The Sorensen Monologues
Going Trad: Pros and Cons
I’ve been curious about the homesteading movement for a long time, albeit from a non-tradwife perspective. For a few years I subscribed to Mother Earth News, whose pages of solar panel installations and gardening tips filled my head with pastoral fantasies. (It’s possible that growing up in rural Pennsylvania planted a seed of affection for farm life, even though I suspect I would be terrible at it.) So I have nothing against people who decide to abandon the corporate world, or soulless suburbs, to live close to the land. I’m just not so into oppressive gender roles and unpasteurized milk.
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Web’s End
The Pew Research Center recently released a study showing that the AI summaries that appear on top of Google search results are dramatically cutting traffic to websites. This has potentially calamitous implications for news sites, which have already been hobbled by tech company middlemen in other ways.
If you have the time, you might check out this video from More Perfect Union on why Google searches suck now (the third panel of this comic was partly inspired by it, in addition to my own frustrations doing research for cartoons or anything else these days).
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Government or Foreign Invader?
I’m hardly the first person to make the point that another country could not do more damage to the US than what is being done from within, but it did occur to me a long time ago that this was the case. If you were an evil dictator trying to destroy and take over the US, you could hardly to a better job than eliminating scientists and medical researchers, healthcare infrastructure, highly qualified military officers, basic corporate and environmental regulations, and economic data statisticians — to name a few. You’d hobble the government financially by plundering it. And you’d eventually put troops in the streets to intimidate the public and quash civil unrest.
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Nonsense Encounters Per Hour Rise Dramatically
Over the past year I’ve been struck by the frequency with which I encounter conspiratorial, false, or downright threatening messages throughout the day. I initially began calling them NEPDs — Nonsense Encounters Per Day. For the strip, I switched to NEPHs because you can actually pronounce that acronym. I’m not even talking about the headlines, necessarily — just ordinary life interrupted by a “Whoa, that’s odd!” moment over and over again.
A while ago, the US government’s Covid website was switched to a ludicrous list of conspiracy theories. So there’s that, too.
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Wrecking Everything
I often watch PBS or PBS Create, especially Rick Steves and other travel shows. The cooking shows are mostly mindless “comfort food TV,” sometimes literally cooking comfort food. NOVA and Christiane Amanpour are also excellent. Now this all faces an uncertain future. I also listen to community radio stations wherever I live, and since I’ve lived in several cities with good stations, I try keep up with some of them online. Now I hear announcements saying “We’ve lost our federal funding, please help cover the shortfall.” Same story for national parks. It’s just bizarre to see visitor centers shuttered in a country as prosperous as this one (speaking in the abstract). You’d think this was the Great Depression.
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Cutting Out the Middleman
I suspect that some readers might interpret this cartoon as a call for Luddism, but mostly it’s a reflection of thoughts I’ve been having lately about out-of-control data harvesting and a growing surveillance state. I find myself daydreaming about how one might go about circumventing the layer of invasive, extractive technology that comes between us and so many mundane tasks these days. Flip phones seem oddly attractive to me now, even though I hate texting on them and I’m not sure how I’d get by without a smartphone. (Tangentially, I’m reminded of a recent Onion headline, “Study: 97% Of Average American’s Day Spent Retrieving 6-Digit Codes.”)
Many people don’t realize new cars are collecting reams of personal data and selling it. Consumer Reports and other organizations have published investigations about this, which I can’t add a link to at the moment due to a WordPress glitch, but which I encourage you to look up.
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Terms for our Times
When we treat American politics as a spectrum of equally-valid ideas and good-faith arguments made in the public interest, we’re actually distorting reality. These old binaries have become a smokescreen for news outlets to sound like they’re covering issues neutrally, when in fact they are simply slapping vague labels on things. Whether the passage of a bill is a “win” for Trump, or Republicans, or Democrats is largely irrelevant. It tells us nothing about the actual effect on people.
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Facing the Threat
The brazen and often shameless attacks on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani from members of his own party reveal how they could be going on the offensive against Trumpism and the naked bigotry of far-right extremists if they were so inclined. Yet the Democratic leadership apparently has no trouble going out of its way to condemn a popular progressive candidate who actually inspires voters.
Many old guard Democrats went so far as to back the repulsive Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign the governorship over a report that he harassed eleven female employees. Thankfully, we’ve seen Democrats like the honorable NYC comptroller Brad Lander rise to the occasion. ” On Colbert, Lander said “No mayor is going to be responsible for what happens in the Middle East, but there is something quite remarkable about a Jewish New Yorker and a Muslim New Yorker coming together to say, ‘Here’s how we protect all New Yorkers. Jewish New Yorkers and Muslim New Yorkers are not going to be divided from each other. We build a city where you have affordable housing and good schools and safe neighborhoods for everyone.’” That’s how you do it!
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Future History
This moment really does feel like I’m living through one of the many documentaries I’ve watched about World War II and other periods when countries went haywire. I much prefer watching a film or reading a book about these events after the fact, as opposed to experiencing the unraveling in real time. Now we have war in Iran (or not?) and a Supreme Court that seems fine with shipping undocumented immigrants off to random hellholes around the world without due process.
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Welcome to the US
It appears foreign nationals entering the country are increasingly having their entire online lives scrutinized and used against them if they’ve expressed the “wrong” political opinions. This is, to state the obvious, a grotesque violation of the freedom of expression as well as an obnoxiously rude thing to do to visitors from other countries who pose no actual threat.
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Wealth Hoarders
It occurred to me that the world’s richest people who seek to accumulate ever more wealth and power are not unlike the troubled souls on the reality show “Hoarders” — although I have far more compassion for regular hoarders.
The cyberlimo does not actually exist in real life as far as I know, although various people online have made efforts to design one.
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Well Excuuuse Me
There’s a whole industry of political consultants and media figures making hay by relentlessly scolding Dems (and random people online who get conflated with Dems) for causing all of this, while billionaires flagrantly destroy our institutions and Trump voters embrace ever more extreme positions. The truth is that the right has long been an engine of demonizing liberals, while simultaneously portraying liberals as the abusers. It’s the “Always Blame the Left” strategy: “We can get ever more abusive and scolding and threatening, but if you say anything bad about us at all, then you are the problem.” And so it becomes a self-defeating doom loop, this attempt to solve the problem of fascism by insulting the very people trying to fight it. The idea that if “the left” just stopped saying x, y, or z then the right would stop getting more extreme and politics would go back to normal again is just completely absurd.
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