As I set out to write, I ought to give some reasons why. I decided that, in order to give shape, and think through my frustration with my prevailing corporate existence, it’s useful to leverage a tool that I’m familiar with. I know, I missed by some thirty years the Golden Age of blogging. Now, it is a quaint medium; now it feels like it rebels against the pace of other platforms, too. It is antithetical to rapid consumption of instantly forgotten, context-collapsed snippets.
I write so that, principally, I can investigate why am I so. pissed. off. while I’m churning out shareholder value, and deplete, arguably ever-more efficiently, planetary reserves of what sustains and nourishes us.
I also write because I read a lot: this is not a humble-brag, it is an ever-expanding chaos that I want to give some structure to. I know that participatory practices pull on Paolo Freire and Arturo Escobar and indigenous ways of being and knowing, and that my illiterate, un-schooled great-grandmother could tell that famine is coming just by listening to the Soviet Five-Year Plan on the radio. I know that reading Ursula K. Le Guin challenges me to represent planetary participants in my human-attuned workshops, because we cannot generally ‘make things better’ if we only make things for humans, a vanishingly tiny percentage of planetary life.
I also know, and live with the tension of – I need to build up my facilitation practice, network, scale, reach, evidence my professional persona to one day have the power take on work that aligns with my ethics, and to make judgements about how much I can afford not to earn, but maintain my integrity instead. And with the experiences I have, I hope that I could be useful for the radical reimagination of world-making that either is captured by corporate interest – see below – or upon collapse, ends up in the hands of people along with the bailouts that’ll wipe out our savings and force us to think once more what is it that we value and that we’re willing to build anew.
Most days, I stand at the precipice of the common man’s AI frontier. In that sense, writing is also a sort of self-directed harm-reduction. I learn about harm-reduction of other kinds: ecosystem restoration, embodied practices, legislative theatre, ecology and adaptation, the names of plants and birds and those of my neighbours, ancestors who have fearlessly confronted injustice, and communities who fight for rights (of water bodies, of protest, of people in carceral systems) currently. I do this, because I feel that I need to be adamant about hope. I remind myself to uplift those different perspectives, histories of resistance, and networked human action against immobile-looking mainstream forces, like apartheid that is known to collapse under boycott and divestment.
I am at a precipice. Writing is a clarifying tool counter to the daily gloop of mind (there’s the words gloom, loop, Goop in there – I’ll write about that origin story sometime) I want to force myself to confront and grapple with concepts that I observe, work through personally, read about, or discuss with others – practitioners, experts by experience, enforcers, policy-makers, etc.
I am learning to edit the eternal ampersands of my mind, to exert focus, sustain attention. I find this ancient format of writing-for-the-web useful for that, because it slows me down, and makes me remember what I was thinking, about structures of this world are sustaining, those that are history-making, those that dared imagining otherwise.
draw together 