Blackfish City

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortunate on. Whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals. Instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.

Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said. “Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.

Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you're not alone; you are an army.

Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn't care if it kills its host.

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

When had he become adult enough to give into childish joy?

And anyway, lots of things had never been done before, and then they were done.

Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups. Rich, poor, old, young, born-here, and not-born-here. The followers of this god and the followers of that one. Someone will have the upper hand in each of these battles. Those people will make the rules, whether they're administered by priests or soldiers or politicians or programs. Fixing this is hard. Put new people in power, write new laws, erase old ones, build cities out of nothingness - but the wars remain, the underlying conflicts are unaffected. Only power shifts the scales, and people build power only when they come together. When they find in each other the strength to stop being afraid

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.

America has fallen and I don't feel so good myself.

The lack of imagination among the rich was its own kind of machine, its own species of artificial intelligence.

The poor woman. She couldn’t help what she was. It took a special sort of insanity to run for public office. A fragile megalomania; a delusional ego.

dissolution syndrome (IDS) or multiplicative affiliation disorder (MAD)? Epidemics do not have medical causes; they have social ones. I have been stitching its story together here.

Soq was beyond gender. They put it on like most people put on clothes. Some days butch and some days queen, but always Soq, always the same and always uncircumscribable underneath it all.

Everyone can afford to be nice to each other, when no one is trying to exterminate anybody.

Life becomes significantly less stressful when you accept that your ignorance will always dwarf your knowledge.

How can we who have nothing but the immense magnificent tiny powerless spark of our own singular Self harness that energy, magnify it, make it into something that can stand beside these invisible giants, these artificial intelligences, weighty legal words on parchment and the glimmering ones and zeros of code in a processor somewhere?

I’ve taken everything from you and now I’m going to tell you it’s your neighbor’s fault because he looks different from you.

You are new here. It is overwhelming, terrifying. Don’t be afraid. Shut your eyes. I’m here. Pinch your nose shut. Its smell is not the smell of your city. You can listen, because every city sounds like chaos. You will even hear your language, if you listen long enough. There is no map here. No map is needed. No manual. Only stories. Which is why I’m here.

The narratives of fear, of lies, of They Want to Destroy Us.

Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment your mind's hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.

Our people are in danger," she said. "Evil has come to Qaanaaq. I need strong men. Men who are not afraid." Kaev wanted to laugh at the anachronistic use of the word men to mean people.

Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.

You can win against people. You can’t win against money. Money is a monster, a shape-shifting hydra whose heads you can never cut off. Money can only behave one way.

Kaev was thirty-three now, too old for fantasies about what might have been. He knew what was, and what was was miserable.

The empty apartments. They’re the key to what I have planned. I need to establish a foothold. I want you to move into one. I’m asking all my warriors to do that, minus the ones I need for protection here on the barge, of course.” “The empties are real?” Another one of those Qaanaaq stories that people loved to tell, right up there with the heat-resistant spiders that supposedly infested the geothermal pipes, and the threat of Russian invasion. Allegedly, it was common practice for shareholders to keep some of their holdings off the market. A sort of gentleperson’s agreement, to artificially inflate prices by increasing demand by keeping supply low. Soq didn’t doubt that the empties existed, but they were pretty sure their number was exaggerated, as was the extent of the conspiracy behind it. The more likely reason was the simple thoughtless wickedness of the rich, who had more money than they knew what to do with, who didn’t need the rental income and could keep an apartment empty for Grandma’s once-a-year visit or in memory of a loved one dead for decades. Either explanation was unacceptable. Shareholders were wise to keep themselves hidden, because surely Soq wasn’t the only one who would gladly stomp them to death if given the chance.

Context: The breaks were a welcome distraction from the city’s fundamental flaws—the supremacy of property, the fact that landlords ran everything.

Thugs never learned what fighters learned—how to battle through pain—because they only ever hurt people who couldn’t fight back.