Perhaps the scariest realisation was that I am actually not convinced that we are fighting fascists anymore. I used to think that Silicon Valley were all technofascists, but the absolute disdain they have for State and Volk makes me feel that this is no longer a useful way to talk about them. There are definitely old-school fascists out there, such as in a certain middle eastern country, for example, but Silicon Valley's ability to instrumentalise their predictable, twentieth century geopolitical interests concerns me. The thing about new extremist ideologies is that they basically always say what they’re going to do before they do it. They can’t help themselves. Therefore, when Peter Thiel publishes a manifesto saying that Christian elites need to dominate the non-Western world, we should listen.

I’m not sure of the importance of finding (let alone keeping) a consistent or most desirable tonal register for these blog posts. I’m not even certain that they adequately reflect the state of mind I was in during a given month. Regardless, I plan to keep writing them, and come away from this year with some kind of keepsake of the experiences I’m having. I recently learnt that my grandmother printed out and bound my teenage travel blogs during my exchange year in Europe, and gave the book to my father.