We Were Warned
A note from Joe: You spoke. I listened. Shocking, I know.
The poll results are in, and you've sentenced me to Tuesdays and Fridays. Maybe Sundays if the mood strikes or the world does something particularly stupid. Which, let's face it, happens most Sundays.
A few of you also mentioned my essays run long. Fair point. When I get rolling on PrumpTutin or the healthcare scam or why war is humanity's favorite hobby, I tend to... continue. So, here's the deal: anything over 500 words gets a 100-word summary up top. Think of it as literary mercy.
Audio's still there for everything. Because sometimes you just want to hear an 80-year-old ex-programmer rant while you're doing dishes or dodging traffic.
Thanks for sticking around through the Substack chaos and the Ghost migration. You're good people. Even when you're wrong about my word count.
The Dystopia We Ordered
Summary:
Writers from Shelley to Butler warned us: surveillance states, manufactured reality, corporate fascism, camps disguised as policy. We read the books, made the movies, then built it anyway. Your phone tracks you constantly—you paid for the privilege. Algorithms amplify rage for profit. Courts captured. Civil service purge ready. Camps operational. PrumpTutin politics: same authoritarian playbook, two accents. This isn't prophecy anymore—it's inventory. The machinery exists. The question isn't could dictatorship happen here. It is happening here. We were warned. We ignored the warnings. Now we live in the dystopia we ordered.
Writers saw it coming. Mary Shelley in 1818: Frankenstein. Build what you can't control, then act surprised when it turns on you.
A century later Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We, glass apartments, and mandatory happiness. Banned in the Soviet Union. Orwell read the bootleg and took notes.
Orwell gave us telescreens. Huxley gave us soma. Bradbury gave us comfort that smothers. Dick gave us reality for sale. Atwood gave us Gilead. Butler gave us fascist America with a demagogue who promised to "make it great again."
They weren't prophets. They were just paying attention. We weren't.
The Architecture Already Built
Orwell warned that surveillance follows power. We handed it to corporations. Your phone tracks you a hundred times a day. You paid $1,200 and a monthly fee for the privilege. ICE buys the data. So do cops. So do political campaigns.
Shelley warned the creation wouldn't obey its maker. Facebook processes billions of posts daily. January 6th didn't self-organize. The algorithm amplified rage because rage sells ads. Zuckerberg testified. Nothing changed.
Cambridge Analytica scraped 87 million profiles in 2016. Foreign interference? No—American companies sold American data to undermine American elections.
We were warned: the surveillance state wouldn't need secret police. It would be a business plan.
The Permission Structure
Orwell again: once the machinery exists, all it needs is a man without restraint.
The Patriot Act. NSA hoovering. CIA operating domestically. Border Patrol with jurisdiction over two-thirds of Americans. The Insurrection Act waiting on the shelf.
Trump didn't invent any of it. He just used it. Putin already showed him how. Portland 2020 was rehearsal: unmarked vans, protesters disappeared. Courts said stop. He said no. Nothing happened to him. Everything happened to Portland.
PrumpTutin politics: same playbook, two accents.
Truth, Optional
Philip K. Dick warned that reality could be manufactured. His paranoid androids lived in worlds where nothing was certain, where memory itself could be bought and sold. We laughed.
Fox News did it analog. "Alternative facts." Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth." Millions nodded. January 6th was filmed from a thousand angles. We saw it. Trump called it peaceful. Millions believed him—not because they didn't see, but because they chose the version they liked.
Putin does the same with Crimea, Ukraine, every journalist who "falls out a window."
We were warned: control truth, control people. PrumpTutin just proved it.
Books Nobody Had to Burn
Bradbury said we wouldn't need firemen. People would choose screens over books. Fahrenheit 451 wasn't about government censorship—it was about voluntary ignorance.
Texas pulled 10,000 books. Florida made teachers cover shelves. Not burning—just bureaucracy. Forms. Insurance liability.
The books still exist. But kids won't read what isn't there. Teachers won't risk jobs. Ideas die without flames, just paperwork. Moms for Liberty doesn't light matches. They run school boards.
We were warned: the shelves would empty quietly.
The Judges Who Decide Everything
Dick feared algorithms deciding human fate. His stories showed computers making life-or-death choices based on incomplete data. Today COMPAS software influences criminal sentencing in 45 states. A proprietary formula decides prison or probation.
But Orwell's bigger warning was the courts. Trump built his Supreme Court. Three justices in four years. Roe dead. Chevron dead. Presidential immunity declared.
Moore v. Harper nearly gave state legislatures unchecked power over elections. It'll be back. That's the endgame: elections as suggestions.
Putin's courts sanctified him. Trump's are being built for the same job. That's PrumpTutin jurisprudence.
The Future That Already Happened
Octavia Butler wrote it in 1998: a president running on "Make America Great Again." Walls, camps, cities burning. Her Parable of the Talents read like prophecy because she understood how American fascism would market itself.
Atwood said every law in Gilead had precedent. Now Texas pays bounties for abortion tips. Idaho prosecutes women for leaving the state pregnant.
Project 2025 isn't a novel. It's 900 pages of blueprints. Fire 50,000 civil servants. Replace with loyalists. Kill NOAA so no one tracks climate change. Gut FDA so corporations decide what's safe. Posted online, free to download. They aren't hiding. They're advertising.
We were warned: fascism would pass as policy.
The Tech Bros Who Chose Sides
Gibson wrote that cyberspace would be owned by corporations. His Neuromancer showed a future where mega-corps wielded more power than governments. He was right.
Musk bought Twitter, fired trust and safety, reinstated Trump, amplified conspiracy, called it free speech. Thiel bankrolls senators who say democracy is overrated. Bezos neutered the Washington Post. Zuckerberg bent the knee at Mar-a-Lago.
Putin has his oligarchs. Trump has his tech bros. Same arrangement. Same obedience. PrumpTutin with better stock options.
The Acceleration
January 6th was rehearsal. The cops who opened doors? Still employed. The senators who voted to overturn? Still in office.
Schedule F—Trump's plan to purge civil servants—already drafted. Ready for day one. Generals who said no last time will be gone. Judges who block him? He's already appointed 234 more.
Orwell called it "the boot stamping on a human face." Putin does it in Ukraine. Trump promises it in Chicago. PrumpTutin acceleration.
The Camps Already Waiting
Butler wrote that America would build camps under the banner of greatness. Her Corporate America didn't call them concentration camps—they were "job training facilities" and "safety zones."
ICE already runs them: 30,000 detainees today. GEO Group stock jumps when Trump wins. Deportations in the millions require camps. They exist. Contracts signed. Guards hired.
Putin calls them filtration camps. Trump will give them a prettier name. History doesn't repeat, it rhymes. This rhyme sounds like cattle cars.
The System Working as Designed
The founders designed minority rule to protect slavery. The electoral college still works. Wyoming equals California.
The filibuster was an accident, weaponized by segregationists. Still strangling democracy.
Citizens United declared money speech. Corporations people. Elections bought legally, foreign cash flowing through shells.
We were warned: the old machinery would not protect us. It would enable what came next.
The Only Question That Matters
The machinery is built. The judges are placed. The camps exist. The algorithms amplify. The cops comply. The generals are being replaced.
This isn't a warning. It's inventory.
The question isn't could it happen here? It is happening here. The question is whether enough people stop calling it politics and start calling it what it is.
Dictatorship with American characteristics. PrumpTutin with a flag pin. Tyranny with a Bible and a Supreme Court ruling.
We were warned. We read the books. We made the movies. Then we built it anyway.
Five stars on Yelp. Would recommend to other declining democracies.
Returns still accepted. But the window's closing.
Appendix: The Prophets Nobody Heeded
Shelley: build without wisdom, it kills you.
Zamyatin: imagination surgically removed, glass-walled surveillance as social control.
Orwell: surveillance as power's servant, truth as variable.
Huxley: control by pleasure, not pain—distraction as oppression.
Bradbury: comfort over books, voluntary ignorance as social policy.
Dick: reality manufactured, empathy commodified, machines making human choices.
Atwood: Gilead, every law with precedent, theocracy through bureaucracy.
Butler: MAGA decades early, corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Gibson: cyberspace owned by corporations, data as the new oil.
Ballard: every dystopia begins as desire, technology serving our worst impulses.
Cameron: machines don't rebel—they obey perfectly, doing exactly what we programmed them to do.
Different angles. Same catastrophe. We applauded them, quoted them, adapted them. Then built everything they warned us about.
Because it was profitable. Because it was legal. Because it was easier than stopping.
