A Little Girl’s Memories of America’s Future

This is what happens when you do nothing.

Photo Alex Alvarova: A Woman in the Factory, 2012

They have hollowed out the real essence of the words "state" and "nation," which once represented places where one could belong, where mutual cooperation, assistance, and security existed. They have filled these words with empty roars that soothe the fearful and frustrated, leaving behind mere husks, hollow pumpkins.

I don’t know if you realize it, but in the twenty-first century, of which we've just experienced the first quarter, powerful nation-states no longer exist. Instead, we've witnessed the rise of global hegemonies whose power vastly surpasses that of nations and their budgets. They operate everywhere and nowhere. Their grip on power has essentially erased the meaning of the word nation without us even noticing.

Apart from a few exceptions, almost all governments today are weaker and more insignificant than these empires, which function across all languages and cultures, arrogating to themselves the right to reshape and modify their verbal and narrative DNA according to their business interests. Yes, I am speaking about the overlords of Silicon Valley.

Their power has long since transcended our definitions of law and constitution as understood by nineteenth-century nation-states. We have neither the vocabulary, the legal framework, nor the ability to fully grasp everything they do and how they operate. Moreover, they actively sabotage our efforts to understand. Our outdated states must remain transparent, yet they may claim business secrets. We submit to them detailed data X-rays of our bodies and psyches, while in return, they reveal nothing about themselves. Instead, what they willingly disclose are top-notch performances by their PR departments—the finest business propaganda money can buy. Our slowly awakening consciousness of our rights is placated by their spin on freedom of speech, hard work, high intellect, and the right to rule.

We are left with fragmented cultural tribes within and across nations, trying to navigate through the chaos of the information these hegemonies distribute while clinging to the remnants of our identities. Dog lovers, travelers, online shoppers, seniors, menopausal women, cyclists, incels, esoteric mothers. We are no longer nations; we are fractured cultural tribes led by digital shamans and influencers wielding virtual coins, leaders of political cults, and filtered beauties on Instagram.

We stick together within our tribes—digital peons cultivated by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, harvested for attention, observed like fish in an aquarium, our behaviors (both commercial and political) cultivated, our data mined, our emotions measured. Often at the price of bloodshed, since the engineers of these new hegemonies were simply not gifted by providence with abilities beyond their narrow expertise. When it comes to anticipating the impact of their programming on our mental and physical health—and consequently on the economy—they are astonishingly naïve.

Yet our surviving tribes and crowds exhausted by information warfare hold the weaker end of the rope. We are involuntary conscripts on their battlefields. Many of us never realized when and how we were drafted. Right now, we're mindlessly attacking each other everywhere. Those who play don't cause trouble—they want to keep us busy.

Photo Alex Alvarova, 2010

Something like Detroit, you know?

I am a girl from a steel town in a communist dictatorship. That was my tribe. A small town where steel mills, cement factories, asbestos factories, ignition-candle factories, refrigerator factories, and textile plants set the cultural tone. Before the communists arrived, my town was a lovely destination for visitors from Prague, who, after visiting Karlštejn Castle, sought something more and ventured further afield. Situated among hills near one of the oldest Celtic archaeological sites, the villages, rivers, and streams around bear Celtic names and radiate energy from ancient Celtic ley lines. The gently rolling hills and valleys protect a river that is a source of beauty and life. The town seemed perfect for romantic encounters by Prague’s residents. But the communists ruled there for sixty years, imposing an anti-romantic counterculture. During the period when the working class was imposed as the cultural model, the town became covered in dirt, thick layers of industrial soot, foul-smelling smog, and the Baroque façades of colorful houses on the old square began to resemble props from a post-apocalyptic farce. I grew up in a small, gray housing estate with worn-out lawns, a single sandbox, and a carpet-beating frame. Our miserable apartment blocks—that was my territory.

In kindergarten, we mostly played war, despite it being the 1970s. Our tribes divided into "Russian partisans and fascists," and we excitedly greeted passing airplanes shouting, "Ours are coming!" as if the German occupation had ended just days before. Our war games were certainly influenced by the huge barracks and military housing blocks near the kindergarten, where many of my friends lived. Our after-school games on the sandbox were no different. There were "bunkers"—primitive concrete tunnel structures left behind from a brief period when actual nuclear shelters were constructed, driven by constant televised threats of nuclear war.

Our "civilian" housing blocks lacked bunkers, much to the disappointment of us "ordinary" kids. But children from military families generously invited us in. These children had other benefits too, notably secretly stolen "alarm cartridges," whose detonation behind bunkers—after quickly learning how to wrap these tiny golden objects in paper and ignite them—drove their potbellied officer fathers mad, often resulting in wild chases across the housing estate: "Didn't I tell you, you little bastard, to stay out of my briefcase!"

Photo Alex Alvarova: Scrap metal in my mind, 2012

Into distant lands

When I was six, I learned to read, and my time spent with other children began to fracture seriously. There were so many fascinating things in books. And no one to share them with.

My world began drifting off into distant lands—to the wild West, the Middle East, and Africa. The more I read, the less willing the neighborhood kids became to wait for me, and my parents often had to push me outside and confiscate my book just to get me some fresh air. The local library became my sanctuary, a place I rushed to at every opportunity, seeking fresh proof that another world, other countries, and different cultures existed.

At first, my parents praised my early reading habits, but soon they became concerned. I began to stand out from other children—I read everything, too quickly, spoke oddly adult conversations, often nonsensical, my vocabulary changed, and I started gaining weight (there’s nothing better than curling up under a table with a good book and devouring chocolate). Alarmed that they might be raising a little autistic, bespectacled nerd, my parents began confiscating my books and forced me to play sports, interact with other children, and go outside. Of course, this only deepened my love for books and dislike of sports.

When the street was dug up for sewer repairs and the workers left in the afternoons, trench warfare began. The fight was "civilians against military kids," and since the civilian team was all boys who didn’t want a little girl on their side, I had to join "the enemy," where girls my age were welcome. The oldest, seven-year-old Klara, constantly monitored enemy positions with binoculars, commenting on the amateurish behavior of the enemy commander who kept sticking his head out of the trench: “That son of a bitch is pissing me off!”

Ah yes, vulgarity. It was everywhere. From a young age, it permeated our nursery rhymes, school conversations, and restroom graffiti, even the harshest and crudest words. By sixth grade, reading crude limericks scrawled in thick marker on the girls' restroom walls was completely normal.

My parents had been raised in environments where vulgarity wasn't spoken (my grandparents were opera singers, painters, teachers, and one mathematician). But I grew up among the children of soldiers and workers, whose lively language taught me their manners. I knew that even whispering the things I heard on the playground could earn me a slap or an ice cream ban. Communism taught us that one language was used outside and another at home, so I had no trouble switching between these worlds from an early age.

Over time, I learned to distinguish the environments I was in, adapting my behavior and speech accordingly. But deep inside, I remained Eliza Doolittle from the steel town.

Photo AI

“WHAT DO THEY HAVE?”

My tribe didn't believe in women's equality, even though it was proudly proclaimed by the regime, with illustrations of heroic women laborers in overalls displayed in every school and textbook. The entire state relied heavily on women's labor and pain, which went unmentioned. Little girls were raised to work for free, cook, clean, serve, and remain silent. Our working mothers, celebrated on television as heroines of socialist labor, dragged swollen feet squeezed into nylons daily, hauling bags filled with groceries, working double shifts—one at factories and another at home caring endlessly for everyone around them, seen as invisible and taken for granted. Beneath their nylons, blue veins and unshaven legs were visible; they wore shapeless skirts and coats in dreary colors (grayish beige, gray, tired blue). They adored the fatty pastries from local bakeries that eased their sorrow and exhaustion after sleepless nights spent silently ironing and washing until collapse. They didn’t have washing machines; they lived in apartments the size of a mid-sized rural barn, with gas heaters and ugly central heating radiators, and sadly twisted plantations of sickly houseplants enduring neglect.

Their conversations took place in ritual ceremonies—angry yet hushed gossip about men (all men), women who refused to "fit in," and valuable exchanges about what stores had available.

“WHAT DO THEY HAVE?” was one of the first phrases I learned. My mother, resourceful and sociable, used it daily. The regime's economic collapse made store availability critical information. The tribe rewarded loyalty with timely alerts like “Eggs arrived!” triggering collective runs to form long lines outside shops. Fathers didn’t bring home mammoth meat; it was the heroic mother with swollen legs who secured bananas and demanded admiration. Loot was anything socialist distribution couldn't ensure. Every now and then, something became unavailable or overpriced. Aggressive idiots ran the economy into the ground and forced us to applaud.

The tribe of mothers (single women had no network access) developed a sophisticated socio-informational system with clear hierarchies, competitive feats (“I stood in line three hours for oranges!”), social capital (“She knows the butcher!”), and bluffing (“No, they had nothing,” my mother would say, hiding her bag of acquired fruit so that the unpleasant neighbor wouldn't notice and envy her).

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Envy and Campfires

Envy was part of institutionalized relationships, and whoever didn't envy others wasn't part of the tribe. You could envy absolutely anything, given that there was almost nothing available in stores. Envy established a competition without rules, where the only thing that counted was what you had at home. How it got there didn't matter. Morality was for weaklings and frail intellectuals in Prague.

In the tribe of Beroun women, everything had its established rules. It went without saying that life effectively ended with marriage at twenty (the regime needed children, so it built many miserable apartments, granted loans to newlyweds, and didn't support education, which only delayed childbirth). After marriage came sixty years of indifferent existence, consumed by frantic searches for anything available, wild drinking of cheap alcohol at work, and idiotic communist propaganda on TV, interspersed with approved soap operas and comedy shows. The people were entertained and forgot their misery and moral humiliation. Without television and pop culture, the regime would have collapsed.

Communist indoctrination was omnipresent, even in preschool. Pictures of Lenin and Stalin hung everywhere. We sang communist and, later, Russian songs. Teachers spoke a strange Newspeak we children had to learn. It was like learning a new language within your own—words like comrade, socialism, proletariat, peace movement sounded entirely normal to us. At home, the world was safe and ordinary; outside, it was just a learned play we had to perform.

War was talked about constantly; films were about war, songs were about partisans, and children’s competitions awarded trophies symbolically connected to war. We were raised by the Soviets to prepare for war—perhaps the most characteristic trait of the Russian culture implanted in us. I remember running a competition called "For the Partisan Submachine Gun," which involved quickly running a team to the finish and solving a mixture of communist propaganda tasks and scouting skills along the way. My classmates convinced me to join the contest, even though I warned them my running resembled more of a rapid walk interrupted by fainting attempts. We deservedly lost. This competition symbolized our entire childhood. The communists set up a course for us at school, like a flea circus, handing out identical propagandistic tasks to everyone (learn a poem, sing a song, draw a Soviet hero, retell a Soviet story), tasks intended for survival (math problems, multiplication tables, mental division), and short-term memory tests labeled as education (I excelled at these). Deviating from the predetermined path had severe consequences. The essential lesson children learned early for their own good was "don't stand out, don't differ." Unfortunately, I wasn't good at this, so I at least tried to look like a harmless simpleton, an alien slightly out of step, who wasn’t intentionally provoking comrades.

Photo Alex Alvarova: Untitled, 2012

At school and work, we said things "for the comrades," while at home we used real, functional, and factual information ("I'm hungry," "I got a C in spelling," "I want another book for my birthday"). Outside, the world was dangerous, enveloped by a dark haze of vague risks that parents hid from us when we were very young.

I first grasped the nature of this hidden risk when I was ten. A man in a dirty coat and hat staggered down our street, shouting, crying, and angrily cursing. Quite amused, I ran to fetch my dad: "Look, dad, a drunk!" Surprisingly, my father didn't laugh. He listened carefully to the man's shouting, then quietly said with a glassy stare into the distance something I didn't initially understand: "Or perhaps that gentleman is coming back from an interrogation."

That was the first time I learned anyone around me could potentially be an informant for the secret police and that any careless public statement could send one of my parents not just for interrogation, but to prison. Suddenly, the discipline they'd instilled in us—what to say, where to say it, and what to avoid saying—gained a very concrete, survival-oriented meaning. It was training for professional brain-splitting.

From preschool onward, our education seamlessly merged with indoctrination—games, song lyrics, working class parades, Russian vocabulary, and various things we inevitably grew fond of, because a child's brain is neuroplastic and regards learning anything as a pleasure.

Our reading books featured kitschy pictures and a mix of folk rhymes alongside impossible communist rubbish, for which some distinguished comrade received royalties as consolation prizes so they wouldn't annoy serious poetry publishers. Fortunately, those publishers generally employed editors with good taste.

Since most communists were unbearably stupid, their censorship in spoken and written word had a limited reach. They lacked both the education and taste necessary to sort everything out effectively. They couldn't fully prevent the publishing of quality poetry, reproductions of fine art, or the Czech translations of American country, rock, swing, and jazz lyrics. The censorship office primarily pursued dissident economic and political views, prohibited praise of the West, and banned any criticism of our Big Brother from the East. Even raising an eyebrow in disagreement was punishable or at least noted. But art they didn't understand and texts harmlessly translated into Czech didn't bother them. Interestingly, Czech tramp subculture, which ceased troubling communists in the eighties, was closely tied to American country music from the Civil War era. Czechs enthusiastically went camping like their Scout children once did, lit campfires, and played guitar chords to songs about John Brown, General Custer, and the Battle of Little Bighorn. They had absolutely no idea what they were singing about, but America remained a distant dream we dreamt behind closed doors at home or around campfires at night. The regime didn't mind since the songs were about long-dead people, none of whom could demonstrably be labeled capitalists or stockbrokers.

Tramp culture inexplicably irritated me deeply, perhaps because it was everywhere and seemed whiny and kitschy, whereas my adolescent tribe thrived on cynicism, nihilism, and dark humor.

Photo Alex Alvarova: Scrap metal of my mind, 2012

All was absurd and we loved it

Without intending it, my high school peers and I began to love absurd poetry and theater, absurd and dark humor—everything communists had no chance of understanding. My universe soon expanded to include a vast amount of poetry. My homeroom teacher discovered my talent for reciting verses and began sending me to every conceivable poetry competition. Each victory I achieved gave school directors—first at elementary and then at high school—an argument for allowing even a "class enemy’s" daughter to study and contribute to socialist education. Poetry taught me to distinguish between trash and art, between propaganda and genuine engagement, even if sometimes the boundaries were blurred. Knowledge of Russian and world poetry not only expanded my imagination and taught me to use both hemispheres of my brain simultaneously, but also gave me the ability to read between the lines and uncover the real meaning behind words and speech. Techniques in spoken-word recitation enabled me to detect in others' voices things most people missed—tremors, hesitation, suppressed joy or fear. Both skills were extraordinarily useful for survival in the communist regime and laid the foundation for my lifelong interest in human communication and methods to shape that communication for a desired effect.

My tribe was once also the Czechoslovak nation. It's hard to say if it still exists. Perhaps only among those born in the seventies, like myself. In any case, the "Czechoslovak identity," rooted in knowledge of both languages and geography of both countries, isn't easily discarded. Perhaps that's why it hurts to see our neighbor Slovakia now falling prey to Russia through hybrid warfare.

The Prague Spring

When I was one year old, Russians came in tanks and shot dozens of people, mostly random passersby in Prague, including mothers with strollers. It was the first attempt in twenty years of captivity that my "tribe," the Czechoslovaks, tried to break free from Soviet dominance. Of course, it was incredibly naive, since Soviets always only respected physical, brutalizing force and never cared much about economics or ideology. They were simpler—whatever they occupied, they held, regardless of what they said or how they behaved. That was just folklore.

The Soviets quickly cured us of the naivety that their game of communism and prosperity mattered. Immediately after seizing power in 1948, they clearly demonstrated—through torture of elites and execution of political opponents—the type of culture they intended to spread and demand imitation. Communists in 1968 foolishly hoped that Russians wanted communism and a socialist economy, believing the ideology mattered. They couldn’t care less. If the belief in hallucinogenic mushrooms and the descent of a toadstool messiah ensured world dominance, half the planet would have been on a trip by now—a very bad one. All they really wanted was to steal—everything from uranium and coal to car parts. They needed our mineral resources, bright minds, and disciplined labor that generated high GDP. And they sheared us like sheep.

Their invasion in 1968 plunged what remained of humanity, decency, creativity, and productivity in my tribe into complete nihilism. My father, who, like many others, briefly hoped that 1968 would bring liberation and a retreat by the Russian hegemon, lost his job. Wherever he went afterward, his "political file" preceded him. It described our entire family as unreliable with dangerous opinions. Today, an employer could likely buy such a file legally on Facebook, or a communist apparatchik might obtain it free "for state needs."

Initially, my mother also struggled to find decent employment. The regime had a weapon powerful enough to break stronger people than my parents: punishing children by denying them education and life opportunities. I barely made it to high school. The humiliating moment of climbing the stairs to the principal’s office, armed with my excellent grades and competition awards, will stay with me forever. I was fourteen. I sat in the hallway outside the principal’s office for about two hours while the comrades discussed it among themselves. Finally, they allowed me to attend high school, sparing future consumers from poorly tailored jackets or badly baked cakes—God certainly hadn't gifted me with skillful hands.

Photo Alex Alvarova: Woman in the Factory, 2012

Velvet Revolution and The Eastern Big Short

When the regime collapsed in 1989 and we grew tired of living in an artificial language and pretending admiration for elderly idiots who ruled us, we were full of hope. Yet, we didn’t know what remained of us after years of moral devastation and the amputation of our true selves. No one was sure who they really were or what they genuinely wanted.

Without the incredible moral authority Václav Havel represented for our nation, perhaps straightening our collective backbone would have required more than just one generation. This makes it even more painful to see how quickly modern Western nations forgot people like Havel and, in their self-assurance, never emphasized building national cultural resilience against sophisticated forms of propaganda and brainwashing.

After the 1989 revolution, another propaganda arrived in the Eastern Bloc—the Darwinist trickle-down economy praising predators, enabling Russian mafias to loot everything remaining in Eastern Bloc state budgets. The stolen billions from banks and fraudulent privatizations were then deposited by Russian gangs into Western real estate. Manhattan, Florida, you name it. I can’t help but think about Leonard Cohen unwitting genius:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For tryin' to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them

First, we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

Alex Alvarova: Scrap Metal of My Mind, 2012

Into the distant lands 2.0.

I've lived in several countries throughout my life. Initially, in Central Europe—Germany and Austria. One sociologist calls this territory the "European tribe of apple strudel," a place where apple strudel is considered the essential pastry in every household.

My paternal grandmother was German, and my grandfather came from Prague Germans. My other grandfather was a Jewish mathematics professor who carefully concealed his origins and married a beautiful farm girl from South Bohemia.

I spent my career as a journalist and communication specialist. However, starting in 2013, strange things began happening in my country. The atmosphere became saturated with various hateful narratives, making it hard to breathe there. In 2016, just before Brexit, my family moved to Canada. Apart from uncertainty about my origins, my Jewish grandfather left me with nightmares about angry mobs, and I wanted out at any cost.

Canada was a profound cultural shock, especially British Columbia and Vancouver—a place Canadians themselves call a state within a state, an extremely liberal left-wing enclave. Within the first month, I realized, to my dismay, that not only did no one understand my jokes about Russian aggression, but many didn't even know exactly where Russia was, or why my surname ending in -OVA didn't mean I was Russian.

Joking about other nations was socially unacceptable. Czech humor—slightly racist, homophobic, misogynistic, or darkly humorous—was considered utterly twisted. My country was viewed similarly to Chechnya. Arriving as a proud representative of contact lenses, bitter beer, and our hockey victory in Nagano, within the first month, I discovered I couldn’t matter less to West Coast tribes.

Over time, I realized my cultural identity didn’t matter to anyone, but neither was I ever insulted for it. It was even polite to show occasional interest. I wasn’t a second-class citizen; just someone from a tiny, unknown country. Canada became my second home, though a sense of loneliness lingered because I couldn’t effectively communicate the culture of my tribe or the Russian danger it faced.

In 2022, we moved to Boston, Massachusetts—a place resembling South Bohemia, but with an ocean. Only here, in America, poisoned by information warfare, did I recognize the same attacker who had contaminated my homeland had also irreversibly poisoned the American nation.

Perhaps even the freest country in the world could succumb to the silent poison known as digital propaganda. No one knows—yet.

about author

Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author and communication expert.

A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on behavioral propaganda. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda.​​ Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.