u/Bobbie_Sacamano

I live in a small college town in a deep-red state, and there was supposed to be a first meeting for a new local DSA group. I’m a longtime factory worker, and I was more excited about it than I realized. I’ve also been an at-large member for years, but between my busy schedule and the lack of much local left-wing culture outside Democrats and Indivisible, I never felt like I could pull off trying to start a chapter without a lot of help.

There is progressive activity around here, but nothing that feels like a durable, working-class organization. Most of it forms around the latest emergency or protest and then fades away. I was hoping this might become something that stayed together between crises, listened to ordinary working people, and eventually won something concrete.
I wasn’t expecting a fully formed chapter or an instant path to power. I just wanted to meet a handful of people who might become dependable to one another. I don’t have many connections to student or activist circles, but I thought I might help connect the group with blue-collar people who feel that neither party is really built around the lives of people who work for a living.

Then the meeting was called off, and communication about the effort went quiet. As far as I can tell, the group is gone before it ever really began. I still don’t know exactly what happened, and I’m not interested in attacking whoever tried to organize it. Starting anything like this in a small conservative town is hard, and people have jobs and lives. But I’m genuinely disappointed. For a minute, it felt like there might finally be somewhere to turn all this political frustration into collective action.

I’m also interested in workplace organizing, but after ten years at my job, I haven’t met another person I trust who seems remotely interested. Most people complain about other workers. Older workers tend to resent younger ones and have really bad takes about unions. Newer workers don’t see it as a long-term job, so they just want to keep their heads down. The workplace doesn’t feel like an obvious place to begin either.

Has anyone here been in this position? If a local organizing effort collapses before its first meeting, what is a realistic next step for someone without much organizing experience, a large network, or unlimited free time? Is it worth trying to pick it back up, or should I focus first on finding two or three dependable people without worrying about forming an official group? How do you find those people when neither your workplace nor the local progressive scene offers an obvious starting point?

I’m not looking for a speech about how one person can change everything. I’d appreciate practical advice about what a tired factory worker in a small conservative town can actually do.

Fable (Safe version of Mythos) is not being included in normal subscriptions but as expensive pay as you go for enterprise customers.

Suddenly frontier models are too expensive and dangerous for regular people. But somehow it is never too dangerous for corporations. Never too dangerous for management, finance, defense contractors, or any other monster with an enterprise account.

I hate AI as much as anyone but I still see that they worry someone like me might figure out how to start a union with it or something. At least now workers have no reason to defend it since they are priced out of models that matter.

Basically, I have it look at articles from Monthly Review, Jacobin, Dissent, In These Times, Cosmonaut, Spectre, Tribune in the UK, New Left Review, Morning Star, and People’s World, the associated press, Reuters, and Al Jazeera and use them as a base and have a model of my choosing create a briefing. Here are the results from this morning.

The Crisis Is No Longer Outside the Machine
What ties the week’s major stories together is that each appears, at first glance, to be a separate crisis. American hegemony is faltering. Europe is baking under dangerous heat. AI billionaires are testing their electoral power. The Pentagon is reshaping its command layer. Nvidia chips are being smuggled into China at extreme markups. Congress is fighting over war powers. Data centers are becoming local political battlegrounds.
But underneath, these are not separate stories. They are symptoms of a system that can still measure crisis, model crisis, forecast crisis, and price crisis, but cannot politically act at the scale required. The American-led world order still has enormous power. It still has the dollar, the military, the major technology firms, global finance, and many of the key institutions of international politics. But more and more, it uses that power not to solve contradictions, but to displace them: onto workers, poorer countries, local communities, the climate, future generations, allies, and ordinary people’s bodies.
The broad historical frame is the rise and decline of U.S. hegemony. The United States won the twentieth century because it became the leading industrial power, survived the destruction of Europe, built the postwar order, defeated its geopolitical rivals, and turned the dollar, NATO, global trade, and American consumer capitalism into the operating system of the world. But that system carried contradictions from the beginning. It called itself a liberal order, but it rested on empire, military bases, coups, debt discipline, cheap energy, anti-communism, and the subordination of much of the world to American capital.
The old bargain was that this violence and domination would be hidden beneath growth. Workers in the imperial core got rising wages, cheap consumer goods, public infrastructure, stable jobs, and the feeling that history was moving forward. Much of the rest of the world got the invitation, or the command, to plug into the American system. But once U.S. capital discovered that it could maintain profits by offshoring production, weakening labor, financializing everyday life, and replacing wages with credit, the domestic base of the order began to rot. The empire stayed large, but the society underneath it became more brittle.
That is why Trumpism is not simply an interruption. It is a symptom of a ruling order that no longer knows how to justify itself. Liberal hegemony said America led the world through laws, institutions, alliances, democracy, science, and prosperity. The new nationalist version says the quiet part more openly: alliances are protection rackets, law is negotiable, trade is coercion, military power is personal, and politics is loyalty. It does not abolish empire. It makes empire cruder, more transactional, and less stable.
This can be seen in the Pentagon story. General Christopher Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and the last American soldier photographed leaving Afghanistan in 2021, is unexpectedly stepping down after only about 18 months in the job. His departure comes as the Pentagon discusses reducing senior command positions and possibly downgrading U.S. Army Europe and Africa from a four-star to a three-star command.
That matters because this is not just about one general. Donahue represents the professional military layer produced by the post-9/11 empire: Afghanistan, Iraq, special operations, evacuation logistics, NATO coordination, Ukraine support, and the daily management of U.S. global power. Removing or intimidating that layer does not mean the empire is becoming peaceful. It means the command machinery is being politically sorted. The old imperial bureaucracy is being pressured to conform to a more openly nationalist and personalist project.
At the same time, the United States is reviewing its military presence in Europe while pressuring NATO allies to take more responsibility for their own defense. That is imperial decline in a specific form. It is not that the U.S. suddenly lacks military power. It has more than enough. The problem is credibility. Hegemony depends not only on troops, ships, and bombs, but on predictability. Allies have to believe that the patron state will remain coherent from one year to the next. When the U.S. starts treating NATO as a customer-service problem and Ukraine policy as a bargaining chip, Europe does not immediately break away, but it starts hedging. It rearms. It looks for alternatives. It wonders whether America is still a stabilizer or now a source of volatility.
The Iran war-powers fight adds another layer. Congress allowed the imperial presidency to expand for decades. War became normalized, outsourced, and legally elastic. Then the machinery was captured by a more openly erratic executive, and suddenly some legislators rediscovered that war powers are supposed to belong to Congress. That does not mean Congress has become anti-imperialist. It means parts of the ruling class are worried that the war machine is being driven too recklessly.
The Iran conflict also exposes how the old imperial map is no longer easy to manage. The Strait of Hormuz is the perfect symbol of the material underside of global capitalism. One waterway can discipline the whole world because oil, shipping, insurance, fertilizer, food prices, and military logistics are all tangled together. The “rules-based order” sounds abstract until a chokepoint is threatened and suddenly everyone remembers that the world economy is a physical machine.
That physical machine is also visible in the Nvidia story. Banned Nvidia AI chips have reportedly doubled in price on China’s black market. That price signal does not mean export controls are failing completely. It means they are working partially. They are making access harder, riskier, slower, more expensive, and less scalable. But they are not eliminating demand. If anything, the black-market premium proves that Nvidia still occupies a commanding position in the AI stack. Chinese firms want Nvidia not only because of raw chip performance, but because of CUDA, software tooling, model compatibility, developer familiarity, reliability, and the ecosystem built around the hardware.
This is where American hegemony has shifted. The United States no longer simply dominates by outproducing everyone else in every category. It dominates by controlling chokepoints: advanced chips, chipmaking equipment, cloud platforms, finance, sanctions, export law, military alliances, and intellectual property. That is a different kind of empire. It is less like the confident factory floor of the mid-twentieth century and more like a gatekeeper system: others may produce, but the United States tries to control the machine tools; others may trade, but the United States controls the currency rails; others may build AI, but the United States controls the chips.
But chokepoint power creates its own contradiction. The more the U.S. weaponizes access, the more China has reason to build a separate stack. Restrictions can slow China down, but they also harden China’s commitment to self-sufficiency. That is the sanctions problem in technological form. Denial can buy time, but it also teaches the target that dependence is intolerable.
AI should not be understood as magic floating above the world. It is a material system. It depends on chips, rare minerals, power plants, cooling systems, water, data centers, transmission lines, and global logistics. It is not separate from the climate crisis. It drills deeper into it.
That is why the data-center fight matters. The AI boom lands locally as electricity demand, water use, zoning fights, tax abatements, utility upgrades, gas plants, land acquisition, and political pressure on communities. The “cloud” has a ground underneath it. Every data center sits somewhere. It uses power from somewhere. It pulls water from somewhere. It shifts costs onto someone. Communities are being asked to sacrifice land, water, electricity, and political control so that hyperscalers can build the infrastructure of private monopoly.
This is also why the electoral fight over AI regulation matters. A congressional race in New York became a testing ground for AI money. A candidate associated with AI regulation was targeted by pro-industry forces, while other tech-adjacent factions supported stricter guardrails. The result was not simply “the people versus tech.” It was different fractions of capital fighting over who gets to write the first generation of AI law.
That distinction matters. Silicon Valley is no longer outside politics. It is entering electoral politics as a disciplined capitalist bloc. The message to politicians is clear: if you build your identity around regulating AI, powerful donors can make your race unbearably expensive. That is not just lobbying. That is preemptive punishment.
But the same political moment also shows openings. Socialist and left candidates have shown that establishment power is not unbeatable under the right conditions. Money remains powerful, but not omnipotent. Organization still matters. Local anger still matters. Candidate quality still matters. Housing, Gaza, cost of living, policing, labor insecurity, and resentment toward billionaire power are all reshaping parts of Democratic politics.
The climate story is the most bodily version of the crisis. Dangerous heat is not just a statistic. It gets into bedrooms, factories, schools, nursing homes, buses, kitchens, warehouses, hospitals, prisons, and train tracks. It cannot be fully externalized. Wealth can buy insulation from it, but only up to a point.
The phrase “built for a climate that no longer exists” captures the problem. Climate change is not merely bad weather. It is the invalidation of the assumptions underneath infrastructure. Brick buildings designed to retain heat become ovens. Roads soften. Rail lines buckle. Power grids strain. Nuclear plants face cooling limits. Schools close. Outdoor work becomes dangerous. Indoor work in poorly cooled spaces becomes a health risk. Hospitals and EMS systems absorb the consequences.
The capitalist move is to turn those consequences into private endurance. Close the curtains. Drink water. Buy a fan. Keep working. Adapt individually. But the crisis is collective. Individuals cannot personally retrofit the grid. Renters cannot personally redesign the housing stock. Teachers cannot personally climate-proof schools. Elderly people cannot personally build cooling centers. Adaptation requires public planning, and public planning is exactly what neoliberal politics spent decades weakening.
This is why heat and AI infrastructure belong in the same analysis. One side of capital is demanding more electricity and water for AI infrastructure at the exact moment climate change is making electricity and water systems more fragile. The grid is being asked to electrify transport, cool homes, power industry, support hospitals, survive heatwaves, and now also feed AI clusters. That is not an engineering problem alone. It is a political allocation problem. Who gets power first? Who pays for new generation? Who gets rate hikes? Who gets shut off? Who gets backup generators? Who gets heat protections at work? Who gets told to tough it out?
From a class perspective, heat is a form of discipline. It hits the body directly, but unevenly. Professionals may close blinds and work from home. Factory workers, farm workers, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, prisoners, unhoused people, and the elderly absorb the crisis with their lungs, kidneys, hearts, sleep, and nerves. The body becomes the infrastructure of last resort.
That is why the phrase “a crisis of our own making” is too soft unless the next question is asked: whose making, whose profit, whose exposure, whose bill? Ordinary people consumed fossil fuels because the whole built environment forced them to. But fossil capital, utilities, developers, automakers, militaries, agribusiness, and governments made the high-carbon world profitable and compulsory. A worker commuting to a job did not have the same power as fossil fuel companies, banks, the Pentagon, or state transportation departments.
The political danger is that climate crisis does not automatically produce solidarity. It can also produce exclusion: borders, policing, sacrifice zones, private shelters, and climate protection for the wealthy while everyone else is abandoned. The issue is not just climate denial. It is climate hierarchy. Who is protected, who is blamed, who is displaced, and who is forced to keep working?
This moment also suggests that neoliberalism is not simply over. It is mutating. The state is back, but not necessarily for workers. Tariffs are back, but not necessarily with labor power. Industrial policy is back, but often as subsidy for capital. Borders are back, but mostly against migrants. National security is back, but as a reason to discipline labor, science, universities, and trade. The “free market” era is shifting into a more nationalist and securitized form of capitalism, but the basic rule remains: public risk, private gain.
The end of U.S. unipolar dominance does not automatically mean liberation. U.S. power has been violent and exploitative. But multipolar capitalism can also mean rival capitalist and state-capitalist blocs competing over resources, technology, trade routes, labor, and military position. The decline of one empire opens possibilities, but also dangers.
The most important synthesis is this: the ruling order is trying to solve every crisis by intensifying the forces that created it.
Climate crisis? Build more energy-hungry AI infrastructure, then sell AI as the tool that will manage climate.
Geopolitical decline? Expand sanctions, military pressure, and export controls, which push rivals toward separate blocs.
Domestic distrust? Pour billionaire money into elections and call it protecting innovation.
Worker insecurity? Promise automation and productivity while weakening labor protections.
Imperial overstretch? Purge the command layer and demand allies pay more.
War fatigue? Rebrand war as deterrence, security, or civilization.
Infrastructure fragility? Privatize gains, socialize costs, and tell households to adapt.
That is the pattern. The system can diagnose many of its own problems. It has climate models, war games, AI safety papers, central bank reports, grid forecasts, insurance data, and intelligence assessments. What it lacks is a social force powerful enough to make those diagnoses binding on capital.
That is why the phrase “political inaction” is also too weak. It is not simply that politicians failed to act. Many acted deliberately: to protect fossil profits, weaken unions, subsidize tech, expand the Pentagon, underfund adaptation, deregulate finance, privatize infrastructure, and discipline dissent. Inaction on climate was action for capital. Inaction on AI regulation is action for monopoly. Inaction on workplace heat is action for employers. Inaction on war powers is action for the executive branch and the military-industrial complex.
The working-class question is: where does this become visible in daily life?
It becomes visible when heat is treated as a personal hydration problem instead of a staffing, ventilation, cooling, and production-speed problem. It becomes visible when institutions talk about waste but do not allocate time or resources to actually reduce it. It becomes visible when quality standards remain on paper but become more permissive in practice because production has to keep moving. It becomes visible when companies and governments still have campaigns, meetings, slogans, dashboards, and values statements, but less real capacity or willingness to act.
That is a miniature version of the larger system. Institutions still have the language of rational control. They still have metrics, policies, warnings, values, and safety language. But the real material priority is throughput. Keep the line moving. Keep the data center powered. Keep the shipping lane open. Keep the alliance together. Keep the stock price high. Keep the war funded. Keep the election money flowing. Keep the old assumptions alive for one more quarter.
The left press helps name what mainstream outlets often describe but do not fully theorize. Reuters and AP are useful for facts: troop reviews, heat deaths, power outages, Senate votes, chip controls, primary results. Al Jazeera is useful for showing the imperial frame around Iran, Gaza, and U.S. power. Monthly Review gives the ecological and monopoly-capital framework. In These Times gives the local, labor, and community angle around data centers. New Left Review helps place the transition from neoliberal globalization to nationalist-market competition. Tribune gives a socialist internationalist frame for the end of unipolarity.
Put together, the story is not simply “America is declining.” It is that American-led capitalism is entering a phase where its methods of maintaining dominance are becoming more openly coercive, more materially expensive, and more politically unstable.
The U.S. still has enormous advantages: the dollar, the military, top universities, major tech firms, energy production, alliances, capital markets, and control over critical technologies. But the old aura is gone. The empire is still powerful, but less admired, less trusted, and less able to present its interests as universal. That is why China can present itself as a development partner, why Europe hedges, why Iran can bargain through chokepoints, why local communities resist data centers, why socialists can win primaries, and why tech billionaires are spending like a political class rather than merely a business sector.
The AI lobby story is especially important for the next few years. AI capital is moving fast because it knows the window before regulation closes may be brief. The companies want infrastructure built, legal norms established, liability limited, procurement locked in, schools dependent, workplaces reorganized, and politicians disciplined before the public fully understands the costs. That is why even a single congressional primary can matter. It can become an early test of whether AI firms can make regulation politically dangerous.
But there is also a weakness there. If powerful donors are willing to spend enormous sums to stop one regulatory candidate, they are afraid of something. They are afraid that AI anxiety is not confined to cranks or reactionaries. Parents are worried about child safety. Workers are worried about jobs. Artists are worried about theft. Local communities are worried about water and electricity. Climate people are worried about energy use. National security people are worried about China. Civil liberties people are worried about surveillance. This is not one opposition bloc yet, but the ingredients are there.
The danger is that the right captures that anger first. Anti-AI politics can become democratic and class-conscious, or it can become nationalist, conspiratorial, xenophobic, and anti-science. Climate politics faces the same fork. Heat can produce solidarity and public investment, or it can produce border walls, police powers, and survival-of-the-richest adaptation. Imperial decline can produce antiwar politics, or it can produce revenge nationalism.
That is why political language matters. The right says: foreigners, migrants, China, weak leaders, environmentalists, and bureaucrats ruined the country. The liberal center says: norms, institutions, innovation, and responsible leadership can restore the order. The left has to say: the crisis is built into a system that puts profit, empire, and private control over human need and ecological survival.
But that has to be said plainly. The people running things knew the climate was changing, but they kept building for profit instead of survival. They knew AI would demand huge amounts of power and water, but they let tech companies dump the costs on communities. They knew war powers had been abused for decades, but only panicked when the wrong president used them too openly. They knew workers were being crushed by heat, speedup, debt, and insecurity, but they called it productivity. They knew globalization hollowed out communities, but they told people cheap goods would make up for lost power. Now the bill is arriving all at once.
The heatwave is a bill for carbon.
The Nvidia black market is a bill for technological dependency.
The Pentagon purge is a bill for imperial overreach.
The NATO crisis is a bill for alliance systems built around U.S. dominance.
The AI primary fight is a bill for letting billionaires build private governments inside democracy.
The data center backlash is a bill for pretending the cloud had no ground underneath it.
The Iran war-powers vote is a bill for decades of executive war-making.
The socialist electoral openings are a sign that some people are starting to look for a different ledger.
The practical thing to watch now is where these crises touch ordinary people. Watch electricity prices. Watch water fights. Watch workplace heat rules. Watch data-center tax abatements. Watch whether utilities build gas plants and blame “demand.” Watch whether AI companies ask for federal guarantees. Watch whether schools and hospitals are asked to buy AI products while cutting staff. Watch whether NATO allies increase defense spending by cutting social spending. Watch whether climate adaptation becomes public infrastructure or private survival gear. Watch whether anti-China policy becomes an excuse for more subsidies to corporations with no labor guarantees. Watch whether “national security” becomes the magic phrase that overrides democracy.
The core translation is this: the same system that can name the problem, measure the problem, and make a poster about the problem often refuses to give ordinary people the power to solve the problem. Fixing the problem would require giving workers, communities, and the public real power over production, investment, infrastructure, and planning. That is the line capital will not cross voluntarily.
So the answer is not despair. The answer is to see the pattern clearly. These are not random bad events. They are connected failures of a political economy that has reached the point where its own maintenance creates new crises. That is frightening, but it also means people’s separate grievances are potentially connectable. The worker angry about heat, the rural resident angry about a data center, the parent worried about AI, the antiwar voter angry about Iran, the renter unable to afford cooling, the teacher in an overheated school, the utility customer seeing higher bills, and the young socialist knocking doors are not automatically on the same side. But materially, they are all being asked to pay for the same system.
The organizing task is to make that visible before the right turns every crisis into scapegoating and before liberals turn every crisis into a plea for better management.
The sentence to keep from all of this is:
The future is no longer arriving as progress. It is arriving as infrastructure failure, heat stress, monopoly power, militarized politics, and bills ordinary people are told to pay. The left’s job is to say: no, the people who profited from this crisis should pay, and the systems we need to survive should be publicly planned, democratically controlled, and built around human need instead of private power.
That is the whole week’s news in one line. The empire is not simply falling. The climate is not simply warming. AI is not simply advancing. The state is not simply malfunctioning. All of these are parts of a system trying to preserve profit and dominance under conditions where the material basis of that dominance is breaking down.
And the more it breaks down, the more obvious the central question becomes: who gets protected, who gets sacrificed, and who gets to decide?

I started using Claude seriously because it felt like the first AI that really clicked with how I think. It was thoughtful, good with long writing projects, good at tone, and good at helping me turn half-formed thoughts into something coherent. For a while it felt less like using a tool and more like having a really sharp writing/thinking partner.

But over time I started feeling more and more stressed about usage. Every prompt felt like I had to decide whether it was “worth” spending premium model time on. That changed how I used it. Instead of freely exploring ideas, I was rationing curiosity.
The worst part was when the model would get stuck arguing from bad assumptions, lose track of context, or push back in a way that felt less like useful criticism and more like burning limited usage trying to convince it to check reality. I don’t mind disagreement. In fact, I want a model that can challenge me. But it gets frustrating when you are paying for a premium model and spending your limited window arguing it back into the task.
I did get some great work out of it. I finished a big Mad Men writing project very quickly by using Claude as the lead writer and then feeding it criticism from other models. That workflow was powerful. But it also made the usage-limit problem obvious. One “go” prompt could set off a chain reaction that burned through a whole window.

Recently I switched more of my daily use to ChatGPT/GPT-5.5, and honestly I’m enjoying it in the same way I enjoyed Claude when I first signed up — except I’m not constantly stressed about usage. That matters more than I expected. A model doesn’t just need to be smart. It needs to be available enough that you can use it casually, messily, and often.
For my purposes — writing, political analysis, local news, screenshots, Reddit threads, random questions, practical daily use — this model feels more useful right now. Claude may still have a certain elegance or “taste” when it’s working well, but ChatGPT feels more like an everyday machine I can actually live with.

I’m curious if other non-coding users have had the same experience. Not developers, not benchmark people — just regular heavy users who use AI for thinking, writing, reading, research, and making sense of the world. Did usage limits and reliability change which model you preferred?

Brought my kids in for the World Cup and worried everything would be packed but was surprised that on a Saturday in June with the soccer game, WWE, and baseball going on yet it was the slowest theme park I have ever been in. Is that normal?

And I can’t help but notice how bad their arguments are and how much missinformation circulates in their Facebook group. If AI is good for anything it is great at leveling the propaganda playing field.

I have never considered myself goth but I have always liked black clothes but not to the extent of goth folks. I never wanted to own a trench coat or paint my nails black. I always did like The Cure and Industrial Music but still never felt like I would fit in with goths. Yesterday was the first day I listened to the station at work and never left to listen to my own playlist. Should I bury these feelings to say fuck it and get a casket? ⚰️