the subtitle “I struggle with feeling very judgemental about society whilst desperating[sic] wanting society to change for the better. How do I reconcile this?”
hmm. okay. let’s see how i’d reconcile it, and then see what they say.
do i feel very judgemental about society. yes.
im often shocked by how unempathetic my initial feeling is when i see regular people doing regular things differently to how i would, like they’re scrolling on tiktok or getting really drunk or whatever else. i feel “how trivial, they should read a novel” or whatever bs im doing at the minute.
but we’re all just trying to make ourselves comfortable in this world… i just sincerely feel like those ways are worse!! but that shouldn’t extend to disempathy (at least at first thought, as usual my second and third thougts are better)
do i desperately want to change society for the better? yes and im unhappy with how little i do for that at the minute.
how do i reconcile this? a lot of the things i initally judge people for are completely reasonable responses to the hell-on-earth we’ve created for each other. of course people are on their phones all the time when we’ve made everything else inaccessible, and built our spaces and lives and culture to be as anti-social as possible!
What im judging is the superfice of the system, and what i want to do is fix the system. but it’s too easy to fixate on that, and not the reasons why people are doing these things, or changing the system. it’s a similar distraction to how bigotry appears effective at smothering social or economic change.
i know i have a strong moralising impulse, and i regularly battle with the extent it pushes me to make certain lifestyle choices that make things harder for me (vegan, minimal phone, try and do as much good) and that don’t have much systemic impact.
it’s a very 100rabbits thing, it’s probably why i like them so much, because it seems(!) like they completely satisfied that impulse and still live their lives. i guess it’s harder to publicise the system things you do. especially if your methods are more than legal. i want to do more economic system things. i want to do more social system things.
okay, then, that’s my answer. let’s see what Jacky Alciné says. long piece so ima do the ‘read a paragraph, write a sentence’ thing.
Alciné is the person who did the reporting about the google photos demonstrating algorithmic bias, and they’re upset that nearly 10 years later, nothing has changed, and the whole conversation around EDI in the tech sphere has become a set of corporate buzzwords and tickbox talks/workshops with no concrete action taken.
and now those same courses, however limited, are under attack by the administration, and being disavowed by the c-suite. they are particurarly upset by “how quickly folks seem to have accepted no concrete action”. interesting emphasis.
lots of exctractive systems still abound. try but its difficult to practice what you preach and work in the industry. branded tech industry will parrot a narrative for the purpose of posturing.
referring to the material reality of the software industry, most workers got one internship and then worked from there until they were in the top 40% of earners in the us. no class conscience.
oh hey! they’re writing about how to balance a salaried job with activism. i need to pay attention! also i need to just start volunteering. this jacky person has been there and done that, and has a lot of experience… it hasn’t resulted in them having a super stable career, but they’ve done a lot of valuable activism.
im not gonna lie though, his writing is a lil hard to follow.
mm interesting paragraph here about writing for liberatory purposes but that conflicting with how the internet works: - google/other search engines deliberate obfuscate and hide such results - domain names, the capstone of internet sovreignity, are leased by corporations, usually strongly connected to the state. it all comes back to ARPA!!
what decentralised methods could work? idea that the domain name doesn’t matter. have loads, hop between them, and share them outside that website, sci-hub style.
the myth of personal reward/reponsibility/culpability, atomised existence, social alienation. even we who can afford to do not directly help those who cannot. morphs into a sort of self-rightiousness – related to what i wrote above??
why do techies talk so much about strength, performance, resiliency – but only for the computer systems they build?
food for thought! my takeaways: - yeah, i mean, i already knew i didn’t want to be in tech. - i want/need to volunteer more face-to-face stuff. so far all my volunteering is too long-distanced… - i kinda regret that i read so much tech oriented stuff, it’s purely a product of the fact that these are the people who know how to put stuff on the internet where i can find it. it’s a selection bias. i want to read a blog written by a nurse! i guess this is why bloggr was cool… - kinda rambling, but this person is cool. im gonna grab his rss.