By Chad Whitmore III | Actual Life Under Communism
Brixton Holloway describes herself as a "trauma-informed, somatic-led, nervous-system-aware wellness facilitator." Her Instagram bio runs to approximately four hundred words. Her hourly rate is eighty-five dollars. Her Pinterest board, titled Healing the Collective Through Yurt Energy, has over two thousand pins.
Photo: Brixton Holloway, via www.nme.com
Last Tuesday, Brixton did something she would come to regard as the worst decision of her adult life, narrowly edging out the time she paid twelve hundred dollars for a cacao ceremony retreat that turned out to be hot chocolate in a barn.
She asked an AI chatbot to assign her a job under a Soviet-style centrally planned economy.
"I thought it would be validating," Brixton told me, still visibly shaken, cradling a $19 adaptogen latte. "Like, the collective needs healers, right? The revolution needs people who can hold space."
The algorithm, regrettably, had other ideas.
The Questionnaire That Started It All
The exercise began innocuously enough. A hypothetical Soviet labor allocation form, the kind that circulates on leftist corners of the internet as a sort of ideological personality quiz. Think Myers-Briggs, but instead of discovering you're an INFJ, you discover you've been assigned to a collective potato farm outside Novosibirsk.
Brixton approached the form with the serene confidence of a woman who has never once considered that her skills might not be universally transferable across all political systems in human history.
Under Primary Competencies, she wrote: holding space, somatic breathwork, emotional witnessing, Canva (intermediate), and "curating transformational group experiences."
Under Physical Capabilities, she listed: "gentle yoga, walking, and I did a cold plunge once."
Under Industrial or Agricultural Experience, she left a small doodle of a sun.
The form also asked about her relationship to manual labor. Brixton typed, and I am quoting directly here, "I believe all labor is sacred when performed with intentionality."
The algorithm processed this for approximately four seconds.
The Results Come In
Brixton's assignment: Zinc smelting technician, Vostochny Metallurgical Combine No. 7, located in a remote region the chatbot described only as "eastern, cold, and productive."
Shift start: 0600. Days off: the anniversary of the October Revolution and, at the discretion of the facility supervisor, one other day to be determined annually.
Brixton stared at her screen for a long time.
"I refreshed it," she said. "Like, multiple times."
The results did not change. They are not the kind of results that change based on how you feel about them. This, Brixton was beginning to understand, is rather the point.
She attempted to re-enter the questionnaire, this time adding "community builder" and "certified in trauma-sensitive mindfulness" to her skill set. The algorithm reassigned her to a slightly different smelting facility. This one was described as having "adequate ventilation."
The Grievance That Wasn't
At this point, a reasonable person might close the laptop and go touch some grass — ideally grass they have not paid a facilitator to help them connect with spiritually. Brixton, however, is not a woman who lets injustice stand unaddressed.
She attempted to file a formal grievance with the People's Committee for Labor Allocation, a body the chatbot had helpfully invented as part of the simulation.
"I just wanted to explain my situation," she said. "That I have a gift for creating containers for emotional processing. That the collective would genuinely benefit from that."
The People's Committee, it transpired, does not have a feelings form.
It does not have a feedback portal. It does not offer a fifteen-minute discovery call. There is no option to "share more about your journey" before your case is reviewed. There is a form. The form has boxes. The boxes ask about tonnage.
Brixton submitted a written statement anyway, seventeen paragraphs long, describing her somatic qualifications and attaching a link to her Linktree. The committee's automated response informed her that her start date remained unchanged and that the facility provided standard-issue protective gloves.
"They didn't even acknowledge my Linktree," she whispered.
What The State Sees When It Looks At You
Here is the thing about centrally planned labor allocation that Brixton, and roughly forty percent of the people who enthusiastically share infographics about seizing the means of production, have not fully internalized: the state is not interested in what you feel your gifts are.
The state looks at inputs and outputs. It looks at the gap between how many zinc ingots it has and how many zinc ingots it needs. It does not look at your aura. It cannot process the concept of a "healing container." It will not be moved by the fact that three separate clients have described your breathwork sessions as "genuinely life-changing."
You know what the state can process? Smelting temperatures. Shift quotas. The number of functioning hands available at 0600.
You have two of those. Congratulations, Comrade. You're on the roster.
The Irony Is Doing A Lot of Heavy Lifting Here
What makes Brixton's situation particularly rich — and I say this with the full warmth of someone who genuinely wishes her no harm — is that she still considers herself a committed leftist.
"I support collective ownership of the means of production," she told me firmly, before clarifying that she does not personally want to be anywhere near the means of production.
She wants the revolution to happen and for someone else to run the smelter while she processes the emotional aftermath of capitalism in a yurt.
This is, historically speaking, not how it has worked out.
The Soviet Union did not suffer from a shortage of people willing to theorize about the revolution. It suffered from a shortage of people willing to do the revolution's actual, physical, unglamorous, zinc-adjacent work. The theoretical gap was filled by people with soft hands and firm opinions. The practical gap was filled by everyone else, under conditions that did not leave much time for somatic breathwork.
Brixton's Next Steps
At the time of publication, Brixton has not reported to the smelter, on account of it being fictional. She is, however, taking the experience "as an invitation to sit with some discomfort," which is a sentence that means she's not going to change anything about her worldview but has decided to journal about it.
She has also started a new Pinterest board.
It's called Healing After the Algorithm.
It has fourteen pins.
The smelter does not have a Pinterest board. The smelter simply has the smelter, and the work, and the hours, and the ingots, and the cold.
It will be there whenever she's ready.
Chad Whitmore III is the founder and sole employee of Actual Life Under Communism. He has never done a cold plunge and does not intend to start.