What if I wrote every day in 2023? There’s only one way to find out.
To expectation-set (for you? for me?) I’m not trying to make this the best writing I have ever done, or to make some grand unifying or even coherent collection of concepts and ideas.
Enough disclaimers!
Today is January 1, 2023 and it does not have the patina of a holiday, except insofar as it is a relatively normal day after a few weeks of family and travel, and there are hints of sun after a rather soggy December. No champagne was opened here. Which is not to say I don’t feel celebratory, exactly. I am grateful for the way the last year has unfolded despite it being rather amorphous. My stepson said he thinks something really terrible will happen in 2023, and you know, he is certainly rational in that pronouncement, the only question is how close the terror will be.
I had no idea I’d go in this direction. What I want to tell you is that I (for whatever reason) feel like optimism of some kinds is also rational, and possibly even necessary. Where this comes from is love, the spaces that are held, that I co-hold, the spaces that do not proscribe any particular kind of excellence or achievement, but celebrate the momentousness of shifts in thinking, in behaviour, in each person’s individual framing of their own experience. Seriously, these places are amazing.
Reading today: The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber. The essay on science fiction and games in particular, which are good companions to the rollicking conversation Graeber had with Peter Thiel. I’m so late to this party but there are still plenty of people dancing. The layers of the system, the bureaucracy backed by violence, the indoctrination into the belief in the need for such bureaucracies, the fashioning of a financial system that requires the enforcement of these beliefs and behaviours, and all of it something to wake up and believe in again every day. I’m way too vague in this description but how can I sum it up succinctly?
This year my intention is to collaborate to build technology that has enough openness to allow for spaces to emerge that don’t require violence to manage as well as enough structure and design to encourage practices of coming together that foster belonging, mattering, and choice. Saying this, I guess I’m making this a special day, even if setting that intention really isn’t any different from any of the days of last year. Saying things out loud. Let me pour it into the hole I’ve built for it to hold up everything else, as concrete as it can be, and hey, here we go, twentytwentythree.