Summer Retrospective 2023

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately. I don't know where to start.

I recently finished a book called Settlers which has provoked fundamental questions about how I choose to develop and apply my skills as an artisan. It is an acute analysis of the structural dynamics that produce the United States and its hegemony writ large, from its origins as a band of colonial endeavors to the seat of a global order. Much like Negroes with Guns, it is decisive and practical in elucidating how amorphous forces crystallize in patterns of observable, reliable behavior -- the nature of the class conflicts that define the union's political structure, embodied in police prejudice time after time.

I think that these books, and some greater critical tradition of radicalism in the Americas, inform a cohesive perspective on a revolutionary politic that can be activated within the imperial core. I call myself a communist, and sure I read Lenin, but I'm looking to contemporaries in Cuba, in Bolivia, in Chiapas, and they don't always call themselves communists. They are socialists, anarchists, indigenists, plurinationalists, and so on. What we share as a feature of our local geography is the fight against colonial powers, against colonialism itself. The antagonisms that define the intersecting, overlapping axes of our society are rooted in the consequences of an ongoing colonial regime-of-regimes; they are what produce class as we know it. The fight for communism in America is one for decolonization, for only through so decolonizing can we rectify the way of things imperial atrocities have articulated. Only after that rectification can a more permanent revolution have any meaning.

(You might be thinking, Revolution? Have you gone nuts? But I don't know what else to tell you anymore. The writing is on the wall, though I want to be specific and practical; this is no time for random violence or fearmongering. We must be prepared if we are to survive.)

There are people in places that can exert critical leverage toward a decolonized future, people we can be, people we can become. We can utilize the true power of our means, embedded as they are in the very bodies and minds capable of them, down even to the design and logistics of our tools. To paraphrase Ro, we don't have to play their racist capitalist games. I believe that once you understand the real stakes, the enveloping nature of the struggle and its contours, you will perceive the potency that our enemies can't. Boons embedded in capital's very face, gleaming like never before. That's what I've been thinking lately, anyway.

Software, like many crafts, inherits distinct advantages from its position in modernity. Tech workers produce the substrate of the mundane, the system-of-systems that acts as a second bureaucracy for a failing sphere, the crude reality of its suffocating legalism despite any pretension of oversight. From how the grocer's shelves are stocked to the computer in your car, from how your money moves through the aether to how your prescriptions are filled, it's all digital now. We did that. We are responsible for all its betrayals, but I don't want to make a spectacle of guilt. I want to make it right.

I believe that our skills and our positions as tech workers imbue us with access to leverage that can be applied to profound effect, if we can comprehend it. We do not need another website or indie dev shop. We need the stuff of transformation! Perhaps, we need a theory of the application of software, a constellation of rationales that counsels its intentional production. I dare to think I am onto one, and it does not play capitalist games.

Software's advantages are structural, emergent from electron and circuit and bit and packet. We can build a new internet. We can reimagine the personal computer. We can construct a mesh network around the planet entire with no center to speak of. We have changed the world and can change it again. We just have to be thoughtful about how we apply our skills; to carry with intention the weight of their potential. I am tired of watching capable professionals mess around with demoware, japing for VC money and centrist clout only to leave users holding the bag over and over and over. (What the fuck is Bluesky doing taking VC money, when Twitter is still on fire? How could Cohost imagine centralized social media had a way forward other than investment and advertising? I know everyone here is doing their best, alright -- but some of you do not understand the powers you are dealing with.) I believe we can do better. We can draw on that leverage they cannot perceive.

I'm not ready to speak in detail about the leverage that I do perceive, but I will offer some preludes:

• We cannot practically seize the vertical of hardware in the near future. It is too complicated, from lithium in Bolivia to chips in Taiwan; efforts to establish an "open source" supply chain have proven non-transformative. But we can still secure steady access to hardware itself -- by resurrecting e-waste, the likes of which capitalism cannot help but produce. Securing such access means becoming familiar, as an individual or a community, with how to resurrect different devices to your needs. The power to turn a phone into a router or a server can make a lot of difference when the lights go out.

• When the wind and rain and quivering earth break down basic utilities like water and power, people facing crisis have time and again found cause and means to create their own internet, as an independent network. Perhaps we should do that work ahead of time, both to produce the software and to become those people who can stand up a network in a disaster. This is not another website or web-based protocol, but a new web entire that questions fundaments like DNS and BGP and even the underlying utilities grid, because those things hold us back and leave us vulnerable again and again. We can do better. I believe, to survive, we must.

• We desperately need a way around the likes of PayPal and payment processors, but even well-intentioned cryptocurrency projects have proven abject failures. Between innate fees and a prevalence for scams, they are unable to compete with the likes of CashApp and Venmo, whose own relationship to payment processors passes prejudice down the line, against sex workers and people even remotely associated with the US' official enemies. I am starting to doubt that money as we know it outlasts the revolution as any kind of critical institution. The dollar belongs to empire, and all its facsimiles are as tendrils. Either somebody finds a way to federate Patreon without Visa, or we need to build networks of serious, actionable trust, which do not rely on profit or transaction.

• Borders are a distraction. They are a reality of the present, yes, but do not presume we need them. When you declare borders, our enemies know just where to attack. If you do not claim borders, you can fortify in plain sight, on grounds that empires have long since forgotten how to govern. It is of critical note that the Zapatistas fought a war against the Mexican government and won only to remain a borderless polity, whose lack of borders undermines the government's ability to combat them and even to discern them at all. (The CHAZ was a monstrous defeat in this regard; a sign of damning unpreparedness.)

I don't have the whole picture, either of my own ideas or of all relevant ideas. I believe that we each possess unique insights and abilities that, if we share and hone them, can find a decisive place upon the broad front for a compassionate and just world. I can only offer my piece of the puzzle. I can, at best, do my part.

Thanks for reading.

PS:

You could call me a civil servant
Of a government from the future.
I am of the present,
But I know they're out there
In the span of inevitable things.

I pass now among cycles of cruelty,
Feeding fleshless foul-hearted giants
Animated by institutional wills
And corpocratic limbs.
Their inertia is like a stench,
Their violence -- nightmarish.
It seems so needless,
So small.

My employers, so to speak,
Are that society beyond want,
Beyond the likes of masters.
I remember the midst of its warmth
Like another lifetime.
I toil there in a basement,
When I choose to work at all,
Maintaining logistical software
For a network of price-free grocers.
It is simple and honest:
By the cleverness
Of our deeds and our tools,
No one goes hungry.

I feel it is my duty to realize
This neverwhere way of life
That feels so much like home.
I see its structure lurking
There in the dynamism of the present;
A future-facet hiding behind
Everything we will have to do together
To do right by each other;
Everything I know we can do!
So I lay the groundwork,
The foundations, the ties,
The bonds and bolts,
The stuff of a fresh society --
Beyond my enemy's very imagination.

I may be soil when it comes;
Still it rises like a dawn,
There on the horizon of the real,
Brighter by every loving deed,
Warmed with dire courage --
A future worthy
Of the innate dignity
Of every living thing.