What does it mean to organize when the world refuses coherence—when every coalition carries the ghosts of dissonance, every alliance the memory of fragmentation? This is not a question for the faint of heart. It marks the threshold between theory and practice, the liminal terrain where the work of making kin, building new forms, and resisting totalizing narratives begins anew.

In “Patchwork Harmonies,” we touched upon how Anna Tsing’s polyphonic assemblage and the deep relational wisdoms of our ancestors frame coalition not as unity, but as a generative cacophony—a world where many melodies, histories, and futures entwine without collapsing into sameness. But how do we bring this theory to bear on the stubborn soil of daily life? How do we enact the radical potentials, not just adumbrate them?

In the harsh rhythm of modern life, where urgency has become the dominant language, we have grown accustomed to a world that deadens us to our own aliveness. It is increasingly difficult to feel ourselves, let alone the fullness of the beings and forces—human and more-than-human—that make life possible. We've adopted a kind of forced numbness, a survival tactic woven tightly into the fabric of industrial, capitalist culture, a kind of armor that lets us keep moving through days unmoored from the pulse of the earth. This numbness—a dissociation from the land, from animals, from the sentience in plants and even in rocks—is not a neutral state. It is a spiritual injury, a political wound, and an ecological rupture carried in our collective body. To endure the impossible systems we’ve inherited and are told to uphold, we must cut ourselves off from the relational world—and doing so costs us everything.

Fascism—no longer confined to textbooks or distant historical epochs—breathes in the pulse of our streets, in the administration of law, in whispered family conversations, and in the ubiquitous gestures of power that insist on submission. To say “fascism is here” is an understatement remedied only by an interrogation deeper, and more unsettling, than many dare to reckon: fascism has been here. It is not a new visitor but the original architect, the primal blueprint embedded within the fecund soils of American society. This is not an ahistorical invocation; it is a recognition that the structural oppressions, and the psychic violences entwined with them, have always constituted the marrow of this nation’s social body.

To walk the streets of California is to encounter the intricate architecture of solidarity economies: Black cultural organizers in Oakland building networks of worker-owned cooperatives that circulate wealth and decision-making within communities; the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust returning land to Indigenous stewardship and enacting collective care through rematriation ceremonies; the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative supporting tenants, many of them immigrants and people of color, to co-own and democratically govern their homes outside the pressures of speculative real estate; artists and activists in Santa Cruz establishing mutual aid funds and creative wildfires that support one another through crisis and transformation; and Monterey Bay’s expansion of social housing initiatives, where permanently affordable homes are insulated from market speculation and governed by residents themselves. There are countless examples.

During the recent 12-day war between Iran and Israel—a conflict in which America’s military and diplomatic shadow loomed unmistakably via its support for Israel—the familiar chants of “Death to America” once again echoed through the streets of Tehran. Western media seized on these images: crowds in black, marching behind the coffins of slain commanders and nuclear scientists, their voices rising in unison with the old slogan, “Death to America, Death to Israel.” News cycles replayed the scenes, amplifying the outrage and reinforcing the narrative of a uniquely hostile, irrational enemy. At state funerals, in public squares, and on social media, the chant became a symbol—platformed and dissected, its meaning debated but rarely understood in its full context.

This essay is an invitation to pause and look closely at something we’re told is fading, suspect, or even selfish: privacy. In a culture obsessed with sharing and visibility, where every moment can be broadcast and every thought is up for comment, the very idea of keeping something for ourselves—or for the people and places that matter most—has become radical. What follows isn’t just a defense of privacy, but a call to reclaim it as a practice, a right, and a source of strength for both individuals and communities.

Let’s begin with a confession, one that is itself a microcosm of our predicament: I read Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism in a browser tab, sandwiched between the dopamine-drip of Slack notifications and the collaborative surveillance of a Google Doc. My attention, parsed and packaged by the very lords Varoufakis indicts, became yet another data-point in the ledger of extraction. To review this book is not to stand outside its thesis, but to enact it: we are all, already, inside the castle, the drawbridge long since raised.

Convenience, that sly and shimmering promise, is everywhere—lurking in our pockets, humming in our kitchens, quietly shaping the decisions we make each day. The world, it seems, has been placed under a velvet enchantment, each object and interface meticulously designed to erase friction, to conjure shortcuts, to offer a spell for bypassing the necessary rigor of living. But what, in truth, do we forfeit when we surrender ourselves to the current of ease? What is the actual price of a life anesthetized against resistance, stripped of the bracing cold of difficulty, the generative memory of pain?