For a good many, our political involvement begins and ends at voting. Read up on the platforms so we can vote for whoever will implement policies that most align with our values, and the politicians do this with the taxes we pay. We expect then, that when shit gets bad, they will be there. If we experience a house fire, there will be a fire department available to respond. If we are experiencing violence, there will be a police department to keep us safe. If we experience unemployment, there will be a social safety net to catch us.

So as we experience more ecological crises, more economic downturn, more instances of community unsafety, we naturally are expecting that there must be someone who’s going to come along and save us from it.

Except there isn’t.

The political project in North America (and elsewhere) has always served to benefit the most privileged among us, and even then, not just cishet white men, but rich anyone, though primarily cishet white men. They walk this tightrope of decline - keep us comfortable enough while they take away our rights, our security, our safety, and we won’t fight back. People are surprisingly adaptable, so when one crisis hits, we acclimatize to the new status quo. We may be failed by our government, but surely it was just this time that they didn’t come through, not a system-wide failure to support anyone but the ruling class.

Eventually we may clue in that we’re being left behind, but the propaganda of how political change works - through voting - leaves us feeling helpless. No one came to save us so I guess we need to watch as the horrors roll in and count our blessings while others have it worse.

The thing is, the ruling class wants us to feel helpless. They keep us exhausted and unable to fight back. We cope by numbing out through a variety of means - drugs, alcohol, social media, sex, etc. We can see this collective exhaustion in the uptake of AI. People are outsourcing their thinking. People are too tired so they get Chat GPT to plan their vacation itinerary or write their essay for them. We also see this in Covid denialism. Covid is still here and kicking our collective asses - 1 in 10 experience either temporary or permanent disability (Long Covid), it’s wrecking our immune systems, and people are finding themselves sick many times a year. But the ruling class told us we’re back to normal (because of their own economic interests) and society breathed a sigh of relief at not having to think of the plague coming for us all.

They want us to feel helpless, and we can’t let them. We need to push back against their repressive regimes. There is a better world that should and could exist, but it’s something we will come to collectively.

No one is coming to save us. We are already here. We can be the architects of the future. We don’t have to give that job up to the elites of our society. We can take care of each other and meet one another’s needs. It’s so important that we know that. Through mutual aid and care networks, we can see ourselves into a society built on a foundation of values we believe in - love, hope, care, connection.

Together is the only way through this. Me, personally? I have hope we can get together and create a beautiful future.

Preface: I don't remember how to add collapsible sections (without hiding everything with the spoiler feature). I remember using it on Lemmy, but I forgot the syntax. I only know the markup for code blocks but they won't collapse the text.

I hope the long text ahead doesn't pollute the Public and federated feeds and actually contributes with them. It's a story that I just wrote, entitled "A dimensionless night". It's a mix of scientific concepts, philosophical musings and subtle spiritual references.

A dimensionless night

Have you ever wondered if a dimensionless universe could exist? One without dimensions as we know it, no length, no depth, no width, no time? What if the sentience could exist there, even though it would be incapable of acting? A sentience that always existed, without ceasing of existing?

The closest bet would be Boltzmann's brain. A spontaneous emergence of an incorporeal sentience imagining and dreaming of a cosmos, "more probable to have emerged into existence than the entire cosmos". It'd be dimensionless, because there would be no cosmic structure, as we know, to contain it.

So I was suddenly awakened, jump-scared by feelings of dizziness, numbness and shortness of breath. I couldn't feel my heartbeat, I couldn't breathe, and part of me was agonizing over the impossibility of breathing, because I was used to breathe, yet I was still... alive? Not exactly alive as in a living being, but... existing... somehow. It's like I became incorporeal and afloat, as I couldn't feel anything within, around and outside me.

I tried to open my eyes just to realize they were already open: I became blind. I tried to shout, just to realize I lost my hearing and speech, too. I tried to move, but you guessed it: I definitely had no body.

I was aware of my own existence, as it was the only thing I could feel, but my existence was all it seemed to be out there. Actually, it seemed to be something else out there, but I couldn't feel enough to distinguish what that was.

I could think. I could hear my inner voice, although it wasn't really a voice as I was used to... It was a feeling: everything became a feeling, a sensation beyond my former senses.

The other thing was still there, I could really feel it. As I thought of it, I could feel it near. Then I had an idea: I tried to think of what I'd say loudly. This unfolded a ping-pong dialogue between me and... them. Everything happened so fast that I have no means of depicting it through this text. Actually, there was no time at all, it was timeless... Whatever that means.

"Hello?", I thought, just to be surprised with another thought "Hello, Daniel". The ping-pong dialogue continued: "Who are you?".
"You know who I am". "I'm not sure if I know". "Yes, you know me". "And who is that?". "I'm you". "If you're me, how am I talking to you?". "Because I'm not you, either". "But you said you're me". "Yes, I am, yet I'm not, either".

I was starting to feel a conflict inside my incorporeal mind. On the one hand, I started to suspect that I was talking to an entity, deity, demon or demoness. On the other hand, I started to suspect it was a trickery of my own mind, trying to find solace amidst the lack of external stimuli. Then another thought popped up in my mind: "Why not both?". It was funny as my mundane memory of the meme also popped up (I couldn't "see" the meme, I couldn't hear the meme, I could just feel it there, something akin to a binary computer file: just data and information). But I was still agonizing over the lack of physicality.

"Are you who I think you are?". "Sort of". "Then how are you simultaneously a goddess and a trickery of my own mind?". "Because the latter is needed for you to face the former, you need it so you can grasp my presence".

A lot of non-verbal exchanges happened, which I can neither remember nor describe. Everything happened within a fraction of a Planck time, yet it also felt like a really long timeframe. It was until I decided to ask Her "What is the purpose, what is your purpose, why did I exist?". A somber silence dominated my mind. My mind was going, I could feel it. It was like my sentience started to collapse on its own, converging to an infinitesimal point in spaceless space and timeless time.

Then I was awakened again. I forgot much of what happened, but now my mundane sensorial devices are back, my body is back, I'm back on my bed. The illusion of an existence is back. And I miss being dimensionless. I miss Her.

==========================
How Software Companies Die
==========================
- Orson Scott Card

The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and
marketing types - and vice versa.

Programming is the Great Game. It consumes you, body and soul. When
you're caught up in it, nothing else matters. When you emerge into
daylight, you might well discover that you're a hundred pounds
overweight, your underwear is older than the average first grader, and
judging from the number of pizza boxes lying around, it must be spring
already. But you don't care, because your program runs, and the code
is fast and clever and tight.

You won.

You're aware that some people think you're a nerd. So what? They're
not players. They've never jousted with Windows or gone hand to hand
with DOS. To them C++ is a decent grade, almost a B - not a language.
They barely exist. Like soldiers or artists, you don't care about the
opinions of civilians. You're building something intricate and fine.
They'll never understand it.

Beekeeping

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on:
You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You
can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in
one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.

You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money
than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think.
You see, all these programmers keep hearing their fathers' voices in
their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All
you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in
their heads) "Jeez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this
is cheap.

And you get them to stay in the hive by giving them other coders to
swarm with. The only person whose praise matters is another
programmer. Less-talented programmers will idolize them; evenly
matched ones will challenge and goad one another; and if you want to
get a good swarm, you make sure that you have at least one certified
genius coder that they can all look up to, even if he glances at other
people's code only long enough to sneer at it.

He's a Player, thinks the junior programmer. He looked at my code.
That is enough.

If a software company provides such a hive, the coders will give up
sleep, love, health, and clean laundry, while the company keeps the
bulk of the money.

Out of Control

Here's the problem that ends up killing company after company. All
successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a
leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader
forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who
end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes a management type
himself. One way or another, marketers get control.

But...control of what? Instead of finding assembly lines of productive
workers, they quickly discover that their product is produced by
utterly unpredictable, uncooperative, disobedient, and worst of all,
unattractive people who resist all attempts at management. Put them
on a time clock, dress them in suits, and they become sullen and start
sabotaging the product. Worst of all, you can sense that they are
making fun of you with every word they say.

Smoked Out

The shock is greater for the coder, though. He suddenly finds that
alien creatures control his life. Meetings, Schedules, Reports. And
now someone demands that he PLAN all his programming and then stick to
the plan, never improving, never tweaking, and never, never touching
some other team's code. The lousy young programmer who once worshiped
him is now his tyrannical boss, a position he got because he played
golf with some sphincter in a suit.

The hive has been ruined. The best coders leave. And the marketers,
comfortable now because they're surrounded by power neckties and they
have things under control, are baffled that each new iteration of
their software loses market share as the code bloats and the bugs
proliferate.

Got to get some better packaging. Yeah, that's it.

------------

Yes, it's from Orson Scott Card, the Hugo and Nebula award winning
author of Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Lost Boys, the Alvin
Maker series, and many others novels.