GREET1NG5

While I’m not a technophobe, I generally prefer face-to-face communication. One-on-one is usually best. However, I want to expand my network and community, and I want to try writing for an audience. I want to test my conception of the internet as a tool for political co-education. As of late, I’ve gotten some positive feedback from acquaintances and people close to me about my ideas and explanations. But there is so much to figure out, and no one can do it alone. I have a great community of like-minded friends, right now, but I spend most of my time with them listening and trying to learn from them. I keep a lot of things to myself. Some of these things are heavy, too, so I think for the sake of my own mental health they’re better out than in.

I’m scared of where we’ll go if we don’t make some serious changes soon. The internet can be a great tool for self-education as well as collective organizing; through it, we observe the real and ever-present impacts of war, exploitation, economic crisis and global climate change. It forces us to watch in HD from prosperous havens as bombs are dropped on some cities, while others are flooded in extreme weather events. I feel deeply obliged to respond to the brutality of globalized technological HD reality.

For the Future

I want to participate in the construction of a social vision for a future to look forward to, and I have a lot of friends who do, too. We won’t resign ourselves to the grim prospect of an endless neoliberal capitalist future. Wages stagnating and forever falling behind the ever-rising cost of living, work day elongating, social programs dissolving, crisis leaving many in financial ruins as top dogs make off with millions, climate change and war killing and displacing the other kind of millions. Our outlook on technology is critically optimistic, focusing on technological potential under democratic, not private, control, as well as on the mis-use of technology under capitalism’s persistent profit drive. Modern technology can be appropriated by the people and used to their benefit, to decrease the work week, mitigate the effects of climate change, and hopefully suck the lifeblood-funding from the war machines, too.

We are not seriously and swiftly addressing the problem of Climate Change, nor are there strong anti-war movements in imperialist countries. I’m convinced that the best way to effectively mitigate the harm and damage to come, already previewed frequently in regular news broadcasts, is to cooperate at all costs internationally. How can the already over-burdened, over-worked and increasingly privatized health care and social support systems of the world handle the increased intensity and frequency of extreme natural disasters? The truth of that statement is a thousand times truer in places that are already war-torn. I’m skeptical that our political/economic systems can handle the changes we can see coming, let alone those we don’t yet, can’t or won’t see. No one country can do it. There is an increased need for care work that crosses borders. The already astounding refugee crisis will get worse in the face of tighter and tighter immigration restrictions. We’ll see more and more people fleeing from ever-rising tides. Something has to be done on an institutional level so that people have a reason to celebrate and pursue internationalism. Climate change is a challenge to the very humanity of humanity. Will we rise to the occasion, or stand by as passive witnesses?

For Free Time

The fight for free time is an essential way to earn the respect of and to inspire “the public”. Currently, the dominant idea is that you should love-what-you-do-what-you-love. There is a kernel of truth at the center of this suggestion, which is why it’s working – working to help people work longer hours, even when they don’t actually have much agency over their own projects. Why not let people choose how and why they want to do socially and personally beneficial work by giving them more free time? The fight for the 40 hour work week happened a long century ago, and working people today are working more and more to make ends meet, often doing work they feel little to no personal connection to amidst social pressure to ABSOLUTELY LOVE  what you do. Conversely, many people who actually enjoy physical/manual labor are seen as not living up to their potential.

Given the right resources and time, humans come up with ingenious solutions to major problems all the time, but they aren’t necessarily the right problems, rather the profitable ones. They profit motive skews the priorities of all society and massively wastes – contrary to its claim of efficiency – unfathomably large quantities of human time and natural resources, in a manner that is both blatantly and subtly exploitative and supremely controlling of most of our waking hours. Meanwhile, many socially rewarding and fulfilling – and also very difficult – fields wither from lack of funds, labor and institutional support. This creates real suffering. It leaves those in need without a thread to grasp onto. It castigates workers who want to help others by performing care and emotional work, educational work, humanitarian work, organizational and grassroots political work, etc. Additionally, when well-paid work in social fields is in short supply, it means the people that pursue it can fall through the very holes in social safety nets that they themselves might gladly help to fill.  This austerity, under-funding of welfare programs, social benefits, and infrastructure, is thus a double-edged sword of precarity of both a personal and professional nature. We should be discussing and pursuing more options, options that go beyond small tweaks in policy, to change the very nature of our global economic and political systems.