(This image from Pixabay has been modified to include a special greeting for someone. Am I doing this right?)
The room is shaped like an irregular triangle, with large pipes running from floor to ceiling. The ceilings are sloped. It has one window that faces an apartment building on the other side of a parking lot three stories below. The space measures 64 feet square. Its floor is made of interlocking yoga mat tiles, and it's furnished with a large shelf, a small shelf, a desk, and a slab of high quality mattress foam.
This is the space that I work and sleep in. The room is in the attic of a house that's shared with seven other adults, including two uncles. I like it, but it's humble.
The house itself is a big old Victorian structure, in a neighborhood filled with big old houses and newer apartment buildings. There are lots of trees and gardens; four grocery stores and at least four coffee shops within easy walking distance. I'm not sure how many bookstores there are these days. Three? Sadly, there is no Post Office, so I have to take a bus downtown for mail-related business.
The neighborhood isn't exactly safe. The level of crime is medium. Nor is it all that clean. Giant piles of tiny bags filled with dog turds perpetually erupt from public trashcans. Fast food packaging and the occasional syringe litter the ground. A paradise it's not. But I love it anyway.
This ecology has become familiar. Comfortable. And my job is easy. All I do is push buttons on a computer, which I can operate with one hand while laying on the floor. The only hard part is knowing which buttons to press, in what order.
My immediate surroundings are acceptable, yet on some level I've given up on physical reality. While I feel natural rhythms deeply and value familiar people and places, most of what I see looks like manufactured landscapes designed to extract value from human lives purely so oligarchs can profit. In this scheme, I'm just a little mouse in a vast cage made by fools and lunatics. If people ever decide to fix the world, I'm up for it. Until then, I'll focus on the internet.
Evolution didn't prepare me for online life. I feel like I can sense people through the network sometimes and surely that's impossible. All I could possibly be sensing is an internal state, but I consider this state in my online behavior. If I get bad vibes from someone, I avoid them. If I get good vibes, I trust them more.
I picture people online as glowing lights on a map. Maybe they see me the same way too, as a light on a map. Is that a psychic bond? Maybe it's close enough.
Closing my eyes, I picture all of the people I'm connected with, all over the world, as points of light on a globe spinning through the vastness of space. Whether I'm waiting to cross a busy street or trying to find the shortest line at the grocery store, this image reminds me of something important. It reminds me that life now involves participating in global networks.
As a kid in the '90s, I remember when the internet first arrived. Soon enough, I was chatting with people in other countries. The implications of that didn't sink in until years later, when everybody got cell phones. The whole world changed, and we're still figuring out what that means.
For me, it means something empowering. It means freedom from the petty injustices of local economies and opportunities to connect with people of like mind, with similar values. These connections don't seem like sterile interactions mediated by heartless technology. They feel as real as anything. More real, in some cases.
During the last few years, I've worked from Boston, Connecticut, NYC, and Alaska. In the last year alone, I've written for clients on four continents. This suggests that the economy I inhabit is not bound by geography at all. And since my life is two-thirds in crypto, the economy as I experience it is also increasingly not subject to all of the rules and assumptions of the legacy system. True, I pay my taxes and generally comply with the law, but that's basically like appeasing elderly relatives while occupying myself with matters that are beyond them.
More and more, I've been wondering what the future of activism might look like in this emerging paradigm. Lately, this has been blended with the question of what activism might consist of post-covid. Like, we're all connected now and the powers that be are hopelessly corrupt liars. Fighting their regime doesn't really work, yet the tech exists to displace their power, freeing our spaces from its influences. The tech exists, but our willingness to free ourselves seems to be developing more slowly.
Here's where my thinking turns to psychology. To sense-making. I personally make sense of the world by naming it a dystopia that most people support with their everyday actions. In my opinion, there was a window where society could have taken a better path, and that window closed when the pandemic began in 2020. Now there is only confusion and broken systems. Personally, I've found accepting this to be freeing.
Are there forms of activism that makes sense in this dystopia? I think there are. There's direct action for those willing to feed themselves to the policing machine and incarceration industry. There's ecosystem regeneration for the propertied class. For the rest of us, there's communication and connection, and perhaps the simple exercise of freedom in a society. These things may seem small, but small things count.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
