the quiet part (sorry robot) is that this pattern extends to political ideologies; if ur vision for a utopian future doesn't address the mundanities of supply chains, ur either lazy, stupid, or aspiring to a Malthusian genocide of the vulnerable, which is fine, but just admit it
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RT @eigenrobot
if you write some kind of speculative fiction and want to portray a tyranny but kind of skimp on describing its economy apart from gesturing …
https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1430156362441396227
many well-meaning leftists often propose radical restructurings of society and the economic system, grounded more in kumbaya-and-friendship than any real semblance of a plan for how to keep all these people alive, fed, and healthy; presumably they hope it will just work out?
such people inevitably betray their naivete when they handwave away such concerns under the guise of "people are fundamentally good but capitalism makes them bad"
this is almost worse than those who *wink wink* wouldn't want most people to die off ofc, but if it happens, oh well
the immense scale of modern supply chains is a double edged sword in how they make themselves invisible, allowing people to never think about how their goods get to them
this has the unfortunate effect of enabling naive politics to develop unquestioned
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RT @pee_zombie
this is exactly it, for me; everywhere I go, all i see is the enormous complexity of our supply chain, the massive feat of social engineering a globalized industrial …
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1331092174071623680
I've been thinking it would be good for us to develop a more explicit coming of age ritual/gate than simply graduating from high school, something closer to the Amish Rumspringa or vision quests. mb if every kid had to work in a factory or on a ship, the discourse would be better
many forms such a coming of age ritual could take, but the essential nature of it should be one that peels back the lie-to-children narratives and open their eyes to the truth of the world, the ugly violent nature of existence, induct them into the great project of civilization
this likely would need to develop organically & locally, as we lack any real society-wide cultural coordination mechanisms which haven't been co-opted by institutions
what sort of coming of age ritual would you design? how would you determine if a youth has achieved adulthood?