Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Refusing to Be a Machine

"Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines."

Kelly Hayes

Kelly Hayes

— 13 min read
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Greetings friends,

This week’s must-reads list is divided into two categories: articles about what’s wrong, and articles about how we can make things right. That means I am highlighting more material than usual, but since I didn’t have a must-reads list last week (I was at a conference and dealing with a lot of pain), and I am about to take some medical leave, I hope you won’t mind this deluge of suggestions. But don’t stop there! This edition also includes some organizing resources, public appearance info, and my final thoughts for the week.

Must-Reads About What’s Wrong

Must-Reads About How to Make Things Right

  • Lessons in Courage, Care and Collective Action from the International Accompaniment Movement by Moira Birss and Zia Kandler. “Rather than despair, we can instead look at the ways movements across the world have responded to authoritarian regimes. After all, for as long as governments have used such tactics, movements, organizations, and individual organizers and activists have cultivated strategies to keep themselves and their communities safe.”
  • The Struggle is Permanent: Keep Fighting by Mariame Kaba. “We are living in times where much is beyond our personal control and we are swimming in a sea of uncertainty. Rather than allowing ourselves to be swallowed by fear because the present and future are uncertain, what if we tried to inhabit and embrace possibility? What if we live in the ‘Maybe’ during what are undoubtedly difficult times?”
  • The Summer’s Hottest Trend Is Resisting State Oppression by Dean Spade. “As the Trump administration increases repression, the risks that come with participating in resistance are growing. But it's easier to have the courage to do things like keeping your neighbors safe from ice or help someone get healthcare they need when you’re not in it alone.”
  • Social Media Replaced Zines. Now Zines Are Taking the Power Back by C. Brandon Ogbunu. “Zines are seeing a resurgence, popping up in museum collections and, in at least one instance, online comics. They are taking on new forms, modified by a generation seeking to make something that won’t go the way of Tumblr.”
  • Understanding Fascism: A Reading List by Harsha Walia. “In his classic Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire identified that fascism in the metropole was the boomerang effect of European colonialism in the periphery. We see this today: the genocide in Gaza is expanding authoritarianism within the imperial core.”
  • Another Way Out: Fighting Back Against Inaction by William C. Anderson. “A peculiar self-inflicted subterfuge is overrunning many people in the U.S. Inaction is being misrepresented as a principled stance against this society’s failure to deliver progress to its people.”

ICYMI

This week on Movement Memos, I talked with author, organizer and documentarian Astra Taylor about the apocalyptic politics of Christian Nationalists and tech oligarchs, how AI is capturing and altering us toward fascist ends, and how we can fight "end times fascism." I think this is a really important episode, and I hope you’ll check it out. You can listen to Movement Memos wherever you get your podcasts or find a transcript and audio here. 

Socialism 2025

Next week, I will be appearing on two panels at Socialism 2025. One of those panels is called “Revolutionary Accompaniment: Holding Each Other When Things Fall Apart.” The panel will include me, Eman Abdelhadi, Tanuja Jagernauth, and Maya Schenwar—all of whom contributed to our upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists In Crisis. The first 30 people to show up for the session will receive an advance reading copy of Read This When Things Fall Apart, which will be published November 4. I wish I could bring a copy for everyone, but my publisher is letting me give away 30, so that’s happening! 

You can preorder the book through my favorite indy bookstore here. You can also order a copy for an activist or organizer in need by placing a donation order here. I consider this book a care package, so I will be working with AK Press to distribute donated copies to organizations and people who need them. 

If you won’t be at the conference, but want to see our panel, you can sign up for the virtual program here.

If you will be attending the conference, you can also catch me on a panel with Shane Burley, Ari Bloomekatz, Michael Staudenmaier, and Rick Perlstein called Rethinking Antifascism.

Organizing Resources

This Month In Criminalization is full of resources and opportunities for action on many fronts, including the war on Iran, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, mutual aid in L.A., assaults on sanctuary cities, gender affirming care, and more. If you’re looking for something that you can and must do from where you are, this is a good place to start.

Final Thoughts

From Trump’s vibes-based bombing of Iran to the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, and news that Israel has killed 410 people seeking food at Israeli-run “aid sites” in Gaza over the last month, it’s been a tough week for people who are paying attention. The plot sickened further on Friday as the Supreme Court issued a ruling that will reign in the ability of federal judges to temporarily pause Trump’s executive orders—which means Trump’s unconstitutional order ending birthright citizenship for the children of some immigrants could go into effect next month in some states. SCOTUS also ruled on Friday that parents can refuse to allow their children to be exposed to queer and trans related content in public schools—a decision that will undoubtedly lead to chaos in public schools and launch countless frivolous lawsuits against schools and educators. 

I feel a twisting ache in my stomach today. It’s a news-induced sensation, and it’s one I am willing to sit with. As a sensitive, empathetic person, my ability to compartmentalize bad news sometimes astounds and even concerns me. It’s a stark change from my younger years, when I did not know how to live in this world, because I found human cruelty so heartbreaking and alienating that I simply could not bear it. That was no way to live. At its worst, it probably wasn’t survivable in the long term. So, I found ways to cope. I became less fragile, and I learned to live with a lot of things. Sometimes, I feel like I've learned to live with too much. So, today, I welcome the opportunity to engage with what my body is telling me about this moment and myself. 

It’s saying, This is too much, and I am hurting, heartbroken, and afraid.

That may sound basic and obvious. After all, what overly informed person would not feel this way? 

But I don’t always feel this way. 

Sometimes, I’m not sure what it means for my humanity that soul-shaking information doesn’t bring me to my knees the way it might have only five or ten years ago. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of psychological survival. I used to marvel at the way people could normalize things I found unthinkable, and now, I often absorb horrors, make a smoothie, and then read some more. It’s not that I don’t feel pain or worry, or cry sometimes, but I am usually able to function, as I walk around knowing things that I cannot reconcile, and therefore, simply analyze and contain. Usually, I am not overwhelmed by what I know. Some might call this progress. Some might even think it sounds healthy. I don’t. I am not sure there’s a “healthy” way to know what I need to know in this world, in order to do the sense-making work I feel called to do. In my reading and research, I feel like I drink poison almost every day, in order to understand what’s happening, share that understanding, and to help form and fuel ideas about how we can make change together. Perhaps I have been developing a tolerance to the poison. Or maybe I am just becoming increasingly numb to the damage it does to me. Either way, the poison, like plastic, is everywhere and in everything, and pretending otherwise won’t help matters. 

I often tell other people to mediate their intake of terrible information, but in order to offer people a breakdown of what I think they actually need to know, I have to consume vast quantities of ugliness. That’s why they pay me the mediocre bucks.

Of course, I never know when my aforementioned tolerance is going to falter. It’s like an involuntary muscle movement—reliable in many instances, but potentially disabling during an unpredictable spasm. Today, I feel sick. Not because I am shocked by the news I am reading, but because the confluence of facts I’ve encountered has touched my nerves in a particular sequence, and broken loose some of the anxiety and hurt that I usually wall off. Like a buried muscle spasm in my back that goes off like a hidden time bomb, when the guarding muscles around it are released—or my heart, which raced uncontrollably as I called an ambulance for my partner in December, reminding me what the deepest kind of fear still feels like in my chest—sometimes, my body, the container and scorecard of my choices, injuries, and awareness, has its say, and cannot be talked down. 

So, I am letting myself have this moment. I feel sick. I may cry. In fact, typing those words actually broke the dam, and now I am weeping. This is not all that unusual. I have cried into my keyboard countless times over the years. I think it’s because this is where I come to tell the truth, to make connections, and spell out my beliefs and conclusions about how fucked things are—and to plead my case by insisting that as ugly as things may have gotten, we and the world are worth fighting for. That belief, that refusal to give up, is reinforced in various ways each day, from the profound to the seemingly trivial.

For example, this week, when I wrote a post on Bluesky stating that I was thinking about the Jewish activists in my city who have embarked on a hunger strike for Gaza, the post drew a response from Alaa, an exhausted mother of three in Gaza, with whom I sometimes correspond. Alaa read the article I shared about the hunger strikers and wrote a response aimed at them. She said:

I am a mother from Gaza. I write this as the bombing still echoes above us, and the food used as a weapon against us remains out of reach for my children. Hunger here is not a choice or a political stance. Hunger here is a decision made against us. But when someone in Chicago chooses to face hunger willingly, because they refuse to remain silent while we suffer, that is not ordinary solidarity, it is a profound act of pure humanity. To link your body with the body of a mother like me, who doesn’t know if she’ll be able to feed her children tomorrow, is a declaration that our lives still matter, that Palestinians are still seen as human beings worthy of life. In a world numbed by slogans, you’ve chosen the most honest form of silence: the silence of a hungry body, facing down a machine that feeds on our starvation. I feel that in your own way, you are breaking the siege not just around Gaza, but around the human conscience itself. From the heart of this catastrophe, I say: we see you, we feel you, and your actions reach us even when the borders remain closed. Because what connects us is not politics but real humanity.

(You can donate to support Alaa’s family here.)

Later that night, I was consuming my daily dose of escapism. I don’t smoke marijuana anymore, so zoning out usually means watching television. In this case, it was the decades-old vampire noir Angel. Recent news of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot inspired me to revisit Buffy for a few seasons, and then pivot to the spinoff Angel, after Buffy Summers went off to college and began to annoy me. In one of the episodes I watched that night, Angel comforted a friend who was grappling with grief and the collapse of her worldview and sense of purpose. “If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do,” Angel said. “‘Cause that's all there is. What we do.”

Over the years, I had forgotten far more than I remembered about this TV show, and I had no recollection of this episode until we were watching it, but those words had been written down, somewhere in my brain, and I found myself saying them out loud as Angel said them: “then all that matters is what we do.”

As I wrote in Let This Radicalize You:

I believe we write the meaning of life as we live it. I believe it is up to us to write a story worth living. I do not believe in the surrender of hope or imagination any more than I believe it is acceptable to give up on the survival of others, or of all life on Earth. There are some things we never surrender, and some things we never surrender to.

I mean every word of that. 

I mean it, even as I sit here, feeling sick. As Alaa’s family longs for food and safety. As activists in Chicago deprive themselves of food in a desperate act of solidarity. As bombs fall. As leftists and progressives celebrate the victory of Zohran Mamdani. As the Supreme Court twists and bends and rewrites the law to abet injustice. As Republicans in Congress conspire to gut Medicaid and kill the poor to feed the rich. As activists in my city deter ICE agents at immigration court. As my partner folds laundry in the next room because the most banal aspects of life go on while war crimes unfold and climate tipping points are reached. As immigrants are hunted. As people “fall in love” with chatbots and journalists stage reality TV-style exploitation pieces about them. As my cat butts in on my efforts to type, demanding my attention, oblivious to the news and the fact that some of you pay for her kibble. 

I mean it. And I feel sick. I feel achingly tired and determined. I feel certain we are worth this pain, this knowing, and this fear. We are worth this grief. And I know I am a being who is meant to feel, and not simply compartmentalize or numb out what knowing brings. So, for this moment, I will sit with this hurt. I will feel it. I will thank it for reminding me that I am still human. I have not lost that. I know who I am and who I want to be in relation to what must be done, what must be built, and what must be fought for. There will always be pain in that. I don’t want that pain to overwhelm and destroy me, but I will try to make space for it when it comes. Because I never want to wall myself away from what makes me human, and from what makes me able to help. 

In my conversation this week with Astra Taylor, during an exchange about the technofascist war on empathy, Astra said, “The end result is actually turning us into the robots that we’re supposedly being replaced with, right?”

I couldn’t agree more. Men who sell machines that mimic people want us to become people who mimic machines. I refuse. I bet you do, too.

So, I will sit here and cry for a bit. Then, I will go make some tea, and get back to reading, scheming, and planning. Saturday, I will attend the Trans Liberation March in Chicago. Then, after the Socialism Conference next week, I will be on medical leave for two to three weeks. (We’ll see how I do.) This space will likely go quiet while I am on leave, but as some of you know, that doesn’t always take. Sometimes, when I have something urgent to say, I will say it no matter what. Time will tell. For now, I hope you are all making space for your tears and also finding some hope, joy, and laughter wherever you can. Keep embracing everything that makes you human. Nurture the soft parts of yourself, so you don’t become hardened to the pain of this world. Figure out where you can do some good and try. Everything begins with trying and continues because we refuse to give up.

Much love,

Kelly

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