Rebecca Solnit: "Trump and Musk are two of the biggest morons in the world."

BarcelonaIn 2008, at a dinner with a friend, Rebecca Solnit He joked about writing an essay entitled Men tell me thingsThe friend replied that women, especially younger ones, needed her. The next day she began the text, which she wrote almost in one sitting and became a worldwide success. The book helped make the term "women" go viral. mansplaining and also to make her a symbol of feminism, although Solnit was already an established writer who had reflected on memory, struggles, and art, among other things. She has just published her book in Catalan. In Praise of the Unexpected Path (Ángulo/Lumen), which compiles several articles that offer insight into the present but also serve as an antidote to despair.

What's happening in the United States?

— Donald Trump is stupid, crazy, and ignorant. This is the first thing we need to establish. The second is that we are experiencing a slow-motion coup, because he is trying to dismantle the rule of law and become a dictator. And the third important thing is that the media is not conveying this to the public in all its complexity. If you put the pieces together, you see that someone is slowly breaking the house down in different places. And that eventually, the house will fall. It is said that he has been manipulated by Putin, and he could be. We have Elon Musk and the tech billionaires who want to establish a techno-feudal state. But he is clearly a person who is confused, manipulated, and doesn't understand anything.

In recent days we have seen Musk's open war with the president.

— What a surprise. Two gigantic egos from two of the world's biggest morons, who have different visions and interests.

Why? What do men like Musk represent?

— We see men richer than ever, buying islands and palaces, and it might seem like this makes them happy. But greed becomes infinite, and it needs more power, more money. You look at them, and they all seem profoundly miserable. The fact that so much power and so much money don't make them happy is proof that they're pursuing the wrong things. We need to create a world where individual people, men, never have that kind of power again.

Their power is immense, not just because of money. There are algorithms that promote news more or less. ARA articles may be viewed more or less depending on what a man in Silicon Valley has decided.

— I was proud to be from San Francisco. For the struggles for equality and leadership against climate change, but today I live at the center of Silicon Valley's global power, which is worse than what is being said. Musk didn't buy Twitter to make money; in fact, he's losing. But it has helped him win Trump and spread far-right, misogynistic, and racist opinions. Bolsonaro's success in Brazil is explained by the information consumed online, because Google creates algorithms that prioritize extremist content to keep you connected longer. Facebook was key to spreading propaganda against the Rohingya in Burma. So the destruction of the rainforest, the rights of Indigenous people in South America, and the genocide in Southeast Asia can all be traced back to Silicon Valley corporations. And the fact that people treat this technology as neutral is one of the things that allows them to continue. I'm glad to see the EU trying to regulate it, but popular awareness and alternatives are also needed. And that's why I insist a lot in this book on the need to connect the dots. Now we have small pieces of information, but not enough pattern recognition to really understand the situation.

One challenge is how to relate to the far right. He says it's not about understanding them.

— We're often told to be nice to the far right and invited to engage in an exercise in understanding. It seems as if the people they're trying to kill should be nice to those trying to kill them. It never goes both ways; right-wing white supremacists are told they should understand lesbians, Black people, and refugees. Nor is it said that left-wing extremism emerges because the right isn't understanding. Which tells us that their values and worldview are more important. A US Supreme Court justice said you couldn't tell jokes anymore. What he meant was, he couldn't tell a racist joke. And obviously he can, but now he'll find someone who will fearlessly tell him that it's racist. They complain about the oppression of not being able to oppress. There may be psychological and sociological understanding that's useful, but I think we need to stop legitimizing and normalizing.

And how do you combat these rhetoric? It's becoming increasingly clear that loudspeakers are incomparable.

— Silicon Valley controls some of the flow of ideas, not all. The Internet also allows a young person to queer or trans people in a town know they're not alone, or that people with rare diseases can connect and join forces for new treatments. A big part of my hope is seeing how the world has changed and continues to change. We're in a world where those who aren't white, Christian, and heterosexual have more rights and representation. And this is a problem for men who had benefited greatly from being Christian, heterosexual, white, etc. And they want to bring back the old world. But we can turn this message around and see that, deep down, what they're telling us is: the world has changed a lot, it's been very successful, and that's why we want to return to the world that existed before its victories. This means that, contrary to what some maintain, feminism has been a victory and the struggle queer It has been a victory.

He argues that we don't see this because we only look at the short term.

— We live in a world that would have been almost inconceivable in 1960, but many things have happened so slowly and gradually that we don't even notice. In 2000, we had no alternative to burning fossil fuels, and there has been an energy revolution to the point that today we can talk about leaving the era of fossil fuels behind. Sometimes we explain changes through parliamentary decisions or court rulings. But these are things that were able to happen because the change was already in our minds and hearts. Marriage equality was able to reach Parliament thanks to the social movements that had fought before. And that's why I'm interested in breaking certain narratives, because otherwise, we can turn them into traps that make us think we have no power and will never win. The left defeats itself even before the right does through this discouraging attitude. I'm still excited that someone like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez could win in 2018. I'm still excited by the fall of the Berlin Wall, or that marriage equality exists. I see everything in greater time frictions.

Do we need to live at a different speed to see it?

— When I talk about slowness, I mean the long-term perspective and the stubbornness to understand that it takes time for things to change. I'm interested in slowness in that sense.

And what do we do with a society that has disconnected from politics?

— People always forget the direct impact that politics has on their lives. In the book A paradise in hell (Capitán Swing, 2020) analyzes what happens in times of catastrophe. And you see that people not only rise to the occasion, but are even happy. Because we need personal things, yes, but also to feel that we are part of something bigger, and that we have something in common with others. We need stories that tell us that we need these things, and that we find deep satisfaction when we get them. The bourgeois realism of many films and novels addresses only this. I reduced from consumerism, which gives us a small, sad version of ourselves. And I also believe that Silicon Valley is robbing us of each other, of the human connections that are the richness of our lives, and then trying to sell us substitutes that aren't real connections, that are mediated by technology. We must recognize how deeply we want and need to find joy in these connections.

FOUR BOOKS TO GET TO KNOW SUELIDO

Although she had previously published a dozen titles, Rebecca Solnit gained global recognition with this collection of essays that popularized the neologism mansplainingThe texts in this volume clearly and forcefully illustrate the many faces of male domination.

The success ofMen tell me thingsThe book was published in collaboration with the author's editors, who led the recovery of one of her best books, where she spins fascinating stories about the art of losing and finding oneself again—physically and mentally—based on unique experiences with turtles, monks, deserts, punk musicians, and explorers.

In this memoir published in the midst of the pandemic, Rebecca Solnit looks back on her youth and explains how being a woman meant—and still means—"facing one's own annihilation in a multitude of ways, running away from oneself or getting to know it, or all three at once."

The climate emergency, feminism, democracy, hope, and the exercise and abuse of power are some of the heartbreaking themes in the author's latest collection of essays. An in-depth analysis of the present and a desire to find strength in challenges that will improve the future are two of the driving forces of the book.