Today, millions of people around the world will be feeling a sense of #hope and #justice after a fraudster, criminal oligarch being convicted. Many will be celebrating.
This essay by Jag Bhalla, on "The Dark Origins of Optimism and its Current Cheerful Evils", is one of the best pieces I've ever read on this. Maybe the best (also many links). Enjoy.
"As Voltaire knew, optimism is often an elite-serving demon in disguise"
Rebecca Solnit: "Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand." @bookstodon#hope#socialJustice
Can we please stop using the word #hope when talking about the #ClimateCrisis?
Hope, especially when used by the media, plays into the hands of those, who claim that innovations, the free market and #capitalism will fix it for us and nobody really has to do anything - not us, not politicians and not the fossil capitalists.
Instead of headlines that read "Scientists say we can still have hope..." I want to read "Scientists say we have the means...".
Chance, possibility, option, alternative, even opportunity are better words to use.
Lets not give up, neither because we are hopeful, nor because we are hopeless. Let's act. It's in our hands!*
*That phrase might just be the best replacement for the word hope.
Someone apparently blocked me for asking them 2x to read my whole thread (total of 2 posts) before twice responding inaccurately after only reading the first one.
I really want people to understand the difference between #optimism and #hope.
They are different things.
OPTIMISM is the sense that things will turn out okay.
It may or may not be based on reality, and it may or may not come true. It's a "feeling" about the future. It can be unrealistic or realistic. It lies on a spectrum with pessimism being the other end.
What heartens me so much about the #Wonka experience disaster is how hard the actors hired tried and what a wonderful job they did interacting with the kids, and especially that the internet quickly passed the urge to mock them and appreciated their humanity. Small hope regained.
Just read @pluralistic 's blog post about the difficulty that @2600 is having, both with its publication and producing the #HOPE con. This is tragic - I've never attended HOPE, but I've seen many videos and read so many recaps and articles inspired by it. Support 2600 today!
The enshittification of email has led to their announcement emails getting filed to spam by Google etc al. (We run our own mailserver and have been wrestling with this for years, but at least our livelihoods don't depend on it!)
But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.
It's been 40 years since #EmmanuelGoldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing @2600: The #Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first #phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:
When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:
But best of all, 2600 gave us #HOPE - both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual #HackersOnPlanetEarth con: