Removing Power from The Colonizers & Restoring Our Analog Past

I find myself in a perpetual conundrum, a never ending cyclical paradox of, what I’m now assuming, is the tension between my analog past and my digital present.

My generation harbors many labels and unfortunate truths. GenX, Latchkey children, the Lost Generation, the powerless ones whom the Boomers refuse to relinquish power to, relegating us to watch from the sidelines in horror as they destroy our futures and everyone behind us through their hoarding of resources and power.

My generation was born into the blossoming days of the Boomer’s success. Our parents navigated the tumultuous and revolutionary sixties, yet chose the path of consumption through the vehicle of the middle class. And for many of us, myself included, that produced a simple and beautiful childhood. A suburban life of modest privilege placing us on the path towards college and anchoring the Creative Class through our intellectual professional pursuits. We were taught that blue collar work was for the “other” and that a college education was the gateway to something beautiful.

I don’t fault my parents generation for wanting such a reality for their children. Many of our Boomer parents grew up in poverty as their parents emerged from shadows of the Great Depression. Scarcity placed a blanket upon our parent's nervous systems that never truly dissipated. The haunting, soul-shattering ghost of such a deep poverty was passed through generational trauma into their very DNA and reinforced through oral storytelling throughout their childhood.

But the reality the Boomers bought into crumbled as my cohort graduated college and entered the workforce. Reagan’s “trickle down economics” were enacted while we were all sloshing around the playground at recess, hopping from one treacherous monkey bars to the next, reenacting the latest Star Wars movie and by the time we graduated college, our fate was sealed.

The middle class still existed when I left college in the late 90s, but it was dwindling fast. Neoliberalism holds no place for a middle class, it bears only the potential for class warfare and a hollowing out of the middle. The very middle that gave my parents security in their adult years and provided that privileged childhood for me. I was “lucky” enough to discover counterculture literature and music from the 60s during my late teens and I decided not to participate in the system at all.

For most of my adult life, I lived on the fringes of the work force. I chose experiences over material wealth. I freelanced as a photojournalist by day and worked as a bartender at night to pay the bills. I floated in and out of jobs, mostly manual labor or in a bar, working in the tourism industry in some of the most beautiful places for a decade. And at the age of 30, I decided to return to college and enter the creative class as a working photojournalist. It was time to grow up and be a “professional”.

My professional trajectory as a photojournalist, turned producer, turned marketer, turned communications expert, turned community professional is really just my professional self trying to outrun the collapsing of ALL of my industries to technology and corporate greed.

Photojournalism was more than a profession, it was a calling. Strip everything away and I’m left with what I was truly meant to do in this life, gather and share stories in community. But doing what I loved as a profession, in an industry that was cannibalized by conglomerates and morphed into a propaganda machine to satisfy shareholders and politicians, sent me down a spiral that lasted decades and lands me here. In a place I never imagined I would be, hitting 50 with absolutely no idea what the next professional chapter should be-- or if I should even bother anymore.

What are we doing now? In the final gasps of late stage capitalism while systems are collapsing upon themselves, what are we doing? Or better yet, why are we doing any of it?

I entered corporate America two years ago, after wrapping up a contemplative education and obtaining my undergraduate degree in yoga and religion. Seemed like a fabulous challenge to apply my area of study, conscious leadership, to a corporate crypto container. One that had the outward trappings of DEI and a bit of humanity on its employee onboarding process. The “People Team” appropriated all the language I’d just become accustomed to at Naropa to calm my reservations about corporations. My stomach turned when I signed my employee start package.

I was wrong. So. Damn. Wrong. The language of inclusion was just a veil of deceit covering up every possible trope we see memorialized in movies and sitcoms about corporations. Weak and spineless men in the executive suite, criminal actions by bosses covered up with strategic gaslighting, paperwork and lies, nervous systems shattering in meetings as everyday people crack under the pressure of a system designed to extract life and intelligence.

And when the system has squeezed all your knowledge and insights and worked them into their OKRs, MBRs and KPIs, (or when you start blowing whistles on the corruption) you’re spit out. Tossed aside like day old bagels.

Tech bros are just the latest oligarchs of our human adventure. Colonizers with egos so large they've convinced themselves they are Gods because they control the networks. They believe in ultimate extraction as their calling in this life-- extracting wealth, intelligence, goodness and resources-- in a manner that is just deceptive enough to not feel feudalistic, until it does. They believe empathy is a sin, a weakness to be removed from every social system that supports our human journey.

Make no mistake, the end game here is to return humanity to the days of lords and serfs. Those who control the networks are the Lords of today, playing God with the very elements we’ve come to rely upon for every aspect of our modern life. And these are flawed men who never dealt with their own traumas, wielding power in a way that destroys the very essence of life itself.

Flawed white men funding military industrial complex parades for wanna be dictators. Flawed white middle age men using satellites and government contracts to steal elections, destroy humanitarian aid, install AI to hoover up ALL of our private information and cut the lifelines so many rely up for food, medicine and housing. Flawed white men who weaponized their AI infrastructure and married it with their surveillance network to seize control of us all, and doing so while many of us are trying to simply survive.

All at the hands of flawed men who wish to return us to a world where their white race and heritage dominates again and where we all live as serfs to fuel their warped vision of a technofeudalistic tomorrow.

The colonizers now have ultimate power and weaponized algorithms and AI are their tools of oppression.

As the world accelerates towards the collapse these overlords want us to continue playing their game. But what if we all opt out?

What if we find the way back towards our analog childhoods and simply refuse to participate in the overlord’s game of colonization and economic slavery? What if we return to our roots and find ways to be human again?

What if we protect the human layer from those who lack empathy and compassion and make ourselves simply “unavailable” to be the pawns in the games of destruction they thrive upon?

What if we simply refuse to participate in this economy? We do just enough labor to take care of our own and then we simply produce art again? We produce things that matter in this world-- physical or digital. We restore our agency by removing ourselves from the surveillance capitalism machine all together.

I don’t know if that’s possible, I like to think it is. Such a transition won’t be easy. Even for myself, someone who only spent 2 years with golden handcuffs from the corporate world, the transition back to my pre-digital days will not be easy. And if I’m honest, there are aspects of my digital life I wish to preserve. I now have a global community I connect with via networking systems controlled by the very colonizers I wish to destroy. I work with technologists all over the world and help them build the solutions to many of these problems. As we build the decentralized infrastructure to burn it all down, we still connect through the oligarch’s tooling— for now.

But I’m at a point where this line of inquiry, exploring the Why?, is the necessary next step. For not only do I not believe in this system of “work” any longer, I am no longer welcomed within it. A strong woman with agency and a voice is not a welcome entity in any system designed for submission and control. And while I’ve fought to stay within this blockchain industry for almost a decade now, because I still stubbornly believe in the mission of our technology, I am no longer willing to fight anymore.

I’m simply done with these systems of extraction and destruction. It’s time to return to my roots. Gathering stories in community and creating art with my hands.

That’s it. That’s the game. You in, Anon?

I wrote this in late June after turning 50, a few weeks before I decided to join yet another surveillance system to share my art. My hope is that as our time on this network evolves, we'll make the journey towards sovereignty together...I'll lead the way. ;) Also, I found my path. I was already walking my next path, I simply misplaced my map

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