A movement began last Friday, if you didn’t know. No one occupied the streets. There wasn’t a single cry, yell, or shriek. No signs flapped in the wind. Pamphlets weren’t scattered on the ground, left for unsuspecting pedestrians to read. Nothing, at least visibly, interrupted American life.
But for The People’s Union USA—a nebulous group of so-called activists organized across Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram—the “24 Hour Economic Blackout” meant the beginning of something like people power. They hoped to “build a better future” after some economic slowdown or shutdown. It would start by us cancelling our Costco memberships.
Led by one man named John Schwarz, who prefers to be called “J”, or just by his TikTok handle, “TheOneCalledJai,” these Internet insurgents rapidly occupied America’s digital terrain. Their “grassroots” movement spontaneously organized themselves by blasting seemingly AI-generated images into the Web. These advertisements encouraged viewers to, as their website declares, “show them who really holds the power.” Their rhetoric activates an already existing national sentiment, that America has been “stolen” away from “us” and now it is time to take it back from “mega-corporations,” “banks and financial institutions,” and “politicians.” Their “movement” plans to “bring truth to light,” and all of their suffering “ends now.”
They want to bring Heaven onto a fallen Earth. It’s adorned with red, white, and blue.
Although John, or @TheOneCalledJai, was the prophet who called the movement into being, hundreds of Internet users took up the charge as well. Microphones, presumably shipped from Amazon, were strapped to their chests, as they became online preachers for the Blackout, from Instagram micro-influencers to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and author Stephen King. Some stitched @TheOneCalledJai’s videos; others created their own propaganda. They all attempted to find future faithful and make them “join the movement.” The algorithm inevitably picked up their engaging content, and their views skyrocketed.
Their bonds of “solidarity” were as strong as the links from one video to another, and altogether, these users “in solidarity” would overturn the Trump oligarchy. Unfortunately, it is unclear what “they,” whoever they are, wanted specifically. Besides the demand to make America a better place, everyone had a different perspective on what the Economic Blackout actually meant. It wasn’t a boycott, and according to John, it wasn’t even a protest.
It seemed more like a ritual than a revolution. @TheOneCalledJai assures you that organizing brings about enlightenment: “Unionizing the people is not just a movement, it is a necessary evolution.” And you should believe him. He’s “certified in multiple disciplines” of “mindfulness and meditation.”
I learned about the revolution after my mother, apparently hooked on @TheOneCalledJai, sent me one of his videos. It seemed the rest of the world noticed: Networks like CNN, NPR, and Time Magazine covered this revolutionary sensation.
CNN correctly reports that “effective boycotts are typically well organized, make clear and specific demands and are focused on one company or issue,” but the People’s Union USA offers a compelling, and more importantly, immediate solution. Their website, managed by @TheOneCalledJai, cuts their mission down into a single sentence: “If we disrupt the economy for just ONE day, it sends a powerful message.”
Read their language carefully. The economy, while rife with “corruption” and decades of corporate malfeasance, could be changed instantaneously. We could do it by “exposing the truth” and “sending the message,” or arguably, the New Gospel for the world. And, hopefully, if everyone finds out, the world will be “impacted” by the movement. All we must do is more and more evangelism—to become apostles heralding the New Millennium of People Power. In this tale, the Economic Blackout was the first plague out of many and the beginning of an American apocalypse of sorts, one that would reveal the world’s bright future and purge it of its sins. And this future is just one purchase away.
The deal is simple for a reason. When the future seems perpetually uncertain and collapse seems more like an inevitability than a possibility, it is hard to believe that anyone can do anything at all. Hope has become a luxury commodity. It ends up being social media influencers who capture the nation’s feeling, guiding us toward what seems like the future, or what gives us the feeling of the future. It doesn’t matter which one.
It doesn’t matter if your life is objectively worsening in quality and your community is gradually slipping into destitution and your nation is hopelessly barrelling toward collapse. The People’s Union USA grants you joy amidst collapse—to desire apocalypse enough to DIY Armageddon.
I disagree with critics who claim that the “Internet feeling” so-called netizens have been experiencing for the past decade or so is some form of our contemporary desire to die. In the usual story, humans have been sucking too much data into their minds, and now we all want to give it up and return to some primitive time, if such a time ever existed.
Incidents like the Economic Blackout are clear evidence to the contrary. @TheOneCalledJai and his bacchants, including my Costco-abstinent mother, wholeheartedly believe that this dream-like, digital world is the beginning of something new for us, now. We confuse death for its twin: ecstasy. The “Internet feeling” is ecstasy expressed in algorithms, as packets of data become little snacks to feast on while you endlessly scroll. The yearning for something else, something that isn’t “the now,” is ever active.
But yearning for something better is certainly not new. Tales of the Last Battle have been shared around countless fires. We’ve wanted to discover what happens when the world, in all its unfathomable immensity, comes crashing down. Homo sapiens has never stopped imagining.
The People’s Union USA offers another fantasy, attempting to shatter the hall of mirrors the Trump administration plans on building in the American post-industrial landscape. But this entails self-imposed restriction and futurist speculation: all traits of a good religion. It seems John has put his “mindfulness” certification to good use.
Utopia has arguably been at the center of the American project since its beginning. America was a candyland for colonists who sought to lay claim to the “unknown.” For the Puritans, their home was supposed to be a “city on a hill.” The Founders of the eventual United States believed it would be a shining beacon for everything good about modernity, from enlightenment to democracy. All it would take was native genocide and Black enslavement.
Maybe it isn’t the so-called “death drive” that has been intensified. It is, rather, something like an “eschatological drive,” or the desire for utopia with its concomitant apocalypse, that has just found another moment to rise up out of the collective well of American want and make itself known in the digital frontier.
Now Americans must face the possibility of their state eating itself alive. Collapse itself becomes the only object left to desire, as apocalypse seems much more likely to produce actual social change than any effort made by the American government so far.
In this frame, organizing takes on an almost Edenic strategy of becoming. It’s interesting how Gen-Xers, instead of “woke” Gen-Zers, were the dominant audience for the People’s Union. They were raised during the nadir of radical Left politics, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of Communism in the eternal battle of the Cold War. Waves of “new social conservatism” and neoliberalism overtook culture’s tides. The Economic Blackout, however futile, tapped into a child-like hope to reverse this ancient “Fall.” This is the tragedy at the heart of the absurdity.
On the other side of American utopia, organizing is an intense struggle. You must work your body to its limits, in hopes of gaining moral approval from the Third World children who you advocate for. It becomes a self-gratifying act of transmigration: when the American soul occupies the body of the utterly transcendent victim, the impossible subject, and the victim of the world in its unending totality, and therefore, the beginning of your anti-imperialist struggle. It could be the beginning of your organizing, that the lives of the Palestinian children whom you will never feasibly meet could satisfy your desire to remake the world in your image. And, luckily, under this logic, your personal redemption is possible, guaranteed by the perpetual tragedy of foreign death.
I sound cross and vindictive, but I assure you that I believe in a better world. I hope Fannie Lou Hamer’s command that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free” is heard even more now. But I remain skeptical about how we think it’ll happen, if it does.
These attempts at revelation become projects of self-redemption: little indulgences to soothe the soul stuck in American Purgatory. The future—or, more precisely, Paradise—is possible when you find the perfect object to destroy and reclaim, either the Palestinian or the Target (body) bag. They are all just tools for building a better world, right?
Organizing, in either form, sustains a fantasy of social transformation. Everything becomes a willing sacrifice, from boycotting Amazon to laying your body down to become a Palestinian too. To adherents, organizing is a sort of alchemy—desperately searching for pure, reckless, and violent utopia where there is none. This isn’t politics, or some real struggle against anything specific, but a psychic struggle to fix the self and fix the world at the same time.
Perhaps I should yearn for Paradise. But it isn’t real. Humans yearn for some time before the Fall because it is hard to face the fact that there never was a time when everything wasn’t this. We will always search for an impossible redemption, to ask that the ancient sin of history be washed away, when it only stains us more and more. Whatever “the future” is can only be found when we stare over the ledge into the well of history and find something that looks like a common interest, or to break ground and cut lines in the sand. It happens when we leave Eden, hand in hand, unflinchingly, staring at the bare and bright horizon.
Maybe, after fantasy’s high, we fall right back down to the ground.
