About Sabot

We live in a global extinction economy where the bloated zombie of capitalism is mindlessly extracting every ounce of wealth it can from our dying planet and its desperate population before the entire thing collapses. The billionaire class wants so badly to become the trillionaire class that they’re willing to burn everything down to do it.

Despair is tempting. Doomer blackpill hopelessness is always right there. Even when I was trying to just write about video games over at Rogue, I wrote about mass layoffs initiated by trillion-dollar companies more often than games I enjoyed. But hopelessness is just another tool of exploitation. Being able to imagine a better world is one more thing those in power want to keep from you.

The idea for Sabot as its own site grew out of a series of articles I wrote at Rogue that examined why the cyberpunk genre of speculative fiction didn’t prepare us for the future we’ve found ourselves in. The same real-life villains kept coming up, the same themes of power, control, and corruption. More and more, I kept getting pulled toward reality — the politics, technology, and all of the new and exciting ways power and oppression keep popping up in our everyday lives.

Framing it through the lens of video games or speculative fiction started to feel more and more forced. There was a time when AI was expected to raise interesting philosophical questions about sapience and what it means to be human. Instead, we got generative AI, a soulless imitation of intelligence built on wholesale theft and lies, that delivered with it an oligarchic surveillance state.

In the dystopian panopticon speculative fiction novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (one of the books I read for my cyberpunk series), the thing that cracks the fascist state is smiles. And that, more than anything, is what I took away from all of the terrible things I wrote about and read.

The word sabotage has its origins in labor disputes. The misguided insult luddite does, too. So does redneck. The story of human history is one of people standing together just as often as it is a story of oppression and exploitation.

Hope is rebellion. Kindness is punk. Joy is resistance. Solidarity is an act of sabotage.

The end might be coming, but what comes next is up to us. And if we stand together against the horrors, we can build something better.