I support optimism
There are still many things happening that are objectively improving. You just have to look a bit harder.
One definitive field is software. It continues to get faster and better and more reliable.
It’s not the way I wanted it to happen (my country fucked it’s industry), but China understood the issue with transition to green energy and built so much production capacity for solar and wind energy, solar energy is properly exploding. Exports to Africa increased by 500% in the past 5 years. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-first-evidence-of-a-take-off-in-solar-in-africa/
What kind of software is getting better? Most commercial software has steadily gotten worse, moving to subscription models, taking more risks with updates and breaking things. I remember clearly when Github got bought by Microsoft. Since then, outages became a common occurance whereas before they were rare.
Open source software is arguably getting better and better, but less people are willing to do it for free while big tech reaps their free labour for profit with no return.
Can you be more specific about software? Because it feels like the consumer software I grew up loving is all a buggy mess of poor design decisions these days.
Am I just not able to accept the bugs anymore and they were always there? I can’t tell anymore.
The fediverse is a good example. There are performance improvements happening at the language level, so even old code runs faster. More essential services are online, online banking isn’t weird and niche anymore. We have so many different messengers to choose from, it’s no longer just skype that can do video calls.
Did you know we have reproducible builds now? https://reproducible-builds.org/
For a long time, you could make software from one piece of code and you got working software, but it wasn’t guaranteed to be identical. That made security and verification a lot harder, because you need to check for behavior instead of just comparing a check value. Now we can just compare the check value.
There are things like better testing and CI/CD pipelines now. We can measure that stuff. More projects have moved to git.
The micro computing sphere is very mature now, you can just buy a raspi or a comparable device and do home automation projects with them.
The only area where things are still messy is some areas of web technologies, because they’re constantly being rewritten.
Preamble: OP asked for optimism. If you reply to this comment trying to kill the vibe, I will burn your house down. Also, I can only really speak about the US; I live there, and don’t know enough to say much about anywhere else.
These dark times are not natural. They are sustained in no small part by a cult of personality and a gigantic propaganda machine, both sustained by dark money & evil billionaires.
That sounds rough, but it means some good things! The personality at the heart of that cult is wandering off and shitting himself, publicly letting his brain leak out his ears. It is the destiny of all machines to fail; money is powerful, but it can only buy so much. And those same billionaires are unpopular and insane. I fully believe part of the reason things are so bad right now is because the bad guys know things are going to get much harder for them very soon.
Additionally: much ado has been made about polarization these days. And yes, right wing extremism is incredibly visible and dangerous right now. But, good radicalization is also happening. We had some of the largest protests in the history of this country last year. Things like police brutality and class consciousness are inching ever closer to being mainstream issues among voters. Millennial democrats are getting elected more and more often, and they are getting more and more progressive. The fascists may be behind the wheel right now, but you know what fascists are fundamentally? Losers. Small, simple, evil men and the opportunists & sycophants that throw their lot in with them. They actively select against competence.
Look, things are bad right now. People are gonna be hurt, lives are gonna be ruined, and it’s gonna be a big fucking mess to clean up in the future. But we’re gonna beat 'em, 100%.
So try to help who you can, look out for your mental health, and stick around. A better future is possible!
Good reply
Locally
Civilization is basically just bureaucracy integrated over population. Some people figure out how to game the system via the chasm of abstraction between; that’s a function of any sufficiently complex system, look at the speed running community
But ultimately, civilization is just people. All the bureaucracy placed on top of it is just a collection of systems made by people to coordinate themselves. A lot of the dark theatrics are the result of the population becoming so vast that even at the lowest levels, the bureaucracy is distant and abstract. That abstraction alienates people from one another, so they only really know how to interact through the lens of that bureaucracy
The optimism is that you can engage your community. You can meet your neighbors, learn their trades and share yours, start a group chat. You can organize barter networks, childcare rotations, handyman services, mutual aid.
You can join local political groups. Start local political groups. Go to protests and meet people in neighboring areas. Network.
You can promote candidates for local office, and encourage others in your network to do so. You can run for local office, and encourage others in your network to do so. We’ve seen what the other side is offering so far as administrative competence, you think you’re worse?
Go to local events. Talk to your neighbors. Organize with your neighbors. The big system is very top down in its perspective, but it’s really ultimately dependent on the composite people. You can organize the people from the bottom up, and get your friends in nearby neighborhoods to do the same.
If all the neighborhoods are organized, bloodless revolution slides quite comfortably into the realm of plausible futures.
Even if I couldn’t find a good reason for optimism Nationally (which I would never admit to due to the the credible threat of getting my house burned down), I know that I can make an impact on the people I love (friends family and strangers) that are directly around me.
I might not change anything, but maybe I will have enough effect to make it possible for someone else. Another philosophy I have is that even though it seems like it’s a failing war against the aristocracy, I’m not going to make it easy for them and maybe I can take them down with me.
What do you mean by that? Can you elaborate?
