When I was a kid, a friend's mom told me about sweatshop conditions at a car parts factory in Mexico. She'd been part of an activist group that went down there to document the terrible situation and she showed me pictures of factories that looked like prisons, complete with worker-facing barbed wire fences. At that time, I knew enough history to know that people sometimes treated each other shabbily. But it was shocking for me to see this evidence of modern slavery.
If something as ubiquitous as auto parts were products of virtual slavery, that meant that other building blocks of everyday life probably had comparably unsavory origins. I feel fortunate to have learned this lesson at a young age. Knowing the system was rotten made it easier to make sense of the world around me.
The system was rotten and everything was a racket. By my early twenties, I was ready to leave it all behind. My life became very fringe and mostly happened off the grid. I was involved with intentional communities and found some of those communities to be just as exploitative as their conventional counterparts. In other words, alternative didn't necessarily mean better.
These days, I see all of society as a dystopia. Although I do what I can to improve my personal sphere of influence, my impact is minimal, and most people actively make this dystopia more dystopian, unwittingly and otherwise. Through this lens, the world appears appropriately bleak. And yet, life still contains infinite beauty, even in this bleak era.
I thought about all of this today while I did my work and braved the Minnesota winter to visit the grocery store. It rested in the back of my mind through reading and listening to a podcast. Eventually, I moved onto thinking about something I don't usually hear discussed, even in the alt media I pay attention to.
The basic idea is that the control regime may not have even a fraction of the power that we imagine it does. Internationally, technological advancement in the developing world is in the process of undermining the old global order. The financial masters of the universe who control that order are scrambling to come up with a way to maintain dominance. Will they still be dominant in twenty years? They might no longer be relevant at all.
The powers that be in the US are formidable, but they're hardly in control. I mean, I live in a city where an angry mob burned down a police station a couple of years ago. That's the definition of out-of-control. If a large enough group of people decides to do something, the control regime cannot stop them.
Our rulers, both corporate and governmental, have long been converting human lives and the natural world into profits as fast as they can. To them we are little more than farm animals. At any point, people could choose to leave the farm, and the regime wouldn't be able to stop it. I'm not sure if that will be true forever, given technological trends.
I've long been preoccupied with how to build better systems. What I've found is that better technical systems are easy and better social systems are hard. There is a particular way that the control regime would prefer us to be socially grouped. I wonder what would make it easier for us to challenge this preference.
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