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Hopeful Pessimism

This post started as a morning musing on my phlog

Woke up thinking about how I think I feel like I exist in a weird mix of seeing all these dark futures that might happen but still believing there's always a chance to change them.

I think, on some level, I never really escaped from the eschatology of my youth: one world government oppressive surveillance states run by the most evil people imaginable. Now, when I was a young cult-indoctrinated fundie child this was all about the rise of the anti-christ and the future oppression of the small number of true Christians in the world.

As an adult staring down the end of my 30s it's more like I see the accumulation of capital into smaller and more concentrated hands as the real "anti-christ", the force that's going to drive us to dystopic horror, except that unlike all the Christian fantasies that it's the work of one force/person who will be stopped when someone else swoops in to save us and take control of it all instead we're living in a world where there's no savior coming, no single person causing the tribulation, and it's all up to us.

And that last part is why I think I always still have this kind of stubborn hope for the world. Until we're down to the last few humans alive with no chance for survival, I can't give up on anything. And I do mean anything.

I've been thinking still about when Anil Dash on twitter tried to argue that NFT shit is inevitable, too big to fail, and instead we should embrace and try to make the best of it.

That's bullshit. That's bullshit the same way that it's bullshit that we have to accept the gig economy, AWS, using Google, &c. We don't have to do any of these things. We can say no if there's enough of us on board.

I often try to describe that my ideas around anarchism come to down to the right to say "no". I want people to be able to decide how they live instead of being pushed into uniformity.

Because, at least in the tech sector, that's what a lot of this comes down to: advertising/profile based platform capitalism needs us to be predictable, surveillable, understandable. We're pushed to listen to the same podcasts, watch the same viral youtube videos, follow the same accounts on social media, consume movies and tv shows made by one company that owns almost everything, use the same three fucking websites, and all shop from the same giant platform that runs half the internet.

I don't want slick uniformity, I want messy and ugly individualism. I want self-hosted janky servers, buggy indie games, weird art, and tools we need to tinker with but that we actually fucking own. And that's where much of my hope comes from because we can always, each of us, choose to resist in these small ways that can

add up if enough of us do them.