This Call Is Being Recorded

On a crowded bus, my daughter asked me what a fascist was. I did my best to explain at the time. And it made me consider the shifting status of personal liberty in my own life.

“What is fascism?” my daughter asked me the other day.

She’s in fifth grade at Catholic school in Brooklyn, and we were coming home from after-school on a crowded city bus in the rare New York City neighborhood that’s mixed in terms of politics. I was on the spot.

My daughter wanted a definition. So, I told her that fascism is a system of government and social organization where the state, the businesses, and the people are all expected to agree on what’s right and what’s wrong, and generally pull in the same direction, without complaint.

I explained that the word Fascism itself is more commonly used for its negative connotation than its precise meaning. This goes back to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, I tried to explain, where the fascists fought the communists, and then later, when the fascists declared war, seemingly, on the rest of the world.

I explained the origin of the word itself - the Roman fasces, the rods bound together - and the lesson implied in the symbol that many people bound together are stronger than any individual.

The word on the charts

The use of the word fascist itself in 2026 is not as high as it was during the Second World War, according to the Google Ngram viewer. It’s about at the level it was when it was on the rise in 1936 and on the downswing in 1947. The difference was that back then people actually called themselves fascists.

Almost nobody in America today would describe themselves as a fascist, I told my daughter. There are no political parties who identify themselves as fascist. As presently used, it’s purely pejorative.

But it’s used a lot, enough that my daughter hears about it. At ten years old, I knew a lot about ICBMs, but I barely knew the word fascist. In the 1980s culture I grew up in, and even through The Big Lebowski (1998) and The Sopranos (1999), the word fascist was almost exclusively put in the mouths of petulant, out-of-touch hippie characters.

On the rise

So why has the world had its resurgence? Last week, I was chatting with a writer who’s seen as a bit of an expert on freedom of speech in America, having authored a book on the Sedition Act of 1798. He gets regular calls from journalists and others to opine on the state of freedom of speech, and he noted that he gets them in equal measure from the Left and the Right - and he’s been getting more calls now than when the book came out in 2015.

I’m no expert on national politics, though the internet would love for me to believe myself so. I know what I’ve seen, and what’s been done to people I like. And we’re all less free than we once were. We have less time, and less derring-do. We speak more cautiously, and are awfully quick to deride those who do speak too freely.

Wheeling the TV into the classroom

If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear - that was the line, after Nine Eleven. We were pissed off and scared in 2001. We started a war on terror, though I wonder if we’re any less pissed off and scared now.

At same the time as the war on terror, there was a television show called The Wire, now considered one of the best ever, and I won’t disagree. The premise of the show was that these police had to use technology with great care, ingenuity and effort, to catch criminals without violating the privacy rights of those criminals.

Today, we suspect that our phones are constantly spying on our casual conversations so Instagram can advertise merchandise to us on Amazon. Most of us don’t love it, but we laugh it off. What the fuck happened?

I was there in between then and now, and some of it was Nine Eleven, and in between there was a television show called 24. It was a giant hit, though people universally prefer to forget it. It was a master-class in the cliffhanger. The stakes were high, then higher - the president is a nuclear bomb! - and the outcome was ever in doubt. It put viewers in a constant state of tension - scared and pissed off - as we rooted for an indomitable torturer with no regard for anyone’s rights. It was hard to turn off.

After two wars to calm us down, we had the financial crisis. It scared everyone - for their jobs, their homes, their futures - so badly that we decided to save the economy, at all costs. Those of us who didn’t become fabulously wealthy from all that courageous saving are now almost twenty years into its costs, with no end in sight.

Fascism begins at the office

There’s a common scenario now where someone speaks badly out of turn in public - it could be social media, in an airport or just at a cashier - and the first thing the online mob does is to tattle on that person to their employer. Any outburst in any situation is now potentially in public - which is a tragedy in itself.

The offending person, once identified, is usually fired, with supposedly only themselves to blame.

We work for businesses, mostly. These businesses leave the choice of whether or not to fire the person to a boss. The boss, having absorbed the lessons that allow them to stick around long enough to become a boss, will almost never take a risk based on a personal relationship or personal integrity. The boss fires the person who tweeted or shouted the terrible thing.

But if you’ve done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear.

Where’s the free part, again?

A person’s job is an enormous swath of American life - around half the waking hours of one’s prime years, for most people. And it’s a time when we are deprived of big-time rights, like freedom of movement and freedom of speech.

I know we’re all mature adults here, with W-2s, 401(k)s, and so forth. But it’s getting worse. Fail to laugh loud enough at some half-ass boss joke and you’re not a culture fit and go hit the bricks. This is nothing new, precisely.

The pirate ship versus the royal navy

So why does it feel like it’s getting worse? You could point to a few decades of steadily degraded working conditions, alongside increasingly casualized surveillance. And there are other factors at play.

More people work for large companies than ever before. More people work for large companies than small companies for the first time ever. Look it up after you’re done with this essay.

When you work at a large company, you may be working very hard, but you personally, ultimately produce very little. This sounds like paradise to people who work hard every day to personally, ultimately get things done. Things, in this context, means things that you could explain to a stranger in under ten seconds. You spend a lot of time aligning on things.

That means that at a big company, your time is spent in meetings - meetings to plan, to prepare, to socialize, but often just to keep up with the other try-hards, to solidify your status, and to stake your little bit of organizational turf and management goodwill before bonus season or the next round of layoffs. Each meeting is a weakness-check among desperately insecure people, and they can happen back-to-back for an entire eight-plus-hour working day.

The fear

But, you may say, all these faces in the bento-box of the Zoom call are educated people with good jobs. Why would they be insecure? Because they make nothing. When they describe what they do, they’ll usually try to impress you with the size and power of the company (millions of this, billions of that, trillions of the other thing), or else bombard you with jargon until you give up on wanting to be alive.

This is fine for that one guy at a party. But when it’s nearly forty percent of working adults, you can start to see where we’re running into problems The current working world prevents people from trusting themselves to be rational, skeptical citizens.

A poem for executive leadership

One summer afternoon in the early days at a new job after the pandemic, my employer hosted a Town Hall event at the Times Square Sheraton. It was a giant company, so we took up as much windowless ballroom space as five or six nice Bar Mitzvahs - all the vinyl room dividers were rolled back into the walls.

Onstage and on the big video screens, a chief-something-or-other rambled on about how gratifying he found it to watch his junior executives graduate from khakis and blazers to expensive suits, as well as his dismay at seeing a Netflix movie reflected in a colleague’s glasses during a Zoom call while they sheltered from Covid.

Then the company invited a junior exec onstage, to read a poem, to keep the show from being too male and pale. She gave a short preamble explaining she’d written the poem for her dear friends in the (name drop prestigious) MBA program. The poem itself was about string. The string was like her - as a single strand she was very resilient. But could you imagine how resilient many hundred such strands would be, if they were bound together!

Everyone clapped. A poem - how nice. Relax, I told myself, this is just corny. Not evil. Everything will be fine.

That balmy afternoon, I was being paid to sit in a stackable chair at the Sheraton - I could tell you how much per minute down to the penny, because it was a staple of my internal monologue at the time. When you play the game for money, you have to play more than your share of away games.

The fasces

The image of the fasces, with the rods bound together, sometimes with an axe tied in, are all over New York. If you look, you’ll find them carved all around Wall Street, on Rockefeller Center, on courthouses, in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, all over, though not on anything built after 1941.

The fasces had been one of the prime decorative motifs press-ganged from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome and Paris in service of our upstart nation’s global, historical and civilizational aspirations (see 2024’s “A Saddle on a Cat”).

The president

I hate this part. I’ve avoided the presidency in all its forms since starting these essays. But let’s get real - my daughter wasn’t asking about fascism in the abstract, but about something she’d heard about our current President.

I’m forty-eight years old, and the man who is now our President has been on televisions around me since I was six or seven. At the time, I recall him saying something like “if you don’t live in a gold house, you’re a loser.” Maybe not a verbatim quote from 1983, but that was the gist. Even in second grade, I thought, this guy’s a mess - he has no clue what it’s all about. I never found any reason to adjust my opinion.

The President and the reintroduction of fascism into the everyday conversation aren’t simply a matter of habitually inflamed rhetoric.

They’re part of a single phenomenon that every person I know can feel. It’s a thread that runs through my adult life. It’s a phenomenon of which I’m most keenly aware when I’m trying to earn a living.

The library and the megaphone

Fascism as we understand it has always had a technological component. It’s no coincidence that the Italian futurists paved the way for Mussolini, or that the cutting-edge industrial giants of Germany - Mercedes-Benz, Krupp, Braun and BASF - felt right at home with the Nazis. The telephone, telegram and radio are what made it possible to ‘unify’ a country of more than ten million people.

Technology itself isn’t neutral, as we’ve all seen. The internet started as a library, which was supposed to offer access and communication within thousands of idiosyncratic intellectual corners. Somewhere along the line, it started acting more like a television, focusing mass attention on a few common objects.

More recently, the entire apparatus has started to resemble an open-mic death ray. People seem to sense this. One reason no one can put down their phones is because they don’t dare turn their back on this creature.

A library informs its visitors, and gives them the quiet and the space to investigate their own ideas and the ideas of others. Mass media is different. It costs its users. That’s why Andrew Carnegie’s name carries reverence to this day, while William Randolph Hearst, Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch are villains in the popular imagination. Beneath the elitism and anti-elitism is a deep sense of who’s really acting in our best interest.

A library refracts and deepens interest, wherever it wanders. Mass media corrals attention into a handful of pens. Advertisers prefer the fish that are already in a barrel.

The pressure

I’m a writer looking for work (consider becoming a paid subscriber). The nice part of looking for work is I’m out talking to a lot of people whose company and wit I enjoy. An often-overlooked benison of mercantile society is it doesn’t tolerate a wallflower.

In these conversations, artificial intelligence is an inevitable subject. Not because we want to talk about it. But because the internet acts like broadcast TV, and it’s one of the three things it pushes on us, and because our employers and would-be employers have backed themselves into a corner.

The owners are investors. And the investors, these days, don’t ask: Is this a good thing? They ask: Will someone (else) still)) buy this?

They need a product and a story about the future. And after a lovely run that’s given us Blank Street Coffee, a horde of unemployed musicians and journalists, and around 28,000 gorgeous kitchen renovations in the suburbs of San Francisco and Boston, these investors have run out of inventory. All they have left is this janky, unreliable autocorrect called A.I. But they’re selling it, mostly to other investors, who can, at this point, put lipstick on a pig in their deep and untroubled sleep. They’re all under pressure. And pressure - more popularly called by another name - rolls downhill.

Agree in the meeting…

This is where it gets tricky. In a corporate setting, a writer has to be careful to not insult the technological marvel that our would-be benefactors have dumped their trillions into. But we also have to be careful not to talk ourselves out of a profession.

How do we do this? I ask the writers I know. Some writers say to stay quiet, stay still. Some say find a high perch. Some say we can talk our way out of it - that’s what we do, right? Some have already started to give up. We writers share a sinking feeling, like we saw this movie once before.

How writers talk about AI? is similar to asking: How do you bring a wild animal into your home? One thing that may help is to keep in mind that the wild, frightened animal isn’t the technology itself, but the owners, the investors and the bosses.

The owners

The pressure on owners is that there’s not much plausible future left to sell, at least if you think like an investor. Investors, like marketers, see the future in terms of the fairly recent past. They have degrees, but they’re not brains, exactly. They’re more like glands - they secrete influences on the brain.

But there’s a barrier. The brain - the one that the future is waiting on - is behind on the rent in Steubenville this month, and we’ll all catch up with it by 2045. In the meanwhile, we’re all scared and pissed off and playing flashlight tag, telling on each other and yelling fascist.

Kissing the pig

I worked at a big company that, like most, bought the AI pig. Shortly before one grim, conference-room Christmas party at headquarters, a dead-eyed managing director told us that in the year ahead we’d be evaluated on how thoroughly and enthusiastically we adopted A.I.

In the moment, I was offended to the point of vendetta. But I also understood who I was dealing with. Big companies hire good students. Some good students are smart, but many are just smart enough to know they’re not going to get ahead on smarts. So they learn the rules, inside and out, and learn the advantages of learning the rules first, as well as the advantages that accrue to the people who enforce the rules.

They watch the teachers and the cops for nuance. They adopt the language, the tone and the implication, as best they can, as they’re a bit dim, and scared of everything. They’re the teacher’s pets, the tattle tales. The other kids know that they’re friends to no kid. They feel at home in large organizations.

Watch the cops

There are smarter kids in school, though, who learn the advantages of interpreting the rules. Like lawyers, they’re valuable to the authorities and the criminals alike. When they’re needed, they’re needed badly.

These attorneys must however choose a side eventually. That’s because there’s another set of kids watching the authorities. They learn the weaknesses in the rules, and in the people who enforce the rules. They grow up to become the bosses or the ceremonial sacrifices, often both. It’s an ancient and unavoidable status. They’re too smart not to see it.

Silence, exile and cunning

Of course, some people never even notice the power imposed on them in the form of money, government, religion and the heat from the wires that we call culture. It doesn’t bother them. Society seems like a good deal. Bless their hearts.

But aside from the cops, lawyers and criminals, there’s another set of kids who keenly feel the collars laid upon their necks at every turn. But they think that they can almost see a way out.

One can be an artist. Of course, that’s not so simple. There’s derision and starvation to contend with. Half of all the writing on Substack consists of writers and other would-be artists bemoaning their conditions, whining (to whom? I wonder) about unfairness, and offering dubious advice, or even more dubious pep talks (see 2025’s “Nobody’s Stopping You”).

Wheels on the bus go round and round

This all takes me back to my daughter’s question about fascism. It’s a word on everyone’s lips for a reason, but not for the reason they think. I don’t love the president, but he’s not who I’m really angry at. I’m angry at what’s become of America, at the conditions of my life, and at myself, for reasons I have trouble articulating.

It’s been 80 years since the last really big war, which is good news. But without regular resets (see 2025’s “Jubilee or Bust”), civilization has a way of consolidating power and money in fewer and fewer hands.

The money flows to the power, and the power rewrites the rules to keep both the money and the power. This used to be called corruption, back when people still felt they had a right to be outraged. But we’ve gotten small. The shrinking wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t one guy’s fault. It was a cumulative pressure, a constant fear, a regular retrenchment.

Now corruption, we clever types like to console ourselves, is just how things are. But cynicism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And corruption doesn’t stop at the office’s revolving door, nor at the edge of the business district, nor at your front door, nor your foyer, nor your bedroom door. It finds you in your sleep. I think of all the fights I’ve given up on in my life, and they’ve found me again in the places I believed I could privately, really live.

Crisis of confidence

“Confidence is the result of proven ability,” Bill Parcells is known to have said. But where the hell are we supposed to prove ourselves today?

There were once experts and standards, peer groups and basement audiences. They had their biases and blind spots. So we decided that money and prestige could be the measure for the value of all endeavors. But each nepo-baby breakout star and legacy college admission seems to call that into question.

So where can a person go to gain confidence? Where will we find the confidence to address the world that is upon us?

Selected Bibliography

Liberty’s First Crisis, by Charles Slack

A Saddle on a Cat

Jubilee or Bust

Nobody’s Stopping You