@tilthat Is Down

@tilthat is down

I WON????

No one warned me that coming into your own also includes grieving the life you were conditioned to believe you wanted.

Untitled.

i made a comic in google slides for some ungodly reason

Why anarchists don’t have all the answers

A lot of people don’t really understand what’s going on when anarchists say they ‘don’t have all the answers’. They think it’d an admission of ignorance or a lack of vision. They think some scholar should come along and give the answers. But that’s not what’s going on.

Anarchists, by definition, can not have an accurate and complete plan of what an anarchist society should be like, because an anarchist society must arise out of consensus processes and spontaneous initiatives of people and groups seizing their autonomy. If it comes from the vision of one or a few theorists, it isn’t an anarchist society.

An inventor can conceive a new machine in his head first and then build it. A dictator can imagine how he wants society to run and then build it. But an anarchist designing the perfect society and then pushing to create a world entirely in their own image, is not actually acting in anarchist ways. They’re prioritizing their own vision instead of listening to everyone else’s thoughts, experiences and needs.

So anarchists can do some guess work about what a future anarchist society can be like, but they can never draft the definitive plan. Because the only society that would be truly anarchist is one born from an anarchist process. It can not have a dogmatic pre-set goal, because if there was a preset goal, the process of coming together and sharing experiences and hearing each others needs and from that process building the best society based on what was heard and shared, all that couldn’t take place anymore. It’d just be a vanguard convincing everyone else of their pre-set goal. That’s not anarchism.

So when anarchists say they don’t have all the answers of what an anarchist society will look like, it isn’t that they as individuals lack the skill to envision it. It’s because the answers of what society will look like have to be the result of the process of anarchism to be an anarchist society.

What anarchists have, is the tools to build anarchism: consensus and autonomy. What they can not have, must not try to have, is an exact blue print of all the things those tools will build. They have to be prepared to leave that to the millions of people who will build it together.

Wayne Douglas Barlowe

been thinking about this a lot lately and it made me realize that the language we use to talk about our future presence in the solar system reflects ideas that shouldn’t cross over with space exploration. words like “colonize” and “settle” in the context of human life on other worlds brings up disquieting imagery of rampant exploitation without regard for the local environment or the people involved, i.e. imperial colonialism. this is most literal when said by people like Musk or Bezos who want to do exactly that, and I’m convinced that it’s in our best interests to stop them. we have to change many things about our civilization before we’re truly ready to begin building an ethical, sustainable presence in the solar system, because right now we don’t even have an ethical, sustainable presence on our own home planet.

TL;DR - we, as a global society, need to decolonize ourselves before we end up colonizing space.

we’ve got work to do, folks.

I think a lot of space enthusiasts, including myself, can get carried away when talking about space exploration so here’s a reminder that “space exploration and multi-planetary civilization good” and “manifest destiny bad” are both extremely important and CAN coexist. just because we’re smart and we’re alone in our solar system (we think) does not mean we own the universe. the cosmos is not made for us, we simply live in it. our future lies among the stars, yes. but that future is as students of nature, and we should exercise our tremendous technological power with care and humility. we are children of the cosmos, not lords. we should be explorers, not conquerors. we’ve made those mistakes before.