Hard Karma
Bruce Sterling’s State of The World 2009 is one of the most amazing things I’ve read online in a long time. It touches on politics, economics, environmental/global warming, humans/social topics, and The Commons/Copyright. Some of it was really scary, some really exciting, some really interesting. All of it, however, was different to anything else I’d seen on the net.
I suggest reading the whole thing, it’s a 2 week long online conversation. One section discussed the online/offline dichotomy. It hit that spot.
Okay, brother, I hear you. As a former denizen of a small Texas refinery town, I know where you are coming from. I have a solution for you. It’s kind of a hard karma, but I can promise it will work.
I would urge you to travel. Put the computer down, get out of the house, and get out of the town. Go to weird cultural events, go to conventions of mutants. Travel cheap if you have to, but make a point to spend a lot of time on the road.
You wanna go accumulate a tonnage of stimulating stuff in two or three days. Then take your loot back to the crib, and think hard about it. The joy of living outside the hipster circuit is that, unlike them, you can get some serious perspective on all that noise.
You will never be able to singlehandedly transform your small town of retired people into an ashram for happy mutants. I would not urge you to try that. It’s neither practical nor necessary. But: if you keep your secret hacker personality entirely hidden on a screen, you will come to feel unhappily schizoid.
So: venture out in the open air. Break your routines, and go mix it up with the weird people. In a spare, calculated, fully-planned fashion.
When you start to feel like your boring little burrow there is actually your “safe and secure base of operations,” then you’re on the right track.
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