Shockingly I agree with the second part. Black people's optimism that America could actually be the nation it says it wants to be has always been treated as radical.
This is the problem with an ideology like this. "Most people want more and better" is a fiction based in modernity. We have been conditioned to want more. And we no longer question where that all-consuming voraciousness comes from.
Most people do want "better". But we have better and won't give it to them. People aren't asking to go to the Mars. They just want a house. Telling them you have to go to Mars and eventually it will result in them getting a house... maybe. That's where this bullshit falls apart.
My ideology says something different. I believe there is a plateau of "more and better" that most people reach. Our continued consumption is driven by a small number of people who cannot be satisfied. Capitalists use scarcity to force us to feed their insatiable hunger.
As I continue to interrogate myself, I know that's why crypto is so offensive to me. It takes something we invented that is actually abundant and treats it like it's not. And it does that entirely for the sake of enriching some people at the expense of others.
My practical critiques still stand. But I do acknowledge that my bias is driven my moral critiques. Crypto is capitalism reified in the purest form we have yet seen. It is waste-driven consumption based on artificial scarcity for no other purpose than more capitalism.
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People are still sheepish about saying they see a therapist. It's slowly changing, but every time somebody says it in a way that sounds like they are embarrassed I get sad.
Therapy is great and you should do it.
I was very resistant to therapy at first. I was conditioned by my upbringing and my hubris to assume it couldn't really do anything for me. I was very wrong.
The problem is that as this stigma slowly lifts, we're gonna need a lot more therapists.
I was talking to @operaqueenie today about twitter. We have both been doing some thinking about whether we’re still getting what we want out of coming here. I think for me that is also coupled with asking myself if what I’m putting into it is net positive.
I want to share a few of the things that have led to me grappling with these questions.
First and foremost, I don’t think I recognize a community that I’m part of on here anymore. The communities I used to be a part of have been fractured to the point of being unrecognizable.
Tech twitter has changed a lot. It’s much more diverse, which is what we set out to do. I think it’s mostly a good change. But the result is I can’t really find my people anymore.
Except this isn't what's happening. People are already paying taxes on this stuff. And that's gonna get worse.
The problem as I see it is that crypto is attracting the tech talent that still wants this fairly tale of disrupting power when that's not what this is.
We're not ready to talk about this yet. I feel like the last generation of idealist technologists are still grappling with the power they helped create and the damage it has done.
Nah. We gotta remember the quote about idealists and sociopaths. And it's not just a binary. There are people all along the spectrum of how genuinely naive they are about what they're building.
I want to add an actual thought on top of this tweet. Ross is right from a practical perspective today. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of abundance, and what it looks like to create a society based around that. Like, what if it *was* sustainable?
Managing static assets (like music files) and making them available has gotten pretty cheap. There are other things companies try to do that ends up making things expensive again. But what if we stayed laser-focused on “easy access to all recorded music for relatively cheap”?
I’m disappointed but I’m not judging this person. We all need to understand that the majority of jobs still work this way. And the majority of people are still conditioned to think this way. We are still teaching each other that we can all do better and we can all have better.
I seem to be the only one who has sympathy for this person. Y’all love to tell me I’m the mean one. Y’all say you’re mad at employers, but you’re actually not. You will destroy a Worker way faster than you’ll actually come for Owners. It’s wild.
I can’t start the fight I wanna start today. But let me say this. Having sympathy for someone doesn’t mean they didn’t do anything wrong. Being thoughtful about how you wanna approach telling someone they did something wrong. That’s on you. It has nothing to do with them.
I think the thing that bothers me about the free speech debate is how simplistic it is. The idea that we aren't allowed to examine anything about the context in which things exist.
The ACLU is a body that tries to protect speech through legal action. There is a reason the ACLU isn't trying to help people get their Twitter accounts back. Because it's not the same fucking thing.
The ACLU also tries to actually stop bigoted discrimination. Because they know that's also bad. But then you talk to people like @siberianmi and he's like "the ACLU did a thing one time which means we can't censor anything ever even if it means people are getting hurt".