i have been trying to find some words for cohost's final days for about a week now. everything i write is self-serving and self-indulgent and a little too woeful. so here's the heart of it.
it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.
it's even better to make things that you believe in.
it's not a liberatory act that will save us ('evil people make things they believe in too'),
but making stuff does propel us forward, towards new intersections of thought and action
the alternative is entropy--real or abstract, and we live in a time where both have advocates
the latest and greatest developments of capitalism would prefer we made nothing, and that dare we make something, it better not be something we believe in for its own end.
exception: you are allowed to believe in a [product/service/brand's] abiltity to ['find an audience'/'create a niche'/generate profit]
but ideally, you don't even make a [product/service/brand]. you dropship a product that was made 5 years ago. you subcontract a service for pennies on the dollar. you leverage a brand built by following trends that you did not even need to organically understand.
soon, they dream: replace the 'you' with 'your ai agent of choice.'
it's good to make things, even though making things is incredibly hard.
it's even better to make things that you really, really believe in.
making things will not save us. but the alternative is creative annihilation.
and many people are rooting it to arrive.
"you can't make a living in creative fields". "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". "all the art made protesting the war had the impact of a pie dropped from six feet up". doomer shitheads will do cognitive backflips to justify why it's okay to be a big overgrown weevil with zero personal interests besides slurping down corporate-approved mass media content, jerking off, and sleeping. why bother? climate change is going to kill us all. the rich will get richer. the poor will stay poor until they die. may as well hammer the dopamine button as much as we can and get while the getting is good, right?
making stuff is how we connect with others. it's how we leave a record of what we were thinking and feeling at this specific point in time. even the art you think is stupid matters; think about the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, Pre-Colombian childrens' toys, doodles of dudes riding snails in the corners of medieval manuscripts, early 20th century Tijuana bibles. no, none of this shit magically saved the entire world, but it still matters! creating something is what makes us human-- it is at once an intimate act of sharing a tiny piece of yourself with others, and a contributing drop of water in humanity's grand tidal wave. corporations aren't human, and won't make your life better unless they can make it worse in some other way in exchange, but by reaching out and leaving our mark we can try to make things easier for each other.
making a website is included in this. making a post on said website is included in this. if you're reading this years in the future on the Wayback Machine or whatever: hello. we were here. we made this. if things are still shit when you're reading this, and it's a good chance they are in some way or another, don't let anyone tell you it's stupid to create and laugh and dream of a better world. eggbug forever
