Thank You! #

Yes, you! Thank you for your trust in me to be worthy of your attention. If you agree, I would like to share a maybe uncommon perspective with you.

In the first version of this website, there was a line around the bottom, reading: “This website would not be possible, without the work of the contributors of the hugo framework and the typo theme.”. But at some point during the design process, I realised that this was symptomatic of a world view, that is as prevalent as it is wrong.

We look at the world and differentiate causes and influences on how things are from ’the environment’. For example: If I handed you a muffin and asked you how it comes that you now have a muffin, you might say “because you brought one from the bakery and gave it to me”.

Our perception of causation, of dependency, is localised in time and space. If I were to probe further, you might eventually think that someone once had to invent muffins, or that there is a road under our feet via which muffin ingredients arrive at the bakery, or that someone got up really early this morning to arrive at the bakery in time to produce the muffin. This deeper layer however, is hidden behind conscious analysis and that has consequences.

Nowadays, we are somewhat aware of how we are affected by environmental conditions and consequently, the privileged shape environments in what they perceive as their favour.

What we are increasingly less aware of, is how this shaping of environments, this establishment of required conditions, is done by people. People that we — in principle — believe hold rights: human rights, among others.

We have however, created systems of motivation, of coercion and control to encourage and force people into desired behaviours and we now believe that we depend upon the systems rather than the people, to create the conditions, which we depend upon. We guard and protect these systems in fear of losing what convenience, what comfort, what privilege we were capable of attaining was granted us.

This does not happen by accident. The invisibility of most of people, involved in the creation and maintenance of anything, is instrumental in their exploitation, and their exploitation is the basis of consumption and wealth, the basis of our society.

On top of this abstraction, of turning people into systems and systems into the environment, rides the narrative of our independence from one another. According to this world view of independence, all we have to do is perform some role to earn money and through only our own abilities we attain success, security, recognition, status, and influence.

We are encouraged to think about ourselves as independent individuals, rather than interconnected, interdependent beings. As competitors rather than collaborators. As individually at fault, rather than suffering from systemic injustice.

This, of course, is false.

For one, we heavily depend on others not disturbing the system too much. The systems we built, one on top of the other, so high that we have long since lost the ability to see the whole stack, seem stable, even unchangeable, but this is an illusion.

They are in fact incredibly fragile. A single slighted software developer, a contaminated medicine factory, a ship blocking the suez canal, a self-important dictator, a windows update gone wrong, a crypto-trojan on the wrong computer, all have had disastrous impacts on the working of the global machinery over the last couple of years. Things are mostly still working, not because they are robust, but because nobody has seriously tried to disrupt them. As tensions between states rise, these disruptions will become more frequent and more severe.

In addition, and much more importantly, we heavily depend on everyone else and on one another. Most of us would not survive without others working (indirectly or directly) to support us, to produce food, medicine, shelter, and clothing, to remove our trash or to provide care or knowledge.

So again: Thank you! Thank all of you for contribution, whatever it may be. Thank you for whatever awareness of others’ contributions you can manage, and thank you for whatever awareness of your own actions’ influence on others you can maintain. Be kind, support each other. We are in this together.