Techno-Feudalism like Yanis Varoufakis Said

under whom we cheerlead the destruction of our kind – 
our heads bowed down with the weight of the media 
-Marc di Saverio (2020). Crito Di Volta, 31.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is building an investor group to acquire ByteDance’s TikTok, as a bipartisan piece of legislation winding its way through Congress threatens its continued existence in the U.S.
-Rohan Goswami and Jesse Pound (2024). 

You are under surveillance!
And the USA is seizing the surveillance for MAGA.

The scramble for cyberspace: 1884 all over again.
Invade. Colonize. Partition.
There are only terra nullius and eminent domain
in platform empires.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary will have your kid’s data.
Trump’s Treasury Secretary will know your recipes and décor hacks.
Twerking tweens will twerk for Trump now.

Now we can all be Miss Teen USA.
Help! We don’t even live in the USA!
Steve Mnuchin wants a platform, and to wear a crown.

MAGA will buy TikTok with offshore accounts,
Then offshoring whales will onboard TikTok in Uncle Sam’s name.
Android-Apple-Alphabet – California Caliphate,
Christian Nationalist internet.
while microserfs make BitCoin bets.
What did you monetize today?
What do the 5 Eyes not see already?
Can one Eye subpoena what another Eye surveils?

What is the difference between “Treasury Secretary” and “Chairman?”
Mao we get to find out.


Terry Trowbridge has appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding poetry during the polycrisis.

While reading Neurodivergent Pride #5 I became interested in interviewing Rikki Branson because of her essay “Faith and Authority:  A Generation X Spiritual Journey”.  We are acquainted from both being involved in publishing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 2010s, and I had been raised Roman Catholic but have both had a complicated relationship to organized religion since the 1990s.

AI: You were already in Jr. High when your parents took you to an evangelical Protestant church.  Did you have any exposure to organized religion before that?  Do you mind sharing more specifically what kind of church it was?

RB:  Sure, it was a Christian and Missionary Alliance church, which at the time was pretty much a mainstream Protestant megachurch in the suburbs. I think my experience is similar to many people’s experiences, though, regardless of what denomination of church they attended.

And I had heard of Christian religion before, I was actually the one who got my parents to take my brother and I to church when I was little! I had read in books about people going to church and thought it was a way to meet other kids and be part of some grand and meaningful cause, so I kept asking them to take us to church, which they finally did.

AI: You mentioned Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott for her description of her spiritual journey as like being lily pads, meandering like a frog. Do you still feel that way? Is there more you’d like to say about Lamott’s writing?

RB:  Yes, and what I meant by that was that my spiritual journey wasn’t a straight line from one point to another. In some seasons I thought more about faith and spirituality than in other seasons, and I’ve found myself re-learning similar lessons and re-thinking the same issues. And I’d end up re-examining the same thing sometimes but from a different angle based on a person or event that had entered my life.

Even the times in my life when I was cynical towards religion were still part of my journey, because I was still engaging with the concept of faith, even to dismiss it. And while I haven’t read anything by Anne Lamott in awhile so can’t speak to her current writing, I do still identify with the “lily pads” metaphor.

AI: You mentioned that your parents told you as a teenager that you seemed autistic, but you didn’t actually get diagnosed until you were an adult. How important do you think a potential adult diagnosis is for others?

RB:  I do think an adult diagnosis can help people of any age who want to better understand themselves. When I was diagnosed, a lot of the focus (understandably) was on helping me with job searching and money management as those were issues I was facing at that time, but we did briefly bring up other topics such as relationships and friendships and faith and spirituality. There are things therapists said to me that I’d like to go back and explore and would bring up in a session if I were still in therapy at UCSF, and I do think the therapy experience gave me things to consider that were useful and interesting.

I think some people don’t pursue diagnoses because they feel that putting a “label” on themselves will limit them or they want to make it in life without making excuses or getting special treatment. But I think that now with autism and other conditions, we have a deeper understanding that autism can affect people in very different ways and that there are many ways to be autistic (just as there are many ways to practice faith/spirituality!) A diagnosis isn’t a statement of your destiny or an excuse, it’s more of a guide to how your unique brain works, where you have strengths and where you might need more support.

I think a diagnosis can help if you are able to access support systems (job coaching, accommodations at work, etc) because of the diagnosis. Or, if you choose to just use the information for yourself and Google “help for autistic people to organize their closet” or something like that, if regular advice for non-autistic people isn’t working for you. There is less stigma attached to mental health and neurological diagnoses now due to more knowledge about them and more people getting diagnosed, and if you choose to get diagnosed and tell people, you can help to lessen that stigma even further.

That said, I would never want to be someone who reduces stigma by claiming “not to be like those other autistic people” who don’t blend in as easily to neurotypical society or have more support needs. We are all valid and all deserve respect.

AI: I like/identify with your “uneasy mental truce with” your faith after college. I consider myself to be culturally catholic (small c no mistake), do you feel like your faith or lack there of is similar? Jesuscentric is a concept I read about on livejournal if I’m not mistaken that I liked back in the ’00s. Unitarian Universalism can also be pretty cool.

RB:  I’ve not heard the term “Jesuscentric” but I do hear “Christ follower” to express that someone is inspired by and hopes to emulate Jesus, but without all of the cultural and political connotations that can come with the word “Christian.” I think it’s a way to say things a bit differently, to get a chance to explain what you mean before you activate people’s cultural stereotypes and have them put you in a box before you get to define yourself.

Yes, I would say that I’m probably similar to what you’re getting at with culturally catholic, although I do think there’s more to being a Christ follower than the cultural Christianity that involves, say, putting up a Christmas tree around the holidays or taking Sunday off. It’s about choosing to live in a more mindful and intentional way that’s inspired by how Jesus acted in the Gospels: love your neighbor, forgive your enemy, treat everyone and the natural world with respect. Getting back to the basics without all the modern cultural and political associations that can come to people’s minds when they think of Christian religion.

AI:  For clarification, for me, being small c and/or culturally catholic isn’t about the church as an institution, high holidays or mass on Sunday.  To me, that is what mainstream religion is.  For me it’s more like the Catholic Worker Movement or Ecclesiastical Base Communities.  Feeding the hungry, offering clothing and shelter to those in need.  Opposing imperialism and the death penalty.  Penpalling with, and sending books to prisoners. 

It’s like the story of the father who asked his son to do some work, and the son said he wouldn’t, but he did it anyways.  His other son said he’d do the work but didn’t.  Faith without works is dead as they say, I’m far more interested in the work than the faith. I was raised Roman Catholic but became an atheist in my youth, then an Evangelical and Pentecostal Christian as a young adult, but left that milieu largely over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also the total indifference to things like sweat shops, the environment, and practically everything wrong with the world except a very narrow definition of what’s “wrong.” 

RB:  I can relate to that!

AI: Do you feel like the publishing executive you mentioned is a good example of non-religious mentorship?

RB:  Yes, I would say so. I think that mentorship and just adult friendship in general is something that people are really lacking in Western/American society. So much of what I heard about adult friendship when I was growing up as a teen was focused on how adults should grow up, settle down, stop hanging out with buddies and spend their non-working hours with their families. I’m all for people being good spouses and good parents, parenting is a very important form of mentoring. But I think we just spend so many hours working, job searching, networking, commuting etc that we don’t have enough hours left to invest in our communities and relationships so we’re forced to ration out the little time we do have and direct it to smaller and smaller circles of people. That’s the problem we should really address, why we’re kept so busy that we can’t maintain normal relationships the way we did when we had a village to support us and we interacted with that village. And friendships don’t have to take you away from your family. I have friends who have children and I’m always down for spending time with them with kids included!

You don’t need to be religious to be a mentor or be mentored, but I think that one good thing that religion provides is a structure where people can meet each other and become friends or mentors/mentees, where platonic friendship is encouraged and supported. I think we need more of this in the world.

AI: do you consider yourself to be on a third path outside of the worldliness vs spirituality world view?

RB:  Yes, I’m still somewhere on that third path. I don’t know how to describe the stage of spiritual life that I’m in now, but I do feel that I’m still on the journey somewhere. I still consider myself a Christ-follower.

What I’m focusing energy on now is working to rebuild communities and social structures that went away during the height of the pandemic. Covid hasn’t totally gone away and I’m all for accommodating people with disabilities or people who are immunocompromised, and am looking forward to rebuilding our social connections in more mindful and inclusive ways. Where I live in Northern California there’s a lot of media talk about how our cities are in a “doom loop” because of violence and economic problems, and I’m writing and speaking about remembering and honoring the role cities have played in America in terms of safety and community for some POC, LGBT and immigrant people and about supporting the communities that exist in our cities. Not sure how that all fits into my Christ-follower faith journey, but I suppose it’s about community and respect which I think is a big part of the good that faith and spirituality can bring to society.

AI: I agree with your critique of submission being linked to “traditional” gender roles, but would add it’s also part of the inherent violence in the white supremacist aspect of the hyper segregated, white dominated churches in the US. The flip of this to me is Liberation Theology, minority churches and actively anti-racist/peace churches can be liberatory. How do you feel about this five years further along in life?

RB:  I related submission to gender roles in my essay because that was what I’d heard growing up, and that’s what I thought I was qualified to speak about, as a white woman.

But all of our unjust social power dynamics, including racism and white supremacy, manifest in our mainstream churches, and I do think it’s important to be actively anti-racist and actively oppose and work against in society and call yourself out for racism and other issues. A few racist things I now recognize from when I was younger from my mostly white church were that we put on a play and listened to music about the sacrifices of some white missionaries who were murdered by native people but didn’t look at the whole story in context. The natives were presented much like the Orcs in Lord of the Rings and it was only as an adult that I read a book that mentioned that the indigenous tribe in question was not “unreached by civilization” but engaged in legal and sometimes physical combat with oil company representatives who wanted to take their land and that the murders happened because one Indigenous man lied to their chief to cover up a love affair, not because they had a cultural habit of murdering all trespassers. But the story was told in an extremely white-centric way.

I also remember missionaries saying that people in other countries who practiced other faiths were under demonic influence and that their religious music was obnoxious, and someone who adopted a boy from East Asia changing the boy’s name to Noel and saying that he was now God’s gift to him and his wife. White supremacy, which I believe was unintentional there, just stemming from a culture saturated in that, would manifest as looking at problems in other countries as horrific but problems here in the U.S. as just sort of unfortunate, and as a hyperfocus on relating every Bible story to something to do with our individual lives or families without considering social justice or social implications. The story of Rahab hiding the Jericho spies, for example, was about how you should follow God before it’s too late, and the illustration was of a man who couldn’t accept his wife’s forgiveness for his affair and didn’t try to get her back until she was already remarried. Not about genocide or war or the role of women or marginalized racial groups, but about American suburban marital drama.

But when I was in my “cynical phase” in my twenties, I didn’t have the tools or language yet as a white person to critique racism and classism in the church. That’s something that came later as I matured. I’m embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t immediately notice the toxic aspects that weren’t directly aimed at me, and I am committed to learning more and doing better. And I think consciously anti-racist and anti-oppression churches can help with that.

Don't Miss Me #DMM 
<--- Title Of Poem #TOP 

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in a better place.
But please, don't forget me,
And the love we used to embrace.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be free from all pain.
But please, don't let my memory fade,
And our moments be in vain.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in eternal sleep.
But please, don't forget my face,
And the promises we couldn't keep.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be just a memory.
But please, don't let me be forgotten,
And our love become a mystery.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be at peace at last.
But please, don't forget my name,
And the moments that have passed.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be beyond your reach.
But please, don't let go of our love,
And the lessons that it did teach.

Don't miss me when I'm gone,
For I'll be in a better place.
But please, don't forget me,
And the love we used to embrace.

✍🏿🗣🎤 Ike Boat

It was Hot Like Summer and the Demons Ran Deep, or Not in This Life Anyways


the rains had arrived when there was supposed to be snow, and the fields became beige and flaxen again, and the world was strange and stayed that way. it was as if it had longed to be strange and present that part of its personality that nobody cared about. and now that it had gotten the chance, it wasn’t going to give it up. for many days and nights the precipitation continued. an old solitary hawk that lived somewhere near or perhaps on the top of the movie-house came down and alighted atop a No Trespassing sign. a dirty sad area, who would want to trespass there anyhow? I watched the beautiful hawk as it looked for something, here and there a bit like you look for where you put your keys down right?- found it, jumped down, seeming to let itself fall down more so than jump, having just jumped into the air I felt, retrieved the thing, and left. later I had seen a few souls, two in person and two in vision, that presented well enough, but which I felt were possessed. I have a soft spot for the aged, the idea of the old man w/his sweater and perhaps book or cane even, hard fought sagacity as it were…but not these ones. whatever had taken up residence in them, if I was right, (you always have to leave room for the idea of being wrong), had really done a number on their souls. I was sad and always a bit startled at this. let them be for it was not my responsibility and besides,- these people wouldn’t only not change, but would defend their ideas to the end. pride. arrogance. one day that end would come, but that was up to the Whole, the Universe, God, whatever nomenclature or moniker one chose or that was in fashion. the rain was rain for the high temperature. if you went near a window or outside it actually felt warm and sometimes hot. back by the way of the hawk again, I glanced to see if my old friend who was not my real friend was around. nothing though. no hawk today. sometimes there is nothing but the rain. 



Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer and photographer. Prose poem and landscape photo book, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through, is forthcoming from Dark Winter Literary Press, summer 2024. 

Beginnings

libel- noun
"defamation of persons by means
of written statements,
                                 pictures,
or other visible signs"

Defaming private people was bad enough,
                                                              but
"reflecting on those who are entrusted
with the administration of public affairs"
was even worse,
                          because it
"has a direct tendency
to breed in the people
a dislike in their governors
and incline them to faction and sedition"

This was the climate I worked in,
                                                  and
it didn't seem likely to change much, if any
My name is John Peter Zenger,
                                                though
I preferred to be called Peter
I made my living as a printer;
                                            unlike today,
                                                                owning a part
of what in America would come to be called the media
wasn't a pathway to great wealth,
                                                  so
when Lewis Morris and James Alexander
approached me about starting a paper
to be called the New York Weekly Journal,
for which they would provide the content,
I was receptive to the idea

The words were never mine,
but,
       as the printer of them
and with my name the only one on the paper,
I would be held responsible
                                           And
since I agreed to keep their names secret
(a secret kept until this moment),
                                                 solely responsible
(in exchange for keeping their identities hidden,
they agreed to support my family
and provide for my defense
should I be arrested for printing their words
Promises kept on both sides)

The grand jury three times
refused to indict me for libel,
                                          but
the determined royal governor
got around that quite easily,
and I was arrested November 17, 1734,
destined to spend the next nine months in jail

The words at the trial weren't mine either,
though I am proud to be associated
with those spoken by our side

The prosecution reminded everyone
"It is not material
whether the libel be true or false"
                                                 but
we trusted the jury to determine
if our words rose to the level of criminality
                                                              (whether
"the just complaints of a number of men
who suffer under a bad administration
is libeling that administration")
                                              and
the jury judged me not to have
committed criminal libel

I don't know if mine was the landmark case
that some have made it out to be
(I'll leave that debate for historians),
but it was a first step,
                                 a beginning:
though not citing my case directly,
afterward juries were reluctant to convict
anyone charged with seditious libel,
and that's enough for me



The Great Dissenter

SPOILER ALERT:
it's not Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
(he's The King of the Weak Analogy,
                                                      and
later dissenting from your own weak analogy
falls far short of greatness)
                                          No,
it's a man by the name
of Robert Carter III

I wasn't born in September,
didn't die in September,
                                    but
in my seventy-seven years  here on Earth
two of the most important events in my life
took place in September, early September
to be precise:

                        September 6, 1777
At fifty,
I was baptized on this day,
                                        and
that went against the grain:
                                           Virginia
had an established church, the Anglican,
                                                            and
though soldiers were busy fighting the British,
some of them weren't too busy
to be among the mobs
that attacked and destroyed our churches
I eventually left the Baptists
because of doctrinal differences
Such dissent among the gentry
was usually labeled eccentric,
as it was in my case

                   September 5, 1791

"I have for some time past been convinced
that to retain them in Slavery in contrary
to the true Principles of Religion and Justice,
                                                                   and
that therefor it was my Duty to manumit them"
                                                                     and
on this date I submitted to the Court
what was called the Deed of Gift,
a schedule to emancipate my slaves gradually,
a schedule that would continue even after
my death a little over a dozen years later

I don't think anyone knows exactly
how many slaves were freed by this
(a few different numbers have been offered),
                                                                  and
it entirely possible that some
who thus obtained the necessary certificates
attesting to their freedom
weren't even my slaves,
                                    which 
I count as a good thing
                                     Though
I showed that gradual emancipation,
without eventual resettlement elsewhere,
was not only possible but practical,
few of my fellow Virginians
followed my example;
                                  in fact,
laws were soon passed to make it
more difficult for anyone to even try to do so

I always wanted to be
"laid under a shady Tree
where he might be undisturbed
& sleep in peace & obscurity"
                                             and
for the most part I have been such,
                                                    because
"My plans and advice
have never been pleasing to the world"
and because they didn't fit the narrative
that has come to be constructed
regarding my more famous contemporaries


Michael Ceraolo is a 66-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had two full-length books (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press; 500 Cleveland Haiku, from Writing Knights Press) published, and has two more, Euclid Creek Book Two and Lawyers, Guns, and Money, in the publication pipeline.

Becoming Nonexistent 

Shrinking from existence. Fading from all worth.
Time holds out its hand to pull me in. There is
wisdom in the longing & sorrow in the loss. Each 
footstep takes me further off my path. I look at you 
with sullen eyes as you walk out of view. The 
sound of crickets fills another lonely night. The 
mirror no longer shares my image, only a history of 
what might have been. Neatly shredded strips of 
paper dangling in an autumn breeze. Expectations
vanish with the sun. I have nothing more to give. 
The smaller I become, the less I have to offer. 
No one will miss me when I’m gone.




There Can Never be Another Casablanca

There can never be another Casablanca. There 
can only be one epic drama / one epic romance. 
Some sagas can be retold /rewritten, but this one 
cannot. No one will ever replace the actors with 
such immortal style. Years in the making / hours 
to observe. Romeo & Juliet – it is not! I need 
your succor / the enemy nears. Darkness overcomes 
dusk / time explodes in sparks & flares / battle has 
begun. We never stop fighting / we never stop 
learning / we never give in to fear. Morrocco / 
land of mystery & romance - there love stories 
go to die. I close my eyes to destruction and war.
I march to the song in my dream. And yet … time 
vanishes too quickly. I waited for too long / the 
curtain begins to fall. 
           La Marseillaise starts to play.



Night Dread

I cannot stop the craziness
that marches through my head.
Nights filled with anxiety-ridden soldiers
battling for space between my dreams. 
Demanding center stage among distorted 
visions that float past my closed eyes.
Filling every crevice with this & that. 
An insistent litany of turmoil,
trying to sort through illusion,
searching for fact. There is no peace
to be found in my restless mind.
Sleep is a stranger 
that haunts my restless mind.




TooMANYToo

Gone – all GONE. 
TOOOOO many /dreams/ are left behind!

         WHY have we killed the DRM? 
Power-Lust-Greed … 
          all HAIL the mighty warriors of DTH!
$ongs $ung out of tune …
Too MANY days / Too MANY times / Too MANY sins.
We are the carriers of D O O M 
We are the bringers of 
                                ~ DESPAIR ~

the DRMS are ALL <GONE>


Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 & 2023 Pushcart Prize in Poetry; nominated for the 2023 Dwarf Stars award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association; winner of Spillwords Press 2020 Publication of the Year; selected as a Judge for the Soundwaves Poetry Contest of Northern Ireland 2023. Her bio is featured in the “Who’s Who of Emerging Writers 2020” and “2021,” published by Sweetycat Press. She is the author of 16 poetry books, and 1 short story book. She lives in Delaware, USA. She loves gardening and cooking.  Chris lives with her husband and four cats. Her most recent credits are: Sand Hills Literary Magazine, The Phoenix, Eclipse Lit, Streetcake Experimental Writing Magazine, Carolina Muse, Ephemeral Literary Review, The Elevation Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Tangled Locks Journal, Wild Roof Journal, The American Writers Review, Black Moon Magazine, Pacific Review, Pomona Valley Review, West Texas Literary Review.
*(a complete list of publications is available upon request)

✨🌹Looking for Mother🌹✨

My thoughts are towards you from evening to morning,
My tongue will be with you even from poison,
From such a city that lights up at night,
The burning eye weeps in thought,
I looked for you with all my heart, mother.

Without you, my days seem to be dreary,
Hasn't luck turned around,
Everything that appears is just a dream,
A butterfly on your sunbul hair,
I looked for you with all my heart, mother.

At night, I wait without closing my eyes,
Sometimes the coral floats or swallows pains,
Maybe these days will pass in one pass,
I'll meet someone as beautiful as you.
I looked for you with all my heart, mother.

A white scarf was left hanging,
Without you, I'm even taller
Come on, ask me what's wrong?
Looking at your picture, the heart cares,
I looked for you with all my heart, mother.

Alisherovna Orzigul