April 2026

Hopecore and Authoritarian Lock

The term “hopecore” has been attributed to sci-fi movies like the recent Hail Mary, as “a genre of videos that invoke ... emotions of hope, glee and wholeness” (Thomas). If hopecore is a reaction to widespread hopelessness, as Thomas argues, from where does that need arise?

Hopelessness is distinct. It’s not bleakness or sadness, it is those emotions coupled with the idea that things won’t or can’t get better. There are arguably two dominant trends that have marked the last decade, at least in Western social and political life: they are a rightward authoritarian shift and rapid technological advancement. I think it’s possible that their relationship has not been fully appreciated. It’s not that it hasn’t been studied or discussed at all—it has, especially in the last few months as the US Government sued the tech company Anthropic for limiting its use of AI for surveillance and weaponry. It’s that what has emerged out of their intersection is perhaps this quiet feeling of dread, or hopelessness, in the absence of a larger public discussion of how historic this moment is.

What I’m talking about is this: in every other authoritarian regime in history—back to the first Neolithic chiefs, the weapons held by both subjects and the ruling class were on a relatively level playing field. If the subjects did not have access to spears, swords, or guns even—they could theoretically build them (with obviously varying degrees of difficulty and required expertise). This changed a lot in the 20^th century, but revolutionary groups still continued to get their hands on automatic weapons and bombs, for instance. Things have completely upended in the last few decades. I’m noting that the gap between making your own cross bow and building your own rifle is incalculably narrower than building your own rifle and building your own AI system.

We have no idea what the true potential of AI is for surveillance, propaganda, and state violence, especially when coupled with other technologies: facial recognition, drones, and advanced weaponry; and given its ascendency in a social infrastructure dominated by private digital platforms—where data has become an asset bigger than opium or oil. This renders the second amendment argument that guns are the best defense against tyranny less compelling. I’m not sure how much guns matter anymore.

I don’t think there will ever be zero hope against tyranny. For reasons stated in this article from Slate, there is a material aspect to AI and other advanced tech that dub it ultimately reliant on humans. Humans within an organization can defect or rebel against tech and the class that controls it (as well as potentially against AI itself) as the tech in question is ultimately part of the material realm: copper wires, electrical signals, silicon chips, etc. (no matter how ethereal it may seem). It breaks down and can be destroyed, as can the centers of capital which power them.

But the point still stands: If Trump is the completion of an authoritarian transition in the West, as Applebaum suggests, or, looked at differently, the beginning of a long, dark voyage into totalitarianism (rather than an ugly detour, as many hoped Trump 1.0 would be); if the wealth and political influence of international tech giants render states irrelevant and, these companies themselves realize an oligarchic world-government—such an order will be harder to fight than any in history (the most salient present-day analogue being China). I call this convergence of advanced tech and authoritarian rule—past which resistance becomes extremely difficult in an unprecedented, Orwellian way—authoritarian lock.

It is also happening at a time when, though people may be more informed than ever, this does not imply they have as much knowledge as ever (previous article) and the means of distraction are more powerful than ever. Our best recourse is not armed revolt, it is collectively organizing and putting pressure on the engines of capital that empower the tech companies and the governments that use them (and are increasingly subordinated to them). Trump partially withdrew ICE from Minnesota after the January 23^rd strike and the subsequent calls for a general strike. We should follow through with a general strike across the political spectrum, demanding public acquisition of critical technologies.

The Function of Homelessness

What can broadly be called the “homelessness” crisis, as I’ve observed it in Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland—is the worst I’ve seen in any North American city. To speak of this issue is already to tread into morally and terminologically dubious waters. It is to reduce a group of people to a common denominator: having nowhere stable and consistent to sleep and live domestically.

How people get there ranges widely, but often includes domestic violence, unmitigated mental health crises or physical disability, having a felony record, and often most visibly—substance abuse issues.  Absent this nuance, the phrase “homeless” easily becomes just a way to other individuals, like “immigrant” or “criminal.” It’s worth exploring to what extent this language constrains our thinking, and whether we ought to do away with the concept entirely. The alternative could be to analyze the separate roads to homelessness as separate issues, and not use “living on the street” as the explanandum, the lens through which all other things are understood and the meter by which progress is measured.

Putting that project aside though, let’s look at what the crisis is.

We can assert that the crisis is defined by individuals living without consistent shelter, and often without other basic necessities: clothing, storage, employment, community. The “crisis” is for each individual experiencing it (barring what I suspect are the few who are truly “voluntarily” homeless in the Chris McCandless / Jack Kerouacian way), and it’s also a crisis for society—particularly the parts of society confronted with and consisting of a large number of homeless people.

This crisis is first and foremost a failure of government. Nowhere else do you have to look to see that the governments of Canada and the USA serve the interests of the wealthy, who will never be at risk of being homeless, and have no contact with the homeless. The wealthy do not care about the problem, in fact, it reinforces their power structure in a few ways:

·      First, it serves as a threat to the other, precarious deciles of society: this could be you if you disobey (if you unionize, strike, revolt, etc.).

·      Second, the large numbers of individuals who are psychologically unwell, potentially dangerous, disrupts communities and tears at social fabric, lending itself further to the divide and rule methodology.

·      Third, some of the homeless form part of a demographic who could potentially threaten to take the jobs of the precarious, driving down their wages.

All of this protects the wealthy and preserves the current economic hierarchy. For reasons 1-3, homelessness serves the ruling class. And of course, solving it would require, within the current paradigm—where capital is controlled by and wealth concentrated amongst a few hundred wealthy families—raising / changing taxes on the rich. If you want to see evidence of a government that does not care about most of its constituents, take a look at the homeless crisis.

This is not a problem that individuals and community organizations can solve—it requires policy change. Individuals, as in the people who pass the homeless folks on the street, are themselves often living check-to-check. They don’t have the emotional or fiscal resources to respond. More so, the folks who are homeless as the result of addiction, psychiatric disorders, or legal issues (which comprises the majority of homeless people)—require professional help: legal, psychiatric, medical, etc. Most people are not professionals in this area, and when they are, they are busy with their own practice. The same is true of community organizations and non-profits, often dependent on donations (again, those who can meaningfully donate don’t want to solve the problem, so donations are scarce), and lacking in expertise.

If the government wanted to make it so that no human ever slept on the street, they could do so virtually overnight—by putting roofs over the heads of people who are sleeping on the street.

This is, in fact, exactly what happens during extreme weather events. Why is it done then and not as a rule? One reason is that when someone is displaced because of a flood, it is seen as the flood’s fault. The public then feels more entitled to pressure the government. The government, in turn, is already acting to protect the interests of the capital that is threatened by the flood. When displacement happens because of a complex series of events described in paragraph one (usually a compounding of these features) it is assumed to be more of a personal failure. This is, of course, almost always a massive overestimation of one’s general capacity to will themselves out of a crisis, and an under-appreciation of the deleterious effects of the (often compounding) elements mentioned.

The government has abandoned their constituents who are themselves homeless, and the community members who are on a regular basis confronted by the homeless crisis. Liberals especially are uncomfortable with the idea that it is unpleasant to be amidst the homeless crisis. It is thought of as “lacking in empathy,” or being elitist or something. This way of thinking is to do a disservice to everyone involved, and to delay action on the homeless issue. Is it pleasant to get screamed at randomly by individuals having a mental health crisis? Is it pleasant to smell urine so strong at your bus stop that it chokes you? What about being stalked? Stepping over feces? Or watching people shoot up in broad daylight? Is that what people pay for, when they pay the exorbitant costs of city living?

We have to be honest about the effect on the population that is not homeless from just being amidst this crisis. It would be distressing, if not traumatizing, to walk through the ER on a regular basis, or to walk through a famine camp. It is certainly distressing to be exposed regularly to the scenes of the Downtown East Side in Vancouver, or many parts of Seattle and Portland. People are ashamed to say this, again, because it comes off as cold or selfish when “those who are really suffering are the homeless themselves.”  

But both things can be true. Yes, it is worse to be the person who is addicted to substances or having a mental health crisis living on the street, than it is to be the person encountering them. But I have already established that the person observing them is likely a precarious worker who is on their way to or from work, trying to make ends meet as 60% of Americans cannot afford the basics to live a quality life. Even if they are secure, helping the person in question is likely not within the realm of their ability. And even if it was, they are one of hundreds if not thousands, in the cities mentioned (not to mention, what if the observer is a child?). Help one person, and be confronted by a legion of others you (or your org) cannot.

Expertise aside, it is unrealistic to ask people to empathize with as many people as truly do need empathy and support. Empathy doesn’t work like that. This leaves most people at a weird paradox:

(A)  Shut off their emotions to not feel the pain and misery around them.

(B)  Leave yourself open.

The cost of (A) is to have less emotional availability for the ones you care about, to have a more shallow emotional reality. It is to feel detached and risk letting other emotions seep in: anger and resentment at the homeless, rather than at the government for abandoning people in need, or at capitalists for squeezing the wealth out of working class and hoarding it to do what—buy yachts? Go to space? It is to also place one in a position where, absent empathy, they risk being criticized for having a fully justified emotional response to the homeless crisis, which is simple aversion at how deeply unpleasant it is to be around (you can feel disgusted and frustrated amidst the homeless crisis without denigrating the homeless individuals themselves—this is not a contradiction).

The cost of (B) is obvious: to feel devastated all the time at the magnitude of suffering. It’s the same result with truly reconciling with poverty on a global scale, or the tens of billions of sentient animals who live most of their lives in brutal captivity, only to be slaughtered for ephemeral, gustatory pleasure.

The cost of this is depression, burnout, and likely ultimately being unable to be much help.

Normally, we consciously let in what we can, what we think we can handle, and what we think will motivate us to change. It’s not putting blinders on (though there’s plenty of that), it's strategically calibrating one’s emotional experience. The problem, of course, is when you are face to face with the crisis. This is when choosing how much news to read, for instance, or what documentaries to watch, or just how much to think about an issue, is irrelevant. When it's in your face, dissociaiton rather than calibration is the available response: Option (A).

Most people choose option (A) and become cold, part of the reputation of big cities—particularly in the PNW. This plays into the second function of homelessness discussed above—the destruction of communities. So again, we’re in a place where we feel awkward to discuss the problem of homelessness because it feels cold, but it is cold inescapably: it is cold because the coldness is survival in this chronically distressing scenario.

Two research programs should be undertaken: (1) the mental health impacts of exposure to the homeless crisis, including detachment (a short-term survival strategy with long-term consequences); (2) the effect on the homeless of being ignored by detached people.  

The problem is not feeling normal human emotions such as disgust or anger amidst the crisis. The offense occurs when moral judgement arises (from feelings of disgust or detachment), against the homeless. Many of these folks are victims of structural violence: they have been locked out of the economy through felony records (often non-violent crimes), they are war veterans who have PTSD from combat they should have never been to—often joining for lack of viable socioeconomic options and seduced by patriotic propaganda; they are the victims of actual physical violence by the state (or in gendered or racial contexts between the other dominant superstructures), and though there's not always a clean causal relationship, van der Kolk has argued how often drug use is just a way to silence the violence that lives inside the body.

Some arrive in the world of homelessness by traits and decisions that are not as obviously tied to socio-economic factors, or by organic mental health issues or disabilities. It is in such cases that blame arises easiest, unlike it would in the case of a flood. Individuals who look like they should just be able to "get a job" are blamed for being homeless, and they are used to excuse government inaction on a broader scale—i.e. the abandonment of those who are truly trapped inside the crisis.

What does it mean to be "blamed for being homeless"? The homeless (especially perceived - volitionally homeless) are blamed for contributing to all of the tension and contradiction discussed in this article, for those who do not live in, but live amidst the crisis. For some it may be deeper as well—a kind of blame for failing a civic duty: not making the collective sacrifice that is to lease their minds and bodies to capital—like draft dodging; or for others, not contributing to society—being a "freeloader."

These reasons for blame are all dubious, for reasons outside the scope of this article, and the scapegoating of a few putatively "willful homeless" needs to be examined. But for blame to be appropriate period, the object of blame needs to have been able to have acted differently (shifting tenses where relevant). In short, ought implies can. In most cases of homelessness, I think the question of “will” or “choice” at best dubiously applies. My suspicion is that very few individuals can will themselves out of homelessness with the tough-love a conservative might daydream of administering. In the case of drug addiction, there is a point at which individuals are not “choosing” in any relevant sense to continue using. And regardless of whether they could have chosen to prevent getting themselves there, the question is now how much choice do they have for getting out?

This needs further philosophical investigation: on whether someone “becoming homeless” (or any analogous station) by their own willful decisions determines the warrant for helping them out of that station. My sense is there is little connection. You can blame someone for ending up trapped in an eddy, because they recklessly chose to swim into a dangerous river. You cannot blame them in the same way for staying in the eddy, and needing rescue. There's likely some connection, and factors include how much foreknowledge the person has, whether they were trapped before, but the connection is fraught and varied. At a certain point the volume of other factors becomes overriding: this is a suffering, sentient person—and we have the capacity to help make their lives less miserable.

The most relevant factor for intervention should not be whether they could have prevented homelessness on their own, it should be whether they can get out on their own. Confusing these two allows indifference and condemnation to proliferate. I think this confusion happens in part because of a widespread carceral mindset, at least in the United States. Ignoring the fact that crime and punishment are rarely commensurate (and assuming that a punitive approach to justice is preferable to a restorative approach): when Rick is found guilty of murder and sentenced to prison, we don’t feel an urge to get him out. He’s trapped there, like someone in a river eddy, or in the belly of the homelessness crisis. We don’t feel called to rescue him because he deserves incarceration. He committed a crime. 

I think this is probably the wrong way to approach justice, for reasons touched on by Litchenberg. But the issue relevant for this article is how it is transferred to the homeless crisis. The guy trapped in the eddy did not commit a crime by swimming in the river, he was just reckless. We would not say, “he deserves to drown.” Likely because of the legacy of the war on drugs, perhaps still rich in the collective unconscious, we transfer more easily the “criminal designation” to the homeless person. After all—the reasoning goes—they’re already kind of criminals for sleeping on the street, for doing drugs. A quiet voice says, "they didn’t just choose to be there, they deserve to be there." 

One way to defeat this view is to go to its root: the carceral mindset, the punitive approach to justice. That is needed, but outside the scope of this article. A faster way to defeat it is just to recognize that this is a self-serving transference with little empirical basis. Sleeping on the street or smoking fentanyl is not murder or armed robbery, and the greater crimes are the often legal mechanisms of state and corporate violence committed against those who exist on the edge of civilized life and exile in an urban wilderness. 

Even if it’s true that they could have done otherwise at various points, do they deserve it? Does making “mistakes” (e.g. using drugs to cope with other ailments) imply one deserves to suffer? Most certainly not, and yet we make this confusion because it makes it easier when we feel powerless, and we are often powerless. Of course we are, because we’ve given our power to a state, with the expectation that they solve these issues.

Solving the homeless crisis then requires reconciling with a few facts:

·      (1) It’s okay to be horrified, disgusted, and annoyed by the crisis and the behavior of individuals who are trapped within this crisis—it is these things; feces on the street is disgusting, screaming obscenities into the void is horrifying; the re-sensitizing of oneself, even if briefly, is an important step in appreciating the scope of the issue.

·      (2) It is okay to be detached, cold even, this is survival; to empathize with every individual who is suffering on the street, even if possible, would lead one to be distraught and incapable of doing what you need to do to survive in the system

·      (3) The responsibility to fix this is not on the homeless themselves, many of whom need serious professional intervention, not on community orgs, not on individuals. It is on the government who has the resources to mobilize to fight pandemics, extreme weather and foreign invaders (all of which threaten capital, notice), but fail to use to provide basic services for those who need them most.

In 2/2 I'll discuss applying these facts.