Thread by @fortelabs

1/ I’m extremely excited to be speaking at @ribbonfarm Refactor Camp in LA next month. It’s sold out but it will be recorded and posted

Current working title: We Are All Activists Now

2/ My basic message is that the new political/social environment is forcing a huge swathe of the population to engage in activism, something that was previously a weird activity for weird people

3/ We’ve done it poorly, resorting mostly to political donations, calls to reps, naming and shaming, boycotting, complaining about it online, unfriending ppl with opposing views, and *maybe* volunteering for campaigns or causes we care about

4/ These are all fine but don’t fundamentally change things, we’re learning. Activism is not about some superficial actions, but a way of being that allows one to cross over, understand, and ultimately shape other people’s alternate realities

5/ From @adriennemaree I’m going to talk about the importance of pleasure, the senses, the body, and art in “making the revolution irresistible.” And what we can learn from biomimicry and sci-fi about how to craft new narratives

6/ From Octavia Butler I’ll draw specific examples of how sci-fi, which is really just highly imaginative storytelling grounded in some way in reality, can be used to propose deeply immersive and vivid “virtual realities” for us to experiment with

7/ From @LFeldmanBarrett I’ll add recent research that the ideas/concepts in our head actually create “body budgeting regimes” that influence our moment to moment emotional experience

8/ And tie them together with a thesis about how imagined sci-fi futures actually represent new ways of budgeting our bodies, through the medium of concepts

9/ And how activism as a deeply embodied way of being is a bridge from the navel-gazing of personal growth to the societal changes we need urgently now, and we need to learn it from the experts: women, ppl of color, indigenous ppls, other oppressed groups

10/ And that that is a much more empowering and realistic framing for progressivism than anything based on guilt, shame, morality, or status signaling

Stay tuned!