Published on Substack 2025-01-23

The pressure is coming to a boil. It’s been building over the past year, as we helplessly watched our government throw money, weapons, and bombs to aid in the genocide of Palestinians. We watched it in real time, thanks to our handheld computer devices and TikTok, silly little TikTok, with its lip-sync dances and microtrends and Shein hauls, but also—bombs dropping on homes, on hospitals, on refugee camps; families clutching one another at a mass grave; a mother tenderly holding her child’s dismembered corpse; but also—a chef cooking meals for the children of the refugee camp, a builder demonstrating how to clear rubble from your home after a bombing, and the poetry of the martyred.

When we begged them to stop, they responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. The media was in lockstep, declared us unruly and irrational; they cared more for the spectacle than the cause. We wrote and called and marched. We sued. We burned ourselves alive. But never mind that, a thick layer of Capital protects Capitol Hill from our noise, provided by the weapons manufacturers tenderly nursing their record profits.

North Carolina and Tennessee washed away over the summer. The livelihoods of millions of citizens are now underwater, and people are living in tents on the spot where their homes once stood. They wait for help that will not come, and if it does, will not be sufficient. Congress declined to fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency when it needed $8 billion to pad its dwindling Disaster Relief Fund, but it did urgently approve an $8 billion arms sale to Israel. And now Los Angeles has burned down. Luckily, home insurance companies were spared millions of dollars in payouts to the newly homeless Americans after pulling fire coverage from their insurance plans just before the disaster hit.

Then one early December morning, two fatal gunshots rang out in the middle of Manhattan. A mysterious hooded vigilante went on the run after assassinating, at point-blank range, the CEO of United Healthcare. To the great shock and dismay of our C-suite oligarchs, the crowd cheered. They desperately thoughts-and-prayers-ed and loving-father-and-husband-ed, but once Luigi was arrested at that western Pennsylvania McDonalds with his hash brown in hand, I’d seen a thousand fan illustrations canonizing him as the Patron Saint of Healthcare Justice before I’d learned the dead CEO’s name (what’s-his-face, Brian Thompson).

As it turns out (to no one’s surprise—we’ve been screaming, crying, throwing up) everyone in America, across the entire political spectrum, has been fucked over at least once by the predatory, money first, people last, joke of a healthcare system. For the first time in a long time, Americans stood united. The media all but begged us to stop sympathizing with Luigi—they called him a murderer, a terrorist—but United Healthcare had caused too many medical bankruptcies, caused too many preventable deaths, and taken away too many loved ones for any of us to give a flying fuck about Brian Thompson. So, we turned off the channel and turned to each other instead. You too? You’re also sick of this shit?

TikTok catalyzed much of our connection. We witnessed war and disasters happen in real time. Discovered real people within them. We talked with refugees on the other side of the world and discovered that we are more alike than we are different, despite how alien and far away the media would prefer to have us believe. We listened to each other’s stories and realized that we were all getting fucked over because of the endless greed of those in power. We started to see through their narratives.

So, they tried to take it away, under the guise of “national security threat.” We were never meant to have so much power—especially not when it runs on an algorithm that they don’t control. As of this writing, however, the TikTok ban has been backtracked not even 24 hours after because the whole thing was likely a farce to try and force people to love Trump more but the damage has been done. Americans have flocked to Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book”, first as a joke to flip off the American government, but then becoming radicalized by talking to normal Chinese citizens on the app, and realizing the lies they’ve been told about China and themselves. It damn near started an uprising.

Instead of finding a shithole of a third-world country devoid of rights, freedom, and individuality as we’ve been told for so long, we saw a highly functioning society of futuristic infrastructure, livable wages, and a working social safety net. These people are well taken care of. On the flip side, Chinese users are shocked to hear the reality of the daily lives of Americans. Having to pay for an ambulance. Homelessness is a punishable offense. So many Americans living with mental health disorders, being on the verge of un-aliving themselves just trying to survive and put food on the table. We’re learning just how opaque and fake the mythology of the “good” American life has been. What’s interesting is that apparently the Chinese government has repeated those same mythologies as well—an effort led by Chinese capitalists.

I won’t lie, even as someone who was raised in a neighboring country, I was also surprised by the Xiaohongshu content and learning more about life in China. I think I had some inkling that they were developing rapidly and getting their shit together (as the country got richer and richer, Chinese tourists to Korea slowly overtook Japanese tourists over the years) but I think as a country that’s been closely aligned with (taken over by) U.S. capital interests, Korea tends to mirror U.S. propaganda—on China, much like the U.S., Korea has maintained a dismissive and wary attitude. (When I brought up the prospect of a China-led new world order to a Korean friend, they shuddered at the thought.)

The last few months have been a wake-up call, and if there are those who aren’t awake yet, we must shake them awake, because the enemies have stepped out from behind the curtain. The new Trump era started with a Nazi salute, given by a billionaire from apartheid South Africa. ICE is mobilizing to carry out mass deportation. It’s looking an awful lot like Germany in 1933. We must teach ourselves to stop taking the bait they keep throwing at us to keep us pointing fingers at each other and not at them. With each moment of lucidity afforded to us when these events happen—and they will continue to happen—we have to inch forward each time, gain momentum, and organize.

Last weekend, I went to watch “Cuckoo,” a multimedia performance held at the Performance Arts Center in Manhattan. The South Korean artist Jaha Koo used film, music, live narration, and three re-programmed rice cookers to talk about the devastating impact of the Asian financial crisis of ‘97 and the subsequent epidemic of ‘golibmuwon’—the untranslatable Korean word for the feeling of helpless isolation—that swallowed people whole.

The pressure is building, sang the rice cooker. I think I might explode.

We’re at a tipping point; something’s about to boil over.