just plain typing
<warning: the following is entirely self-referential navel-gazing fluff... at first, then looks at the dark side of the big picture>
Sometimes I think about typing here, exploring something out in the open, and I shy away because of some concept of... wanting it to be high-quality, in case it might sit at the top of this site for months. But - hah, whatever! I don't need that. (This feels a bit like finding something in an old box, shrugging, and just chucking it in the garbage can. It didn't feel like it was attached to anything.) The intention I have as I loosen up my brain-to-fingers flow here is to make this blog space more salient in my brain the next time it's relevant. That's about it.
Ya know, though, while we're here — it's 2022 and no one is in charge. I think that's the spirit of the times, as we tick the counter once more while the Omicron wave surges through, COP26 fades to irrelevance, the Olympics ramp up in a country still committing genocide, Russia threatens Ukraine, crypto-web3 races towards the ugly terrible peak of its hype cycle, ... I won't list off every other thing that's off-the-rails about today's world. It's just so painfully obvious that we don't have a brain, as a species. We're not conscious at that level.
And so, we'll probably careen right up to the edges of global collapse — using only the hand-in-a-vise type pain to lurchingly make corrections that will be too late to prevent major pain and disruption. How hard will the next ten years of climate tipping points hit us? How many climate refugees will it take to cause enough pain to motivate political action? How will we be able to treat them/us? Will we collectively retreat, fracture, and defend... or somehow manage mostly compassion and unification and collective sacrifice?
Will we thread the necessary needles on AI, security, surveillance, drones, war and terrorism? How about the balance between trillion-dollar megacorps and sclerotic public institutions? Lurking beneath it all is the traumatizing crank of the incredible wealth drain of the transition away from cheap fossil fuels. That's really going to change the mindset of the entire world, a hard slant away from abundance and towards scarcity.
Yikes, so that was what wanted to come out of my brain in an open ruminating space? Yeah, well we're going to need a lot of processing for all these upcoming shocks to the system... which would be difficult even if 20th century post-war modernism were still dominant. I guess our war will be for the soul of humanity. It looks like a long, hard, gritty slog right now.
Type type type, whee blogging is fun. Looking at what is, though, doesn't make it any worse. Can we let ourselves see what we fear, without being sucked inside of that fear, to see accurately and act courageously? I guess that goes for every layer of the fractal — to myself, to us, to systems, all the way out. Yup, Intentional Society seems like the thing to do for me, still.