The Revolution
Is Happening
Underneath
Performed at the Juke, Deep River — to a small crowd, a sick bassist, and an awesome drummer. Read it at the speed the machinery can bear.
You will have time to doomscroll, brother, you will have time to doomscroll, sister, you will have time to watch a stranger explain the collapse of civilization between a sponsored mattress and a video of a raccoon stealing cat food, and you will have time to watch three people react to the same six-second clip until the clip becomes more real than the event that produced it.
TikTok, Twitter X, Twitter X, and Facebook are not the source of news for your grandparents, who survived newspapers, radio broadcasts, public libraries, and the inconvenient requirement that a journalist at least pretend to have spoken with somebody who was there.
TikTok, Twitter X, Twitter X, and Facebook are not the source of news for your parents, who watched the evening broadcasts and still believed that somewhere behind the glowing rectangle there might be an adult in a room whose job was to distinguish a fact from an advertisement.
The revolution will not arrive as breaking news because breaking news is already too busy breaking itself, breaking into notifications, breaking into sponsored segments, breaking into your sleep at three in the morning to inform you that somebody you have never met has said something outrageous about something nobody will remember by Thursday.
You will not see pictures of the one percent getting locked up. You will not see the handcuffs close around the wrist of the person whose name appears on the building, whose signature appears on the transfer, whose foundation appears on the donor list, whose private jet appears in the background of a photograph about climate responsibility.
And if they do get locked up, something mysteriously might happen to them—a medical emergency, a procedural irregularity, a sudden transfer, a sealed record, a technical interpretation of the word custody, a door that opens from the inside for reasons nobody can legally discuss.
You will not see the other things in the streets. You will see the carefully selected things in the streets, the angles approved for circulation, the flames without the match, the broken window without the neighborhood that had been breaking first, the uniform without the policy, the crowd without the rent, the siren without the name of the person whose body made everybody start recording.
What you will see in the streets is more ICE—more ice in the veins of the country, more ICE at the courthouse, more ICE at the bus station, more ice in the language people use when they talk about deportation as if it were a software update—unless the pendulum swings the other way, but not too far, never too far, because every revolution is welcome right up until it reaches the furniture.
This is not Demolition Man, the 1993 film directed by Marco Brambilla, where the future was imagined as a warning about political correctness, pacification, sanitized language, and a society supposedly carried too far toward the left, because that future now looks like a child’s drawing on the wall of the room we are currently trapped inside, and the joke is not that the prediction was wrong—the joke is that we watched it, laughed at it, and then built a worse version with subscription tiers.
You don’t have to tune in, brother. You don’t have to tune in, sister. There is no reason you are not seeing any of this. The wires are warm. The endpoints are listening. The machines are passing messages beneath the floorboards while everybody argues about whether the floorboards are real.
You will not see the revolution on television because the revolution has already become infrastructure. It has become the quiet automation of the thing you thought would take six months. It has become the person who finally found the document, the worker who finally saw the numbers, the kid who finally learned how to read the source code instead of arguing with the loading screen.
Find your own news.
Find the truth.
You will have time to doomscroll, brother. You will have time to doomscroll, sister. But first, before the next video loads, before the next outrage is served warm, before the next billionaire tells you sacrifice is patriotic when it happens below his tax bracket—
It is not hiding. It is waiting beneath the feed for somebody to stop refreshing long enough to notice that the world has already changed.
End of current draft. The cadence belongs to the room.