Aloha!
What is a burning question that drives your work?
How does one co-survive with any degree of mindfulness, artfulness & elegance in a dysfunctional global system where sick societies are normal? Clearly there are few like us but certainly there must be more. Where are our people? How do we meet up & work together?
How did you get started and what hurdles have you met along the way?
We got started young, helped by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring & the realization that previous generations had really screwed things up & contemporary generations seemed incapable of fixing things. Running away into the “woods” provided brief respite & we saw them consumed in the name of BAU development & economic progress.
Warned by our “betters” that we best get in line, we rebelled becoming outcasts. We lived our lives between protesting on the streets & in the woods, self-directed education, escapist activities, freelance art work, extreme sports & running away. The shutting down of the alternative press, the rise of new media & the Internet necessitated new strategies.
Our biggest hurdles involve procuring food & shelter, in both urban & rural environments. We’ve lost opportunities when identified as being dysfunctional to the dysfunctional system. Institutions do a good job filtering out people like us, we’ve done best in new programs & usually see the door slammed on our backsides to prevent more like us from entering.
We often find ourselves where none like us have gone before except in dim memory, myth or legend & none may follow for a variety of reasons. Our understanding is that this is the way the system functions to keep us separated from like-minded fellow travelers. The system appears to fear our gathering in groups, so that is what we seek.
Which doubts do you have about the work you are doing and the path forward?
We work in the arts, writing fiction & nonfiction, media production & performance; the soft sciences, personal & social psychology; & technology, media production tech support & coding for a networked world. We’re now developing & refining a focus on data science, AI, machine learning, & deep learning in several dimensions of sentiment analysis & data mining & data visualization.
Our only doubts lie in judging the efficacy of our work. Clearly we excel in academics & production but we only seem to benefit when found useful & manageable by exploitive agents of BAU. The more our cognitive ability, theory & perception evolve the harder it becomes to find acceptance from gatekeepers.
It seems to us that the path forward lies in the intersection of the work we do, especially in collaboration, which emerges as a requirement. It’s not exactly clear what that is. It appears to be like driving an unknown road at night, only able to see what’s in the headlights & no further.
What kind of support would you like to offer others traveling a similar path?
We prefer being open to what fellow travelers perceive as their needs in the way of support. We do not recommend our particular path to anyone & acknowledge that we may cross paths for unknowable reasons & appreciate input from people we happen to meet. Clearly, we do not know how to deal with this system. We do not know what people need.
We tend to be averse to those who revel in identifying “enemies” as we see that impulse emerging from paranoid-schizoid defenses and it only serves the dysfunctional system to divide us. That said, we do understand there are some very damaged & dangerous people out here that seek to exploit all they meet, we’ve met a few & see many on TV gaining celebrity status. So, perhaps the best we offer is in the way of suggesting tools & techniques useful for growing positive progressive communities.
