A Better World is Possible

[soos_mite_ah]

I'm trying to write a book about someone time travels into the future and I want to use models like Spiral Dynamics and The Four Turnings Theory to help me build this futuristic world. I'm not at a place where I have the plot or characters mapped out but I want to focus on the world building aspect first. 

The reason why I want to write this book is because I want to envision a better future. A lot of stories in the time travel genre, even if it’s something set in the future, is a reflection of how people feel in the present. The Jetsons came out in 1962. The first time humanity got to space was 1961. The first time we were able to fly was 1903. In the span of less than 60 years, we were able to go from ground only transportations to being able to go to space. No wonder people thought in 1962 that in 2062 people will be living like the Jetsons up in space with all types of robots. Back to the Future was envisioning the year 2015 from the lens of 1985 and the optimism of the future back then. Now that we’re in the Crisis era, a lot of our media that depicts the future has to do with dystopias (think the Hunger Games, Cyber Punk 2077 etc.). But I think at this point in time, with cultural nihilism being at it’s peak, rather than envisioning dystopias to critique the present, I think it’s important that we envision building something better.

That’s why the Solar Punk aesthetic is popular. But I think rather than a couple of Pinterest mood boards, I want to create a more cohesive narrative of how society and people develop and ultimately, have it be something hopeful and something to aspire to. While I did enjoy the Jetsons and Back to the Future, I think the thing that messed with me even when I was a kid is how much it focused on the fantastical, technological aspect of the future rather than the social one. Unlike what Back to the Future thought in 1985, we didn’t get flying cars in 2015. But something that would send someone from 1985 into a coma if they saw us today is how much more accepting we are of gay and trans people and how much more common things like interracial marriage is. That’s the real controversial, juicy stuff, not the flying cars and hover boards. Sure, I want to make changes in the material world through my world building. But I want to emphasize the changes of policy and social attitudes even more. I don’t want my depiction of the future to be something that seems other worldly. I want it to seem like something that can be tangible.

Bascially, this journal is going to be where I track my research as I'm doing my world building. 

[soos_mite_ah]

 

[soos_mite_ah]

 

[soos_mite_ah]

Reading List 

This is going to be pieces of media that I want to consume. It's not a literal reading list that features books but it's also going to feature movies, shows and more. 

Imagining a Solar Punk World: 

• Disney's Strange World 
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers
• Studio Ghibli's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, and Princess Mononoke
• Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
• Always Coming Home by  Ursula K. Le Guin
• Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
• Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers by Sarena Ulibarri 
• The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 

More Technical Material

• The Fourth Turning and The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe and William Strauss
• I don't know any sources for this but things on decomodifying housing 
• The videos on Alan Fisher's Youtube Channel about urban planning and public transit 
• Continue watching videos from Real Life Lore 
• Rewatch Leo's videos on Conscious Politics
• Various Books from my degree (I'm not in my apartment right now so I cannot list them off the top of my head). 

Philosophy

• Salvation by bell hooks 
• All About Love by bell hooks 
• The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus 
• The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus 
• The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov
• Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
• Vulcan's Hammer by  Philip K. Dick

Topics to Research (no specific sources, just explore these things)

• Parallels between the previous crisis era and now 
• comparing the counter culture movement to the transcendentalist movements 
• green energy 
• what different countries are doing and potential solutions to current problems

Edited Monday at 09:30 PM by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

What If Things Never Got Better? 

What if things never got better? What if the cost of a median house or the cost of oil/gas never got better? But, instead of us succumbing to this, we build systems around this material reality and those systems actually end up better for us in the long run. The suburban house, the nuclear family living under one roof, the typical middle class lifestyle that we imagine, is not something that has already been around. It’s something that has come up in the last 80 years post WW2. That’s not the only way to live.

The main reason why highways were built to and from cities was so that in the event of a nuclear war, we can move supplies around efficiently. After WW2, we didn’t “go back to normal” and get rid of the highways. Instead, we used that as existing infrastructure to make the suburbs which were created as a mid point between rural and urban living but also because of racism and redlining. That’s how things work in the High. New instructions and ways of life are built from the by product of the Crisis. They aren’t perfect and the rationale gets called into action in the Awakening (think Civil Rights movement in this situation).

I watched a few financial channels and I’m seeing that the previous financial benefits of owning a suburban house is dwindling these days because of how expensive houses are and because of property tax. A few decades ago, buying a house was a good idea because it locked in your mortgage payment and it was cheaper in the long run as opposed to renting. It was also much easier to buy a house back then where you could save up for a few years and get a down payment. Now, if we’re going off of cost alone and we ignore the American Dream propaganda we have been fed, it makes more sense in major cities now to rent an apartment and take the difference you would have spent on a mortgage and other hidden costs associated with home ownership and put it in the stock market, it will yield higher returns.

I also think of Amsterdam and how in the 60s and 70s, people were much more likely to buy cars. Then, because of the 1970s oil crisis, gas became incredibly expensive. And it never went down to where using a car was sustainable again. Instead, the city moved around that and people built more bike and pedestrian friendly infrastructure. Now, fast forward a few decades, I don’t think people are seeing the oil crisis of the 70s as a major hit to people’s quality of life. If anything, I think the new system that was built as a result of the crisis is yielding better results.

We can look to today as an example as well. While we never went fully “back to normal” since COVID, some really good things came out of it. People get to work from home now meaning they have more flexibility with where they live, their work life balance, and taking care of kids. While there isn’t a mass physical infrastructure change, to take away one’s commute and give them extra hours of their day back is a huge change to someone’s life infrastructure.  

And what I’m thinking as far as world building goes is what if housing prices and gas prices never went down and that was actually a good thing. What if this incentivizes people to be in apartments more, thus creating more of a demand for nicer walkable areas. What if instead of all the property taxes from the city core going out to subsidize the suburbs, we reinvest that money towards schools, hospitals, and other major building projects in the city. There is a reason why a lot of major building constructions dwindled after WW2. I mean a lot of the fancy, traditional looking architecture that give a city life was built around the post war period or before that. That is before suburbs became a big thing. It’s because all the money was going out to maintain the suburbs. What if gas prices never went down, people have to use public transport and biking more, and that increases the demand for public transport, better infrastructure, and more denser neighborhoods. What if this is the push we need to invest in green energy and phase out oil and gas. Yes, the American Dream and traditional institutions established 80 years ago are crumbling. And it’s scary because as of now, we just see the negatives and the hit to our quality of life. But what if this is our chance to create a better dream instead of going back to the old and trying to patch up a dying paradigm? But that requires creativity and being able to think outside the box of how the ideal life is a heterosexual marriage with 2.5 kids in a suburban home with two or more cars.

Yes, we want to solve the problems of today when envisioning the future. But, we don’t want to do it in a way where we “go back to normal.” We want to create better overall systems that adapt to a changing world, not just fight it to preserve old paradigms. And something that I find so beautiful and also so tragic about the 2020s is that we have the solutions to a lot of these problems. We can solve the climate crisis with our current green energy technology. We can put more money towards schools and our healthcare system because we have the money. We know what policies need to be implemented to create a better quality of life for people. The problem isn’t finding solutions. The problem is implementing said solutions across the backdrop of corporate interests and cultural talking points that are used to cause people to vote against their best interests. That’s why I don’t think that 2076 is going to be this hyper futuristic place. I don’t think more technology alone is going to solve our problems because if that was the case, we wouldn’t be in this situation. If anything, more technology without the proper regulations and protections does more harm than good. Look at the way that companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Uber are harming the economy, harming the consumers, and harming the workers. Yes the conveniences are nice, but they aren’t a net positive without the proper guard rails.

Edited Tuesday at 03:35 AM by soos_mite_ah

[soos_mite_ah]

A Crumbling Empire

I watched this video recently and I really liked this. The video starts with talking about the disaster that is the Iran war, how Britain had a similar (granted less embarrassing) fumble in the Suez canal in the 1950s, and the disaster that was the 250th Independence day. It talks about these events in a narrative of how this is a crumbling empire as the U.S. causes chaos in the global stage, loses leverage and respect, and it can't even throw a proper birthday party without the reflecting pool turning green and having all the performers cancel. Then, the video shifts into talking about how while the empire is crumbling, that's not all bad because the empire isn't necessarily the people. This is my favorite part of the video: 

Quote

24:56 - 28:17
When Britain's Empire died, who actually lost something? Anthony Eden lost something. He lost the Prime Minister's office and his entire reputation. Do you know that he was only Prime Minister for less than 2 years? Isn't that extremely embarrassing? The officer class lost its global posting circuit. The armament manufacturers lost their best customer. The financial houses in the city of London that were built on colonial trade lost their entire business model. Those people experienced Suez as a catastrophe because for them, it was one. 
But do you know who didn't lose their empire? A nurse in Manchester. Her job didn't depend on who controlled a canal in Egypt. And here is the counterintuitive part of this. The same decade that Britain gave up its empire,  British workers got the NHS, universal health care, free at the point of use, built while their colonies went their own way. It's a system that they should be really proud of, but they really seem insistent on killing. The empire's retreat was arguably the best thing that ever happened to them.

Now, let's do the American version of the same thing. Did you get any of the empire's dividends? Let's be honest. The costs are easily defined. The wars were fought disproportionately by kids from poor and rural towns because enlistment was the only job that was on offer for them. The factories have been shipped overseas because financializing the economy made the empire cheaper to run for the people who own assets or you know, who own things.  And now we're in this kind of weird K-shaped economy where the only way to actually make any appreciable money is to own assets. Also, the stuff that a country is supposed to give you like healthcare, housing, or transit have all been sidelined for decades in the name of, I don't know, priorities like 800 overseas military bases, countless wars, and endless weapons money for Israel. 800 bases and America has no high-speed trains. 

The signature at Versailles humiliated the people whose careers were built on the promise that American force could dictate outcomes: the bipartisan foreign policy bloc, the think tank circuit, the procurement lobby. You didn't design the Hormuz strategy or lack therof, really. You didn't get to vote on whether to do this. The surrender (now, that you know I wrote this before the war started up again), the surrender that's inevitably going to come is going to be on their resume, not yours. But, you sure as hell are going to have to pay for it in inflation... And all of this mattters because there's a trap here that you can mistake their crisis for your catastrophe. And rallying to restore their empire, you know, the one that never paid your rent, as if it were your own life that you were saving. Germans fell for this in the '20s and we know where that went. The trap is what the party is for, the spectacle, the 4th of July. 

Then, the creator goes into his experience watching all of this go down as a Canadian. He touches on how the Revolutionary War gave birth to the U.S, but also Canada and how that really affected average people there. He differentiates between the land, the borders, who rules over a place, from the people themselves, the history they create, and the way they championed their rights. 

Another section I liked in this video is the part where the creator talks about the Antonio Gramsci quote "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
 

Quote

49:50 - 53:00

Interregnum, the gap between kings. The stretch where the old order has stopped working, but nothing has replaced it. The morbid symptoms part you do not need to be explained, just look at the news. But, here's what many readings of that quote often skip. The gap is also where everything gets built. The New Deal wasn't built in good times. It was built in the wreckage of the old economic order because organized people were standing there when it broke. The NHS got built the exact decade Britain gave up its empire, partly out of everything the empire had stopped eating, because that's what imperial retreat is materially:  money, industrial capacity, talent, attention, all of it coming back on the market. 

The only question is who's organized enough to pick it up. Last time in the '30s, the answer included fascists. This time in the 2020s, it also includes fascists. It's not a spectator sport. So, here's what I'm asking, and it's one thing, not a list. Sometime this month, show up physically once to something near you...A union local, a tenant meeting, a mutual aid group, whatever's within 20 minutes of you. You don't have to be brave yet. Courage is really a muscle, and nothing deadlifts the revolution on day one. You're going because the people who pick up what empires dropped will be the people who already know each other and are ready to roll. 

...
The old war is dying and the new world is waiting on builders. The peopel currently speaking in the country's name are not the ones building it. 

I think this is a good call to action and the overall message that I want to send.