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I don't want my favorite dive bar to be more popular than it is is because I enjoy a quiet table where I can hear my friends talk. Same with here. A little tired of hearing about how my hangout spot is a "failure" because it won't fit a stadium's worth of people in it.
"Community gardens are a failure because they aren't operating at the same scale as industrial agriculture. And besides, most people don't have time or resources to garden anyway, they just want to buy cheap food from a big convenient store with all the things they need and a large parking lot. It's a real loser attitude that you're still bothering with this." ← what these people sound like to me
people like to call the desire for infinite scale a problem with capitalism and like, yeah, it is. But deeper than that, it's a colonizer problem, and deeper than that, a proselytizing-Christianity problem. Capitalism is the newest face it wears – a gray goo saturating its way through the means of production – but the first thing to start being eaten alive was the human spirit. We'll have to learn to think in smaller & stranger & older ways if don't want everything we know to be consumed with it
@clarity
I think it's even deeper, it's an evolution problem.
@notsoloud @clarity how do you make that theory productive?
@j12i
Good question. I'm not sure I do. But I think it helps to acknowledge that we're descended from a long line of expansionists that rolled over whatever was there beforehand. There are powerful tendencies left in us by our history and they will not be easy to redirect.
I like the way you reframe the problem to "favourite bar" rather than "competing kingdoms" which is one way to trigger a different pattern of reactions.
@clarity
@notsoloud @j12i Have you read The Dawn of Everything?
@notsoloud Well. Pretty evidently, infinite expansion isn't some fundamental part of the human condition or an evolved trait (not sure if you were claiming this), but is instead a property which some cultures value and some do not. And while empires and expansion did happen long before, the invention of christianity and the proselytization thereof marks a significant development in how culture propagates itself. Appealing to essential nature is a cop-out, and entirely unhelpful.
@j12i
@notsoloud that's the interesting question! Maybe there's a sort of ideological poison pill, or vaccination. Or maybe there's a way of organizing people (and a military) at scale that doesn't require a state to function. Or maybe we learn to live in a way that is invisible to the machine. Or maybe there's a way to synthesize the heart of expansionism into a new ideology that encloses and neuters it (just like it always does with its own critiques). Or maybe this: https://xoxo.zone/@clarity/111689125284890848 @j12i
@clarity
I like anarchist ideals and agree that absence of coercion would relieve pressure on a whole lot of society's problems. But my hope for it as a practical political system is completely destroyed by this post.