justice, we see community action as peers supporting peers. A thin line often separates the person offering a service and the person receiving them. But everyone deserves respect. No story is worth more than the person who lives to tell it.

I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new startup that would soon fizzle into obscurity. Mostly I was confused by their gargantuan ad budget. I was not alone. But the ads never relented, and as I was served unskippable Grammarly ads again and again, the script seared into my brain: "Writing's not that easy, but Grammarly can help." The ads irritated me so much that, on principle, I tried to coat my brain in teflon and slough off any and all information about Grammarly's whole deal, which meant that I barely registered what, exactly, the company did. But even back then, before I had any real reason to, I knew then that I hated Grammarly.

Grammarly, which was founded in 2009 and rebranded as Superhuman last fall, used tools like machine learning to proofread people's writing. It checked grammar and spelling, similar to Microsoft's Office Assistant, albeit with none of Clippy's signature panache. If Grammarly's ads were to be trusted, it was perfect for people like Tyler, who needed Grammarly's help to write an email to his boss Anita. In that commercial's logic, Tyler wants Anita to like him, but he doesn't want to sound unsure of himself. So Grammarly helps him swap words like "really helpful" to "beneficial" and "educational" to "informative," words, we are told, that will connect better with Anita. Tyler's successful email means Anita emails him back in just a few minutes, and they can now ride the elevator together standing close to each other. Each time I was forced to watch this ad, I remember wondering: Are Tyler and Anita going to smash?

That product appeared somewhat benign, considering the wretched contemporary landscape of overtly malevolent tech companies with even more discomfiting ads. But not to be outdone, in 2023 Grammarly introduced generative AI assistance, which, among other things, offered to now do the writing for you. In the years following, the company expanded its suite of generative AI fripperies, with features such as "AI Instagram Caption Generators" or a feature called "Improve It" that offered to "make" a piece of writing any of the following adjectives: diplomatic, exciting, inspirational, friendly, empathetic, assertive, confident, or persuasive. This all sounded like stupid, run-of-the mill gen-AI bluster.

If the Trump administration was expecting it’d quickly wrap up its “little excursion” in Iran like in a repeat of Venezuela, geopolitical reality had different ideas. 

On Wednesday, the Iranian government said it was ready for a long war that would “destroy” the global economy, Le Monde reported, as it continues to shut down a key passageway for oil supplies, the Strait of Hormuz.

“Get ready for the oil barrel to be at $200 because the oil price depends on the regional stability which you have destabilised,” Ebrahim Zolfaqari, a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told Reuters.

Oil prices have surged since February 28, when the US and Israel opened aggressions by assassinating Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei in a series of missile strikes that also killed the commander of the IRGC, the minister of defense, and other top brass. The strikes have also killed more than 1,000 civilians. One US Tomahawk missile struck an elementary school, killing at least 175 people including numerous students in a massacre that’s now under investigation by the Pentagon.

The regime has not collapsed, as some Trump officials may have hoped, and it retaliated by launching its own campaign of missile and drone strikes across US allies in the Middle East.

The IRGC has vowed that not a “single liter of oil” would pass through the Strait of Hormuz to hostile nations. Approximately 20 percent of the world’s global oil supplies flow through the passage, where Iran has cut off shipping traffic for the past two weeks. The strait connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, providing the only route to the open ocean for supertankers carrying oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Iran, and others.

Two oil vessels were struck with explosions in an Iraqi port on Thursday, in suspected Iranian attacks. Three other cargo ships were also struck and set ablaze in the Gulf hours before. The IRGC has claimed responsibility for at least one of those attacks, a Thai bulk carrier.

Whether the gravity of the situation has sunk in for US leadership is an open question. The day before the seeming escalations in the Gulf, Donald Trump declared that the US had already won the war.

Iran’s newly appointed supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei redoubled pressure on oil markets Thursday. In his first public message since being appointed mere days ago, Khamenei affirmed that the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed, adding his demand that all US bases in the region should be closed, per Reuters.

Last week, Brent crude oil prices reached over $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022, peaking at nearly $120 per barrel on Monday, sending shudders throughout the economy. Gas prices in the US have surged to an average of over $3.50 per gallon, according to AAA, and are already soaring far past that point on the West Coast.

The International Energy Agency said the ongoing war has caused the largest disruption to global oil supplies in history. On Wednesday, it announced that member countries would release 400 million barrels of oil from emergency stockpiles, itself a historic figure, to dampen surging oil prices. The US said it would chip in with 172 million barrels from its ​Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Despite the announcement, Brent crude rose more than 8 percent to over $100 per barrel overnight, Axios reported.

President Trump was transparent that the strain on oil markets would provide a windfall for US producers.

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social, his social media site.

More on Iran: Toxic Sludge Raining Down on Iran After Bombing of Oil Facilities

The post Iran Says It’s Ready to Destroy the Global Economy appeared first on Futurism.

On Alderson Loops, Billionaire Cruelty, and Living Inside the Trap

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks[1]

I. The Loop

In computer science, there is a structure called an Alderson loop.[2] It is a program that appears to have an exit condition—a way out, a termination point, something that should resolve the process and let you move on. But the exit condition can never actually be met. The loop runs forever, cycling through its instructions with the cruel veneer of functionality. It lies to you in that it appears to work just fine but it traps you in an endless loop that can never be ended.

This is what it feels like to be a trans person in an increasingly authoritarians and autocratic America in 2026.

Every path that should lead to safety, to justice, to the simple baseline dignity of existing in public, has been engineered to dead-end. Advocate peacefully through institutions—the courts are captured by conservative super-majorities who will never uphold your rights.[3] Build coalitions and watch the funding dry up as foundations flee and donors go silent, and as organizations like the Human Rights Campaign hemorrhage staff in mass layoffs.[4] Appeal to moderates but the Overton window has already shifted so far that your mere existence is now the “extreme” position. Exhibit any outrage at the indignities perpetrated against you and you confirm the narrative they’ve spent years constructing that you are violent, dangerous, a threat to children. Stay quiet, get erased quietly. Every option looks like an exit. None of them actually terminates the loop.

I have written before about what Ernst Fraenkel called the “dual state,” the structure of fascist governance in which two legal orders operate simultaneously, one for the protected and one for the persecuted.[5] Trans people in America live inside the persecuted order. Our documents can be revoked. Our healthcare can be criminalized. Our right to exist in public space can be legislated away. The normative order, the one with constitutional protections and due process and equal protection, watches from the inside and tells us the system is working just fine.[6]

I have spent years inside this structure. I have spent years watching the people I work alongside—brilliant attorneys, tireless advocates, entire organizations built to protect our community—run the same instructions over and over, each time expecting the condition to resolve, each time watching it fail. I have done it myself. The loop does not care about your effort. It does not care about your expertise. It does not care about the moral clarity of your position. It simply runs.

II. The Architects

The Loop that traps trans people in America was not an accident. It was engineered, and the engineers have names. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, who purchased both a social media platform and a role inside the federal government to amplify the dehumanization campaign. J.K. Rowling, who leveraged one of the most beloved literary franchises in history, and the wealth that flowed from it, into a full-time crusade against trans existence in the UK. Joseph Edelman, a billionaire biotech hedge fund manager, has poured millions into undermining the medical consensus on gender-affirming care. There's the litany of far right conservative influencers that have built their entire platforms on dehumanizing and degrading trans people. There's the New York Times that viewed shifting editorial stances on trans people as a means of bolstering their credentials with conservative audiences. Then there’s the network of conservative foundations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, and the American College of Pediatricians, that have created the policy infrastructure to support their goals. They have all spent billions collectively to construct an information ecosystem where trans people are pathologized, criminalized, and erased.

They play God with our lives without permission. They dictate where we use the bathroom, how we are addressed, what our documents say about us, what healthcare we can access. Every aspect of our daily existence is subject to their whims. It’s an executive order here, a state law there, a Supreme Court decision that reshapes the legal landscape overnight. Yet, they face no consequences. None. Musk remains the richest man alive. Rowling is still celebrated with an HBO reboot of Harry Potter on the way. Edelman still runs his biotech VC hedge fund. The think tanks continue on as always with their minions slowly building their careers on the backs of trans people. The politicians who sponsor these bills get reelected. The asymmetry between what this costs them, which is nothing, and what it costs us, everything, is absolutely obscene.

What makes it uniquely maddening is the casualness of the cruelty. For them, our erasure is a culture war strategy, a tweet, a fundraising email. For us, it is Tuesday morning wondering whether our prescriptions will still be filled, whether our driver’s license will be honored, whether some new executive order just made our existence a little more illegal. They are playing with our lives like it doesn’t matter at all. In the only calculus that governs their behavior, power and profit, it actually doesn’t.

III. The Preemptive Trap

There is a deeper cruelty embedded in the Loop, one that reveals just how deliberately it was constructed. The architects have not only closed every exit, they have also preemptively delegitimized the very concept of resistance. For years, a coordinated disinformation campaign across conservative media and social media has seeded the narrative that trans people are inherently violent. In 2022, immediately after the Uvalde massacre, right-wing influencers falsely identified the shooter as a trans woman, spreading the disinformation to millions before any correction could take hold.[7] The Nashville shooting was amplified and instrumentalized endlessly. Joe Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, repeated the lie just this past week that trans people are responsible for most school shootings for his millions of listeners to hear.[8]  Every instance of violence committed by any trans person, anywhere, at any time, is purposefully elevated to national news by an ecosystem designed to make the anomalous appear endemic.[9]

This is not random. This is the oldest play in the authoritarian handbook, preemptively labeling a marginalized group as dangerous to justify whatever comes next and to foreclose any possibility of resistance. The Black Panthers were labeled terrorists to justify COINTELPRO.[10] Civil rights protesters were framed as violent agitators to justify state violence against them. Jewish communities were labeled subversive as a precondition for pogroms. Even the mere expression of anger at the constant indignities one must face becomes the confirmation of the propaganda they have spread. The mechanism is identical: create a trap where any action, even expressions of anger, confirms the narrative, and passivity is taken as permission to continue the persecution.

I see it clearly. That is its own particular kind of hell—seeing the mechanism with perfect clarity and being unable to do a single thing about it. The Loop doesn’t require that you be ignorant of its structure. It only requires that the exit condition remain unsatisfiable. You can understand the Loop completely and still be trapped inside it.

IV. The Moral Hazard of Mercy

History offers a grim lesson for those of us looking for precedent. The revolutions and transitions that successfully overthrew entrenched power without replicating its atrocities such as Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, South Africa’s transition, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia all share a common feature that should trouble anyone seeking accountability: the oppressors got away with it.

The Apartheid architects received Truth and Reconciliation. The Portuguese fascists faded into private life. The Soviet-aligned leaders in Czechoslovakia simply became irrelevant. These were the good outcomes, the ones where the new order was humane, where institutions were built rather than destroyed, where the vulnerable were protected rather than consumed by the revolution that claimed to liberate them. And in every case, the people who inflicted the suffering faced no consequences proportional to the harm they caused.

We don't even have to look abroad for precedent of this lack of meaningful accountability for the transgressions of oppression of entire classes of people. The politicians and bureaucrats who effectuated the Lavender scare, which saw the full scale purge of LGBTQ Americans from federal employment in the 1950's, never faced any sort of repercussions for their actions. The Reagan administration officials that obfuscated and covered up the AIDS crisis that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the LGBTQ community, likewise never saw any sort of consequences for their actions that resulted in mass death. I could go on and on.

This is a moral hazard of staggering proportions, and the oligarchs understand it intuitively even if they would never articulate it in these exact terms. They know they are effectively playing with house money. The best-case scenario for the opposition, a peaceful, democratic restoration of rights, the dismantling of the oligarchy, and the end of autocracy, is also the scenario in which Musk keeps his billions, Trump’s Administration escapes criminal prosecution, and the politicians who built their careers on cruelty and suffering retire comfortably. The worst-case scenario, from their perspective, is simply irrelevance. That is the entire range of consequences available to them within any political transition that is also capable of producing a just society.

Meanwhile, the revolutions that did exact retribution, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, and the Maoists, all invariably became their own particular hellish nightmares. In every case, queer people, among others, were specifically targeted by the new regimes. Stalin recriminalized homosexuality. Castro’s Cuba persecuted gay men in labor camps, the same Cuba whose revolution Reinaldo Arenas supported before it turned on him and drove him to exile and death.[11]

The structure is elegant in its cruelty: the paths to accountability that preserve justice offer no accountability, and the paths to accountability that offer retribution destroy justice. The oligarchs sit comfortably in the space between these two possibilities, knowing that no outcome available to us reaches them where it counts. This is the Loop functioning as it was designed, the core function to protect power and insulate the powerful from accountability.

V. Living in Truth Inside the Loop

Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who was imprisoned for his opposition to the totalitarian Soviet regime, wrote The Power of the Powerless in 1978, under a regime that appeared permanent.[12] There was no visible path to change, no plausible mechanism for liberation, no reason to believe the system would collapse. The exits were all Alderson loops; the system appeared functional and yet there was no escape. And yet Havel wrote. Not from hope, exactly, but from a refusal to let the system’s description of reality go unchallenged. He called it “living in truth,” the act of naming what is actually happening even when the naming has no power to change it.

James Baldwin wrote from inside the same structure, mapped onto a different human geography. In No Name in the Street, after watching Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. murdered in sequence, Baldwin surveyed the wreckage of every avenue of hope and still kept writing despite his growing pessimism that liberation would ever be achieved.[13] He wrote, not because he believed the writing would fix it, but because the alternative of silence, surrender, and the acceptance of someone else’s description of your reality, was itself a form of death that preceded the physical kind.

Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist writing under Reagan, described exhaustion and despair as political tools wielded against marginalized people. She described the refusal to succumb to them through anger at the injustice as a motivating force.[14] This is not inspirational poster language. This is a strategic assessment from someone who understood that the system’s most effective weapon is not the law or the police or the executive order. It is the moment you stop fighting or being angry because you have concluded, rationally, that fighting or feeling anything but suffering is pointless. Within that framework that Lorde wrote so elegantly about, your anger and your rage at the systemic injustices around you are the fuel that must propel you through what appears to be an inescapable condition.

VI. Exit Condition

I will not end this essay with hope. Hope is not owed to you, and I will not manufacture it to make this current situation seem more palatable. The honest assessment is this: the Loop is real, the exits are fake, the architects face no consequences, and the next decade or longer will be unimaginably difficult. The courts are captured. The funding infrastructure of our organizations is collapsing. The federal government has turned actively hostile and even blue states can no longer protect us. The billionaire class has consolidated enough power to sustain this Girardian scapegoating campaign indefinitely. If you are waiting for me to tell you how this resolves, I do not have that answer for you.

What I want to do though is be precise about what Gramsci actually meant when he wrote from a fascist prison cell that the task is “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”[15] He was not offering some sort of neat little bumper sticker slogan. He was describing a methodology for survival under conditions of autocratic capture. The pessimism of the intellect means seeing the Loop for what it is with no illusions, no false exits, and no comforting narratives about the arc of history. The optimism of the will means refusing to let that clarity become paralysis. Not because you believe you will win but rather because the alternative is a surrender that the architects of your suffering did not earn and do not deserve.

Havel could not have known that the Soviet Union would fall eleven years after he wrote The Power of the Powerless. He wrote it assuming it would not. Baldwin could not have known that the Civil Rights Act would survive the reaction against it, even though by the end of his life, he was not sure it had. Arenas finished his memoir while dying of AIDS in a New York apartment, exiled from everything he knew, having been proved right about Castro at the cost of everything he loved.[16] None of them wrote from hope. They wrote from inside the Loop. They wrote because the record mattered, because silence was worse, and because, even when they could not see the exit, they refused to let the people who put them there have the last word.

The Loop runs until the underlying system changes. You cannot force the exit condition from inside the Loop. But the underlying system, the demographics, the economics, the cultural assumptions, and the tolerance of cruelty, is not static, even when it appears to be. Systems that look permanent are often most brittle precisely when they appear most dominant. I do not know when this one breaks. I do not know if I will live to see it. But I do know that the oligarchs who built this loop are building against time. And time is the only thing their god forsaken wealth cannot buy.

In the meantime, we are still here. Seguimos aquí. We are trapped, and we are furious, and we are not going anywhere. The loop runs. We run inside it. But we will not let these bastards have the satisfaction of our surrender or our silence.

That is not hope. It is will. And it is enough.

[1] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 175 (Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds. & trans., International Publishers 1971) (1929–1935).

[2] The term "Alderson loop" originates in computer science, colloquially describing a program structure that appears to have an exit condition, but where the condition can never actually be satisfied. The loop runs indefinitely, giving the illusion of functionality while being unable to end it without rebooting the system. Though it is often more formally called an infinite loop.

[3] See U.S. v. Skrmetti, 603 U.S. ___ (2025) (upholding Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors); Trump v. Orr, 607 U.S. ___ (2025) (per curiam) (granting application to stay preliminary injunction barring enforcement of State Department policy requiring passports to reflect sex assigned at birth); Mirabelli v. Bonta, No. 25A___ (U.S. Mar. 2, 2026) (per curiam) (vacating Ninth Circuit stay and restoring class-wide permanent injunction against California's AB 1955 and related policies restricting parental notification of students' gender identity changes in schools).

[4] Major Layoffs Coming at Human Rights Campaign | Advocate.Com, https://www.advocate.com/news/human-rights-campaign-layoffs.

[5] Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford Univ. Press 1941) (1940); see also Alejandra Caraballo, The Dual State of Trans Existence, The Dissident (Sept. 4, 2025), https://www.thedissident.news/the-dual-state-of-trans-existence/.

[6] Id.

[7] Odette Yousef, The Uvalde Shooting Conspiracies Show How Far-Right Misinformation Is Evolving, NPR, May 26, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101479269/texas-uvalde-school-shooting-misinformation-conspiracy-far-right.

[8] Joe Rogan Experience, Episode 2271 (2026) (falsely claiming trans people are responsible for most school shootings).

[9] There are even entire publications such as Reduxx that exist solely to mimic their ideological forbearers such as Der Sturmer to serve as the originator of much of this vile dehumanizing propaganda.

[10] See COINTELPRO, FBI Records: The Vault, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro (documenting systematic FBI operations to surveil, infiltrate, and discredit Black political organizations including the Black Panther Party through disinformation campaigns and provocateur activities).

[11] Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, Farewell p. 301 (Viking 1993)

[12] Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990, at 125 (Paul Wilson ed. & trans., Vintage Books 1992) (1978).

[13] James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972).

[14] Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Revised edition. ed. 2007).

[15] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks 175 (Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith eds. & trans., International Publishers 1971) (1929–1935).

[16] Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, Farewell p. 301 (Viking 1993)

I understand the desire to be close with our friends, lovers, and families while enjoying a walk with them. What I don't understand is how it came to be that, while running on a popular path the other day, I made physical contact with someone because two separate groups of side-by-side walkers couldn't be parted from their companions for the actual second it would have taken for me to run past. 

I was running behind one group, and the oncoming group saw me, as I am visible. They were looking ahead, so I made eye contact with the man closest to me. I said to the group ahead of me, "on your left," like a human being who lives in a society with shared spaces. They did not separate or scoot over. In their defense, maybe I didn't give enough warning, maybe they didn't hear me, maybe they didn't understand me. Fair. But the oncoming twosome had zero excuse not to choose any evasive maneuver. When I ran around the other group (on their left), and the oncoming group made their choice to firmly hold their ground, I ended up shoulder-checking the man I had made eye contact with.

Apart from being surprised, I was pissed. This dude saw me coming, he saw the couple I was clearly going to have to run around, and there was time to react. Making a conscious choice to be rude is just rude. Do better.

And to all other side-by-side walkers: May you make better choices or be shoulder checked by people whose impact might make you rethink your co-walking formations. 

Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous and we'll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and the guilty.