Doing Good in a Bad Machine

This is the part where I tell you who I am and why you should read my newsletter. My name is Mark Bailey. I live in Minneapolis and work as a writer. My primary job since 2014 has been summarizing news reports about corruption and cover-ups for WantToKnow.info, a nonprofit information service. I've also published eight science fiction novels and written for the cryptocurrency industry.

Although this newsletter will consider significant matters, the view that I offer is the view from street level. Students of deep politics may appreciate the dots I connect. Academics and the policy-minded may find my candor refreshing. Casual readers of all stripes may enjoy the fun I poke at the official story. But those most likely to benefit from this newsletter are people who recognize that a total system transformation is now underway and society isn't adjusting to this transformation gracefully.

My ambitions here are modest. I have many thoughts spread across my novels and manifesto and hundreds of blog posts. By organizing these thoughts into a newsletter, I hope to make them more accessible, and to better contribute my perspective to the big public conversation that's beginning. This is the conversation about what we as a society should do now that we can all see how big of a mistake it was to trust our leaders about the pandemic.

Covid was bad but we made it so much worse. Economic devastation. Civil unrest. Deaths of despair. Vaccine injuries. Everyone who supported pandemic policies contributed to these outcomes. Predictably, the pandemic ran its course regardless of these policies, with variants becoming progressively less dangerous until there was sufficient natural immunity in the population to make the virus into just another flu. Also predictably, these policies enriched the wealthy and large corporations at everyone else's expense.

On this and other topics, much of what I have to say is controversial. I favor the total overhaul of many of society's systems. I'd like to see radical shifts in how we treat each other and interact with the natural world. I believe our politics are hopelessly corrupt. So are many corporate entities. And because mainstream media distorts everything, average people rarely hear about it.

My ideas are anti-partisan and pro-technology. I'm critical of the establishment and don't take the threat of sentient AI at all seriously. I believe that there are UFOs but don't pretend to know what they are. What I do know is that society is becoming less free every year and we should probably do something about that.

Some of the topics I deal with are dark. While I don't shy away from this darkness, I try not to give it too much power. There are power abusers out there, but there are far more people out there trying to make things better. They're trying to do good in a bad machine.

I don't think it's possible for anyone to fix the system from within. There's too much momentum headed in the wrong direction. Nor do I believe the system can be appropriately reformed under external pressure of the sort activists attempt to apply. Millions could take to the streets to protest and decision makers would just shrug before proceeding.

When antiwar activists staged the largest demonstrations in human history in 2003, that didn't stop the US from invading Iraq on false pretenses. And when civil rights activists staged far larger demonstrations in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, our leaders didn't scramble to eliminate structural racism. Instead, they carried on as usual.

Traditional activism may have proven ineffectual, but that doesn't mean we're powerless. In fact, because of the technology now accessible to us, we have more power than we've ever had before. Our unprecedented information sharing capabilities are giving rise to real conversations that would've been impossible in the recent past. And the emerging blockchain economy can make it technically impossible for the control regime to apply pressure to opposition groups by messing with their money.

My perspective is that society started down a dystopian path on 9/11, and that the covid response marked our arrival in dystopia. Yet as troubled as these times are, they are also hopeful. We are a people divided, living under the twin tyrannies of government and big business, in the context of ecological collapse and geopolitical instability. Looking soberly at this invites us to begin taking responsibility for our part in it. I'd like to think there's hope in that.

In many ways, our culture is deeply sick. Our minds are poisoned by manipulated media and our bodies are poisoned by the actual poisons added to our food and natural environments. A startling number of us are survivors of childhood abuses, and of the traumas associated with being marginalized in various circumstances. Fortunately, people are resilient. We can heal. And, more than anything, this new era demands healing, in both an individual and a social sense.