36 entries for 2025

CONSPIRACY

[Nudging people towards your conclusion while making them think they arrived there themselves will keep them resistant to questioning their basis for belief.]

[Conspiracism is more invested in the issues of specific leaders (bad satan worshippers) than the structure of power itself.]

[The face of Jesus and Mary may be commonly found on toast and fruit in Christian nations, wheras the name of Allah might be found on cantaloupe skins in Indonesia.]

[‘Is it possible that…’ has a very low barrier for proof.]

[One function of the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ conspiracy is to deny that sexual violence is banal and that culture empowers men to do it.]

[A movie lets you spend time together without having to make lots of small talk; sports migut even let you root for the same team.]

a kenyan woman got out of her rickshaw as I walked past, looked at me and spoke in english, “hi jesus!”

Who do you trust (when you don’t trust the news)?

[If manufacturers of cars bear some responsibility for your private vehicle’s safety issues, as airplane manufacturers would if flights put people in danger, perhaps so should social media companies for presenting alternative realities that lead to real world catastrophes.]

Wanting & Capitalism

You don’t go to Satan’s Discounter for your golden lute. Don’t use our evil overlord to buy something (gasp) REAL—something you’ll use forever and that will become a part of you. That would be like using a dating app to find the love of your life…

I found a pen shop. A little hole-in-the-wall. The kind of place I’m surprised exists, glad too. It has probably been in the family for generations, passed from papa to son, while the neighborhood around them has slowly been turned into an outdoor luxury mall.

It doesn’t matter if you have 100 attachments or one attachment. You still have attachments. There’s no practical distance between one and 100.

Ideally we should try to notice and hold our attachments with an open hand. Ready to let them go when the time is right.

When you live out of a backpack, you can’t have favorites. You need to survive. If I weren’t walking all day, I could wear jeans, mosey around cafes, and twirl my mustache. Unfortunately, my current (self-assigned) profession involves walking seven days a week.

On Funding Agencies and the Third Sector

The gruelling applications, tens of pages long and unnecessarily complicated and repetitive, were clearly meant for insiders and I soon realised that this was precisely what was being assessed - how ‘insider’ I was.

When every project has some funding agency’s logo on the footer, this is what is communicated, there is an officialisation of a sector which is, by definition, unofficial, a sector which arose to bridge the gaps of officialism. That’s when I made the ‘NOT in partnership with’ banner.

[When funding is normalized as a kind of approval, the agencies become filters who thwart anything that challenges their preferred narratives, while simultaneously supporting those narratives through their agents.]

People on the inside of these organisations are just ordinary people - some with the strength to see but not the awareness, others with the awareness but not the strength, and fewer with both. Many begin with genuine dreams to change the world, others to be seen in the image of someone who is doing just that.

When are you leaving?

Recently, a phrase I have been saying has been, “One hand cleans the other,” and that’s how I see it in many ways. I need to continue on my Way. I have to get rid of things one way or the other. For me to give them to people who need them, who will use them, who will love them, that’s a huge bonus. It’s like 1+1=3. Like there are cheat codes in the game of life. Helping you find a copy of Snowcrash you’ve been looking for helps me get rid of a book I haven’t finished reading in 8 years. And along the way, joy and gratitude are created from nothing.

There is a place beyond words and beyond understanding; don’t run away from it. When you rest in it, not knowing is knowing. Good is bad. Right is wrong. I am you. The space between objects shrinks to nothing. To grasp it, let go. To control it, surrender. To succeed, fail. To know, don’t.

you can spend half an hour on projects or goals that intimidate you, and progress even if you just observe your discomfort and where it might come from.

Our Crisis of Imagination

We’re trapped in an era of fatalism, unable to envision alternatives to the models of ownership and funding beyond current extractive defaults. We’ve agreed that innovation can touch every aspect of our lives — except the structures that shape them. This isn’t just a failure of imagination — it’s a feature of those very structures.

From Protest to Proposal

Proposals require us to answer difficult questions that protesting alone does not: Who will build it? How will it be funded? How will it compete and self-sustain? What trade-offs are we willing to accept?

psa to please help your friends setup tech alternatives as a social event: switch together so everyone transitions successfully with known contacts on the new platform. lone profiles leave momentum on the table.

like a paywall requires money to access, a nerdwall requires technical knowhow

[Getting near is important for seeing clear. If we avoid those who think differently, our understanding risks to be superficial.]

from observing what you see to observing how you watch

when heading somewhere people ask “have everything you’ll need?” and as a backpacker i respond “i took everything i have”.

when someone uses a different system of understanding than yours, responding with “try my system instead” is not convincing.