Now that the hard parts of getting a local business operational and the day-to-day demands of inventory and community work have settled into a somewhat predictable pace, I'm slowly able to spend more time on my writing. I'm putting more energy back into my fiction, and also feeling more momentum for this kind of non-fiction writing work here—the personal essay and cultural criticism part of my writing life— building more and more as each day goes by and we continue to see the Things We Warned About come to pass. So, I'm following my gut and starting to get my thoughts back together, which feels like the right thing to do as I'm able to get back to, well, getting back to things.
Over the last half year of cultivating an inviting third space, I've found myself at the center of a lot of disconnected commentary about where young working-class voters see themselves over the next decade. It's been illuminating to listen to how young men talk about what's going on around us, especially since I myself was someone who went straight from high school into the Marine Corps. I didn't have the wherewithal to understand anything about our nations politics at their age, but I do remember what it's like to constantly be fighting overdraft fees, paying for gas with the coins I found in a gutter, and having to choose between paying a bill and eating a meal.
Following are some thoughts on things I've heard from the young folks around me, and a rough but long overdue re-entry into my side of the conversational space that so many of you have helped me build.
The decline of third spaces has been detrimental to the average American's sense of community, but this is a reversible problem. Third spaces are incredibly important and useful in building community knowledge and the emotional underpinnings of a sense of mutuality because they break through the attention hijacking effects of digital connectedness. If there's one thing I've learned since March, it's that cultivating a space that is warm, welcoming, and inclusive has the effect of enabling an openness toward new ideas and modes of logic. I'm primarily interacting with young men between the ages of 11 to 31, and the patterns I see in their behavior, their thought processes, and the way they navigate the world tells me that the right amount of curiosity combined with compassion can often pierce through cognitive walls that have been littered with propaganda. People can still seem distracted or disengaged in person, of course, but the physical aspects of social proximity and interpersonal connection (both deep and shallow) can override the effects of anti-information that we run into everywhere we go online.
My way forward is to focus on what I'm doing for the folks around me—people in my family, customers in my store, members of my community—and using the internet as a means of publishing more so than a means of ingestion. That means being conscious about how I'm spending my attention, because attention is the thing that those in power crave from us the most. I want to give my attention to the things that are leading to fulfillment, not anxiety; things that are helping alleviate my anxiety rather than perpetuating it. It's why people find it hard to get in contact with me these days: I'm just not using my phone as much as others would like me to. Speaking of smartphones...
Yes, smartphone addiction is a legitimate issue—but it's not that people are spending all their time on their phones, it's that they spend all their time in a state of superficial attention and distraction. This might seem like I'm saying the same thing, but the framing here is important: it's not that these young men (and I'm primarily dealing with and talking about young men) are sucked into their phones, it's that they're being sucked away from the world around them. Circumstances we are all dealing with—like disassociated "leaders" and parents along with the ever-present pain of economic uncertainty—have all but excised the concept of hope and prosperity from their imaginations, leaving them (and, frankly, many of us) in a constant state of oscillating between attention escape and non-consensual attention engagement in the form of advertisement assault.
Even though this seems grim, the escapism is generating a kind of potential energy. People who went straight from the pandemic into young adulthood mired in immediate economic disenfranchisement and turmoil are finding solace in new voices that reignite the spark of our collective imaginations—of rising leaders like Mamdani in New York, whose electoral victory is not a signal of widespread push-back against the political subterfuge of corporate welfare politics per se, it reflects a rebounding of all this bent-up frustration from people who are not seeing the payoffs of the systems into which they've emotionally and intellectually paid. Perhaps what we are seeing is a mass spiritual trajectory correction after the last decade+ of pain and misery bestowed upon our nation's youth has finally pushed them to some kind of breaking point—or, if not a breaking point, certainly a point where enough of them are slowing down, stopping even, and deciding that enough is enough.
Mamdani's successful campaign shows that there is a real, actionable, palpable energy around a new kind of politics—one that has rejected old strategies of voter engagement and political punditry and embraced people (sometimes quite literally) where they are at, engaging with them at their level and in their community. Not superficially. Not with a corporate financier's motives underlying their political momentum. I read somewhere that "the youth are waking up," but this characterizes young voters as having not paid any attention so far. Based on my conversations with young voters, paying attention is just about the only thing they can do because it's the only thing they can afford to do.
One aspect of getting older is understanding that a healthy nation is not so much built on healthy policies per se, but rather, that healthy information sources are the foundations upon which healthy policies can subsequently be created. While I spent a great deal of time last year worried about the ways information was being shared and the kinds of information going viral (i.e., disinformation leading up to an election), in the political and economic fallout of last year's presidential election I am seeing two distinct opportunities to help build new bridges of information in our uniquely anti-information world:
Opportunity 1: Asking about Communism—or terrorism, or antifa, or...
Much of the Republican party's propaganda is mired in semantic abstractions: the bad guys are antifa; Mamdani is a communist; socialism bad. I've asked people what socialism and communism looks like to them, and nine times out of ten they can't articulate what they are, let alone the differences between them. As long as you aren't being disrespectful, asking people to reflect on the things they hold "true"—like, what does it mean for a government to be run by communists?—is a tried-and-true counter-propaganda technique that is used in psychological deprogramming.
Asking young men to articulate the difference between Communism and Capitalism, using examples from our own government (and the present administration), and approaching these ideas with respectful curiosity does work in helping plant the seeds of doubt—which is how we build a foundation of cognitive competence to thwart disinformation on a community scale.
Opportunity 2: Building and Holding Space for Disaffected Republicans
Many online conversations I've been in about voting have devolved into a left-versus-right tirade of tired old quips. It's one of the reasons why I had to step away from TikTok. What I thought would be an opportunity to engage with voters across the political spectrum was instead a never-ending firehose of self-aggrandizement, performative political theatrics, and echo chamber champions who drive people further into algorithm silos and exacerbate the already prevalent disaster of information segregation.
Both Republicans and Democrats are affected by this. Between bad actors making fake content and the armies of Russian disinformation bots, there's no way to avoid being subjected to content and algorithms that drive content creators further away from the people who could benefit from their content the most. However, the fact is that Democrats weren't the ones rioting and storing the Capitol on Jan 6th, and Democrats aren't the ones who have had our government shut down for the most time in our nation's history. The data suggests that something is terribly wrong with the Republican party, whether or not you agree with Democrats at all.
This is something that more people could focus on when it comes to anti-propaganda and reaching out to members of our communities. Disagreeing with the Republican Party doesn't mean you have to vote for the Democrat on the ballot. You can be a registered Republican, decide you don't like the current Republicans in charge, and just not vote Republican—while also not voting for a Democrat!
Closing Thoughts
- I've been away for a while, sorry. I couldn't spend time telling people how important cultivating in-person connections and building inclusive third spaces for young Americans are without doing the hard work of just that. I don't like speaking out of both sides of my mouth; I like leading from the front.
- I'm actively bringing on folks to help keep Lawsonry alive. It's hard work to find the right folks to work with, but it's good work that's worthwhile to do. I am working on more essays; I will be writing and publishing more. But I do have a third space that I'm tending to, and I hope that we all have our own little community gardens (whatever they may be) that give us an excuse to disconnect from these digital avenues of advertisement and propaganda.
- My first essay at Lawsonry was published March 2012—over fourteen years ago! A lot of those were specific to the Romney campaign at the time, but there are some good nuggets of history there. I'm excited to give it all a home again in our archives.