This is a great read but I feel it really shies away from saying the one bad word it skirts around. "We're trapped in systems designed for scarcity and competition instead of abundance and cooperation" – We're trapped in capitalism. We have to say it because for a lot of people it still doesn't stick. And I'm not saying it was the first individualistic system, but it certainly rewired our entire species to it.
A lot of the existing, working solutions that are already put into practice at smaller scales, are silenced or ignored because they function so fundamentally differently from what Capitalism teaches us is how "things work". Capitalistic classe don't want people to learn about cooperatives and ranked voting. Hell I'm giving it five or ten more years before the idea of a library becomes completely alien to most. "It would never work, one person would come and steal all the books!". This is the sad state our species has reached.
It's the same kind of blockage for a post-capitalism society. People literally can't reason in the terms needed for it. They do see the tools like you mention, but they don't believe in them because the drive of cooperating blindly with others, which has brought our species to this point, is broken. People have been brainwashed by zero-sum games and prison dillemas and entire decades of depression post-apocalyptic stories that consitently fail to depict humanity as collaborating just because we can. Instead you get stories of raiders "man is the worst enemy actually" but no hope anywhere to be found. And despite this, when catastrophes like COVID hit, you absolutely do see in real life these completely unrelated social cells/cooperatives/clubs/etc spring into collective action without a reward. To help people, feed them, house them, because for a lot of communities every person they help is a person that will help them back in the future. That happy safe people you lend a hand to, do work for the sake of the community, for the greater good. And that method has worked for goddamn millenias.
People forget that used to be a time were global collaboration was our forte, where we all came together and it's not a coincidence, and it's not just a technological lull enforced on them by a capitalistic class. Yes people are being pushed to zone out of the end of the world, but outside of that they also need reminders of past stories and to be deconstructed out of their completely warped individualistic/capitalistic minds. But it's not just technological or ecological or whatever, it is a different way to operate as a species and it is ruining us. So name the root cause, of all problems, of geopolitics and technology and ecology and carework etc. all collapsing simultaneously. It's capitalism, it's a system with a thrust that is reaching it's unhealthy end goal. And until it's gone, our entire social system favors these people doubling down on focusing on their own navel. On privilegizing the safe harbor of their own lives and immediate vicinity over the fight of going in the streets with hundreds others are realizing their power. To get people to fight you will to remember they can trust each other, that the polarization runing us is a lie, that the world isn't full of evil assholes. But its hard when every asshole is given a gigantic stage and microphone to remind every one constantly.
I don't know where I'm going with this rant. Just hate this system.
