In the early part of December, I wrote and published this post: Looking ahead to 2024 8.12.23. It's a possibly somewhat bleak assessment of what 2024 may bring. I use the term assessment because it has more flexibility than making hard and fast predictions. As I've said numerous times before, prediction is a mug's game, and I'm doing my level best to not be a mug! The best anyone can honestly do is to pick out how matters may trend as 2024 plays out. Coming out with anything more definitive than that is chancing it, and pretty dishonest as well.
So, why am I writing a piece looking ahead to 2024 and asking if we have reasons to be cheerful if I think prediction is a mug's game? It's because looking at a number of underlying trends, it seems that a growing number of people are becoming more aware of what's being done to us in the name of the great reset by those who presume to rule over us, and are starting to ask difficult questions and following on from that, fighting back. I'll do my best to explain why I'm cautiously optimistic about the coming year.
No human being is perfect, we're all flawed in one way or another. Those who claim to be perfect needs to be avoided at all costs because they're probably incredibly toxic people! Having said this, for all of our imperfections and flaws, by and large, humans are co-operative and realise that we have to work together to have a functioning society. Co-operation requires bonding and empathy which, despite decades of an onslaught of neo-liberal propaganda pushing aggressive individualism, most people are still capable of practising.
As someone who professes to hold anarchist beliefs, by definition I have to have a strong degree of faith in humanity. I have to believe that we are, by and large, a co-operative species. This belief is why I see grassroots action at the neighbourhood level as being the key to bringing about the radical change that's needed to build a saner and more sustainable world. Those who reject the notion that humans are co-operative and can only see change happening through violent upheaval led by a vanguardist elite are nihilists who need to be shunned. Having said that, I'm under no illusion that a degree of force will be necessary to dislodge the bastards who presume to rule over us but, that would just be one tactic amongst many.
As I've said a few times now, a growing number of people are becoming aware of what's actually being done to us by government and the corporations they serve. They're not liking it one bit and, in a variety of ways, they're starting to resist. Okay, they're not all moving uniformly in one direction at the same time. There are different and evolving levels of understanding, and as a consequence, a range of ways people are starting to resist. One of those is a stubborn insistence among a number of sections of the populace to keep on using physical cash, even when it's being made increasingly inconvenient to do so. There's actually a growing demand for cash which is baffling and worrying the authorities, as explained in this piece:
Happy New Year via the Paradox of Banknotes - Iain Davies | Substack | 31.12.23
We now have to speculate ourselves, precisely because cash use is anonymous and can’t be easily traced. We know certain relevant facts: the demand for cash is consistent or increasing, the use of cash in retail settings is holding up, if not growing, and a lot of the cash in circulation is unaccounted for.
All of this is happening at a time when it is being made progressively more difficult the to obtain cash. Evidently, there is a sizeable proportion of the population who are willing to forgo convenience in order to keep cash in their pockets.
In an age that feels like technology and the digitisation of everything is dominating our lives, there's a growing body of evidence suggesting that Gen Z are starting to question this dominance and are reassessing their relationship with screens. If this is the case, this is a really interesting development. This is just one of a number of articles looking at the relationship Gen Z has with technology:
Gen Z has lived their entire lives online. Some are fed up. - Alex Pena | CBS News | 5.5.22
Members of Generation Z were among the first to go from birth through adolescence to young adulthood connected to a screen. They're also among the first to say that they've had enough.
"I had a lovely time going on and feeling as though I had the world at my fingertips. I could connect to Olive Garden, I commented on the picture and they commented back, best day of my life," said Emma Lembke, a 19-year-old college freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, recalling her first experiences on social media as a younger teen.
"And yet there was that sense, too, that I was entering these platforms and just feeling as though I didn't have control," she said. "I left feeling more anxious, more depressed."
The huge number of hours spent online, compounded by a global pandemic that tied teens to their devices for both schoolwork and personal life, pushed Lembke to take action. From her bedroom in Mobile, Alabama, she launched the LOG OFF Movement in 2020.
While the two examples cited above are not yet manifesting themselves as a mass shift, there's more than just a few flickers of resistance and questioning happening. With digital cash and social media both being used as ways of controlling and modifying people's behaviour as well as monitoring it, anything that signals a questioning and rejection of this has to be welcomed. What will be interesting is to see how the powers that be and the tech giants react to this.
As a brief aside, with Gen Z at the very least questioning the ubiquity of social media, it does justify our decision to focus more on physical propaganda such as papers, stickers and posters.
As I stated at the start of this piece, we as humans are flawed and no one is perfect. We're all prone to making errors. That includes all those at various levels in the implementation of the great reset. Given that the world has become so complex these days, it's pretty much impossible for anyone to develop a workable overview of how things work. When this is compounded by those at the top of the great reset food chain being given the information they want to hear as opposed to the messy realities of the truth, then the assumptions based on this flawed world view will inevitably lead to errors being made:
WHY THE GREAT RESET WILL FAIL - Nevermor Media | 31.12.23
In any hierarchy (business, government, military, etc.) people and employees inevitably distort the truth of reports when dealing with their superiors, in order to avoid any punishment for relaying bad news. As a result, the superiors often operate from a distorted view of the situation, sometimes leading to poor results. This creates a situation where the people on top of hierarchical structures are actually very uninformed about what goes on at the bottom, which is why the Powers That Shouldn’t Be are so obsessed with surveillance.
And there's this concluding remark:
The real question isn’t whether or not the criminocrats will actually succeed in establishing a new Fourth Reich.
It is, as Whitney puts it: “How much damage will they do before they fail?”
I rest my case.
These are errors that we should be ruthlessly exploiting to undermine their failing, dysfunctional and dystopian system. My gut feeling is that as 2024 progresses, the powers that be will be clocking that their grip on things is slipping. They may even see the reason for that being that the way the world is now set up is way too complex for anyone to effectively grasp. That means they will be getting increasingly desperate as they see the threat to their grip growing by the day. So, be prepared for some psyops as they try to retain what they think is their grip on the world.
I'm realistic enough to know that 2024 is going to be a difficult, challenging and turbulent year. I'm expecting some heavy duty shit from the authorities in a bid to keep us in line. However, with a growing tide of resistance to, withdrawing consent from, and where possible, opting out of the system as far as is possible, there are reasons to be optimistic. Looking at ways of withdrawing consent and building parallel systems is what we hope to achieve with this project: At the Grassroots. So, despite what will be getting thrown at us this year, hopefully it will be onwards and upwards, because there are reasons to be cheerful:)
If one cannot be cheerful or content, it is because they have let the past interfere with their ideas of the future. All bleak views of previous occurrences, experiences or predictions are in the past. What happened in the past does not predict a certain future.