Vox Meditantis

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Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

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Tuesday, 9th November 2032 – Somewhere near the Welsh borders

The rain hasn’t stopped for three days. I watched it sheet across the solar panels this morning, blurring the already weak November light, and thought about how appropriate it is – this endless downpour – for a week when half the country seems to be drowning in recriminations and the other half in smug vindication. The election postmortems are everywhere. Every forum I used to frequent, every platform I told myself I’d left behind, is awash with hot takes and cold fury.

I opened the community forum this morning. Hovered over the login button for a full minute before closing the window. What would be the point? They’re all there, dissecting Tuesday’s results in the States, drawing parallels to our own political stalemates, arguing about whether the water riots in Jakarta last month were a harbinger or an anomaly. Same voices. Same certainty. I used to be one of them – typing replies at 2 AM, certain I could change minds, build bridges, find some scrap of common ground in the wreckage.

Now I just watch the rain pool in the ruts of the track and wonder what I thought I was purchasing with all those years of engagement.

Which brings me to the question someone posted in the old philosophy group before I left: Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

Mine was access. £8,400 for a three-year membership to the Symposium Network – those invitation-only conferences where academics, activists, and industry types gathered to solve the world’s problems over catered lunches and panel discussions. I thought I was buying entry to the marketplace of ideas. What I actually bought was a front-row seat to watch clever people talk past each other whilst pretending to listen, then retreat to their respective echo chambers to complain about the other side’s bad faith.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m now paying £140 a month for satellite internet so I can sit in rural isolation and lurk in the same forums I swore I’d left. Connection without community. All the information, none of the belonging.

Today’s flood warnings came through at half-six. The Wye’s rising again. Environment Agency projections show another week of this and we’ll see scenes like last March – people sandbagging their houses, roads cut off, the usual footage of sodden furniture piled on pavements. But online, no one’s talking about the water. They’re all still drowning in the election, in their narratives about what it means, who’s to blame, whether this is the beginning or the end of something.

I drafted a comment this afternoon. Something about how we’re obsessing over political theatre whilst the rivers literally breach their banks. About how our marketplace of ideas has become a series of fortified stalls where we shout at each other across widening gaps. I wrote three paragraphs. Deleted them. Wrote two more. Deleted those too.

The problem isn’t that I don’t know what to say. It’s that I know exactly how it would be received. The progressive stall would accuse me of bothsidesism. The conservative stall would call me a climate alarmist. The techno-optimist stall would inform me that desalination and carbon capture will solve everything. And the doomers would welcome me to the end times with grim satisfaction.

I made tea instead. Watched the kettle steam and thought about all the ways water moves – underground aquifers, atmospheric rivers, the hydrological cycle we learned about in school. Water doesn’t care about our marketplace. It finds its own level, carves its own channels, flows where it will. It doesn’t need permission to belong.

But I’m not water. I’m a woman alone in a cottage with satellite internet and three years of conference access gathering dust in my account history. I’m angry because I want to belong to something real, something that matters. I’m frustrated because every time I reach for it, I find only the simulation – the endless churning of opinion, the performance of community without its substance.

The rain’s easing now. There’s a break in the clouds to the west, pewter light spilling across the hills. Tomorrow they’re saying it might clear. The rivers will recede. The forums will move on to the next crisis, the next outrage, the next opportunity for everyone to demonstrate their positions.

And I’ll still be here at the edge, watching the water flow past, trying to decide whether the marketplace of ideas is somewhere I want to wade back into, or whether isolation is simply the price of refusing to drown.

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Late 2020s-early 2030s, marked by intensifying climate volatility and polarised democratic politics, form the backdrop to this entry. In early November 2032, US election analysis dominated global media while the UK faced recurrent flood warnings along rivers such as the Wye amid wetter autumns attributed to a warming climate. Public debate increasingly migrated to online platforms, where “marketplace of ideas” forums amplified factionalism and burnout among moderators and participants. Subsequent years saw continued UK flood resilience measures and infrastructure adaptation, alongside regulatory scrutiny of large platforms and misinformation. The period is now studied for how climate stress and digital discourse co‑shaped civic trust, participation, and belonging.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.