Dark Times and the Refusal to Despair

Dark times, in Solnit's framework, are not times without light. They are times when the light is hard to see. The darkness is not primarily the darkness of acute catastrophe—earthquake, flood, fascist march—but the ordinary, accumulating darkness of systems that process without understanding, that optimize without caring, that operate at scales and speeds that make human oversight structurally difficult. The moment when Facebook's AI content moderation silenced Solnit herself while she was writing about protest is not a disaster. Nobody died. But it is diagnostic: the inane indifference of a system that cannot distinguish between a writer documenting political upheaval and one inciting it reveals the texture of dark times, the aggregate of millions of micro-decisions made by systems that cannot distinguish meaning from pattern. The refusal to despair in this context is not the insistence that things will get better. It is the refusal of the inference from damage to defeat, the insistence that the gap between what is and what