Notices by James Fairbairn (james@mastodon.exitmusic.world)

Observation. Barely anyone is talking about Russian influence this time. Given how flagrant it was last time, and how unpunished, and how the, um, strategic situation has only ratcheted up, it seems likely to me that there is more of it now, rather than none.

Experimenting with a new theory of change for the coming decades we are facing:

- Get people relating healthily again (bring back third places, decommodify and de-mediatize relationships)
- Nurture a generation of polymaths (use the tools and technologies of learning and collaboration to enable young people to cross disciplinary boundaries and synthesize better futures)
- Build social resilience out of the resulting emergent friendships and knowledge/skill communities

@adamgreenfield this is a fantastic thread, Adam. Thank you!

The federated model, absent the “just add targeted ads” panacea, pushes us to rethink constraints like disk space and bandwidth and moderator capacity, and to build things that are much more frugal with those resources than the centralized, highly-capitalized hegemons.

What stuff can we build to help each other, that we can run on our “universal basic hosted servers”?

(This thought brought to you by inspiration from @dansup continuing to tinker with cool things)

Unpopular take: “applying my design skills to help solve climate change” is like “applying my colonization skills to help solve slavery”

@woodbark right. And yet we still depend 100% on farming and land management for our survival!

Heard someone say on a podcast that we all still live in an agrarian society, only the set of people now directly doing that agrarianism is very small.

I will never be able to forget that now.

To seek to fix the world by applying the same technological ideologies that fucked it up in the first place is a fool’s errand.

If synthetic fertilizer destroyed our topsoil’s humus, let us engineer a world that can survive without topsoil. If deforestation decimated rainfall in the tropics, let us engineer a planet that can survive with arid tropics. If our political culture destroyed democracy, let us engineer a world that can survive without democracy.

No. Do you see?

It’s not the bad politics or the bad management skills or the bullshit. Those aren’t the source. The source is the presumption that a few of us have the will (and because of that, the right) to fix the world. And that those few of us deserve all the wealth and power that come with that.

Know this, if you happen to be EA- or e/acc-adjacent. This is not our world to fix, just as it was never our world to fuck up.

I’m hoping that the emergence of the real Musk into public view this past year - the Great Unmusking, if you will - is causing some Messiah-complex sufferers to reorient themselves to the world, to their own understanding of it, to other beings, and to the inevitability and regenerative potential of loss.

Looking for an EA Exodus; an e/acc/:q!; a move towards right relation with others, death, and life.

Hoping, but not persuaded.

Let life thrive. Design in partnership with living systems and let those systems grow us all back towards health. Let nature heal itself; let it create conditions for human nature to heal itself too.

Be a steward of regrowth to creatures around you. Expand your horizons, to live in sympathy with more perspectives. Also reduce your influence on the world hidden beyond those horizons, whether geographical, socioeconomic, or perceptual.

This is what “design” and “technology” can mean for us now.

@amerika no, it really doesn’t mean that. The opposite of equality is hierarchy. The opposite of uniformity is diversity.

Nature abhors uniformity, not equality. Look at any measure of ecosystem health you care to imagine.

“Worried about climate change? These systems theorists show us a future that’s stranger than we can imagine”