Begin

01 Begin

This is where it all started. I bought a domain and Googled “Hugo static pages and Cloudflare” and that got the ball rolling. I’ll write the process up later. Now, it’s go time.

Who knew that 919971991.xyz was a premium domain? Of course it is. Everything is amazing, game-changing and premium. And 919971991.xyz is no exception to the rule. It is mind-blowing!

WEB BROWSING WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!

20 GoTo

I often experience moments of lucidity, profoundness or elation on weekend mornings. Maybe I’m fresh after a good night’s sleep. Maybe it’s because I have time. I don’t have to go to work so I can just think and let my mind go. What a bunch of amateurs we are, having to spend so much time working.

“The things you used to own, now they own you.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Maybe if we all got our shit together and aligned ourselves, we could skip most of the daily grind. How much of what we earn and pay in taxes, or how big a proportion of our subsistence spending, could be eliminated if we all worked together to solve problems instead of postponing or exacerbating them?

What if we became a hive-mind? Free will is an illusion anyway. The first step to happiness is to make a conscious choice to boost your happiness, it’s almost a tautology¹. To quote (the emphasis is mine):

Most people are not rich; many people are not born good-natured; many people have uneasy passions which make a quiet and well-regulated life seem intolerably boring; health is a blessing which no one can be sure of preserving; marriage is not invariably a source of bliss. For all these reasons, happiness must be, for most men and women, an achievement rather than a gift of the gods, and in this achievement effort, both inward and outward, must play a great part.

— Bertrand Russell (1930), The Conquest of Happiness.

30 Exit

What if Technology is really driving evolution now and not vice versa? Shouldn’t we align ourselves with the biological world before it’s too late? Do we need an exit strategy?

“In 1828… [t]he Faust legend obsessed artists and writers; in dozens of works they told the story of the modern predicament: in gaining the power of industry, the world was sacrificing it’s soul.

It was not the new machines themselves they feared - there were not yet many. it was machine thinking.”

— Jonathan Hale, The old way of seeing.

Most of us are already living within the machines we call cities. And cities are loud, the air quality there is bad and most surfaces are hard, demanding constant maintenance we can no longer afford. So, potholes? Absolutely. Graffiti? Aye. High rises that block out the sun? Check.

We’ll never be truly happy in a dead, machine-only world. Who would want to live on Coruscant? And I mean live forever because it will damn be hard to convince people remove some of the built environment to make way for wild plants and animals.

Elhacham, E., Ben-Uri, L., Grozovski, J. et al. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588, 442–444 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5

Screw Elon Musk² and the other techno feudal lords. We need to rewild the Earth. Now.

These are the things I ponder on Saturday mornings.