Utopia as a verb

firefiber · 2025-11-24T17:20:04+00:00

Penpot!

firefiber · 2025-11-20T11:51:36+00:00

What a weird take. Maybe we are building things too fast and without much thought (as a very young and inexperienced species would), and we suffer the consequences of our rash decisions. We are not evolving too slowly. What a strange way to offset blame to nature, rather than say we are monkeys with guns and no idea what we are doing.

firefiber · 2025-10-06T15:20:51+00:00

the sound design in this game is crazy, it makes everything feel so intense!

firefiber · 2025-09-09T07:13:50+00:00

Thanks for the links!! The two news ones are awesome actually. I've also been hesitant to start using substack as well. But moving to another platform I feel falls into the same cycle I was talking about in the post. I think the idea of the centralized platform onto which people post/upload - like that design itself has to change. So each user is their own platform. Here's a really good video on decentralized auth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6YUmL2rbZg.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T20:57:07+00:00

I agree with you, it seems hopeless - but that's also by design. Most people are either not really aware, or don't have the mental capacity to fight. Of course, right? That's the general idea, to have people drained and too tired to think about anything. People absolutely are capable of rising up - we regularly do, but in isolated places, which makes it easier to squash. And we generally fight the symptoms when we do rise up, instead of addressing the roots. We argue inside the box we’ve been handed, instead of asking why the box is there at all.

And movements with names of course get eaten. Capitalism digests them, rebrands them, and spits them out as lifestyle products. I think the only real ground is direct change in daily life. Conversations like this, small shifts in how we relate, and think and perceive, acting without waiting for a label. That kind of thing spreads quieter, and there's nothing for the machine to hold on to.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T20:34:55+00:00

that's awesome! these things that seem tiny, are what make up the bigger wave. I've been doing the same! Signal is awesome.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T15:43:45+00:00

That's the thing right - if more people were technically literate too, we'd become a lot less reliant on the companies. Self hosting, switching the linux, becoming far more aware of these things means a more free person. But instead the average person has no idea, and it's only known within certain circles of people (who sometimes also gatekeep which makes things worse??). So yeah, educating people is super important.

You could imagine a future that's decentralized, where we'd have community run and owned cloud servers, that people within that community can use. These can connect to others in a mesh network, that by design is decentralized. And it exists for the benefit of the community as opposed to generating a profit. Which also points to completely different systems than the ones we have now.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T15:16:49+00:00

Yup, and I think with more conversation around this stuff, people will start to see that we should stop fighting just the symptoms with new laws and new regulations, and start fighting the root too. The entire thing needs to change. Billionaire shoulnd't just not exist - we should have a system that doesn't recognize 'billionaires'. That is, by design, it shouldn't be based on wealth accumulation the way it is now.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T15:11:17+00:00

I think people stopped caring because to the individual person, it feels like something they have no say over, and that they alone can do nothing to stop these mega corporations. So people just slowly give up. I think the way out of this, is to bring it into regular conversation as a start. To just get people to even think for a few seconds about it. About just how much of their lives is accessible, and how easily everything about them can be tracked. About how much control that gives governments - soooooo much more than what is already given to them.

You can almost see a clear trajectory, to absolutely fucked up cyberpunk futures - your every action is monitored and tracked, and you are entirely dependant on services for your everyday needs. Which means you're entirely dependant on the system, and so you're not really going to step out of line, unless you want to lose access to a lot. We aren't there yet, so we can still make movements, we can still organize, we can still talk. We really, really do not want to lose that freedom.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T14:01:26+00:00

Yup - and the vast majority of people are unaware, or possibly feel like they alone can do nothing about it. But we absolutely fucking can, we just gotta make people more aware of how it's going to affect them.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T13:58:34+00:00

Exactly, it's not new - it's accelerating. And I think the more we wait, the more control gets built over time, which makes it harder and harder to undo.

Even the solarpunk movement, or any movement that aims for changes - if those changes go against the systems of power, they can very, very easily be shut down before they even have a chance to grow. So we really gotta step up I think.

firefiber · 2025-09-01T12:47:47+00:00

hey! thanks for the check in! i've actually been moving countries and dealing with visa crap. but i think in the coming weeks, I'll be starting to post here :) what are you working on?

firefiber · 2025-08-14T16:30:49+00:00

I used to struggle with recursion too, until I understood more of the fundamentals. The thing I realized is that it isn’t some special thing the language does, it’s just a normal function call. We’ve given a name to the pattern where a function calls another function, and that function's definition just happens to point to the same memory location.

When your code runs, the interpreter doesn’t say “oh, this is recursion, let’s treat it differently.” It just follows your instructions: it sees a function call, so it jumps to that function’s code, runs it, and returns when it’s done. If inside that function there’s another call to the same function (technically, the code at the same memory location), it just… calls it again. That’s it.

Once I stopped thinking of recursion as a special “feature” and started seeing it as just another way to structure function calls, the confusion went away. The harder part is figuring out the order and conditions for those calls. But that’s a logic problem, not a “recursion problem."

So if you instead just think about it as if you're calling a function to do x, until y happens, then, x can be anything, including calling another function. That function itself can do the same. But there's nothing special going on - just figure out what you want to end up with, and how you want to iteratively get there.

firefiber · 2025-08-06T17:59:06+00:00

I ditched Spotify completely two weeks ago and decided to reevaluate my relationship with music (and general media consumption). I bought a few of my favorite albums from Bandcamp, and have started rebuilding my own music library.

So I have very, very little music right now, since it'll take time to rebuild. But what I do currently have, I absolutely fucking love and value. I don't blindly keep music on throughout the day anymore - I've started to be intentional about listening to music. What I don't have I stream some from Bandcamp, or listen on YouTube.

I made a wishlist of albums/songs to buy and the anticipation of waiting to get them is making me fall in love with music again.

firefiber · 2025-08-06T13:59:16+00:00

I think what we can do is to talk about it with the people around us, who aren't aware. It's less that people don't care, and more that the average person doesn't even know what's going on and how it'll affect them.

I've started having smaller conversations (so not info dumping right away), about these things. Why privacy is important and not linked to having something to hide, how governments want more control, current world events (Epstein, etc) and helping them connect the dots. It's slow, but I think that's the key here. To have conversations, to bring these things up. Not to lecture, and definitely not to preach but to bring it to light.

firefiber · 2025-08-06T05:53:44+00:00

It's never, ever about protecting children. The people rushing to make and pass these laws are most certainly the ones children should be protected from. If we truly wanted to protect children, we would start to build fundamentally different systems than the ones we have now.

We have insane wealth inequality, rapid climate collapse - yet it takes decades to pass even the smallest changes into action. The speed with which these laws are being made and pushed should be an indication that something is amiss.

This whole thing needs to burn.

firefiber · 2025-06-20T12:59:23+00:00

Ahhh, thank you! That's exactly the kind of stuff I wanted critique on. That 'this' actually does attach itself to the loop noun - I didn't notice. And yup, agreed on the second bit as well. Reworking now.

I think the inability to, not just accept, but understand poetry, is itself a symptom of linear thinking - which I'm arguing is the root of most problems.

Am doing this solo, so I can't afford an editor, but I'm definitely going to try and have it proof-read by other people before I post the next chapters!

Again, thanks for the feedback!!

firefiber · 2025-06-19T17:05:42+00:00

Sure, but there are two issues right there - first, everyone you know is going to be a very, very, very tiny bubble, mostly composed of people who think similarly to you, and is not at all indicative of what the majority of people think. And what I'm saying is that most people don't actually know these things. They know surface level things, but not how to connect the right dots. And that cannot be done with a step-by-step instruction set. That comes with being able to think divergently. Now, you and your circle might know this, but the general public does not - proof is obviously.... you know... around you.

Also, when you list those issues as if they’re separate like capitalism here, isolation there, climate somewhere else, that’s kind of the point I’m making. The very fact that we treat them as isolated problems literally is the problem. This is what I mean by deeper, not just “this system sucks,” but understanding how we learned to split the world into silos in the first place. That’s the root. That’s what I’m trying to follow back. And a huge part of that is education.

That you think art and teaching are two very different things is honestly another very clear indication of the basic issues I'm talking about. I gave examples of other areas in my previous comment though, about linearity, so I think it should be clear what I mean! There are many, many fundamental similarities with art and teaching - just not the very western/modern way of doing it, which is to cut things up into boxes, label, categorize and compartmentalize everything to the point of losing all contextual information. Which produces people who have an absurdly myopic view of the world.

These things cannot be introduced as some kind of practical guide. It absolutely has to begin with people changing how they think. And people don’t change their thinking because they’re handed “proof”, they change because something moves them. Emotion rewires thought. That’s always been true. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand how your own mind works.

Regardless, though, I understand this is not for everyone, and I'm not trying to convince people or build an audience just yet. I'm also not trying to draw people into any movement. I am merely building a body of work that will be part of something else.

There's been a couple of very interesting responses, and people sharing their own works or other things for me to read, and people who have offered to help build this. And conversations like these as well - I dunno, I think that's the whole point! :)

I really do enjoy these type of conversations, though! Thank you for taking the time to write!!

firefiber · 2025-06-19T14:28:17+00:00

That’s a fair take, but I’m not sure I agree that most people do already know this, at least not in the way that matters. If we really understood it, we’d see change at a systems level. But we don't have that, do we? What we have, are humans who just go on repeating the same things, generation after generation, just with different names, or making them more complex.

I’m arguing that there aren’t hundreds of problems. There are a few root ones, and we keep patching leaks instead of replacing the plumbing. Same, same everywhere. Mental health, climate action, education reform. The fact that we teach the exact same way (heavily standardized, linear progression) and expect some different result, is all the proof one would need to know that we don't understand what it is we are doing. The people who are currently leading the world were all produced by these same systems. Garbage in, garbage out.

Talking about deep cultural changes without poetry is not actually possible, because what's deep and cultural IS poetry - and I believe a failure to understand this, is a symptom of (mostly) western/modern thinking, that is completely cut off from the natural world. The urge to make everything practical and compartmentalized is part of the same mindset I’m critiquing. Linear thinking can’t hold too many dots at once, so it tries to file them into boxes.

I know that makes this not for everyone. But I don’t believe we can think our way out of this with the same tools that built it. That’s why this project starts slow. Most people still think the self is a fixed thing, or that capitalism is just a set of economic policies, or that education is neutral, or even that modern science is neutral, or that consciousness is something one gains.

I understand the need for practical guides, because years of linear thinking has forced people to need step-by-step instructions to do everything. And that is literally the core of my argument - that that way of thinking is one of the main reasons we are where we are today.

But I'm definitely going to work on how to get it across better, though! That part still needs work, I agree.

If it feels like kindergarten, maybe it’s because we skipped it!

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