what we're up against

[TI-18] an interlude on what I care about by detailing it's opposite, or the kind of technology i find so wrong

the underside of a large leaf at the Conservatory of Flowers

It's been quiet in my writing brain the past few weeks. I've been busy making, figuring out how to juggle a several different moving pieces at once while keeping my mind quiet and my hands steady. I don't do well with frenetic energy—I find it jumbles up momentum, scatters it into pieces that you find yourself looking for in a daze in between switches. I feel a bit like the hummingbirds I sometimes see outside the window of my office, fluttering for a moment in front of one branch and darting to another. Are they present for every moment? Do they remember when they revisit branches? I wonder if they have any advice to give to me.

Driving back from coworking in the mission today, I experienced an exceptionally above-average amount of anger. One man honked at me intermittently for the 5-10 seconds I waited for someone to cross the street to turn. Then, as I stopped to pick up a stool from the side of the road, a woman started screaming at me to get out of her driveway—honking, cursing, and threatening to tow, all the while. L notes all the unresolved rage that manifests on the road. People swerving between lanes, trying to save several extra seconds or even a minute or two getting to where they're trying to go. Where does it all come from and where does it all go?

It makes me angry. Angry, of course, at being yelled at unjustifiably (to my perspective), but more encompassing, angry at the entire situation, the cycle, the pointlessness of it all. More than angry, it makes me sad: this burden that so many carry with them and pass onto unsuspecting others, perpetuating a cycle of mischanneled rage and illwill. The fact that some swerving and honking in a car is one of the few places where they feel enough agency to process their emotions.

I wonder why I feel so affected by this as I finish my ride home. I think it's the opposite parallel of how comforted I feel when I experience or witness surprisingly warm encounters among people—whether strangers forming an instant connection over something silly or the little everyday acts of care, from a smile on the street to a nice word at the cafe. I feel so affected because these cycles of misdirected rage and fear and vengeance feel like the antithesis of everything I stand for and everything I work towards with my practice.

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Last week, I saw the launch of this app, branding itself as "Uber for guns." The post author is known for creating extremely viral social apps that quickly become acquired (mostly for their data and other scraps as the virality fades). They consult as a "consumer, social, and growth expert" and their calls start at $2800/hr.

https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1891685562412675284

My first reaction was "we live in a dystopia." This is a prime example of a system that accelerates and perpetuates everything that made me so sad and angry in my driving experience. The marketing is slick and leverages all the latest trending social devices to go viral. Their hero content features a couple of influencers sharing their experience calling "Protectors" to pick them up from LAX and drive them around for a day of sightseeing. It hits the right balance of absurd casual that makes for a viral video formula, featuring tall men in suits and earpieces escorting them picturesque LA spots in Cadillacs. Their social media pages feature professional portraits featuring assured, powerful men with sharp jawlines and straight backs in matching suits. Clicking in reveals a video where they talk to the camera about their past military and law enforcement experience, with a rotating slideshow of heroic images from their experiences. Each is captioned "<NAME> is a Protector." On their lapels, you see small red pins featuring the company's logo. Red: for power, or maybe for the blood that they are prepared to shed in defense. They have several other videos commenting on the United Healthcare CEO killing, showing how things could have been different if only they had been around.

The messaging capitalizes on fear, sharpens it into a spearhead to drive people to enter their hyper-optimized onboarding flow. Their UX is equal parts fun and streamlined, designed to maximize things that would be a hit on social while eliminating distractions. For example, you can swipe through a token Security Service-looking Protector in different outfits to customize how they come dressed. The dystopia is not climate change or nuclear war—it's when summoning guns into everyday society becomes as fun as playing a video game.

Taking all this in, I try to think about how to describe the intensity of my emotion. Disbelief. Rage. Disgust. The app proliferates with the rise of crime. The app addresses our fear through suppression, by putting more guns out onto our streets, creating a wealth gap for who deserves safety, creating a cool aura around being someone who can feel untouchable. To put as many systems in place where we live in a world free from fear, and free from the connection found in each other, too.

They promise something they can't give: safety from all the turmoil in the world. Like all the large platforms of technology, it seizes a death grip on one of our most vulnerable emotions and presents a neatly packaged solution at a reasonable market price. Their solution appears to address all the issues, but the trick, the prestige, is that it solves symptoms while perpetuating the system that produces the problem. After all, if they eliminated their problem, where would their business go?

The worst part is that it feels like everything is designed to be controversial. They know being provocative yields engagement, and engagement yields the kind of curve you need to show venture capital investors. The people deriding it (myself included) are just accelerating their efforts. All of it fills me with a rage that I don't know what to do with.

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a rotating flower arrangement we keep on the windowsill next to our kitchen sink

So what to do with this rage?

Every once in a while, I zoom out at the state of the world and feel bewildered by how we live in this state. So many people stuck working bullshit jobs that they hate, so many people lacking basic necessities while billions of dollars go towards inconsequential or actively harmful ends, so much hate and exploitation when life already offers so much love and bounty.

I don't know the answer—I just have my working answer that allows me to continue on.

I think about circles expanding outwards. Most immediately, taking care of yourself, doing something that fulfills you, giving yourself enough rest. And slowly expanding outwards, contributing to your community, making small differences in the days of those around you. And using all those experiences to think about how our systems should change, how they could work for us rather than against us. What kind of world do we want to live in? What kinds of behaviors should be encouraged? Who do you want kids to look up to growing up?

For me, it means committing to my health as just as important as my creative practice and my community. It means cultivating the handmade, personal, loving internet and computing that I see every day when I watch people use their devices. It means making things dedicated to that love and things that make it easier for us to create spaces and technology that feels like this, overflowing with the humanity inherent to all artificial creations. It means appreciating art that I love, telling people when their works touch me, supporting independent creators giving their own answer to the question. It means smiling at the people I walk by, supporting peers in my community, showing up for friends, stopping at the neighbor's house to chat about their garage sale and help them move something heavy up the stairs. It means treating every day as a new chance to give another answer, to do my part in actualizing the kind of world I hope for in my dreams.

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