Later, Timmons forwarded one of those emails to me. It gave an eloquent and evocative account of just how rancid the vibe is these days. The writer said that when they and their spouse encounter this rot, they cite Stephen King's *Dark Tower* novels, quoting the oft-repeated phrase from that series: "The world has moved on."

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At this point, I should warn you that the following contains some *Dark Tower* spoilers, so if you're planning to read a decades-old (but very good) dystopian western/science fiction crossover series, and if spoilers bug you, this might not be the essay for you.

Spoiler alert!

Still with me? OK, then.

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In the *Dark Tower* novels, we crisscross a fallen world in which decay is all around us. The buildings are rotten, the machines have stopped working and no one knows how to fix them, babies and livestock alike are frequently born with deadly congenital defects. Much of the world has fallen into wasteland, cracked and barren.

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An army of wreckers, led by the demagogue John Farson (who styles himself "The Good Man") are slowly but surely conquering the land, laying waste to those few remaining outposts of civilization and conscripting the young men in the conquered lands to march on their neighbors.

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It wasn't always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn't golden - there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars - but life was *good*.

And then the world moved on.

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For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn't be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back the Second Law of Thermodynamics - an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration - has collapsed. The world has moved on.

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The *Dark Tower* series is a long, long, *long* Bildungsroman, with many detours through the life-stories of the characters in the ensemble cast, as well as the biographies of many of the figures they meet along the road. It's mostly an adventure novel, as road-trip tales tend to be, but those character studies and the lore that they surface - from our world and theirs - creates an overwhelming, many-layered, richly textured sense of loss and worse, of *despair*.

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For the world has moved on, and despite the love and care and bravery of many of the people in that world, the world cannot be redeemed. Each terrible day of those people's lives is the *best* day of the rest of their lives. From here on in, it only gets worse.

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When Timmons' reader and their spouse greet every fresh depredation in modern life - hours on the phone with customer service to resolve a billing error that the company repeats every month, say - with "the world has moved on," they are invoking something *heavy*. This isn't just a rancid vibe, it's the *fucking end-times*.

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For all that the *Dark Tower* novels are a series of cracking adventures and thoughtful character studies, they are also a *mystery*. Over and over again, we are made to ask ourselves, *why* has the world moved on? Was it John Farson and his army? Was it the Man in Black, the evil wizard whom the book's protagonist has pursued across time and space? Was it the Crimson King, the evil force whom the Man in Black serves?

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Well, yes - and no.

Midway through the novels, we learn that the Crimson King and his evil minions have laid siege to "the beams," vast ley-lines that span the universe and provide the force that pushes away entropy, creating breathing room where repair and care can live. "All things serve the beams," we're told. The beams are the organizing force of the universe, the answer to the riddle of how such pitiful things as we could have fought back remorseless entropy for so long.

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By attacking the beams, the villains of the series have all but snuffed out that force, and so *the world has moved on.*

When I read that email and the invocation of the *Dark Tower*, I was immediately struck by how apt this comparison is. Because, as I've written many times, there were *always* enshittifiers who would have plundered your data and money and treated you with naked contempt:

pluralistic.net/2025/03/04/obj…

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There were always enshittifiers, but those enshittifiers faced external forces that checked their wreckers' urge. They were held in check by competition, and regulation, and workers' sense of fairness and duty, and by the threat of new products and services that might pop up to correct the defects they deliberately introduced into their products by enshittifying them.

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And the foundation - the Dark Tower upon which all the beams converged- was antitrust enforcement, grounded in the idea that we could not afford to let any company - not a "good" company, nor a "bad" company - get so large that it could no longer be regulated, lest its executives become "autocrats of trade":

pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-…

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The same people who laid siege to antitrust law would later come after *all* forms of checks and balances. These are the people who gave us the "unitary executive" and Project 2025, and the collapse of accountability that has allowed the worst people to commit the gravest sins they could imagine and still reap vast fortunes. These beam-breakers wanted kings, and they got them.

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I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robins's book, *The Reactionary Mind*. Robinson asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies - various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc - "conservative"? What binds all these views together?

pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all…

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Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for *everyone* is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

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That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and antiracism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are *natural*, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

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If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that "diversity hires," promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that's just proof that shit happens - it definitely doesn't prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

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For conservatives, virtue is "whatever the people who are born to rule desire." Hence Frank Wilhoit's definition of conservativism, "exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." It's not a crime if the president does it. It's also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it.

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