• 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle
  • Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

    Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

    It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

    I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

    We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

    Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities




  • A few months ago, I would’ve said how people try to engage you in good faith and how people would read walls of text and engage

    Lately I feel people are scared and angry. Which is totally reasonable, but has some of the best parts of our communities

    We also probably got a lot of new refugees and more interest from botters… But I used to get love with near every message I posted. Or at least honest engagement. Now? I get way less replies, and way more of them are reading into something I didn’t say


  • This is why I don’t contribute. Kudos to you for doing so, but I literally couldn’t handle that on a passion project. I get enough of that in my day job

    If I could make a living off my passion projects I would love that and deal with what it entails, but dealing with that in my free time sounds like a nightmare.

    There’s got to be a better way… But I appreciate you and hope you all the best from the bottom of my heart






  • I’m trying to think what shattered the illusion for me… Weirdly, one of the first ones was when I was in high school, my Spanish teacher told me that in Spain, they had hardly any computers (she had just visited that summer). I told that to a friend of my dad, and he was like “uh… No, pretty much everyone has them”. Which wasn’t propaganda, but I think they was the first time I felt ashamed of my ignorance

    Then in college, I was having a discussion about politics with someone from Paris, and mentioned offhand how it’s different because they’re a socialist country. He laughed and said “what? We’re not socialist”. That was pounded into me since elementary school, that the UK and France were socialists.

    The guy owned a business, and I knew this and the fact he was fairly wealthy due to said business… And that’s when the illusion completely shattered, and I realized I was repeating shit I’d been taught without evaluating the information

    Propaganda works. On all of us… It works less if you’re aware of it and examine your own beliefs, but that shit creeps in through the cracks. It’s insidious