Leviathan Dot Com
👋 Hello again, my friend.
I have been an Adobe customer for twenty five years. Adobe products turned me into the digital creative that I am. I published my first zine in InDesign. I made my first cartoon in Flash. I published my first website in GoLive. And a few weeks ago, I canceled my subscription.
The instigating event was actually pretty small. I won't bore you with the technical details, but in short, Adobe had a bug that prevented users (like me) to export their animations into a JSON format for web display. Yes, the tool affected was an older one, and yes, maybe it's not Adobe's core business anymore. But the bug, first reported in September 2025, has been totally unaddressed, despite endless haranguing by myself and others on the Adobe support forum. Just ignored. For thousands of angry users.
And at a certain point, I just snapped. Why the hell am I giving this monolithic company any money at all?
Scale is both a lure and a poison. If we had to diagnose the early twenty-first century, we could say that human being were fooled by the idea of scale as progress. We won't just change the process of buying pants, we will change commerce itself. We won't just adjust the tariffs on imports, we will leave the EU. We won't just prioritize American manufacturing, we will elect an arsonist. All in, no backsies. We are in an age of ambition. We are in an age of hubris. Do the hegemons deserve this all-in trust? We're in the Finding Out phase.
I've recently been thinking quite a bit about Thomas Hobbes. The 17th century thinker is probably best known for his piece "Leviathan", on every freshman poli-sci student's syllabus. A refresher: Hobbes' whole thing was his conceit that life (especially during the English Civil War) was "nasty, brutish, and short". The State of Nature, as he called it, is awful. Enter "The Leviathan", the concept of the enormous state hegemon that protects you.
Hobbes argued that while you may hate many parts of the Leviathan – it can be cruel and arbitrary, enriching the connected and wealthy, and enamored of itself and its glory – it keeps you and your family safe and mostly prosperous, and hence, you tolerate the mis-steps of the Leviathan.
However, there is an event horizon where the deal falls apart. The hegemon of any circus is bearable as long as the Hobbesian ideal is kept. More often than not, leviathans don't fail because of some internal management misstep, or an outsider subverting their power. They fall apart because, at a certain point, a hegemon long enough in power forgets why they were given the reins in the first place.
As much as any leviathan would seem to be an inevitability, they are actually not. One only has to look at history to see the long records of unstoppable forces and undefeated empires that have been committed to the dustbins of history. Leviathans only stay around as long as they keep true to a fairly simple calculation of grief abated for the members of the leviathan.
The calculation simplified is:
(Grief abated – Mis-steps of Hegemon) = Hegemonic Tolerance
Every hegemon arc follows the same playbook on a long enough timeline. All monolithic hegemons are at base belief systems. The leviathan, made up of people, either believes in the contract, or doesn't. When pain for the members of the leviathan accumulates faster than the loyalty compounds, the leviathan is in deep trouble. The leviathan who fails in its base promise loses both access to its privilege, and the belief system that bolstered it. And once the belief system is shattered, it's quite rare that it is re-established.
Hobbes was writing during a civil war, when the old systems (monarchy) was dying. I think that deep down, Hobbes was terrified, and trying to convince his fellow Englishmen that the old order still mattered. Change is difficult. Change is scary.
I was never a USA-hater. I still like watching Tom Clancy movies about the heroic US hegemon. I so want those stories to be true. But in some ways, I am grateful for Trump and his thugs, as I think it has caused members of the bourgeoisie like me to stare directly into the face of how little our hegemon gives us these days. This is the core weakness of authoritarians. They assume that the power of the state is immutable, but it never, ever is. We have been on the forums of USA.com, asking for bug fixes for far, far too long.
It might be time to switch platforms.
XO, Joe
🤑 Programming Note: I finally opened up my store! Check it out.
✊ Fuck these bastards: Also, I have made some protest posters that are totally free to download for your local anti-Trump rally. I'm also selling anti-ICE merch that is raising money for the ACLU's immigrant rights project. We've already raised over $500! 100% of the profit of teeshirts sold goes to the ACLU. Go get it!
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