For a long time, the common wisdom was that game consoles would usurp PC gaming, leaving it a niche hobby, ignored by the greater gaming community. And indeed, for a long time consoles were the most popular way to play mainstream games. But recently, especially since the release of the current generation of consoles, the very opposite seems to be coming true. PC gaming has been expanding while consoles falter.

Looking forward to the next Xbox and PlayStation consoles, analysts are predicting $900 as the low end of possible pricing–and that number is seeming more and more optimistic. That’s a lot of money to spend for a dedicated machine that, for most console owners, is just used for playing Call of Duty or the latest football game. Consoles are becoming too expensive for all but the most dedicated gamers to justify–especially when gamers in their teens and early 20s have grown up in a world where a console is no longer needed to play the vast majority of games.

The VRA was the nice version. The version that said: here’s a door, it’s open, your voice has weight, use it. They’ve closed the door. They closed it on purpose, knowing exactly what they were doing, because the people behind it had started to win.

The question for any Democrat running for anything in the next four years isn’t whether you oppose what the Court has done. Of course you do. The question is whether you understand what it means: what it broke, what it’ll cost, what you’re willing to do to hold this country together while there’s still a country to hold.

The answer is not a better legal brief. It’s not another press release of outrage, though outrage is correct. The answer is the nerve to use every lever the system still gives us, and the discipline to say out loud what we’re using them for. Not to win the next cycle. To rebuild the conditions in which participation isn’t a sucker’s bet. To restore the bargain before the people we’ve asked to keep faith with it conclude, reasonably, that they’re done.

Because the alternative isn’t a slightly worse version of normal. It’s the thing none of us want to live through.

Traveling the world as a Salvadoran since Bukele became president is different. Before, the natural reaction was a question, or a misunderstanding: “And where is that?” “El Salvador, the one in Chile or Brazil?” Since Bukele has come to power, the reaction is usually: “Oh right, Bukele’s country.”

Weeks after hearing the waiter Ángel say that to solve the problem of the Spanish coast, a Bukele was needed, I toured some cities in Norway. In the port city of Fredrikstad, I met with a group of teenagers in their final year of high school, all Spanish students. At one point, out of curiosity, I asked who could locate El Salvador on a map. Nobody could. I asked if any of the 30 or so of them had heard of Bukele, and four raised their hands. It seems like a small number, but it isn’t: Four teenagers immersed in their first-world teenage lives, almost 10,000 kilometers from El Salvador, didn’t know where the country was but had heard of that man.

In Spain, a Civil Guard officer congratulated me at the airport after returning my passport: “Congratulations, what a tremendous president you have.” In Colombia, every taxi driver I spoke to had words of praise for Bukele. The same in Chile. In Panama and Costa Rica, if it were up to the taxi drivers, Bukele would govern them. In New Jersey, one afternoon I’d had enough and asked the Dominican barber, who had been delaying my haircut for half an hour to extol the virtues of Bukele’s mega-prison, if he knew what a state of emergency was, and he said no. I asked if he knew that Bukele had made a pact with the gangs, and he said it was impossible. At least I managed to finish my haircut in silence.

It’s overwhelming going around the world talking to people whose argument for praising Bukele is that they saw a television program that featured the mega-prison or that they are among the 16 million people who saw the mockery of an interview the Mexican YouTuber Luisito Comunica did with Bukele in 2021, which ends with Bukele saying, “I hardly ever give interviews, but I’m sure that this interview will be watched more than any news program or newspaper, so it was worth it.” Or else, they saw a snippet of the “interview” that the rapper Residente, who seems to think he’s an expert in everything, conducted with Bukele in the middle of the pandemic, on Instagram live, in which the singer made it clear that he knew almost as little about El Salvador as the bartender in Madrid. Perhaps they saw that empty speech by Bukele in 2019 before the United Nations plenary session, which resonated around the world because thousands of media outlets thought it was disruptive of Bukele to take a selfie from the podium, and predicted — accurately — that the gesture would be more viral than his words.