Letter to 1995 Me
Snoop Swizzle!
We made it to 48! Who would have thought? Not us! We don't even have any serious health problems yet! Soon, I'm sure, since polio is coming back and we'll be drinking milk straight from the cow's teat; but we're getting ahead of ourselves. I won't ask if you're well, since I know you're just listening to Fake Plastic Trees while hitting 57mph in the '84 Reliant. It'll die soon and you'll be very sad. Prepare yourself for Merkur XR4Ti ownership for three months until the mechanic tells you that if you had full insurance coverage, he'd set in on fire for you. Then you'll get a '94 Mercury Cougar XR7, the transcendence of which you'll be far too young to appreciate.
Anyway, looks like we'll be going to war with Canada, Panama, and Greenland shortly. Probably the EU (the European Union - it's complicated) as well, since the villainous Danes seem unlikely to yield Nuuk and the adjacent ice sheet to us. Seems like the whole country is melting pretty quickly (unsure if you were aware of global warming back then, because, well, 1995 - 2025: there were a lot of drugs done in the dash between the years), so I'm not sure what the problem is, to be honest. Definitely will be weird to go to war against NATO, since we're still a member and are the putative leaders of the organization. But Trump apparently wants a literal imperial presidency and if nuke-for-Nuuk is the only path to get there, so be it.
So, yeah, that's Donald Trump, the Marla Maples casino dude, and he'll be president again in two weeks. Hahaha, yep, again. He was president in 2016, it was bizarre (derogatory) in a lot of ways. He lost the 2020 election, then incited a bunch of Temu (uh, Internet [everyone on earth uses their computers and phones {which you carry in your pocket and are just like computers} to talk each other into fever dreams that destroy the fabric of reality] Savers, basically) Pat Buchanans to storm the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of electoral votes. One dude was dressed like a Viking and a bunch of Capitol police got their faces smashed in.
Truly the wildest shit we'll see since 9/11 (Islamic fundamentalist terrorists will fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, destroying the former - start telling people that jet fuel won't melt steel beams immediately and be a legend). Anyhow, it was a big deal and we thought that was the end of Trump for about 96 hours until the Senate declined to convict him, thus keeping him eligible for the presidency. So he beat Kamala Harris, the Vice President of Joe Biden (decent man, nominally still alive, withdrew from the race because the nominally is doing a lot of work there), a few weeks back, will be coronated before the end of the month, and will likely be pardoning the dudes who smashed the cops' faces in because they were patriots preserving the rule of law.
I'd love to tell you the use of "coronated" there is ironic, but, yeah, no. You'll read the blog of a dude named Mencius Moldbug in a few years, become morbidly fascinated with something called the Dark Enlightenment and its justification of a CEO as US President due to pesky inefficiencies of a democratic republic, then stick it in the bucket with Aristotle, Heidegger, Jordan Peterson (you'll see), and other philosophical nonsense. Turns out, though, Moldbug (sadly, a pseudonym for the much less exciting name of Curtis - yes, fucking Curtis - Yarvin) caught on with some influential tech people who came to dominate the Internet (see parenthetical above). A few became centibillionaires who own all of mass media, apply that control to foment malignant discontent on cultural issues, and use their wealth to buy proxy representation in government.
I know you've probably still got warm fuzzies over the democratization of the former Soviet Union, and rightfully so. Sadly, it'll eventually slip into oligarchy where a few centibillionaires owned all of mass media, applied that control to foment malignant discontent on cultural issues, and used their wealth to buy proxy representation in government. At least they tried, though, and their starting point was a single-party state in an economic death spiral. The US in 2025 is the most prosperous and powerful nation in the history of the solar system and most of us are either scrotum swinging on the oligarchs like they're our favorite college football team or ineffectually screaming into the ether about how bad it's going to get (hi!).
There's more to it than all of this, of course: over 50 years, we (both major political parties - Ross Perot didn't work out, despite your greatest efforts as a 15-year old) shipped all of the nation's manufacturing capacity overseas because it was cheaper, leaving a large swath of the country with minimal opportunities for economic advancement; financialized absolutely everything into magnificently arcane collateralized debt products which led to a global economic Chernobyl and many of the people with no opportunity for economic advancement losing their homes; we addressed their despair from this situation by yeeting them into a slurry of opiates, booze, and online gambling; finally (rhetorically, not temporally) salted what was left of the earth with cobalt-60 by removing any restrictions on money in politics.
There was also a nasty pandemic where people got very, very mad about wearing masks, our previously unimpeachable scientific institutions were sullied, perhaps irreparably, and now people won't take vaccines because they come with a computer chip, turn your sperm LGBTQ+, and are for cuckolds.
Finally, because we're working on a word count here, there's a Columbine every two months, they barely make the news, and no one who could do something about it cares.
I recognize how absolutely batshit all of this must seem to you, my sweet summer me. You may literally die from reading it. If I wink out of existence upon hitting send, at least we'll have saved an awful lot of money on booze and therapy, missed 30 years of our sports teams not winning anything, and perhaps changed the future for the better - or at least less absurd.
Best,
Carl