yesterday, i was outside the grocery store i frequent; wondering where i could keep my bike to go in & grab a sandwich quickly. the staff told me to take my bike in, otherwise someone would steal it.
i biked my way to rc wondering about the state of the world. it feels irreversibly out of balance — wealth disparity; greed; unkind-ness; healthcare is rare, fast food is not; a specie single-handedly destroying a planet’s climate; capitalism; blah, blah, blah.
and it is for / in this world that i want to make art. make things, for people, to gleefully escape for a temporal second. to forget that there is so much happening that is just wrong.
and in all of this: i’m supposed to use technology: a medium inherently invented for capitalism. maybe that’s a good thought: what does anti-capitalistic technology look like?
we do have:
- rhizome’s solar network: https://solar-protocol-node.rhizome.org → i would, however, argue that this is also inherently exploitative.
all technology is perhaps exploitative: exploit a machine; silicon; children in the democratic-republic-of-congo; displace families to build more data-centers.
because building a computer yourself is too difficult.
what really is a computer or computing machine, and what does it offer, that other things can't?
is my pursuit worth it?
the counter to that question is: if not this, then what? what pursuit is worth it?
if i do ‘social-work’, the scale i can operate at is too small. if i do artistic work, it is self-indulgent and realistically unsustainable. if i teach, i’m offering lies (because there is no space for idealism in the real-world). if i ‘make tools to change the world’, i’m lying to myself.
really — what should i do?