I'm out of spicy takes for the week I think, but I've been thinking a lot about how to build things and I'm tried of the same things being tried over and over again and failing for the same reasons and then people going "but this time it might work" even if they don't realize it.
I'm only in the middle of my 30s and have already seen the same things happen four times in a row, on the left, in software, in the communities that form around my marginalizations, in municipal and state politics, in groups that fill gaps the state refuses to.
it's not the fault of people saying it or doing it, of course, but like.
we don't really have time to be making old mistakes, we've had eight years to do that in microscale and nearly half a century in macroscale.
in every domain. because they're all connected by the common thread.
but instead people keep focusing on one or two things and thinking that if that changed it'll work, when you really need to be thinking synoptically about things.
this isn't an argument against dispursed small groups, but it is one for being connected in some way enough that you can at least apply leverage in the same directions at the same time. software, community building, foundations of whatever flavor of left you are, whatever, the core problem is similar and unless you're directly in the line of fire, these separate things keep ending up as wedges, both in the wedge issue sense, and in the pinball sense of "making people who would otherwise be working at the intersection instead have to choose one or the other category to work on"
[the saying goes "one struggle one fight" but it means acting in the same direction because every piece of gained ground weakens the oppressors. the individual fights matter but it needs to be in concert with a similar direction instead of the current thing where people often are picking zero sum fights and stepping on other toes of people doing the same work, because there's no connective tissue anymore. because people keep doing their own tiny projects not wanting the baggage of the collective.]
