I want to explore anarchist ideas and lifestyle more. I’ve felt drawn to it ever since I happened to meet a staunch anarchist in person and found that I vibed quite well with what he talked about, that it seemed to closely match a lot of my own thoughts. The anarchist discussions I’ve seen here and on Reddit have also seemed remarkably reasonable and well thought out, a glimpse of actual human discussion on an increasingly dead Internet.

I want to dip my toes in. Not just with the ideas, but moreso the actual practice of it. I’d also like to chat & hang out with anarchists, see how well we’d get along. The trouble is that in my current living situation, I can’t really drive anywhere to meet people in person, so it’d have to be online. I do have a Matrix account I made a while ago but I guess jumping to a new platform which I don’t really understand scares me. I would join something if it’s vouched for, I guess, but idk what to expect or how much I can trust anyone. As for taking part in direct action / mutual aid, again all I think I can do right now is online/digital stuff. My energy level is usually pretty low, but if there’s something I could do sometimes to actually help people a little bit, I think it would be meaningful for me.

I have been told all my life that I have to work for money to survive and that “you get what you pay for” and all that, and I have always hated it. I want to work to help other people because I care, and they need it or it’s meaningful to them, and to know that I’m a part of something where people work to help me because they care. Not because everyone is on the tether of money. I’ve seen it happen naturally, almost on accident, when it was allowed to, and I want to experiment with doing it intentionally.

  • explorator_1317@mander.xyzOP
    2·
    4 days ago

    Have you thought about translating, transscribing or proof reading for texts and other media? Also making audio versions of texts or translated audio tracks are digital tasks that often dont have enough people doing them.

    No, I didn’t even know that was something people needed. I figured modern translation & transcription software was good enough to do most of these tasks. Where is it needed?

    Do you have things that you believe you could do but currently dont because you dont have the confidence / skills you think you need for that?

    Kind of, yeah. I am a competent programmer and generally have a good mind for technology. There are a few reasons I haven’t applied it to anything anarchist-y yet:

    • I’m a game programmer, and have almost no experience working with any other kind of tech, software or otherwise. The fundamental skills & mindset are very transferable, but anything which is practically useful will require the effort of learning how to do new things.
    • I could contribute to open source projects, but coding is a lot of work and I’m not sure what a minimal first step would be. The idea of having to get to know an entire code base just to fix a small bug or add a simple feature is daunting.
    • I’m not actually sure how much I could really help people through code. Maybe a project like Meshtastic, decentralized communications? Software is a tool, and more than just a tool, it’s like a meta-tool, it’s multiple steps removed from physical reality, which makes it harder to gauge how much help I’m really providing. It is definitely something I am well suited for, and it’s something I like doing, but I don’t want to get lost in the sauce of making tools for the sake of making tools or making the efficiency more efficient without it being grounded somewhere. Unless people really want someone to put more effort towards open source game projects, then I guess I could do that lol, it just feels like a very indirect way of making the world a better place.