We Can Help Each Other
It is very easy to get bogged down in the bad. Here's some good.
Hi,
I’m not sure if you noticed, but the world feels incredibly bleak right now. It’s easy to feel sort of trapped and helpless (me included) — and it’s easy to give up on the idea of taking action to change it.
So today I wanted to send out an older Webworm that I sent to paying subscribers last year, which looked at some ways we can help others, and ourselves — perhaps saving our sanity in the process.
It’s written by Jackson Wood, who watched and reported on the entire Lord of the Rings extended trilogy recently.
If you like it, head over to the comments section from last year, where the Webworm community has weighed in.
As usual, the readers here fill me with a lot of hope!
David.
Combating Hypercapitalism with Mutual Aid
by Jackson Wood.
It is very easy to get bogged down in the bad. We are algorithmically served up bad news written in ways to maximise “engagement” and when we’re not consuming news, we are beholden to social media which serves us up content that will maximise “engagement”.
But there are better things to focus on than engagement — because that can never, and will never, be enough. There are ways we as humans can interact with each other online and more importantly offline which actually make our lives better.
Getting engaged
The metric of engagement is the overly simplistic way well-known android/reptile/replicant Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk try to quantify the rich tapestry that is all human interaction. Social media, in part, has been an attempt to moderate and modify the way we interact to put the sum total of everything you and I do into easily categorised boxes.
A like here. A heart there. A comment. A poke. An easy map of all your friends. A block list of all your enemies.
Because of the limitations of social media platforms, and perhaps the limits of understanding humans many people, especially in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley companies seem to exhibit, there has been this dedicated push to rewire us.
Essentially every major tech company becoming an ad serving platform, or a platform feeding data into serving you ads, tracking your every physical move and so much more, means they can scrape every single moment of your attention and monetise it.
You’re not getting ads for [insert product-you-were-talking-to-your-friend-about-but-have-never-ever-searched-for here] because your phone is listening to you. You’re getting those ads because Big Tech has gigs and gigs of data about you specifically and probably plenty of petabytes of data about every other person who has ever used the internet ever. They can predict you better than you can.
This is hyper capitalism in the digital age. Welcome welcome welcome.
This is why almost every single thing you do or can think of has a SaaS platform that, for a low monthly subscription, will solve a pesky problem for you (while harvesting your data). The capitalist way of clipping the ticket infects almost every aspect of our lives now.
Quora — a website that said no ads, then introduced ads — for asking your mates a question.
Airbnb for letting mates stay at your house.
Upwork for destroying your soul by becoming a freelancer.
And now ChatGPT for everything else.
Honourable mention for Juicero which sought to profit off the simple pleasure of making juice. Sadly, other massive liquid-based grifts, like Soylent, keep on truckin’.
All of this is a mugs game. The focus on money and whacky metrics has completely abstracted the pure joy of… well… being human.
At an individual level it removes the joy of talking to your pals and at a societal level it has commodified pretty much every interaction you have.
This is not a new issue, we’re just progressing through the hellscape of “bowling alone” Robert Putnam described in 2000.
What can you do to combat hypercapitalism and recover your sanity?
What follows is my attempt to collate some actual meaningful ways you can go out and combat all this bad in the world and how we can help each other in a social way, rather than giving in to these side shows.
You can affect real change at a local level and not in the way big polluting profiteering corporations shame you into using paper straws, but in a good actually meaningful impactful way.
Enter Mutual Aid.
TL;DR: there was this mad lad Russian called Pyotr Kropotkin. Apart from having a sick beard, this dude absolutely fuckin’ rocked. Rejecting his aristocratic background he went off to Siberia in the 1860s which was at the time where all the exiled thinkers who were too cool for the Tsar were sent. This did four things for ol’ Pytor:
He hung out which a bunch of other mad lads who were miffed at being sent to Siberia
He had the chance to read a lot of books by European political thinkers who were critiquing capitalism on the back of Marx as well as the latest scientific books, like everyone's favourite OG tome on evolution: Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.
He saw a lot of peasants living in mind bogglingly utterly terrible conditions, and
He observed a lot of the amazing natural beauty that resides in the harsh landscape of the Siberian tundra.
Basically Petey Krops reckoned the animals best suited to surviving harsh environments were the ones that worked together in a coordinated way. It was like that scene in A Beautiful Mind where Russel Crowe figures out that he can get laid using maths.
This is a gross simplification, and I encourage you to read Mutual Aid — it’s surprisingly easy to read given its age. But the point stands: people working together in an equal way is good for everyone.
When it comes to humans, this approach gets harder because we have language and feelings and emotions. So the organisational theory of Mutual Aid relies on non-hierarchical, member-driven participation.
Where capitalism thrives on competition and the idea of ‘survival of the fittest’, Mutual Aid thrives on cooperation and survival of the group. Where capitalism creates thoughtless waste, Mutual Aid suggests thoughtful resource allocation. Where profit drives people apart, cooperation drives connection.
The virus of capitalism has co-opted some of these ideas. We tend to create value and fulfil each other’s needs in small bands of humans called companies. But where profit motive delivers Team Planning Days where on the ground staff list their grievances so middle management can ignore them, Mutual Aid can and does drive real change.
How?
Well, outside of old Russian dudes looking at polar bears, Mutual Aid has had massive beneficial effects IRL, and even more importantly in capitalist societies especially in the wake of massive disasters.
I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to the news for the past four decades, but we’re currently experiencing a massive disaster called climate change. You could also, perhaps uncharitably, classify this ongoing experiment with capitalism — which has led to this climate catastrophe — a massive disaster in and of itself.
Dropping back to using scare quotes again for just one moment: “engagement” is a parody of actual engagement. Because the consequences of clicking a button with a thumbs up icon can never truly equal the consequences of giving someone a high five. Sure you get the quick dopamine hit, but you’re constantly frustrated by the lack of actual human connection. Treating your social interactions as an experiment in Mutual Aid might help this.
The problem is not an immediate natural disaster, it’s a slow moving all encompassing meta problem that has a bunch of other catastrophes attached. The first thing you can do to take a Mutual Aid-focussed approach is to try and decouple yourself from the engagement drivers. Because even though you're trying to be true to your values, you're playing by the billionaire rules.
Huge disclaimer here: I’m about to suggest some things you can do to try and break away. I come at this from a place of privilege. I’m a white dude on a decent salary living in a vaguely functioning western democracy. Not everyone has the range of options I have and sometimes it is cheaper and significantly easier to not live up to this ethically high bar. Shit, I don’t sometimes. But where you have the ability to seek alternatives, do so. Where alternatives exist, use them. Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t. We can’t let perfect get in the way of good when it comes to battling these ghouls.
One thing I have been consciously working on is minimising my use of Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta products. They are actively bad for democracy. Stop Googling things. Start Duck Duck Go’ing them. There are lots of resources out there to help you find alternatives, workarounds, privacy plugins or just plain give ‘em up.
At the very least you’ll spend less time scrolling, which will be good for your mental health.
Think about it this way: every minute you stay on Twitter fundamentally benefits Elon Musk. Every post on Facebook helps Mark Zuckerberg.
You’re toiling away down the bottom of the content mine, coming up at the end of a hard day to just sit in front of your SmartTV (which is sending data about you back to its maker) to live Tweet the latest episode of whatever it is the kids are watching these days. All these fractions of cents add up to big bucks for the billionaires.
This one might be harder for American readers, but if you can afford to and there are alternatives: stop using Amazon. Stop using Uber, they treat your data like spare change and then hide behind a complex web of international company structures to eschew responsibility.
Wean off companies which profit off your data and impinge on your privacy. Start using local companies. Find B Corps. Find worker cooperatives and support them.
Change your bank to a cooperative or mutual bank. When you bank with a cooperative you literally own the bank. I bank with one and every year I get to vote on certain decisions the bank makes, I can go to the AGM, and I can have direct input into the broad direction of the institution. These banks tend to move slower in raising interest rates on mortgages and drop rates quicker when they’re coming down. They generally have lower fees and fewer hidden costs.
Change your retirement fund into a not-for-profit like Simplicity in New Zealand*, HostPlus in Australia*, or whatever the equivalent in the US is (I have no idea and I did a Duck Duck Go search and I am confused about whether people in America can ever retire or if they’re just sent to a glue factory).
Join a union. I am a proud union thug. There is power in numbers. Unions are responsible for many of the rights workers enjoy today, from the 40 hour workweek to annual leave (PTO for Americans) to sick pay and all sorts of stuff that most people take for granted.
In Australia, union members earn 32% more than non-members and workplaces with more union members are safer, with fewer serious injuries. It’s a fuckin’ no brainer. Also they can be a great social thing. Apple, Amazon, Uber and many big companies responsible for eroding workers rights hate unions: that in itself is a good enough reason to join one.
Here’s where things get hard.
Stop being selfish.
Help those around you.
Actively seek out ways you can help people in your community.
Talk to people who you wouldn’t normally talk to. Find out what they need. Help them get it. They might just need a conversation. They might need a hug. They might need help with their lawn or moving some stuff. They might be crowdfunding to put on a play. Just help ‘em.
Throw yourself into helping others and building meaningful relationships with other people in your area. Show solidarity with people who are struggling. Mutual Aid is not about charity, it’s about helping others to everyone's benefit. I can’t tell you how to do it, you and your community need to figure out what’s best for you.
By doing this, you firstly regain privacy so you’re not constantly scrolling through ad-laden feeds feeding the data machine with engagement. Secondly you’re creating time to be what humans evolved to be: a social animal. You’re providing emotional and mental Mutual Aid to your fellow humans. Something we desperately need.
Essentially any action you can take to stop feeding the machine of capitalism and choose to be empathetic towards others makes a tiny little dent in the machine.
You filthy idealist.
It’s highly unlikely anything you do as an individual is going to unshackle us from the chains the Almighty Dollar has wrapped around every single one of our appendages. I don’t even do all of these myself, but I try.
And with enough dents, who knows what can happen.
Sound off in the comments about cool ways you’re building community, smashing capitalism, and/or regaining privacy.
*this is not an ad, promise, they’re just examples I know off the top of my head.
-Jackson Wood.
David here again. Hope to see you at the Webworm pop-up in LA on May 11! Come say hi.
