Tom Nomad on Nostr: Happy Halloween everyone! Time for a spoooooky post...not really, but we are going to ...

Happy Halloween everyone! Time for a spoooooky post...not really, but we are going to talk about what is coming in the next couple of weeks (which is spooky in its own way).

Today I want to focus our attention on gaming out the election, but with some specific caveats. Normally, when these sorts of electoral tabletops happen the focus is on the election itself, but that's not what I am concerned with. We are going to focus, rather, on possible outcomes on a social-political level, namely, what the fallout of the election within our everyday lives may be, especially when it relates to repression and state action.

The second caveat here is that there is always an extreme amount of artifice involved in any sort of strategic tabletop, or any piece of strategy writing for that matter. Strategy is an act of incredible projection, not just projecting out into the future, but doing so in the recognition that this future is going to meet resistances. Not only are the actions we are taking modifying the terrain, but also is the counteractions being taken to stop us, and these create additional modification, to say nothing of the uncountable actions taken by billions of people, and the impacts that has on the dynamics of our lives. As a result strategy is impossible in any sort of context; it can never be evaluated on the level of being more or less accurate.

So, why even do something like this then? Well, though fictional and artificial, strategy games and tabletops can assist us in figuring out how to threat model future situations, and how to maybe start preparing for the outcomes we deem most likely. It is a chance to get together with others and have some important discussions, learn how one another react to situations, and how one another thinks. If you don't want to go all out and set up a think tank style tabletop exercise, playing Bloc by Bloc can give you all some of these experiences.

The motivation for writing this comes out of discussions I have been having with friends. In discussion after discussion I see a series of themes coming up. The first is anxiety. The election has been run through a language of menace and threat. Trump has run a campaign based on identifying who he thinks should be able to count, and be protected by the Constitution, and who should not. This has played out through the rhetoric of directly threatening violent militarized repression as an action to take regardless of circumstances. Going into this election a lot more people are taking things Trump says seriously, and are justifiably worried about the unleashing of state violence if he wins.

The second feeling, and this is always in tension with the first, is that no one seems to have a sense that the election will actually fix anything. The entire race thus far has been about avoiding risk, moving away from danger, prioritizing stability, security, and a stable economy. Regardless of whether we are talking about Trump or Harris, no one is actually saying they are going to change anything. Both campaigns have portrayed themselves as feel good barriers to the horrible evil represented by their opposition. All of the language around the election is about catastrophe and avoiding that catastrophe, which of course means maintaining the current way things are.

We find ourselves in a moment of extreme political uncertainty, and that is creating a strange sense. On the one hand there is this anxiety about the present and future, about not knowing who will win, or what will happen regardless of the results. On the other there is a sense of foreboding, of needing to prepare, get our communities ready to deal with repression, and to be ready to defend ourselves. It is simultaneously a moment where I am checking my supplies, and yawning every time the news comes on, at the same time. It feels as if we are stuck in a moment of suspension, where the only exits are acute authoritarianism or a continuation of things as they are.