Autonomies

From Ill Will (25/01/2026)

The frozen city is under siege. In the long cold winters at the heart of the Midwest the air can get so cold it hurts to breathe. Masked mercenaries in unmarked vehicles rove through the snowbanks, snatching people off the street and shuttling them to detention centers for indefinite periods of time. Each of the mercenaries is paid tens of thousands in a “signing bonus” (up to 50k, and 60k in student loan forgiveness) simply to take up arms on behalf of the embattled regime. Faced with a slow-motion economic crisis in which a surreal, state-backed stock market boom is paired with persistent stagflation in the everyday economy, bootlicking is one of the few industries seeing any real growth. As the streets freeze in Minneapolis, the S&P reaches record highs. Meanwhile, the last year’s employment growth was so dismal that, after the numbers were released, the regime moved quickly to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and threaten media outlets reporting on the figures.¹ In addition to declining employment due to the freeze on immigration, the depth of the crisis is signaled by the ongoing drop in the Labor Force Participation Rate, which served as the largest single drag on employment growth in the first half of 2025 — indicating that more and more people are dropping out of the labor force entirely, but not being picked up by unemployment statistics.² We can therefore think of the siege as sort of mercenary Keynesianism, making up for the lack of employment in the new AI-powered defense sectors that have been the focus of the larger plunder-and-restructure approach to governance.