Urgent: We need to tell you some things
Feb. 3rd, 2026 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerr posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
alt_fenThis community has been quiescent for a long time because Alternity is over.
Except that three of the writers who helped conceptualize and write this game are living in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and we need to tell you this:
We are actually living it.
If you ever loved Alternity, we are earnestly asking you, begging you, to read this right now.
[pegkerr here.] Here are some of the things that I’ve learned, looking back on the experience of writing Alternity and then reflecting on what we are seeing in our daily lives:
Nothing could have prepared me better for what is happening today in my city than writing Alternity.
Here are some of the things we explored when writing the game:
Being brave in times like these is much more difficult than I ever thought it would be. And yet, I am haunted by the feeling that I am not doing nearly enough because I know that I’m not one of the ones who has the most to fear. What goads us forward is realizing that we have to stand up for those who are in even greater danger than us.
We are doing the work under the Order Lock, using Signal, or meeting in person, being careful to ensure we are not tracked. The regime is monitoring us with helicopters and drones, biometric scanning, license plate scanning, and military-grade programs that suck information from our phones when we are simply outside going about our business.
The temptation to minimize, to look away, to comply, is overwhelming. But you must not do so.
Alternity explored how an oppressive regime picks a scapegoat class and brutalizes them, blaming them for all people’s dissatisfactions in life. It’s all the fault of the muggles. They are garbage. They are subhuman. You mustn’t empathize with them. You must root out any scrap of pity you might have for them. You must make their lives as difficult as possible.
And now we are under an oppressive government that is telling us the same things about immigrants. These are lies, and you must reject them.
No one is coming to save us.
It’s overwhelming sometimes, to see what is going on and think, even to cry out, why does nobody STOP this? We see the smashed and abandoned cars in the street with busted windows, and we know that ICE thugs have dragged yet another person from their car who was simply going to work. Or someone who stopped to exercise their constitutional rights by filming another warrantless arrest. There are signs on the lawns and tacked to the trees all around us that read, ‘ICE kidnapped our neighbor here.’ Masked thugs are lobbing tear gas at us in our parks and in our streets.
We call our senators and our representatives and our mayor and our governor and our city council members, over and over again, begging for help. Lawsuits have been filed with the courts. A few—-not all—-of the city council members have been on the streets, facing the tear gas with the rest of us, but most of our politicians have been absolutely useless. And the regime is ignoring court order after court order when rebuked for their unconstitutional actions.
It is a remarkably helpless feeling.
I’m struck by the fact that here in our metro community, just as in the world of Alternity, we have to keep going on without knowing whether we'll get through this and out the other side to a world that in any way resembles what we’ve lost. The life we have always known is crumbling away right before our eyes.
But we can’t let them weaponize the despair they are causing against us.
We must save ourselves and the people around us.
When you finally accept that you are on your own, you realize that you must turn to the people around you. And we have all been astonished by what we can accomplish together.
[naomikritzer here]
I have also been thinking a lot about Alternity lately, as my community (I live in St. Paul, and the occupation is affecting the whole metro area) has pulled together and also argued about priorities, tactics, opsec, and more.
Here’s part of what I’ve thought about in the context of the Fictional Dystopia I Wrote In vs. the Real Dystopia I’m Living In.
Here in the Twin Cities, we are better protected by just assuming our chats are being monitored, taking various basic precautions (people use pseudonyms; the big Signal chats are being used to plan legal activities), and helping as many people who want to get involved find a way to help as possible. Because our best defense is not secrecy, our best defense is that right now we massively outnumber them, and they know it. And the more people connect with a group and start helping, the more true that is.
I wrote a whole thing about how to help from outside Minnesota that includes a section on organizing wherever you are, on the assumption that ICE might come to you, next. The one thing I really want to underscore is the advice at the part about building networks: that’s both Alternity-related and important. Everyone has networks they just don’t think about much: if you have kids at a school, the parents in the PTA or who you talk to at pickup time. If you’re in fandom, the groups that organize local conventions. Your physical neighbors. If you’re in a religious community, the people there. Start conversations with them. There’s an excellent post written by a Minnesota local on “The Cookie Theory of Collective Action,” which gets into some of the nitty-gritty of how you start to build power with the networks you’re already in.
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of purely “performative” stuff to help you find the people you can recruit for networks of work and care! Buy a big box of anti-ICE buttons and offer them to people at your science fiction book club; see who accepts. (And see who complains.) Are you on Signal? Get those other folks on a Signal group with you.
I wrote an op-ed for a big Houston paper and the deluge of bots in the Facebook comments made it clear that there’s someone out there deeply invested in convincing Texans who oppose ICE that they are fully isolated and alone. It’s the performative stuff that can be that first step in showing people, you’re really not, there are lots of us.
[elisem here]
OK, I have a few thoughts from both Alternity and here:
Not everybody can do every job. We are not interchangeable. In the checklist of things to consider before you join particular actions, there is an item about not causing more work for your friends, not making your neighbors have to rescue you, etc. Asthma, other disabilities, what we have to give, what other responsibilities do we have? Some people can’t be observers, or go to marches, or be out in public in ways and places that might get them gassed, et cetera. And others can’t talk about what they do.
The problem with the terror units is not that they’re insufficiently skilled or funded. It’s not that ICE needs better training or more money. They don’t need to be more efficient bullies, or to “show their mettle” as the saying in Alternity went. They know what they are doing. Their cruelty is the point. Instilling fear is the point. After Renee Good died, ICE said to numerous people who were observing, “Didn’t you people learn your lesson already? That’s why we killed that lesbian bitch!” Then they laughed. And after the laughing, usually they teargassed us.
Get ready first. Get ready now. There are a lot of us on their hate list, and they’ll get around to all of us unless they are stopped. And while they have lists of kinds of people they particularly want to hurt right away, they will enthusiastically expand that list to anyone who isn’t on it but shows willingness to stand up for people who are. (Bonus: Once you’re connected, you can use your groups and networks to deal with fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, or other disasters you might have besides state terror squads.)
Doing something is better than doing nothing. Even if you may not be doing the thing that finally breaks the logjam and lets justice roll down, you may be inspiring the people who do. You may be contributing to a rent fund that keeps the people who do housed. You may be feeding them. Or protecting their kids. Or writing the messages that eventually get through to the politicians who should be doing more. Or comforting people, listening to them, letting them decompress. A million different things.
Things to remember:
1. Do what you can reach. Ya gotta kick from where you are standing.
2. Don’t encumber your neighbors and allies with more casualties if you can help it. Work smart. (I don’t go face teargas, because I have asthma and diminished lung capacity and in a teargas circumstance I’m more likely to be a burden rather than an asset.)
3. Boost the efforts of other people when you can. There are lots of chances to do this.
4. Talk to people outside of your area, and encourage them to strengthen – or begin building – their networks where they are.
5. Build on pre-existing networks and relationships with places you are known to, because they will know of needs you don’t know. (Does the Coffee For Elders fund already know me because I’ve been using donations there as a way to celebrate selling a big piece of artwork for years? Excellent! They will know other folks with particular needs right now. Do I know people with social circles way beyond mine? They might know someone who knows what to do with ten or twenty or fifty extra dollars when I have some to share.) The morale boost of even ten dollars of help should not be underestimated.
6. For some people, living through all this without their kids or themselves getting taken is their part. Nobody knows what someone else is carrying. Do what you can, and be kind. If all else fails, be too busy to judge what somebody else is doing where you can see it.
There are a million different tasks, and we won’t know until later which ones were load-bearing — and we may be surprised by which ones kept people alive and doing their part. And do not neglect yourself. You aren’t expendable either.
P.S. A Small Afterthought: What’s Bugging Me About Some of the Protest Songs
The ones that talk about the stranger in our midst, or draw lines between long-time Minnesotans and new ones feel to me like they totally mean well but the language is missing something important. They say immigrant where we say neighbor. It’s been “stop killing our neighbors!” here for a while now. (And there are so many more names than often get listed.)
Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the songs! Thank you for the songs! Just maybe try out how it feels to call everybody neighbors. If they try to divide us, being neighbors unites us. Love our neighbor. It’s not how everybody talks, but if it fits for you, it can be a profound statement of commitment and respect, an acknowledgement that we aren’t any of us free until everybody is free, and a reminder that turning away from what is going on will not save us.
***
If you have made it this far (yes, we know this was long), thanks for listening. We would welcome your comments.
Except that three of the writers who helped conceptualize and write this game are living in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and we need to tell you this:
We are actually living it.
If you ever loved Alternity, we are earnestly asking you, begging you, to read this right now.
[
pegkerr here.] Here are some of the things that I’ve learned, looking back on the experience of writing Alternity and then reflecting on what we are seeing in our daily lives:Nothing could have prepared me better for what is happening today in my city than writing Alternity.
Here are some of the things we explored when writing the game:
• We examined how little decisions that sometimes seem perfectly banal build upon one another. It’s only months later—and eventually it might be years later—that you look back and realize that you are a genuine hero who has saved people’s lives because you chose what is right over what is easy, even if it means enormous sacrifices.I learned about bravery by writing Alternity. But I’m painfully aware that I’m not as brave as my characters.
• Conversely, maybe someday you’ll look back and realize that you chose to stick to doing only what was safe and what was legal, what the government told you could do, which seemed perfectly reasonable and rational at the time. And before you know it, you are well on your way on a pathway to hell, and you don’t even recognize yourself anymore.
• We looked at the way an oppressive regime destroys everything and distorts the truth, so that people look at the horror and somehow convince themselves they are not seeing what is right in front of their eyes.
• We examined stories of the tradeoffs you have to make between your own security and taking the right action, NOW, because a better time may never come.
• We looked at how education, health care, the courts, entertainment, and even family life end up being poisoned by a fascist regime.
• We told stories of how, even in terrible times, networks can be built to help people, operating right under the noses of the powers that be.
Being brave in times like these is much more difficult than I ever thought it would be. And yet, I am haunted by the feeling that I am not doing nearly enough because I know that I’m not one of the ones who has the most to fear. What goads us forward is realizing that we have to stand up for those who are in even greater danger than us.
We are doing the work under the Order Lock, using Signal, or meeting in person, being careful to ensure we are not tracked. The regime is monitoring us with helicopters and drones, biometric scanning, license plate scanning, and military-grade programs that suck information from our phones when we are simply outside going about our business.
The temptation to minimize, to look away, to comply, is overwhelming. But you must not do so.
Alternity explored how an oppressive regime picks a scapegoat class and brutalizes them, blaming them for all people’s dissatisfactions in life. It’s all the fault of the muggles. They are garbage. They are subhuman. You mustn’t empathize with them. You must root out any scrap of pity you might have for them. You must make their lives as difficult as possible.
And now we are under an oppressive government that is telling us the same things about immigrants. These are lies, and you must reject them.
No one is coming to save us.
It’s overwhelming sometimes, to see what is going on and think, even to cry out, why does nobody STOP this? We see the smashed and abandoned cars in the street with busted windows, and we know that ICE thugs have dragged yet another person from their car who was simply going to work. Or someone who stopped to exercise their constitutional rights by filming another warrantless arrest. There are signs on the lawns and tacked to the trees all around us that read, ‘ICE kidnapped our neighbor here.’ Masked thugs are lobbing tear gas at us in our parks and in our streets.
We call our senators and our representatives and our mayor and our governor and our city council members, over and over again, begging for help. Lawsuits have been filed with the courts. A few—-not all—-of the city council members have been on the streets, facing the tear gas with the rest of us, but most of our politicians have been absolutely useless. And the regime is ignoring court order after court order when rebuked for their unconstitutional actions.
It is a remarkably helpless feeling.
I’m struck by the fact that here in our metro community, just as in the world of Alternity, we have to keep going on without knowing whether we'll get through this and out the other side to a world that in any way resembles what we’ve lost. The life we have always known is crumbling away right before our eyes.
But we can’t let them weaponize the despair they are causing against us.
We must save ourselves and the people around us.
When you finally accept that you are on your own, you realize that you must turn to the people around you. And we have all been astonished by what we can accomplish together.
[
naomikritzer here]I have also been thinking a lot about Alternity lately, as my community (I live in St. Paul, and the occupation is affecting the whole metro area) has pulled together and also argued about priorities, tactics, opsec, and more.
Here’s part of what I’ve thought about in the context of the Fictional Dystopia I Wrote In vs. the Real Dystopia I’m Living In.
• Communication is so important.I will say I think we presented one kind of hilariously inaccurate lesson in Alternity, which is that perfect opsec is achievable and something to strive for. In Alternity, the whole story was kind of contingent on the Order not fucking up and letting a Death Eater onto the Order lock.
Minneapolis residents have a whole slew of online communication options, with varying degrees of secrecy. There are a host of Facebook groups (common everywhere, I think). There are hyperlocal WhatsApp groups, many of which were created in 2020 and went dormant for years, only to be reactivated. There are Signal groups: some hyperlocal, some not, and some vetted and others not. We also have something uncommon (possibly unique?), which is a private Bluesky feed restricted to locals. All the posts on it are public, but this means that if you want, you can go read a feed of people you might not otherwise follow, but who are your neighbors.
• Successful resistance requires a lot of diverse skills, and this means there’s a place for everyone.
In-game, we talked about how resistance required people from all four houses. This isn’t a metaphor I use much anymore because JKR turned out to be absolute fucking trash. But the idea that a lot of skills are needed: that’s absolutely true. The idea that not everyone has to be on the “go out on the front lines to confront ICE agents directly” team: critical. We choose our lanes here, because everyone who does the direct confrontational stuff is getting put on lists, and that makes it more dangerous for them to do stuff like grocery deliveries to people in hiding.
But also: there are absolutely key tasks that are being done by people with significant physical disabilities that keep them homebound. (Dispatch is one of the absolutely crucial roles in ICEWatch work.)
• You can be afraid of something and do it anyway.
There was a conversation the kids in Alternity had a number of times, about the ever-present threat of the Cruciatus curse, and how, while none of them was excited to get hit with it, they also refused to let that fear control their choices.
Literally, this is what ICE has done here with pepper spray, arrests, and murders. They wanted to terrorize us into submission, and it has backfired. I don’t particularly want to get arrested! I would strongly prefer not to get pepper-sprayed! But like so many people here, I’m not going to shrink away from doing completely legal stuff because of that fear.
• Leadership doesn’t matter as much as people think it does.
The Order had a formal set of leaders at all times, but the ISS lock was created by a pair of anarchists and was basically self-organizing, and what a lot of the Order members did had relatively little to do with what the current leader thought they ought to be doing.
The resistance here is leaderless. There are countless hyperlocal groups all following some similar strategies; there are countless people organizing with their neighbors to watch for ICE and protect the vulnerable. The lack of leadership creates some weird problems when there’s a conflict but also means that there’s no one person for the feds to swoop in and arrest.
Here in the Twin Cities, we are better protected by just assuming our chats are being monitored, taking various basic precautions (people use pseudonyms; the big Signal chats are being used to plan legal activities), and helping as many people who want to get involved find a way to help as possible. Because our best defense is not secrecy, our best defense is that right now we massively outnumber them, and they know it. And the more people connect with a group and start helping, the more true that is.
I wrote a whole thing about how to help from outside Minnesota that includes a section on organizing wherever you are, on the assumption that ICE might come to you, next. The one thing I really want to underscore is the advice at the part about building networks: that’s both Alternity-related and important. Everyone has networks they just don’t think about much: if you have kids at a school, the parents in the PTA or who you talk to at pickup time. If you’re in fandom, the groups that organize local conventions. Your physical neighbors. If you’re in a religious community, the people there. Start conversations with them. There’s an excellent post written by a Minnesota local on “The Cookie Theory of Collective Action,” which gets into some of the nitty-gritty of how you start to build power with the networks you’re already in.
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of purely “performative” stuff to help you find the people you can recruit for networks of work and care! Buy a big box of anti-ICE buttons and offer them to people at your science fiction book club; see who accepts. (And see who complains.) Are you on Signal? Get those other folks on a Signal group with you.
I wrote an op-ed for a big Houston paper and the deluge of bots in the Facebook comments made it clear that there’s someone out there deeply invested in convincing Texans who oppose ICE that they are fully isolated and alone. It’s the performative stuff that can be that first step in showing people, you’re really not, there are lots of us.
[
elisem here]OK, I have a few thoughts from both Alternity and here:
Not everybody can do every job. We are not interchangeable. In the checklist of things to consider before you join particular actions, there is an item about not causing more work for your friends, not making your neighbors have to rescue you, etc. Asthma, other disabilities, what we have to give, what other responsibilities do we have? Some people can’t be observers, or go to marches, or be out in public in ways and places that might get them gassed, et cetera. And others can’t talk about what they do.
The problem with the terror units is not that they’re insufficiently skilled or funded. It’s not that ICE needs better training or more money. They don’t need to be more efficient bullies, or to “show their mettle” as the saying in Alternity went. They know what they are doing. Their cruelty is the point. Instilling fear is the point. After Renee Good died, ICE said to numerous people who were observing, “Didn’t you people learn your lesson already? That’s why we killed that lesbian bitch!” Then they laughed. And after the laughing, usually they teargassed us.
Get ready first. Get ready now. There are a lot of us on their hate list, and they’ll get around to all of us unless they are stopped. And while they have lists of kinds of people they particularly want to hurt right away, they will enthusiastically expand that list to anyone who isn’t on it but shows willingness to stand up for people who are. (Bonus: Once you’re connected, you can use your groups and networks to deal with fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, or other disasters you might have besides state terror squads.)
Doing something is better than doing nothing. Even if you may not be doing the thing that finally breaks the logjam and lets justice roll down, you may be inspiring the people who do. You may be contributing to a rent fund that keeps the people who do housed. You may be feeding them. Or protecting their kids. Or writing the messages that eventually get through to the politicians who should be doing more. Or comforting people, listening to them, letting them decompress. A million different things.
Things to remember:
1. Do what you can reach. Ya gotta kick from where you are standing.
2. Don’t encumber your neighbors and allies with more casualties if you can help it. Work smart. (I don’t go face teargas, because I have asthma and diminished lung capacity and in a teargas circumstance I’m more likely to be a burden rather than an asset.)
3. Boost the efforts of other people when you can. There are lots of chances to do this.
4. Talk to people outside of your area, and encourage them to strengthen – or begin building – their networks where they are.
5. Build on pre-existing networks and relationships with places you are known to, because they will know of needs you don’t know. (Does the Coffee For Elders fund already know me because I’ve been using donations there as a way to celebrate selling a big piece of artwork for years? Excellent! They will know other folks with particular needs right now. Do I know people with social circles way beyond mine? They might know someone who knows what to do with ten or twenty or fifty extra dollars when I have some to share.) The morale boost of even ten dollars of help should not be underestimated.
6. For some people, living through all this without their kids or themselves getting taken is their part. Nobody knows what someone else is carrying. Do what you can, and be kind. If all else fails, be too busy to judge what somebody else is doing where you can see it.
There are a million different tasks, and we won’t know until later which ones were load-bearing — and we may be surprised by which ones kept people alive and doing their part. And do not neglect yourself. You aren’t expendable either.
P.S. A Small Afterthought: What’s Bugging Me About Some of the Protest Songs
The ones that talk about the stranger in our midst, or draw lines between long-time Minnesotans and new ones feel to me like they totally mean well but the language is missing something important. They say immigrant where we say neighbor. It’s been “stop killing our neighbors!” here for a while now. (And there are so many more names than often get listed.)
Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the songs! Thank you for the songs! Just maybe try out how it feels to call everybody neighbors. If they try to divide us, being neighbors unites us. Love our neighbor. It’s not how everybody talks, but if it fits for you, it can be a profound statement of commitment and respect, an acknowledgement that we aren’t any of us free until everybody is free, and a reminder that turning away from what is going on will not save us.
***
If you have made it this far (yes, we know this was long), thanks for listening. We would welcome your comments.