The Authority. It was a hurricane of flannel and Canadian flags on the streets of Ontario when disgruntled, Brooklyn wordcels initiated their first strike assault on cartoon apes across the internet — a bizarre, crypto-populist confluence of events that has been coming, really, since America entered its very first AOL chatroom. The internet is not just a tool, it’s the digital substrate we live inside, and now, fully mature, what happens online shapes our physical world. This is a major, reality-altering paradigm shift that has already snapped our tether to collective reality, and the only thing it guarantees for sure is a fundamentally weird looking future. Concerning substance, however, what comes next will either be an increasingly-chaotic decentralization, or an increasingly-violent centralization of power. One trend will dominate — because only one can dominate — and that trend will shape the next century. Centralization, and its inevitable authoritarianism, is presently dominating (sorry).

Covid, which pulled the curtain back on everything, went something like this: governments across the free world initiated a series of authoritarian policies to combat a virus that itself almost certainly leaked from a lab in an authoritarian country. While many politicians earnestly believed their Covid policies necessary and good, it is impossible not to notice these policies also afforded our political leaders sweeping new power over the lives of ostensibly free people. Beyond the world of elected power, on questions related to the nature of the pandemic from which these new political powers draw legitimacy, media companies policed our information landscape for dissent, and social media companies erased that dissent from the internet. All of this was managed unofficially in tandem, and with ruthless efficiency. Tensions flared. Flaring tensions were further repressed. Backlash was inevitable, and in Ontario that backlash manifested on the road.

Truckers throughout Canada, demanding an end to vaccine mandates, called for a kind of strike and blocked a major trade route into the United States. Pro-establishment elements of media, in defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s rainbow-colored iron fist, falsely characterized the protest as violent (there was honking) and white nationalist. There was breathless reporting. There were saddened speeches. The word “insurrection” was repeatedly invoked. All of this in turn afforded GoFundMe, a crowdfunding platform, the social permission to seize 9 million dollars raised by the protestors, a now-typical act of extra-judicial corporate punishment of state dissent. Finally, Trudeau authorized unprecedented “emergency measures,” allowing banks to freeze accounts of both truckers and their supporters.