Learn to Garden.
No seriously.
AI represents the pinnacle of consumerism.
The culmination of a system where Humans produce nothing for their own consumption.
Fractured communities of isolated and desperate consumer-workers who cannot survive outside the system they were born into.
To undermine this system requires not just attacking it’s foundation, but digging beneath to the fundament, usurping it through a grass roots refusal to participate.
Beneath the foundations of consumerism, capitalism, and every society we can remember is agriculture.
Stop participating in the high price of groceries.
Start producing your own food, feeding, and growing your community.
You don’t have to make everything from scratch to reject the Door Dash Fast Food Overnight Delivery system that exists entirely to extract profit from the human need to eat.
Use capitalism to your advantage. Buy hydroponics and lights to grow indoors year round. Buy hoop houses to extend outdoor seasons. Buy seeds. Grow seedlings and give them away.
Learn to harvest seeds from the plants you grow.
Cook and preserve food. Fill a pantry/freezer and EAT what’s in it!
Work together with your friends/neighbours to support local farmers and grocers.
Learn about plant Hardiness and what crops will remain/become viable in your region.
Then take this concept and apply it to every other aspect of human existence that’s been coopted to fund a system that ultimately results in AI slop.
I have a slightly different but similar take. The real human superpower is community, and we’ve lost so much of that through the Internet, or at least have lost our grasp on how to handle it. We are at our strongest, in fact pretty much unstoppable, when we come together as a group, when we help each other and support each other without being transactional. Our collective goals unite us but individual diversity is our strength.
It’s not just about food, but food is a great example. If you’ve ever been part of a friendly community with a farmer or even a gardener, you’ll know they frequently give away food to anyone who wants it, because they frequently end up with more than they need, and even you will end up with more than you need. They grow or harvest stuff you don’t, and they do a great job at it, with a few different connections you’ll have a supermarket worth of groceries knocking on your door. And in return, in the words of Letterkenny, “When a friend [or neighbor] asks for help, you help them.” This is how communities work. We give when we can, share when we can, we ask for help when we can’t, we work together as a group but remain individuals. Granted some people will only ever ask for help, won’t share anything and will take and take and take and that can be draining, toxic, and truly ruinous if you can’t figure out anything you appreciate about them. But they are the minority, and they don’t find themselves welcome in most communities. Most people share and share-alike, most people provide something to the community in their own way, and if you find the right group of people and community and look at it with the right attitude that’s all you’ll find.
There’s always going to be drama and conflict too, that’s also very deeply human. But we need to stay connected to our friends and neighbors and communities anyway. We need to be strong enough to tolerate that, and endure it and live with it, in exchange for the many, many benefits we get from the community we gain as a result. We are social creatures, and our social drive has been stolen and sabotaged and twisted into some horrible network of global toxicity for profit. We need to reclaim it, take it back for ourselves and start reconnecting to other human beings on a human level again, start re-knitting the fabric of our communities. This is how we’ll become resilient enough to survive the future. Our history is a history of struggle and endurance and community. And that’s not going to change because of any amount of technology or natural disaster or self-inflicted disaster. We will still struggle and endure and build communities.
It’s what we do.
I find it hard to build community when the majority of people around me are likely maga nutheads that are one conversation away from saying they want to kill Trans people and enslave blacks.
So I pretty much keep to myself. Can’t trust people.
I don’t know who the people around you are. I won’t tell you you’re wrong to be afraid of interacting with them.
But I do know that social media is designed to make you feel that way.
Social media algorithms find the angriest, the most hateful, the most radical, content on all sides and feed it to you. So you’re going to see people on your side saying the other side wants to kill you, and you’re going to see people on the other side saying they want to kill you, and you’re not going to see the vast majority of people who don’t actually want to kill you.
Because the more afraid you are of your actual human neighbors, the more time you’ll spend on social media watching ads and being force-fed algorithmic slop. And that slop makes you even more afraid of your neighbors, so you spend even more time online, and so on and so forth.
So I’d ask you to ask yourself: if you believe people in your community want to kill trans people and enslave blacks, how much of that belief comes from what people in your community have actually said and done, and how much of that belief comes from stuff you’ve heard online?
Sound advice. We should be mindful of how social media polarizes us. but I must push back a little on one aspect.
The difference between wanting to kill people and remaining silent among the calls for violence is negligible.
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Still working on that. I’ll DM you.
That position mostly comes from looking at what politicians say and do, and looking at who supports them.
There are communities out there you can trust, that will both support you and find you very useful, you’ve just got to find them, which isn’t necessarily easy. Like I said, the whole social system has been sabotaged and what we have access to is designed to keep people divided and disconnected from each other. There are a lot of obstacles. Physical proximity is definitely very helpful as a way of getting around many of those obstacles and systems, but it’s not explicitly required. If you can find a community that would fit you and that you need, they may not be close to you. But if you make it a priority, you find a way to either bring yourself to the community or bring some of that community to yourself, whichever turns out to be the more practical option. Or do neither because physical proximity is still not strictly required, it just makes things a lot easier. If it’s easier to stay where you are instead of making it easier to connect with some beneficial form of community then you can do that too (but it’s probably not actually easier, we just become convinced we are stuck when we fail to see any way out).
Building your community doesn’t preclude your right to establish healthy boundaries.
You can give your MAGA neighbour a potted plant without inviting them to the potlatch. (I think Americans call them block parties?)
Build it for those that will contribute positively.
Fully agree.
Community is built on communal experiences. Food, music, culture, they’re really all just biproducts of sharing the human experience that is survival.