anyways im radicalized now
I’m not funding a war
if I pretend the money
in my taxes are only going
toward the roads that
are actively collapsing.
Did you hear about the soldiers
who stole all of those tractors?
Did you hear the company
that makes those tractors,
founded in a country not “fighting” in the war,
was able to brick the tractors
before they were at all functional?
There are in-built kill switches in our devices.
Think about your debts and
how much they weigh.
US company sends a shipment of bricks
equal to the weight of the hard drives they develop
to Singapore because
they can get away with it.
Do you think if the bulldozer used
to build the Killdozer was an American make
it would have been stopped before
it was rendered inert too?
Maybe the make made the autonomy possible.
I’m not funding a war,
I’m in one.
There’s no recourse to repair
what we own within legality.
Amazon acquires OneMedical healthcare,
Amazon sells medical information to the police.
It hasn’t happened yet but
the Ring Doorbells send footage
to the police without the consent
and the knowledge of the “owners,”
and who makes the doorbells?
User on twitter finds out the company
that they got their printer from
can disable its functionality from afar
because their debit card had expired.
A friend can have their CPAP machine
forcibly taken away from them
if they aren’t using it “enough.”
John Deere pioneered the addition of remote
kill switches being installed in technology
and now the idea of one being installed
into a pacemaker is not
so far off.
Rendering a piece of technology inert
is called “bricking” it.
Are you excited to talk to a friend and
because of the status of their debts
a brick is weighed into their body?
Think about what you owe
and how much it weighs,
think about what you give away
and where it goes, think about
how much choice you really have,
if you have choice at all.
Marvin Heemeyer’s choices were diminished
until there was nothing left but to build Killdozer
but even so he was allowed to build it
without the only options he had left becoming bricks.
It’s called a siege when you decide
to wait for your enemy to run out of resources.
It’s called “scorched earth” to destroy anything
that might be useful to whomever you’re fighting against.
Who was the first brick at Stonewall?
We got past Act Up and now you can’t get
a monkeypox vaccine unless you can prove
you’re a gay man who has sex with other men.
Did you know you can be arrested for sodomy still?
Did you know some John Deere tractors only work
if the same farmer is buying Monsanto approved seed?
Marvin Heemeyer said “It is interesting to observe
that I was never caught.”
Maybe we will get a justified right to repair,
maybe the earth will die before then.
Scorched Earth.
We’re in an overwhelming heat wave,
we’re in the coldest summer of the rest of our lives.
They don’t make the tools we need
to become autonomous anymore
because they can ship us
our weight in debts instead.
What happens when we learn
that we can’t use our refrigerators
because we’re late on rent?
What are you going to do
if you’re trying to shoot yourself
in the head and the gun won’t go off
because your sold healthcare data
informed the manufacturer
that because of severe depression
the guns you own will become bricked?
What are you going to do
when you can’t do anything else
but lower the DIY armor
over the caddy of your killdozer,
only to find that it’s been rendered
a series of bricks?
“It is interesting to observe
that I was never caught ...
somehow their vision was clouded”
Copyright © 2024 by aeon ginsberg. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 17, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I am aware of the state of our world. How could I not become radicalized against it?”
—aeon ginsberg