The Wolf That Wins is The One You Feed
How to support what we love instead of that which is out to get us
I have a paid subscriber. My very first one. It isn’t my dad or my aunt or my best friend, none of them know or care about my Substack anyway. It’s a person I don’t know who has decided my writing is worth supporting. (Hi! Thank you for upgrading! You literally made my week!) They didn’t do it to gain anything for themselves, all of my writing is available for free. They, presumably, just wanted me to know someone somewhere appreciates what I’m making.
It’s difficult to stress just how much enthusiasm that one small notification put into my day. I was suddenly extremely excited about what I would write next. I was overrun with ideas for future articles. I felt a surge of belief that making something good, and cool, and meaningful, was possible. Someone else believed I could. They can’t possibly be wrong.
As artists we all know how damn hard it is to sell art. Getting paid for creating is a whole separate science from the science of actual creativity - a whole new level of alchemy. And one of the main reasons is because we have been trained to expect to consume creativity for free.
It was a clever ruse, when you think about it. By accepting to receive so much content for free, you enter a sort of sinister covenant. (I was going to write ‘deal with the Devil’ but I then realized I don’t want to malign the Devil, I feel he already gets a needlessly bad rap). If you are using social media for free, you’re not going to complain that much when they serve you with endless ads, when they scrape your content to feed their AI, when they censor your posts because you’re talking about Palestine. If you’re using Spotify for free, you’re not going to protest too loudly when you realize they’re fleecing artists. If you’re getting all your news for free you won’t ask too many questions about the level of journalism. I mean - it’s free! What do you expect?
The trick is, now we’re used to having all this stuff for free, or super cheap - it’s difficult to realign.
After Oct 7, when I realized the ‘western media’ are…. more of a public lullaby system than a source of objective information, I started hunting for alternative news outlets. You can get snippets of news directly from people posting and reposting things, but if you care at all about integrity of the information you will find it grueling work to confirm and reconfirm which stories seem reliable and which are just made up. I wanted journalism. Actual honest-to-god investigative journalism, with sources and shit.
Eventually I dug up a few reliable-seeming papers - The Maple, The Intercept, The Breach. The Breach is my favorite. They were covering the situation in Palestine in a way no legacy media were even dreaming of attempting. And they were not hidden behind paywalls - just like my humble Substack corner, they publish everything for free, and you only pay them if you want to. Paying doesn’t give you anything.
Or does it?
I signed up to support two out of the three - the two Canadian ones, I have to confess - with a modest monthly sum. Because paying them does give me something - a chance to support honest reporting. I could see how painfully immoral and mealy-mouthed the Rich-People-Sponsored media were forced to be. My only conclusion was that perhaps Poor-People-Sponsored media were the antidote to this. (By ‘poor people’ I don’t want to imply we need to actually be experiencing poverty. I just mean all of us regular grubs who don’t have any billions at all).
I have signed up to give ongoing micro-support to a few other people. Not many, but some whose work seemed really important to me. A few Patreon creators. A few independent journalists. Cara, the potential new social platform for artists, set up by artists. People doing work that I believe is valuable, but not easily monetized in our capitalist framework. I will keep looking for opportunities to join my paltry bit of support with other people’s paltry bits of support in the hope that we can fund great and important things if we band our efforts together.
There is, you see, an invisible front line, separate from all the other front lines of currently raging wars - it’s much closer to home, no matter where home is. It’s the front line of What We Allow.
An old quote attributed to different prominent men over the years states “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”
This intuitively makes sense - imagine our rights and liberties as big bubbles we carry around us as we move through the world, and when these bubbles bump up against each other, they both need to give a little to accommodate that squish, right? Otherwise, if one side’s bubble doesn’t give at all, or if it, say, happens to be covered in spikes - the other side’s bubble will burst.
The same happens in every relationship, but is particularly stark when the two sides are disproportionately sized. Say, an Israeli tank vs. a Palestinian child. An armed cop vs. a scared woman boiling water. Amazon vs. an Amazon employee. The US Government vs. Julian Assange.
When one side has a massive, reinforced bubble with spikes and gun turrets sticking out of it, the only way the other side doesn’t get trampled underfoot by this spiky bouncing monstrosity is by teaming up with other small people around them to form somewhat bigger bubbles. For mutual protection. Big Bubble knows this, so they have worked long and hard and gotten very creative at keeping all our little bubbles separate from each other and disinterested in engaging.
This ensures that when they need to pop one of us - or a small group - they manage to do so with relative ease.
Imagine if every time when First Nations people stood up for the protection of their lands against the oil giants and manufacturing polluters, the entire nation stood with them in open solidarity?
Imagine if when people marched on the streets of Montreal asking Canada to stand up against the genocide in Palestine, the entire city stood with them?
Imagine if when the nurses and the teachers took to the streets to ask for better working conditions and more fair treatment, everyone showed up to support them?
This of course already happens to a degree. Many cases of injustice we hear about are actually only visible because people noticed and made noise about it, so the government/ companies/ the ruling class had to go ‘ah, ok, they care about this one, I guess we let it go. Darn.’
UK journalists Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Medhurst, who were recently arrested under the the UK's Terrorism Act for literally just reporting news about Palestine, were held for hours, denied access to food and medication, interrogated for further hours, denied basic rights like a phone call and an appointed attorney, had their homes ransacked and their equipment confiscated, in an action that would only to the most faithful of government stooges seem like anything other than a blatant attempt at intimidation and humiliation.
A warning.
To them and to anyone else thinking of following in their footsteps.
Wilkinson, a 61 year old woman, was issued a series of draconian measures that were basically calculated to be impossible to comply with. Her passport was confiscated from her by the police during the arrest, not listed on the list of confiscated items, and then she was ordered to surrender it - to surrender the passport that THEY HAD ALREADY TAKEN FROM HER - to the police station by the end of the week or risk jail time. It was just one of a bunch of completely unreasonable measures, such as ‘do not under any circumstance leave your home, but also come to the police station to give us the passport that we already have’. She was also ordered to not use any means of communication, including her phone, even in a medical emergency. (Wilkinson is chronically ill with a potentially life-threatening condition, so this is not a mere hypothetical).
They hid her bank card in the attic.
They broke the urn containing her mother’s ashes and spilled it on her floor.
Once the public got wind of this and started kicking up a fuss, most of these idiotic measures were walked back, the passport was miraculously found, and the police even promised they would ‘look into the disappearance’ of the £200 they had casually taken from her, because apparently that’s something the police can casually do. But if people hadn’t been paying attention, what would have stopped her from getting disappeared into a jail cell and left there for a few years just to be taught a lesson about standing up for the defenseless?
The fact is, the powerful will always keep putting pressure on that front line. And it will keep moving towards us, it will keep shoving us inexorably back, as far as we let it. No rich person will ever willingly make themselves less rich. They turned charity into tax-evasion, they turned political representation into a rigged carnival game, they turned AI into intellectual property theft, they turned eco-conscious initiatives into hollow marketing opportunities. They turned the media into their personal propaganda machine. They turned the police into their personal thugs-for-hire. They come up with a thousand colorful excuses and explanations on why we shouldn’t have unions, or social security, or health insurance, or free time, or stability, or safe products, or clean food, or anything else that might accidentally make our lives less crap.
And what they give us in return is the free shit that’s supposed to keep us hypnotized with pretty colored lights, or keep us deeply engaged in bickering pointlessly with each other, in the hope we never realize that we can - and sort of have to - push back against that ever encroaching line.
And I get it - going out to get your head bashed in at a protest isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. It isn’t mine either. Back in Serbia when we were trying to get rid of a dictator, I was never in that first line pressing right against the cops in riot gear. We’re not all made to eat tear gas and laugh/ cry it off as a well spent Thursday night.
But just because you don’t want to go out and be openly insubordinate doesn’t mean you can’t push back against that line. Support someone who is speaking on something important. Support someone who is making something beautiful. Support someone who is being treated unfairly. In this age of effortless micro-transactions, sending 5$ someone’s way probably won’t break your budget, but to them it will be way more than one free coffee that month - it will be a secret message. A coded letter that says ‘I see what you are doing. I want you to succeed.’ That, my friends, is priceless beyond measure.
So use your bubble for good.
We’ll miss those bubbles once it’s our turn to get popped.