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The return of wildfire smoke is worrisome for two reasons.

First, it’s a sign that what was an unprecedented hazard in 2023 is becoming a recurring one. Global warming is producing hotter, drier summers in Canadian forests, which is leading to more and larger wildfires (for a deeper explanation, see this excellent post by climatologist Zeke Hausfather). These fires are often set off by lightning in remote areas and, because they are so remote, are largely impossible to contain and extinguish. Over the coming years, summer in the U.S. will be marked by, in addition to heat waves and intense storms, dayslong stretches where fine soot from northern fires makes it unhealthy to breathe outdoors.

The second worrisome thing is just how unhealthy this soot turns out to be. Robinson Meyer points to new research suggesting that the economic burden of wildfire smoke-related deaths in the U.S. exceeds the cost of climate-related damage from all other causes.

The thing is, most of us just don’t realize how harmful this kind of smoke is. It’s a new danger. We have little direct experience to draw on here. You step outside one day under an orange sky, your eyes water a little and your throat stings, with no obvious explanation. No fire is burning nearby, and at ground level it doesn’t look like you’re enveloped in smoke. The damage accumulates anyway, exposure after exposure. Journalist Colleen Hagerty has a very useful roundup of the health science involved, in her newsletter. But the most interesting part of her roundup, to me, is this snippet from her interview with atmospheric scientist Joseph L. Wilkins about how hard it is to get people take the danger seriously:

A lot of times you can’t see air quality. You can’t see air pollution. You just don’t know. That’s why we rely on the instrumentation to tell us what it is, and we rely on these model predictions and these tools so we can tell you exactly at your location what the actual air quality is, and then you can respond.

You know, I’m not a social scientist by any stretch, so we need to get those folks in the room more. We also need to get the constituents in the room, the actual people, and ask them, ‘What would make you take [smoke] more seriously?’ Because I can scream till the cows come home and tell you this is bad, it’s going to take off years of your life—we can calculate exactly how many years of your life it’ll take off depending on how much you breathe. We know all this stuff, and it’s a matter of how do you get the people to believe it? How do you get people to respond to it?

Wilkins’ concern here — how do we get people to believe us scientists? how do we get them to act on our warnings? — is a strong contender for The Refrain of Our Times. Why didn’t people listen to the science during Covid? About Climate Change? About vaccines? About drinking raw milk? In sociology we often refer to this as The Crisis of Expertise, a generalized collapse in the public legitimacy of expert knowledge. The reasons for declining trust in experts are complicated and varied. It’s hard to “just follow the science” when scientific knowledge is provisional, makes claims that are difficult for lay people to evaluate, and because usually the application of scientific knowledge involves making political or moral choices with tradeoffs that can’t be adjudicated through the scientific method.

But there may be some answers to Wilkins’ specific question, of how to get people to believe scientists about future dangers and respond to the warnings, in the sociology of social activism. Sociologist Kate Pride Brown, in a study of environmental activists in Russia, points out that most people take their social world as a given, something they can’t influence. Most of us believe things are the way they are because of “human nature,” or because of divine will, or because of the inertia of power. When it comes to ideas about the future, there is, she writes, “a variable degree of fatalism and freedom in the public mind for imagining alternatives and the means by which to achieve them.”

For change to happen, Brown writes, some people have to believe that social activism has some plausible route to success. She calls this belief the prospectus for social activism. A person’s prospectus is influenced by their inhabited experience — the things that actually happen to them in everyday life; their inherited experience — their understanding of historical experience in their community; and their circulated experience — stories they encounter about life and history outside their local experience.

I think you can apply this model pretty straightforwardly to people’s imagination of disaster. Call it a prospectus for disaster. There are plenty of people who believe it’s futile to prepare for or try to prevent future disasters (I wrote about this in a recent issue of this newsletter). There are others who think it’s hubris, or blasphemy.

For some, inhabited experience teaches that misfortune arrives regardless of anyone's best efforts, so preparing is a waste of time. For others, it teaches that bad things happen mainly to other people, who somehow bring it on themselves and can’t or shouldn’t be helped. For others, conversely, preparation and discipline have paid dividends in daily life — or at any rate they believe they have — and they seek out knowledge and resources to continue that practice. Inherited experience works the same way: people take what they’ve been told about how their families and communities endured past disasters as a guide to perceiving and meeting future dangers.

One trouble with disasters is that they’re rare. Most of what we know about them arrives circulated from elsewhere. Our knowledge comes transposed from different settings, different kinds of dangers that we try to map on to whatever we’re currently facing or fearing. To know about strange dangers we have to reach outside our direct experience, drawing from institutionalized knowledge like expert advice and public policy, but also from culture — films and TV and internet memes, books and poems, religious traditions, folktales and urban legends.

Where we get our knowledge about future dangers, and what to do about them, is a habituated choice, an outgrowth of all of our previous choices and experiences. As sociologist Jessi Streib argues, we opt in to or out of certain cultural systems based on the conditions we experience over our life course. Maybe you opt in to a belief in the value of hard work in education because you had success early on, had teachers or family who encouraged you to go to college and supported you along the way. Then again, maybe a lack of support or resources, along with encouragement towards achievement outside education, convinces you to opt out of schooling and be suspicious of academics. Maybe a string of bad experiences with doctors convinces you to opt out of the system of medical authority. Maybe regular experiences with indifferent or condescending bureaucrats convinces you to opt out of belief in the efficacy of government assistance.

Our disposition towards perceiving future danger and acting on it is also shaped by our circulated experience. Stories in our culture present us with tools we can pick up to help us interpret the world and make our decisions in it. A newly published study of German folklore and voting patterns in the 1930 Reichstag elections shows, through a particularly grim case, the power of circulated experience to shape people’s perception of threats and their responses to them. Examining archives of Kinderschreck — folktales told to teach children about certain kinds of danger, for example, “do not go to the cornfield or the werewolf will take you” — the researchers find that regions whose stories featured more “ethnic bogeymen” in the fairy tales circulating in their population showed stronger electoral support for nativist, authoritarian parties running on xenophobic platforms. The relationship was strongest in regions that under economic or political stress. In other words, hardship met a cultural toolkit stocked with stories about dangerous outsiders, people were more likely to blame their troubles on ethnic others, and to vote for politicians who promised to rid them of those bogeymen.

Of course, stories can also inspire us to heed our better angels, to overcome our fatalism about the possibility of saving our world and each other regardless of our differences. But circulated experience will only get you so far, once it mingles with the realities of people’s inhabited and inherited experience. A society where trust generally is falling as people live more isolated social lives under conditions of widening economic inequality, where everything feels like a scam and they’re confronted on social media with a flood of cheap but emotionally resonant cynicism, is not a society that primes people to pay attention to AQI warnings and take collective action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

But trust can be rebuilt, and communities can rediscover the real benefits of collective action. It’s hard work, but history is full of examples of our past successes. The first step is believing change is possible. The second is reaching out to others to make it happen.

We’re afflicted by this challenge whether we experience disaster ourselves or witness it from afar. We can’t even escape it by mastering the walk ourselves — we’re always at risk of being pulled off the wire by other people who lose their own balance, plunge into either nihilism or fanaticism, and conscript us into their personal tragedies.

This problem is also the core thematic engine of Melville’s Moby-Dick, a story about how our disenchanted world wounds people and leads them into tragic fixations on making sense of senseless traumas. The book was itself inspired by a real disaster, the wreck of the whale ship Essex in 1820, which captivated the public of the early United States. The book’s concerns — about our struggles for mastery over or coexistence with fate, nature, and each other — still resonate deeply 175 years after its publication.

In late December of last year I was feeling grim about the mouth and hazy in the eyes, and worried that the captain of my ship of state was a monomaniacal tyrant twisted by an insatiable thirst for revenge that would drive us all to doom. So I made a New Year’s resolution to re-read Moby-Dick over the 31 days of January1. And, in keeping with the doomed spirit of things, I would also pivot to video, teaching myself how to make vertical video shorts by producing and posting one Instagram Reel each day about the Moby-Dick chapters I’d read.

It surprised me, what I learned through a month of alternating between reading the novel and formulating my thoughts about it for Reels; finding meaning in the text and immediately performing it for the dead eye of my smartphone camera and the lively feedback from an audience online.

The first surprise was just how much more social my social media experience suddenly became. Friends kept getting in touch to tell me how they’d been inspired to start reading along with me, to share their own experiences with the book, and to send me whale facts, puns, and Ahab memes. I had become, almost automatically, a Moby-Dick influencer.

My influencer-dom was all the more unexpected because I keep my Instagram account private, locked down to a couple hundred friends and acquaintances. But all of us have been socialized by social media algorithms into a habit of passively consuming the content of super-prolific influencer accounts, only rarely posting ourselves and only rarely interacting with anyone we actually know2. The internet has been transformed, as media scholar danah boyd writes, into a parasocial medium, like television, where we expect to experience “one-sided connections, where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people — like celebrities — who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate.” My relentless Moby-Dick posting let me reap some benefits from this new parasocial landscape, returning to my social media experience an approximation of the community feeling it had back in the 2010s. But producing this stream of content was exhausting, and would absolutely not have been worth it beyond the scope of this one-month project3.

What’s wild is that Moby-Dick is also about the ways modernity can produce social isolation, and the real price that isolation exacts. In the novel, the whole reason Ishmael signs up for a whaling voyage in the first place is to escape the neuroses of his unfulfilling life as an urban professional. What he finds at sea is that the American whaling fleet is a globe-spanning industrial concern in which the crushing demand for oil production alienates men from each other and from the transcendent pleasures of the sea itself. Ahab is someone who has given his life over to this industry, with few rewards. When he’s mauled by the White Whale, some time before the book begins, it’s the final indignity. He’s been living a meaningless life as a cog in a vast industrial machine, and in the course of this soulless work he’s inflicted with this agonizing injury that drives him over the edge — it can’t all have been for nothing, he decides.

So much of the rest of the book involves people telling Ahab it was all for nothing: that the whale didn’t set out to attack him personally, that his pursuit of Moby Dick is a fruitless enterprise, that true vengeance isn’t possible even if he catches and kills this monster of his imagination. But this nothingness is its own tragedy, and it’s a central source of discontent in society for us still today: science and technology can show you how the world works and how to manipulate it, but it can’t tell you how to live or what anything really means. When we’re confronted with misfortune, with the agonies of life, technical expertise (whether it’s medicine or engineering or, heaven save us, economics) can illuminate the causes, but not the significance of events. It does no good to tell Ahab that the White Whale is just an animal that wants to be left alone, instead of an avatar of God against which he can avenge himself. Because accepting that truth reduces Ahab to an old man with a debilitating workplace injury, instead of his preferred self-image as an epic hero striking against fate itself.

A lot of trouble in contemporary society comes from people whose faith in the meaning of things has been stripped away, and when they’re offered technical explanations for their suffering, they look for an alternative that gives them meaning instead. Sometimes it’s falling into mass politics, or renewed religious devotion, sometimes it’s conspiracism, sometimes, as we see regularly, it’s an act of public violence.

Melville actually repeatedly offers Ahab a solution to his woes that’s neither the nihilism of technical expertise nor epic vengeance against the divine. It’s friendship, solidarity, transcendent connection to other people and the natural world. Ishmael finds comfort in his deep connection with Queequeg; the captains of two ships the Pequod encounters on its voyage turn away from hunting Moby Dick because of their abiding connections to friends and family; Ahab himself it seems is nearly turned back at the last second by Starbuck’s appeal to him as a family man and comrade-in-arms. But Ahab simply can not connect to the social reality around him. He’s too far gone.

There are all kinds of things in society, Melville points out, that keep us from forming and sustaining friendships: hierarchies imposed by labor, or by racist beliefs, and, relatedly, the petty tyranny of people who feel the need to tear down others because it assuages their own insecurities and fears. Moby-Dick portrays these in the model society Melville constructs aboard the Pequod, and in the stories Ishmael tells about off-ship life. Ahab and his two chief mates, Starbuck and Stubb, turn out to be social types you can still readily recognize in the world around you. Starbuck, the hyper-competent, amoral professional who will facilitate a great wrong because he’s allergic to the small wrong of questioning his boss, is so broadly represented in American institutional life today that we have a national chain of coffee shops named after him. Stubb, the narrow-minded bigot whose major desires are to be dominated by a great man and to, in turn, dominate those he sees as his natural inferiors, is no more difficult to find now than he was in the 1850s.

As the United States turn 250 this summer, we’re still living in the country Moby-Dick describes: an adventurous, industrious, multi-cultural project full of contradictory impulses, containing simultaneously the potential for new forms of liberation and subjugation. Part of the reason the novel endures is that the features of American society it depicts are inextricably part of the country’s character, both great and terrible. Small wonder that our frontier technology at the moment is machine intelligence that is just as incapable as Ahab of accessing external reality, that searches endlessly and fruitlessly for meaning without ever grasping it, that readily pulls others into madness with it.

I don’t think Melville himself could have imagined a better 250th birthday present for the country to give itself than the reality we’re living: a weeks-long national fixation on a monumental reflecting pool in the capitol. It’s as if he foretold it, in the novel’s opening chapter: “And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Happy Fourth of July everyone!

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For decades in the U.S. — arguably since the 1940s — the prevailing set of ideas held that disaster was caused by failures in systems, failures that could be detected, anticipated, and managed through technical expertise, and that it was the federal government’s duty (for reasons of National Security or economic prosperity, if not out of interest for the general social welfare) to do its best to mitigate disasters before they happen, respond when they do, and speed recovery afterwards.

These prevailing ideas were never without their critics, but the second Trump administration is the first group to hold both the ideological commitment and the means to substantially and broadly roll them back. I wrote about this last year as a generalized effort from the White House to “unwind the government’s longstanding efforts to see around corners and plan to meet future challenges.” This campaign has continued with the same populist rhetoric the administration rode in on — that government isn’t simply inefficient and heavy-handed (as Reagan-era conservatives argued) it’s corrupt, preying on the public.

WNYC’s On The Media aired a great four-part podcast this month about the effort to unravel the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and I recommend listening to it. FEMA has under this administration been paralyzed by constant leadership turnover, indiscriminate DOGE cuts, partisan warfare in aid administration, and threats to abolish the agency altogether. And while the President seems to have backed away from actively unwinding FEMA, the agency is likely weaker now than it has been at any point since the G. W. Bush years leading up to Hurricane Katrina2.

The OTM podcast tells one important part of the story about how we got to this point: the undercurrent of conspiracy thinking in the public that has stalked the agency since its early days, and how those fears were leveraged into electoral success by politicians who were more broadly interested in destroying the administrative state for ideological reasons.

Emergency management (along with public health, to some extent) is vulnerable to this kind of attack, and it’s hard to build a public constituency around it, for three reasons, which we can call the Godzilla problem, the control room problem, and the contingency problem.

The Godzilla Problem

There’s a basic mismatch between the public’s perception of what emergency management is for and what it actually does in practice. One emergency manager I interviewed in my research referred to it as ‘the Godzilla problem.’ When you start talking about disaster risk management, people often jump to the extremes — major catastrophes, Godzilla rising unstoppable out of the harbor. Against the imagined, Hollywood-inspired worst case scenarios common among the public, emergency management seems like pure folly. Or, more to the point, given FEMA’s historical roots in Cold War civil defense, like tucking your head under your desk to ride out global thermonuclear war. This disaster imaginary is fed by real-world events, too, including FEMA’s unconscionable failures after Hurricane Katrina. It also grows out of the very real planning work FEMA was ordered to carry out during the Reagan administration to plan for the evacuation of millions of Americans into relocation camps in the lead-up to a potential nuclear exchange with the USSR (this project, abandoned in the late 80s, gave rise to the “FEMA camp” conspiracy memes that are everywhere in certain corners of the internet today, a history the OTM podcast does a masterful job of sketching out).

In its mundane reality, emergency management is about 99% spreadsheets and meetings: mapping out resources, making checklists, building relationships, administering grants, writing reports. Occasionally, there are exercises where people act out potential disasters. The vast majority of emergencies FEMA responds to are relatively minor, in the scheme of things (though of course to the people and communities who suffer them, these events are often life-changing tragedies). The work of responding to these smaller emergencies helps build capacity to deal with larger ones, by making encounters with rare events routine.

Things often go wrong, or get frustrating for the public, even in these smaller responses, which can build distrust. FEMA is, in fact, in serious need of reform. But the agency’s problems are often not of its own making — it’s at the mercy of political forces outside of its control.

The Control Room Problem

Emergency managers, whether at the city, state, or federal level, don’t set the conditions in which they operate. They don’t get to set policy, they try to stay out of politics. That gets tricky, because it means they don’t have much say in the production of the conditions that make the disasters they’re responsible for managing, though they still get the blame when things go wrong. It helps to imagine Ray Arnold, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Jurassic Park. He spends most of the film in the park’s control room, monitoring systems, trying to keep the park online. He didn’t design the automation systems (thanks, Nedry), and he doesn’t control the incentives driving the park’s construction and operation (that’s up to the park’s billionaire CEO John Hammond, and his ongoing dream of a wee flea circus). But he’s still the one responsible for turning the power back on when glitches, Nedry’s misconduct, a hurricane, and rogue dinosaurs bring the park to catastrophe (for his trouble, spoiler alert, he is eaten by a Velociraptor off camera).

We live in a highly complex technical society, where infrastructure systems, regulations, and the structured daily work of millions of people and countless machines keep things in motion, constantly both producing the possibility of catastrophe and keeping it from happening. All of this goes on, as it were, behind the scenes, out of most of our awareness. When things do go wrong, accountability is of course important. But so is attention to the people who quietly do the mundane work of keeping things from going wrong in the first place.

The Contingency Problem

Finally, it’s quite difficult to make the case that things would have been worse without the intervention of emergency managers. When a flood doesn’t happen because of hazard mitigation efforts, or when people don’t meet financial ruin from a tornado because of disaster aid, there isn’t much to see. When a response goes wrong, the last thing anyone wants to hear is ‘yes mistakes were made but it would have been even worse if we hadn’t tried.’

Scholars have done a great deal of research into the shortcomings of institutional emergency management, or public health, or humanitarian aid. But now we’re on the verge of a very strange period in which these institutions are just gone or nonfunctional, as a matter of policy. We’re rapidly approaching the contingency of finding out what happens when institutions just stop trying to mitigate disasters.

In the case of USAID, which was rapidly disassembled by DOGE, the numbers are clear. Research estimates that the abrupt end of USAID funding has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, a death toll that could rise to 14 million by 2030. The gutting of the CDC’s public health emergency mitigation and response capacity, along with the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization, has allowed a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo to spread widely.

So far, the consequences of the rollback of disaster risk management have fallen mostly overseas. But we may feel them domestically in the U.S. soon enough. Disease outbreaks that start overseas rarely stay contained there. The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through the end of November. Wildfire season is already under way. There’s the possibility of disaster at the dozens of World Cup games being held this summer. There is the longer term possibility of catastrophes that would have overmatched FEMA even at its peak — major earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest or Southern California. The effects of hobbling FEMA will not show up gradually, but all at once. After all, Michael Brown had been head of FEMA for years before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and his unfitness for the moment was so historic Congress enacted legislation specifically to prevent the appointment of someone like him — an administration flunky with no significant emergency management experience — ever again. President Trump recently nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency, in violation of that statue.

If how you plan for disaster is a reflection of your beliefs about what causes disasters, who bears the consequences, and what to do about it, then what beliefs can we infer from this administration’s approach to disaster risk management? The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò suggests it’s as simple as the belief in elite impunity: the idea that wealth and privilege is enough protection from disaster, and that when the big one hits, there is always a bunker, always a plane, always a security team waiting. It’s a fantasy, magical thinking. Plenty of rulers have held this delusion in history, and they’ve always discovered its emptiness too late.

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It’s an article of faith in the U.S. that society is shaped by the invisible hand of market forces, the sum of the countless choices people make in deliberate pursuit of their own self-interest1. But there is a kindred force, equally powerful and usually overlooked: the collective behavior of people who have been wrong-footed by events and have to improvise ways to steady themselves. People do not passively endure an unstable world. They stagger, pivot, or dig in. They reach out to others for support in unexpected or unfamiliar ways, and test out new avenues of thought and action. This too adds up to a real effect. Call it the invisible heel.

This is what I, with my colleague Denise Milstein, set out to understand in a study recently published in the journal Social Forces. Drawing on 115 in-depth interviews with New Yorkers conducted during the chaotic first months of the Covid pandemic, we looked for patterns in the ways people described the crisis they were living through and how they were coping with it. Our findings can help make sense of the strange social weather that prevails in periods of widespread instability and upheaval.

What made the pandemic so traumatic for many, aside from direct experiences of illness and grief, was something more diffuse and pernicious: a general loss of trust in the dependability of people, places, things, and self-conceptions that had been taken-for-granted pillars of everyday life. Pandemics aren’t the only events that can cause this. Today you can point to all kinds of events and transformations that scramble or sever, en masse, the connections, assumptions, and social roles people have relied on to buttress their self-identities.

When the scaffolding of everyday trust falls away, people can experience what we refer to in the paper as ontological insecurity2: a feeling of being adrift, unable to connect your present circumstances to life as you knew it, without a practical path into the future3. It’s a crisis of self-confidence, brought on by a suddenly bewildering world. Unable to depend on the connections that defined you, you become unsure of who you are.

People do not go quietly into ontological insecurity. It does not just happen to them. In our interviews people described their crisis as being triggered by failures they couldn’t overcome in one of two areas: their ability to know something about the world, or their ability to act in it. So as they worked to steady themselves and repair their trust in things, these are the domains they turned to. They gathered new knowledge, reframed what they already knew, or redrew their boundaries around what they thought could or should be known. We call this in the paper cognitive grounding: overcoming pervasive uncertainty by resetting your assumptions, anchoring your thinking in things you can rely on to be true.

At the same time, people took action to reshape their social and physical environments in ways that made them more predictable and trustworthy. They made new friendships or cut off troublesome ones, gathered supplies4 or joined mutual aid networks to help others in need, rearranged their living spaces, set up new routines and schedules to structure the formless days of lockdown and work/learn-from-home life. This we call agentic enactment: regaining confidence in your ability to act effectively by making changes to your immediate social and physical surroundings5.

The boundary between these two areas—thinking and acting—was permeable: people experimented through new ways of acting to test out their knowledge. Sometimes, severing a social tie could be a way of cutting off a flow of destabilizing information. Venturing out to a street protest could be a way of testing assumptions about the risk of catching the virus in crowded public places. Of course, people’s attempts to rebuild their trust in the world didn’t always succeed. That rarely stopped them from trying.

The most interesting thing about this work of repair, though, is that even as people faced a totally unprecedented situation, in a period of general social isolation, they didn’t invent strategies of repair totally on their own, from scratch. They adapted things they already knew from their professional training or personal histories, or picked up behaviors they saw from neighbors, on social media, or just generally from the culture around them. A classic example is the 7-o’clock cheer, where every evening during the early pandemic New Yorkers headed out to their fire escapes, balconies, or leaned out of their windows to make noise together to celebrate health care workers. The practice originated in Italy, spread through social media and then through word of mouth and ultimately through example. For New Yorkers, the cheer built a space of togetherness and shared emotional intensity, and a common temporal structure to the day.

In our paper we call these learned techniques and routines people use to rebuild their ruptured trust in the world repertoires of repair. These repertoires can be as simple as the expressions people use in conversation or say to themselves to move past a moment of discomfort6 or as complex as participation in a social movement that builds community ties and reshapes the institutional life of the country. In between are all kinds of habits and dispositions people pick up from each other to recover for themselves a feeling of continuity or control.

If the invisible hand works by coordinating behavior through markets, the invisible heel works by coordinating behavior through culture. The urge to find security may be individual, but the strategies we use to pursue it, like the languages we speak, are borrowed and adapted from the templates we learn through our encounters in the social world. Because repertoires travel, because they can, to use a vulgar term, go viral, they can produce widespread and consequential patterns of new behavior and thinking. When enough people reach for a similar strategy of action, what starts as an improvised solution can get reinforced, and over time can solidify into an institution. At the same time, because repertoires travel socially, and are adopted unevenly across society, the repair work of some can destabilize others. It can pit groups against each other. It can be pathological.

The pandemic provides examples of this too. The political backlash against public health officials and institutions — the harassment campaigns against pandemic restrictions that congealed into state legislative action to strip health departments of their powers, culminating in the effective destruction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — can be read through the lens of ontological insecurity. A significant share of the public experienced the disorientation of the pandemic and the lockdowns as intolerable intrusions into their personal sovereignty, upending their conceptions of what it meant to be Americans. Anti-government and anti-science populist mobilization were readily available repertoires for repair. Before Covid, it would have been hard to imagine that the US would, as a result of experiencing a pandemic, dismantle its public health infrastructure. The idea of the invisible heel helps reveal a pathway to a possible future that had been there all along.

The pandemic has receded, but widespread experiences of uncertainty and insecurity have not. In a January 2026 Civic Pulse poll, 52% of Americans said they were worried that “something unexpected could significantly disrupt their life this year.” Among these, 42% were most worried about economic disruptions like job loss or rising prices, while 39% said their biggest fears were political in nature — war, government repression, civil unrest. Fully 53% of Americans in the survey said they felt threatened or unsafe in the current political climate.

It’s not hard to see the sources of this insecurity. Precarity has shot through the labor market so completely that even economists are broadly worried about their job prospects7. Inflation is making prices unreliable, with the cost of groceries rising faster than at any time since 2022, and the war in Iran is already spiking gas prices, setting off the most serious energy crisis since the 1970s.

Developments in AI have either, depending on who you ask, produced an asset bubble pushing the economy to the edge of another great recession, or led us to the edge of a fundamental transformation in the nature of power, labor, and the economy itself — Silicon Valley elites excitedly tell each other these days that now is their last chance to amass wealth before AI ends economic mobility forever and builds a new permanent aristocracy and a new permanent underclass.

As predictable returns to work and education evaporate, and chance seems increasingly the only way to get ahead, online sports gambling has exploded in popularity. Prediction markets — themselves a response to the uncertainty of the Covid pandemic according to Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan — have extended wagering to pretty much all other areas of social life. Complicating that already dizzying state of play, a series of scandals in sports betting and in prediction markets have left bettors wondering if these games too are rigged.

Meanwhile the federal mass deportation program has terrorized immigrants regardless of documentation status, and upended even citizens’ long-held assumptions of safety and security in the places where they live and work.

Amid all of this disruption and insecurity, people are searching for solid ground in new ways. Communities are finding new connections by organizing against the construction of data centers, both for environmental reasons and as an opportunity to hash out fundamental concerns about how Artificial Intelligence is being used to reorder society. Mutual aid networks that were founded during the pandemic have sprung back to life in places like Minneapolis to help cities under siege by out-of-control immigration enforcement agencies.

The coming weeks and months do not seem likely to bring certainty to many people. They will seek it out anyhow, testing out new ways of thinking and acting in attempts to rebuild their trust in an unsteady world. The work of repair can have unpredictable, unanticipated outcomes. The distributed responses of people to ontological insecurity can be as consequential as the actions of powerful decision-makers trying to make deliberate change. It’s critical to pay attention to these movements: to learn more about what conditions make repair productive rather than destructive, or what makes certain repertoires of repair more or less likely to spread and to succeed, and how the process differs across communities with different resources to draw on.

In other words we have to pay closer attention to how people stagger, pivot, or dig in when things get out of hand. Repair isn’t a matter of pure reaction, it’s another way people make the future.

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Mainly I just want to share with you this delightful, hilarious video and article about the further misadventures of Antrhopic’s AI vending machine, Claudius. When I first wrote about Claudius back in September, Anthropic had been testing it internally in its offices, a…

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