Optimistic Pessimism
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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.