>”Berlin, where I lived for seven years, has long been ground zero for this ‘we’. As a prototypical hub for revolving artists (and now techies), the city’s brand exploits the fantasy of freedom and collaboration with minimal commitment or responsibility.” “Assuming that nationalistic tendencies will not slow but accelerate post-pandemic, this is the right moment to invent—or simply recognize—the various wes that are embedded in place and ecosystemic in scale. The construction and collapse of cosmopolitan internationalism in Zweig’s era bred globalization and a new form of internationalism premised on the same we. Perhaps now we can stop thinking in mutually exclusive terms of nationalism or internationalism and construct new forms of action that respond to ossified nationalist structures while dispensing of their—and our—terminology altogether”

“Can you participate in strengthening the health of a social body and resisting state power if your own body isn’t there? What if your body has never been there? How can you know what the local problems really are if you don’t share them? How long do you have to live somewhere to be a local? How can the elite leverage their power while also ceding it? Do you have to have a personal stake in struggle to wage it? Can you share responsibility if you don’t share risk? Or is participating in struggles that don’t affect you precisely what solidarity means?”