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UofWinds 410,Week 16, 2025: A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse, How cascades of rapid change routinely sweep across families, institutions, and nations, “Trump's manly tariffs”


Good morning. I'm at my parent's house for the Easter long weekend. It was warm last night so we opened the windows. This morning, I was awakened by the dawn chorus. The return of birdsong and the return of spring brings me a wave of relief. Which is a weird thing to say but understandable I think, as we are currently living in a world where it feels like you can't take anything for granted.

In my immediate circle, things are good. My son finished his last exam and will be able to enjoy a couple of months of rest before his summer job starts. This makes my daughter jealous as she's still in high school, but we just celebrated her birthday so her grievances have been temporarily soothed. (I asked my husband if he would like to be mentioned in this week's newsletter and he said, no). In a couple weeks, I'll be taking a couple of weeks off from work.

My mom just told me that I needed to see the Eastern Towhee under the feeder and so I did. I return to my Grandmother's writing desk to finish this newsletter.

A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse


For all the reasons that you already know, we are going to have a social movement. Here are two articles that helped me solidify this claim.

The first article came to my attention from Ann Friedman. It's a reprint of a piece that the much-missed David Graeber wrote for The Baffler in 2013 entitled, A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse. It begins,

What is a revolution? We used to think we knew. Revolutions were seizures of power by popular forces aiming to transform the very nature of the political, social, and economic system in the country in which the revolution took place, usually according to some visionary dream of a just society. Nowadays, we live in an age when, if rebel armies do come sweeping into a city, or mass uprisings overthrow a dictator, it’s unlikely to have any such implications; when profound social transformation does occur—as with, say, the rise of feminism—it’s likely to take an entirely different form. It’s not that revolutionary dreams aren’t out there. But contemporary revolutionaries rarely think they can bring them into being by some modern-day equivalent of storming the Bastille.

At moments like this, it generally pays to go back to the history one already knows and ask: Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be? For me, the person who has asked this most effectively is the great world historian Immanuel Wallerstein. He argues that for the last quarter millennium or so, revolutions have consisted above all of planetwide transformations of political common sense.

But there's a specific portion of the essay that I'd like to direct your attention to. It is David's contention that a tremendous amount of political and state energies are constantly expended to ensure that social movements are rendered ineffective.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What hap- pens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?

Is it possible that this preemptive attitude toward social movements, the designing of wars and trade summits in such a way that preventing effective opposition is considered more of a priority than the success of the war or summit itself, really reflects a more general principle?

I thought of these questions while reading Henry Farrel's April 17th newsletter entitled, Absolute power can be a terrible weakness: The respective vulnerabilities of tyrants and crowds.

The current U.S. president is looking to seize power that he clearly is not entitled to under the law and the constitution, and that will usher through some kind of regime change if he succeeds. Many people are trying to resist. What are Trump’s strengths and weaknesses? What are the strengths and weaknesses of those who want to oppose him?

There’s a simple account of power that I think is useful here. It is developed in this paper by the late Russell Hardin, but really descends from David Hume’s understanding of politics.

The fundamental argument is this: that power in modern societies depends on social coordination. That is just as true of aspiring authoritarians like Trump as of the people who want to mobilize against him.

How cascades of rapid change routinely sweep across families, institutions, and nations


In the Henry Farrell essay I shared above, is this paragraph:

The strategic implications of all this, for what to do, are not surprising. Figure out how to generate common knowledge that will enable coordination. Protests - especially if they are widespread, and especially if they happen in unusual places, or involve surprising coalitions can help generate information cascades. But getting media coverage and broader conversation is important.

Reader, I just learned about information cascades just this week. Last weekend, I was listening to my weekly diet of podcasts and listened to this repeat 2023 episode of the human psychology podcast, You Are Not So Smart. It's entitled, YANSS 274 – How cascades of rapid change routinely sweep across families, institutions, and nations. In the episode, host David McRaney interviews Wharton lecturer and change consultant, Greg Satell about his book Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change, but not before he spends some time explaining the science of information-driven cascades of behavioral change. What I found particularly compelling about this interview is that Satell grounds his advice not from stories of social media virality but from experiences from Ukraine's Orange Revolution.

Using Library Extension, I just ordered a copy of Cascades from my local library.

“Trump's manly tariffs”

Sometimes the subtext becomes text.

I mean literal text that appears on the bottom of a TV screen.

TRUMP'S MANLY TARIFFS

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this. And if you're out working, like building robots like Harold, you are around other guys. You're not around HR ladies and lawyers that gives you estrogen.

There are so many self-ordained cultural warriors are trying to enforce gender and gender roles as a means to restore the lost ground of patriarchy in the name of masculinity. The manosphere needs to be deflated for the safety of all of us.

And for the sake of our climate.

I came across an article this week that address petrol-masculinity called, Are ‘Manosphere’ Influencers Disengaging Gen-Z Men from Climate Activism?. It reminded me that earlier this month, I learned that there's an entire podcast on the topic: "Non-toxic, dedicated to connecting the dots between the manosphere and atmosphere".

Yesterday, we drove north along the St. Clair Parkway, through the Aamjiwnaang First Nations Reserve, and past Canada's Chemical Valley to my family home. At this moment, I am only a short drive away from the small towns of Petrolia and Oil Springs. Two days ago I added Don Gilmore's On Oil to my reading list.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

I refuse to leave this newsletter on such a grim note.

If the ground is petrol-masculinity, I am going to figure my efforts bringing about the disruption of feminist solar abundance.

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