Everything is In-Between

How I went from an agent of change to an agent of care

mycelial strands

I’ve begun this piece maybe twenty times in the past three weeks. By the time I’ve finished the first paragraph, some new thing happens that obsolesces whatever event I’m writing about. And I’m not even writing about the news, so much as using one shared moment as a “peg” for a piece about some larger phenomenon or strategy.

How do I even write in a way that is appropriate to the moment, when the moment keeps changing? Trump wins (help people breathe), Carter dies (highlight an era where climate change was an accepted fact and a president told us to turn down the heat and wear a sweater), Musk takes power (techno-feudalism, getting off social media, reversion to the mean), disappearing transgender (the vulnerability of emphasizing language in identity), Zuckerberg saying he’ll be more like Musk (ends content moderation, says he wants more masculinity at Facebook), Steve Bannon speaking coherently about the threat that tech bros pose in DC (considering having a conversation with him about this betrayal of MAGA middle class)….Then the California fires, the Gaza maybe-truce/maybe-real-estate-deal, then Chinese Deepseek AI, then RFK, Tulsi, Hegseth, then ending all US funding to everything, then not, then the tariffs and stock market crash, then not. And plane crashes blamed on DEI. And ebola (yes, ebola!) back in Uganda and now without the USAID…

The problem is that there’s been so much change, so many things, that it’s hard to talk about any thing. But maybe we don’t need to be talking about any thing. As I’ve been suggesting through my last few pieces, these subjects and news stories are more like the figures on the TV than the ground on which we actually live. Yes, they are real events and have real repercussions. But to most of us, most of these phenomena are not directly related to our lived, moment-to-moment experience. Even if our house is burning down in LA, the story of Ebola in Uganda is still just a story on the news. We have enough to deal with.

So yes, events and massive changes are coming through, as quickly and furiously as Terence McKenna told us they would back in the 1970s when he theorized a peak of novelty around now. Like when we leap an order of magnitude from speed to acceleration, exponential change creates the sensation that the only thing happening is change itself. So we end up just watching this kaleidoscope of new thing replacing new thing folding over onto new thing, new thing. We can’t adjust course much less make sense of the last new thing before the next new thing comes along.

Maybe we shouldn’t try to.

Yes, we continue to care about things. I am not saying to move into a state of denial — but I am choosing an alternative to watching the news all day in a state of paralysis when I could be attending to real people, some of who are being impacted by those very things. I will still read the paper and go to C4AA, Church of Stop Shopping or Indivisible meetings, but I am not going to obsess over every Truth Social decree. Meanwhile, I’m working toward an alternative, complementary strategy to paralysis, impotency, and despair.

So yes, we take care of people whose houses burned down, we assist refugees in Gaza to the extent we have the ability to do that, and we help everywhere else we intersect with people in distress: kids who are confused, immigrants losing their status, students losing their funding, neighborhoods losing their water. There’s enough to do right outside our windows, whether or not we watch the things on the screen.

As for making sense of the world and what’s happening, I don’t think it’s a matter of focusing on those things, but trying to get a sense of what is in between those things. Less attention to the individual pictures on the TV set, and more attention to what is happening on the ground. It has less to do with the news stories we may not be able to change, and more to do with how we process and metabolize their implications. I keep quoting the medieval Hebrew Unetaneh Tokef prayer in this regard: we may not be able to change what is decreed in the Book of Life, but we can lessen the negative impact by being compassionate with one another. Or as the Ancient Greek Stoics argued, we have less influence over what powerful dictators might do to us than we do over our response to those actions.

More than any individual trauma coming down the pike, what matters most is how we are going to engage with one another through the unavoidable traumas ahead. And that means getting off the TV or Internet, and immersing ourselves in the real world. You can probably find out what you need to about global events (if you care to) in a good hour every evening. PBS, NPR, and the Guardian, are all pretty straightforward.

For my part, I’m living in New York City again, acting as “scholar in residence” for a social club called CX Collective, developing a live show/salon based on my book Present Shock, opening a new way for people to take graduate courses with me at CUNY without having to pursue an entire masters degree, expanding Team Human to live events, and prioritizing activities that promote the connections between people and things rather than the things themselves. I’ll be coming live to Indiana, Austin, Zurich, and Berlin in the next couple of months.

My own obsession with the in-between was triggered this month by my daughter having a big surgery that was largely speculative. She had been having all sorts of symptoms over the past five or six years, and we were going from doctor to doctor to figure it out. Everyone had a different idea of what it could be, from auto-immune conditions to diet to anxiety. Well-meaning gaslighting from a medical establishment who only looked at things a certain way.

We finally ended up at a holistic gynecologist, Karli Goldstein — her Instagram is PatientSurgeonMomma, which should give you some idea of how she approaches medicine. She suspected endometriosis, which is when uterine-type tissue grows in between someone’s organs, fusing things and wreaking havoc in all sorts of awful inflammatory ways. There’s no way to see it on a scan; there’s no test. A surgeon has to go in to find it. And very little is known about it, because it’s not in a specific organ. Not a thing. We have heart doctors and kidney doctors, but in-between doctors? Not so much. Plus, it’s a woman’s disease, so research on it is about a century behind, too.

It’s an interesting metaphor and reality for this moment, no? For becoming distracted by things, and learning to explore the in-between? Of course, the surgeon found a ton of the stuff, fusing things like the appendix, colon, ovaries…. Everything was stuck together down there, but in a way that couldn’t be detected by looking at the things themselves. Connective tissue wasn’t even acknowledged, much less treated as an organ, by Western medicine until the last few years. They didn’t even acknowledge its existence, or the meridians, gut biome, or any of the other liminal, in-between things that actually compose the community of organisms our bodies represent and share.

The organs are just the figures; the connections and interplay between them is the ground. It’s a bit like mycelial networks, which sprout little mushrooms above the soil — figures we can see, but which represent a tiny fraction of the global networks of fibers beneath and between them. Those of us in the cultural “underground” who have any perception, understanding, or faith in that dimension of our reality are very often gaslit by those who don’t. Just like mutual aid proponents will be gaslit by capitalists. Those who can only see the figures.

My poor daughter had been gas lit for so long that in the recovery room she made a video post with the surgeon (and me) dancing in celebration of “POV: you just had surgery and removed 17 spots of endometriosis from ur body #laparoscopy #validation.” As if to say, I was not faking it. This is real. This, in-between space. The unacknowledged ground. Women. The stuff without nouns, which haven’t been assigned “thing” status. The stuff that’s not a metric on the TV, like GDP or DJI.

This in-between zone is the same one where we find compassion, connection, identification, and the respiration and metabolism of life itself. It is real, yet invisible to those trapped in “the mindset,” as well to those of us who have succumbed to the endless scroll of things.

The alternative reality in which we actually exist does not show up so easily in the medical scans and their equivalents — that Cartesian grid we use to model spatial reality. (You remember: those X/Y axes we used to locate points and draw lines in high school?) Where on the grid of latitude and longitude lines are we, and who does it matter to, really? What does it really describe about our state or experience? The boat navigating across the ocean may need those coordinates, but the surfer or even the tiny fishing vessel may care more about the waves. Mapmakers can’t see those movements; the waves do not exist. But that’s where the action is.

Anything like true social justice, mutual aid, or “team human” as I’ve come to call it, happens in that mycelial, connected, doula space where compassion resides and domination has no place: there are no subjects and objects, just relationships.

Now I’ve spent most of life and career thinking of myself as an agent of change. I grew up at the end of the Vietnam War protests, and mixed one part Brechtian activist theater to another part prophetic Judaism and ended up at the TWO protests and Occupy Wall Street. I really believed we could use those deliberate mechanisms to create policy, fight the power, and create measurable change. Actual progress. That’s really the premise of prophetic Judaism: that we should focus on making the world a better place.

Occupy Wall Street marked something of a turning point for me. It was a protest without specific demands because it was meant to be permanent. Less about getting a thing done than occupying a new normative state. I tried to explain that to CNN at the time, to much ridicule. Yet the protests were successful, at least for me, in that they taught me about a different sort of occupation. The encampments themselves were laboratories in collective governance, experimenting with new, post-parliamentary modes of forging consensus (the general assembly), and even the “human microphone” for group communication. The majority of time was spent in small seminar sessions, led in a peer to peer fashion. It’s what inspired me to start teaching at CUNY, where I feel I do make a difference, albeit in a more interstitial way.

It’s also what inspired me to write my book Present Shock, which argued that embracing the present — the real, lived present — was a healthy way for us to respond the to collapse of narrative, and our inability to make meaning in traditional ways now that the story was breaking down. Rather than creating a new story and erecting a new figure, we simply try to occupy this space together, looking to each other rather than to the idols we use to occupy our attention.

But that was awfully hard. Instead, many people turned to things that promised faster, noticeable results like the Tea Party and Trump and MAGA and authoritarianism; while others got some things to protest against. Many of us got to become activists, which was as easy as putting on a pink hat, and then try to push against the authoritarianism impulse before it’s too late. One side tries to crash the institutions of government while the other tries to preserve them.

Many of us are confused, finding ourselves fighting for the very globalist institutions — World Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Union and trade zone — we had been protesting against ten years earlier. Last week, I wrote about the way the institutions we may have once thought were promoting Enlightenment values or developing the world’s poorest nations were actually just opening their markets to exploitation by multi-national corporations, putting them into debt, extracting their resources, enslaving their people, and destroying their environments. Colonialism 2.0, masquerading as global benevolence.

Many of us who spent our time as activists were attempting to affect change at scale through one or more of those cynically devised institutions — through systems most of us believed were more than a superficial layer on the same old domination. I’m happy for just 1% of us, or three million Americans to watch the news all day and dedicate their time and energy to devising global solutions together, while the other 335 million of us stand ready to vote or march or do whatever will help them enact the policy they’re working towards. That distribution of labor frees up a lot of time and energy for the 99%. to get on with the activities here on the ground that can reduce our dependence on top-down institutions and corporations to serve our needs — reducing their power over us in the process.

I find myself slowing changing from an agent of change to an agent of care. I’m less confident in the impact my activism might have on policy than I am about the impact my care may have on other human beings, as well as how they might trickle up to the systems that need changing.

What I've seen work in real life are activities such as mutual aid, caring for neighbors, bringing meals to firefighters or the newly homeless in Los Angeles. I’ve experienced the power of friendship, kindness, or just listening, processing, and metabolizing. A lot of the activism I did and much of what I see functions more like traditional medicine that's looking at the organs — at the things — where the care addresses the in between, the interstitial, maybe even the palliative. And radical care, radical compassion may just be a surer path to the kinds of change that activism is trying to create. Even if care is a more subtle, seemingly indirect approach. And in a moment like this, when there are so many things coming so quickly that it's hard to know what to say about anyone one of them, I start to realize that the things I have to say about those things don't matter; that watching those things and being addicted to The Trump Show Season Two, with guest star Elon Musk, and each new exciting episode is itself a distraction from the care I could be giving at any given moment. It also compromises my readiness to take action when a real activist or someone who actually knows what we should do tells me, “hey, Rushkoff, show up here for this thing.”

I’m not talking about socialism so much as the social. Together, we can retrieve and rebuild the social reality: the inter-human and ideally inter-species connections that actually define living existence, and serve as the culture in which everything else grows.