The Technofeudal Divestment Continues…!
Life updates (I’m leaving instagram), and how my friends help me live as if already free
Hello friends! I hate instagram. Lol. I’d much rather be engaging with writing and people that I choose to see, rather than having the all-powerful Algorithm™ choose it for me.
But what I do love is getting to put my silly little thoughts into the world, share my lovely little photos, go on rants, talk about articles, books, video games, etc that I have looked at recently and generally share what I have been doing in my life!
My most recent Life Addition has been playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which I am in love with!! Here is an image of my character in the world :)
So I now have a ✨secret blog✨. Yay! This is a personal blog, intended for my friends and friendly acquaintances to read, rather than a professional one.
Updates will be sporadic but I hope I will do them!! If I do end up writing posts that I want to share with a wider audience, I may change the ✨secret✨ part and properly link to the relevant posts, but for now this is the vibe.
I'm going to try really hard not to be a perfectionist about this, and to have these pieces be more freeform, less perscriptive, and reflective of however I'm feeling in the moment. Maybe the piece turns into something deeper (like this one ends up doing oops), maybe I just share photos of my new favourite sunset. A fun surprise when a new post shows up in your inbox!!
My new favourite sunset!!
I haven’t deleted instagram completely - I log on every day or so to watch the latest sandsandsand colour mixing video and catch up on the posts my friends have sent me (anything from memes to the latest bird flu updates and actions for Gaza) (wow incredible not to have to censor that, hey?), as well as checking a couple people's stories to reduce the chance I'm missing any vital news.
But in general, I’m not there, and I'm not scrolling very much, so if you’re posting or sharing something you think would be of interest, relevance or importance to me, you’re so welcome to send it to me directly!! I really want to keep engaging with people and the world, I just don’t want to do it in a complete state of technofeudalism[1].
See my footnotes for more discussion on technofeudalism!! Disclaimer I haven’t actually read this book (although I have read other work by Varoufakis) but think the concept is very useful
It would be remiss of me not to shoutout my friend Ryan who has paved the way for by saying “hey did y'all know you can just stay in contact with people via email/newsletter/blogging rather than social media?” through their excellent newsletter In The Round.
One of the guiding ideals for me in my life is the idea of “living as if we are already free", a phrase originated by anarchist writer David Graeber and that I learned from my beloved partner[2] Dannie at a time when I really needed to hear it.
Graeber speaks about this concept in relation to the Occupy Wall Street and subsequent global Occupy movement, which saw a movement standing in opposition to the vast socioeconomic inequality post the 2007-8 global financial crisis. My understanding is that the Occupy camps ran similarly to the recent encampments for Gaza.
In both these movements, selfsustaining, selfgoverning communities were created outside of current social structures as much as possible. These social microcosms aimed to reject hierarchical governance, to provide food, water, shelter, company and care to all regardless of means or ability, and to spend their time skill sharing, collectively maintaining the camps, and creating and celebrating art and culture.
In other words: these movements operated in the way they dreamed all of society could operate. These communities were trying to live as if they were already free.
“Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”
But acting as if already free is something we can strive for in our existing lives and communities too - indeed, it is one of the core ideas behind mutual aid, and is something I know you friends reading this already do in different ways each time you choose to put good into the world even when it feels insignificant.
One of the big motivating factors that helps me continuing pushing myself to live in this way is seeing people I have a personal connection with break convention and live freer in their own lives.
It's one of the things that drew me to Dannie when we first started becoming closer - they actually knew how to recycle properly, they were vegetarian, and they rode their bike basically everywhere. These were all things I wanted to be doing in an ideal world, but without having anyone up close and personal I could body double doing it with, I just hadn’t done it.
But within a few months of seeing Dannie do it, I had very easily revolutionised my family's recycling bin to no longer contain dripping wet cardboard or individual pieces of foil[3]. And now after a year of living with them, I have a whole slew of vegetarian recipes and meat substitutions up my sleeve. I still eat meat, but far less than I used to.
(The bike riding's been put on hold due to me developing Exhaustion Disease™, but I still have hope for the future!)
Two in progress shots cooking one of my favourite veggo meals, tofu stir fry! You can use basically any type of tasty sauce with it, so it is very versatile and easy to switch up when I get bored
This year I finally switched from fascism HQ to Bluesky at the urging of my close friend and twitter mutual of almost 10 years, Laura, and last year I changed my bank account from proud fossil-fuel investor Commbank to Up, an offshoot of the comparatively-far-less-evil Bendigo Bank[4], after prompting from my then-partner Nick and our mutual friends.
In 2023 I started talking about COVID (yay no censoring!!!) extremely publically, in part because seeing the incredible Seboosay do it on his close friends story made me that little less scared that all my friends would slowly cut contact with me if I actually voiced how I truly felt on the subject (shoutout to everyone who didn’t do that lol).
I say all this not to flex these good-girlable moments, but rather to reflect on how much my ability to live the life I wish I were living is impacted by the people around me. Maybe it is the same for you, too?
It is far, far easier to move to friendlier but nicher ways of navigating the internet when your friends are doing it with you, to eat less meat when the people that you eat with have made that commitment too, or to add COVID precations to your event when the other events you’re attending model what that might look like.
If you'd like to hear from me more frequently than this blog allows, join me @wordofpi on Bluesky, a wonderful site whose only downfall is it not yet having private accounts, so I am back to my pi (π) pseudonymous roots
So, to move this massive tangent back to where it began - thank you to Ryan for modelling what connecting with friends and community can look like outside of social media. It’s much easier to do with you having paved the way!
I am excited for this new era of fighting technofeudalism, and am very pleased to share it with you all!
Feel free to leave comments and such! Let me know how your day’s going, or how someone in your life influenced you to do a Good Thing recently :).
Or, if you disagree with someone I said or think something might be factually inaccurate, please say! Part of the “not putting super amounts of pressure on myself in writing this” thing I’m trying to do includes not triple fact checking and referencing everything I say. Obvs I’m doing my best not to spread misinformation haha, but I’m not checking as vigorously as if I was writing publically, so please tell me if something doesn’t ring true for you!
Much love, friends ❤️🔥
PS: You should absolutely read the footnotes!! they take soooooo long to make on Squarespace lmao!!!!! [5]
1 Technofeudalism is a term coined by economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that current Western society is no longer capitalist, and instead a kind of feudalism brought about by the monopoly that Big Tech has over our bodies and minds.
“Imagine the following scene straight out of the science fiction storybook,” [Varoufakis] writes. “You are beamed into a town full of people going about their business, trading in gadgets, clothes, shoes, books, songs, games and movies. At first everything looks normal. Until you begin to notice something odd. It turns out all the shops, indeed every building, belongs to a chap called Jeff. What’s more, everyone walks down different streets, and sees different stores because everything is intermediated by his algorithm… an algorithm that dances to Jeff’s tune.”
It might look like a market, but Varoufakis says it’s anything but. Jeff (Bezos, the owner of Amazon) doesn’t produce capital, he argues. He charges rent. Which isn’t capitalism, it’s feudalism. And us? We’re the serfs. “Cloud serfs”, so lacking in class consciousness that we don’t even realise that the tweeting and posting that we’re doing is actually building value in these companies.”
-- quote from this Guardian article explanaing technofeudalism (be warned a lot of the article is annoyingly skippable)
I’ve been told that since publishing his theory of technofeudalism, Varoufakis has expressed a desire to rename the term, as he feels like “feudalism” doesn’t quite capture the full extent or nuances of his theory here. Having not read the book myself, I can't comment, but I nonetheless think the simple term as it stands is good food for thought regardless.
[2] Did I say partner? ahem. sorry, I meant "centrelink assigned girlfriend/boyfriend" because we were too queer to pass their partner test!! thank god!! i love being on income payments that actually somewhat support my cost of living 🤪
[3] Wet cardboard can potentially invalidate a whole batch of recycling if it gets mouldy.
Individual pieces of foil are too small to be recycled! You have to put multiple pieces together to create a tennis ball shape or larger otherwise it gets separated out and goes to landfill.
[4] Up is a virtual bank with awesome UI, money tracking tools and outstanding customer service.
Whilst any bank running through Bendigo Bank was my first choice, from my research I would recommend going with Teacher's Mutual Bank if you have access to it! As a mutual bank, it's member owned and thus focused on its members (you have to be a member to open an account) rather than external shareholders! However you can only become a member if you're a teacher or direct relation of a member, so that wasn't an option for me.
[5] I almost switched from Squarespace to a different web builder as part of starting this blog, because by god am I enraged to be paying $195/year for a site that doesn't even let me make linkable footnotes!!! But my billing cycle doesn't end until December, so I've decided to stick it out until then.
