The western borg is not a place. It’s a state of mind. As it expands across the world, it aims to rob other places of their placehood too, and assimilate them to the same shallow diffuse global consumerist project. The western borg likes to conceive of itself as post-national and post-political. Its values, in its own conception, exist on a higher plane, like religious or philosophical truths. They are about “freedom” and “democracy” and “peace” and “human rights.” Yet people in the West do not have much voice in government, they are not free, the western borg instigates wars across the world, and western assimilated governments do not care about anybody’s rights.

These are just the words with which the western borg seeks to disguise its imperialist, autocratic tendencies. Unlike some of you, I prefer to see the actions of the borg as essentially undirected, and the result of internal dynamics. It arises from a lot of separate forces, among them prosperity and technology, the complexity of mass society and its management, and the universal claims of the liberal democratic political tradition. All of its ideological obsessions and propaganda narratives either further or express its totalising project in some way.

Upcoming: Observations about the ongoing Omicron wave in Europe, a review of Alex Berenson’s Pandemia, and thoughts on whether Corona is truly ending or merely taking a break. I just had to get this out of my system first.