To Make a Long Story Short

My ultimate goal is to enable people to collectively build projects of "degrowth" in their communities that equitably distribute the challenges and collectively multiply the benefits.

Right now, I'm organizing for political change and mutual aid in my city, building my practical skill set, and designing a community computing system to facilitate these changes.

I turn 30 this summer, and I think that I'm actually ready for it.

The Long(er) Story

I left my most recent salary job in the Fall, and have been living off of savings while I put together plans for the next major phase of my life. I had saved a good amount of money in my 20s that I intended to use to put a down payment on a house, but the world (and the housing market) had other plans. I decided to "be the change", and dedicate my life completely to bringing about the economic and social shifts that the planet desperately needs.

From one angle, I've been building up a local grassroots advocacy group that focuses on the holistic thinking needed for livable, resilient, people-oriented cities. We've built up a distributed group of people who show up to city council meetings, meet with neighbors, and talk to reporters. We've pushed for parking reforms and have shaped local narrative around density and transit. In the future we hope to continue to organize and educate our neighborhoods on the need for intentional, dynamic, and fearlessly compassionate community, that welcomes new neighbors and lives within our "ecological means". Hopefully, we are just getting started.

At the same time, I am building real, practical skills for the future I want to live in. I have been developing my skills as a woodworker, doing my best to learn how to repurpose old materials, to favor hand tools, and to build for longevity. I am in my second year of volunteering at a local community farm which provides a no cost CSA to low-income or food-insecure folks. I aim to continue developing these skills and communicate them, to better distribute the knowledge of buiding and food production among my community.

Finally, I am working on a computing system inspired by natural complex systems called the Coalescent Computer. My hope is to develop a platform for social computing that allows communities to "fork and evolve" economic processes and knowledge systems for their local needs, while still gaining the computational benefit of code and data reuse.