Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit
Jan. 1st, 2025 08:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe And just like that, it's 2025.
I don't think I imagined the year 2025 to look quite the way it's going to. How could anyone? Who could have called that our cultural landscape would be dominated by the global slide toward fascism, and that we would have elected an incredibly stupid, racist reality star twice -- the second time after knowing how corrupt he would be in office, and clearly showing signs of cognitive decline? Ugh. The worst timeline.
But here we are, so we must soldier on through. This time, I have a better perspective on my power and limitations, and I have a better handle on how best to actually help things. I'm only one person, and I can only do so much. But I can do a lot more than I think.
Personally, my focus is on community -- building it, maintaining it, strengthening it. I think one of the reasons we're in this mess is because we all seek out connection and companionship, but we've lost the language to talk about how we actually do that. Social structures and dynamics have become so charged that the words we use to describe them can carry a current through a conversation. We can't talk about organizing or values or how we live them without...stumbling into a blow-up about the rights of the community infringing on the rights of the individual.
Suggest that maybe a group should live its values of compassion and inclusion through carefully-chosen speech? Tone policing. Dare recognize the right of a community to define and police its boundaries? Creating an echo chamber. It's hard to talk about our collective responsibility to each other because we've somehow tricked ourselves into seeing bonds as shackles, and freedom as an absence of any bond whatsoever. We seek to belong, but not be restrained, and belonging doesn't work that way.
So...what's the way out? Well, for me, that's being clear-eyed and intentional about the bonds I create, the structures I build to exist within. It's understanding that to enjoy the connection -- true communion -- with others, I must stop thinking about the cost of engagement as a sacrifice. It is a gift, freely given.
I've talked about how we live in a world that...demands our attention, our allegiance to something, all the time. Just to have a space to type and share these thoughts, I have to navigate notifications and pop-ups from my operating system (Windows), hardware supplier (Dell), their business partner (McAfee), web browser (Chrome), its parent company's embedded search engine (Google), the ad blocker I use to keep more notifications from showing up on my browser (AdBlockPlus), and several other apps (Discord! YouTube! Telegram!). It's a nightmare just trying to do the thing you set out to do -- and I think it's become so ubiquitous we don't even notice it's happening sometime.
And all of these companies use language that hijacks the concept of community as a hook into our empathy, our morality. They claim these unceasing demands of our time and money are just "calls to action" as part of a "user community". If we care, we should prove it by becoming evangelists or banks for whatever we use.
After a while, we stop believing in community at all.
And that's all I have time for. More tomorrow.
I don't think I imagined the year 2025 to look quite the way it's going to. How could anyone? Who could have called that our cultural landscape would be dominated by the global slide toward fascism, and that we would have elected an incredibly stupid, racist reality star twice -- the second time after knowing how corrupt he would be in office, and clearly showing signs of cognitive decline? Ugh. The worst timeline.
But here we are, so we must soldier on through. This time, I have a better perspective on my power and limitations, and I have a better handle on how best to actually help things. I'm only one person, and I can only do so much. But I can do a lot more than I think.
Personally, my focus is on community -- building it, maintaining it, strengthening it. I think one of the reasons we're in this mess is because we all seek out connection and companionship, but we've lost the language to talk about how we actually do that. Social structures and dynamics have become so charged that the words we use to describe them can carry a current through a conversation. We can't talk about organizing or values or how we live them without...stumbling into a blow-up about the rights of the community infringing on the rights of the individual.
Suggest that maybe a group should live its values of compassion and inclusion through carefully-chosen speech? Tone policing. Dare recognize the right of a community to define and police its boundaries? Creating an echo chamber. It's hard to talk about our collective responsibility to each other because we've somehow tricked ourselves into seeing bonds as shackles, and freedom as an absence of any bond whatsoever. We seek to belong, but not be restrained, and belonging doesn't work that way.
So...what's the way out? Well, for me, that's being clear-eyed and intentional about the bonds I create, the structures I build to exist within. It's understanding that to enjoy the connection -- true communion -- with others, I must stop thinking about the cost of engagement as a sacrifice. It is a gift, freely given.
I've talked about how we live in a world that...demands our attention, our allegiance to something, all the time. Just to have a space to type and share these thoughts, I have to navigate notifications and pop-ups from my operating system (Windows), hardware supplier (Dell), their business partner (McAfee), web browser (Chrome), its parent company's embedded search engine (Google), the ad blocker I use to keep more notifications from showing up on my browser (AdBlockPlus), and several other apps (Discord! YouTube! Telegram!). It's a nightmare just trying to do the thing you set out to do -- and I think it's become so ubiquitous we don't even notice it's happening sometime.
And all of these companies use language that hijacks the concept of community as a hook into our empathy, our morality. They claim these unceasing demands of our time and money are just "calls to action" as part of a "user community". If we care, we should prove it by becoming evangelists or banks for whatever we use.
After a while, we stop believing in community at all.
And that's all I have time for. More tomorrow.
