The future will be community-based
The need to belong is thwarting the globalist agenda.
A little observation is enough to realize that many people, after a flashy start of the internet and the "incredible luck" of being able to connect to the whole world, are starting to have reflexes of withdrawal and retreat from what the globalists wanted to push.
The individualism exacerbated by a society of comfort and publicity, patiently working our minds to egoism and insensitivity to others, seemed to have found a new glory in the frenetic use of connected high-tech devices, in the virtualization of relationships to the point of not feeling in duty of anything nor responsible for anything.
In short: the advent of a form of instant enjoyment without apparent consequences and the ease of escaping any form of relational frustration through the immensity of the web and its ease of zapping and moving on.
So we started sending emails, enjoying services sold from the other side of the planet, scouring ad and rating platforms, listening to endless information about the world, chatting online with people from any country, making new friends and lovers, etc.
However, and this is a big one, after the initial exhilaration of discovery, we also discovered spam, online scams, fake ads and fake ratings, fake news, fake accounts (of a liar, a robot or an intelligence agent) and fake friends, as well as the blandness of meaningless booty calls.
Internet: from excitement to nausea
Many people still live in the fantasy world of the internet, but more and more feel nausea and disgust.
What we have lost in the last twenty years is trust and innocence.
We no longer ignore much about the worst of this world and sometimes also about the "little fun" in it. And we have been gorged with information to the point where all its contradictions make us wonder about the true value of the speech and the writing.
Our bulimia has engendered disgust and disgust could well engender anorexia.
Now, when we are faced with a piece of information or a business proposal, we wonder more than ever about its veracity and honesty.
What commercial malice has engendered of distrust reaches its paroxysm in a digital world where cheatings are innumerable and often exceed our imagination.
The observation is quite clear: most of the time, the world wants to harm us. This is not personal, it comes mostly from the greed nurtured by the monotropic capitalist paradigm. That’s why being naive, in this world, is sadly a deadly weakness.
We don't trust the virtual world, and actually, we don't trust the real world either. In fact, we have created individual bubbles of distrust. We are now programmed to be constantly suspicious. And this is so distressing that many of us consciously choose to endure malice for a little peace of mind.
We know for example that Facebook is harvesting and selling our data, but the mental effort to react to it and face its implications is too enormous to be made for many people.
It's that we are in fact exhausted. Mentally, psychologically and probably also spiritually.
We no longer have any reference points, we no longer know if what we hear is true or not, if we have to correct something in our existence because we are not enough this or too much that.
We no longer know who we are and what we really need.
The Internet has also led us to reinforce deep-seated addictions that are firmly rooted in us.
In reaction to our isolation, we have fallen into a frenzy of virtual interactions, always stimulating, almost never satisfying.
We are exhausted and frustrated. We no longer trust anyone and we have lost our innocence in the world, which would have led us to spontaneously choose the kindest explanation for a situation or an event. Now we choose the worst one and even if it is sometimes correct, it sets us in a constant mood of despair.
The return of the small network
In reaction to this exasperated saturation, we gradually return to the essential and especially to our known space, small enough not to lose our mind.
This known space is made of our family, our friends and a few satellite acquaintances. These are people we know and trust more than the Malian scammer trying to sell us products that don't exist, or the Chinese brand with a manual full of spelling mistakes that sells us a cheap, fragile and irreparable product.
The fact is that we need stable reference points in our lives and this is not an empty word, it is in fact a fundamental need of the human being.
If we have a question about a particular problem, like the repair of a car for example, going to the person of our entourage "who knows about it" becomes more and more preferable to the wandering of forums in blogs, on an Internet polluted by the false information, propagated by incompetence, carelessness or malevolence.
We need simplicity and easily understandable answers to our daily problems.
If I need to change the gas filter, I want to know how to do it, not find out that I'd better change the engine altogether.
I would also like to be shown how to do it in real life, in front of me, and with a human interaction that is enriching, or at least pleasant.
Recreating a network of trust in which we find just about everything we need is becoming urgent. Moreover, this urgency is first and foremost a feeling and a psychological need, before being an autonomous intellectual resolution or anything else.
Sharing a meal in real life has more flavor than doing it through webcams. Hugging someone has even more beauty than sharing hugs in emojis.
There is an intensity in our authentic interactions that no technology can replace, and we are just beginning to truly realize this, because we have tried its technological equivalent and it has only brought us depression.
Reclaiming our surroundings
So we need to recreate circles of trust, rich in personalities and skills.
However, this is something that is difficult for us to do, because we keep track of the world's malevolence and of the imaginary vision of it that we have created by our extensive use of the Internet.
We need to take time to nurture again positive relationships, little by little, with patience and a lot of love.
We need to find again our ways to communicate and what we consider having a value in this world.
We need to recreate our own reference points, in everything. But we also have new ideas since we have been connected to many different people and concepts through the Internet. Hence, there are some things we don’t want anymore, some spirituality or politicial views we would like to share with other people, some work we would like to do, etc.
That is why, our own personal network will probably be a mix of people physically around us, with whom we will be able to talk, smile, hug, eat and so on, and people that we meet online to share specific values, sometimes rare, that we can’t really fully express in our physical surroundings for some reason.
These virtual connections can also bring some useful information and tools and concepts, such as what I do here with my articles. They will never replace the physical ones because they are from totally different nature, like the physical ones won’t probably replace the virtual ones.
But it is fine, and actually it is a great opportunity to establish new forms of communities, that are totally independent but still able to share common interests and grow together in some ways.
However, because of what we experienced at full speed with the infinite internet, we aim to find virtual relations that come from genuine people, willingly showing human traits, and we will probably just have a few of them. No need to have two thousands friends or three hundreds thousands of followers. We don’t know them all anyway.
It appears that, for most of us, our real social needs call for a few of trustworthy human beings. And we will have to learn to keep our circles tidy and kind of minimalistic. Because we experienced over virtual socialization and it led us frustrated and rather sad for most of us.
Also, one of the most difficult point is that, in many places in the West, community is not something necessary for survival anymore, as it was for millenia. Recently in our history, relationships became optional and leaving everyone we know rarely means that it will end up badly for us (on that matter, the more a country offers social support, the more it is noticeable).
So, we have to recreate communities because we really want to, and because we have understood that what it brings is bigger than what brings a virtual or individualist life. It is therefore harder, because the temptation of quitting is stronger, since its consequences appear acceptable.
But the choice is ours, we can keep going with the flow of hyper-virtualization or decide to patiently build our own communities.
Tools for communities
While many of us share this desire for a return to one or more trustworthy communities, it requires that we relearn some things and create others.
Communication is one of the main relational keys. Some people write books about it, but for me it comes down to three things:
being as authentic as possible
understanding that we are complex beings and that what we express may be different from what we want to express, may change over time, may be misunderstood and that we don’t all use the same modes of expression
deepening our modes of expression (including languages of course) in order to match as well as possible what we wish to express and the expressions and vocabulary we use
Then, if we wish to enjoy chosen and patiently nurtured relationships, we must adapt our way of life to correspond to them.
For example, as it is important to take time for our relationships, if we physically have relationships around us that we want to take care of, it requires that we devote time to them, and therefore that we are not always working, traveling or spending time on the Internet.
If our lifestyle is travel, then it may be better to care for our relationships from a distance, if they are important to us.
It's crucial to spend time on what we want to see happen, and that's the same for everything. Love, time, money devoted to something is the same energy. It is a focus of who we are on what we want to see exist.
Regarding communities on the Internet, tools like the fediverse, which allows you to create your own interconnected social networks, or Peertube, which allows you to create your own video hosting platform, are tools that help create and maintain communities whose nature, values and size we can decide. Some chat rooms such as Mattermost, Matrix/Element or Briar can also be suitable for people who want to exchange a lot of information in writing and keep track of their communications. Nextcloud can be used for small or medium clouds too.
Yunohost is a debian-based operating system that provides an easy way to set up our own personal server with mailboxes, websites, fora, etc. You can set up your fediverse instance with it and a Peertube platform, amongst many other things. It fits small-scale server needs.
Unfortunately, I encountered myself many issues with this solution and had to stop using it but developers try to improve it all the time. You can reach the Yunohost forum to ask your questions and find some help with your issues.
The most important thing is to make the tools fit our real needs, not the opposite. We don’t need super powerful computers nor high speed connections. Sometimes, sharing a small computer is enough for several people.
We don’t need terabytes of data of music and movies. Maybe some of our music will be stored on vinyls records. Maybe we will share some movies at a local cinema.
Barter, money, loans and gifts are also central part of a community. About the money, private cryptocurrencies can help in exchanging values safe from governments or agencies control and therefore give the opportunity to live a more synergetic life. Libre money is also an excellent way to make our own communities able to create and manage their own money and currency.
Third places are also absolutely essential in a local community. They can be a bar, a fablab, a theater, a barbecue area, etc. Such places of socialization are very important to reinforce a feeling of belonging and to encourage solidarity reflexes through genuine friendship. They are also places to meet someone to start a family with.
Other things will be needed of course, I won’t tell them all as they are quite obvious, I am just sharing what I think is important to focus on particularly.
To finish, families and children are of course the sinequanone conditions of a lasting community and all we create only generally find its real meaning through the use by multiple generations of people. Thinking in the long run is also the best way to create a synergetic way of life, since the notion of durability will concern almost everything we do.
To help these families, it is necessary to consider all the places they could use such as nursery, kindergarten, school and all the medical needs (answered as synergetically as possible).
In order to prevent malevolent intrusion from any lobby, people also have to be very tight-knit and brave.
This is no joke. Powerful and malevolent people won’t let us create peacefully our own paradise, free from tyranny and surveillance. They won’t either let us have any form of spirituality, only the ones that will be allowed because they are not a threat to their objectives.
Every step toward communitarization will have to be smart and courageously done.
Let’s keep on sharing what is worth it and strengthen our communities, let’s make them resistant, resilient and truly free, in a word: synergetic communities.