Exit Music (notes)

(Another Mastodon thread I'm afraid; this is how things seem to come out of me at the moment. It's overly laconic and possibly a bit Rorschach-y. Hopefully I'll be able to expand on this better in the future.)

People working in tech deserve both awakening to their part in the state of the world, and also compassion for not already knowing it or knowing how to extricate themselves yet. (And I say this to myself as someone a quarter-century into a tech career who has slowly come into some understanding.)

Not only can we understand our part in the state of the world, we can start to think about our part in the transition to a world that humans and other living creatures would want to live in.

That world is not a world of efficiency of production or transfer, but a world of care and connection and craft. A world where the way we live is an expression of the love that binds us to the real place we live in, and the creatures we share it with. A world whose sacredness is shot through with the everyday.

This world will come about again, one way or another. My hope is that the more we can create conditions that make us ready for the arrival of this world, the more of us there will be to enjoy it.

There is a lot of work to do, from the local to the global; from the socioeconomic to the ecological and political; from coordination to reconciliation.

The transition will be complex and messy and full of upheaval. We will have to use parts of the old system to take us to the new; we will have to use parts of the old system to protect us from other parts of the old system.

There is a place for all of us in this work, and in this transition. But there isn't necessarily a place for the things that made us what we believed ourselves to be – our skills, the things we produced, our learned place in society, our expectations for what life would be.

Still, that can be – I want to say freeing, but I don't mean bringing freedom to us as atomised individuals, to each do as we think fit. I mean rather, that this knowledge can bring us agency to act through our relation and our mutual dependence. And that is why I feel that the path of love is the path to love.