take it from the tricera-top!

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

The part about it being envisioned specifically as a "village" is relevant, I think, in that these kinds of people romanticize small rural villages as this ideal form of close-knit community to which we must retvrn, in contrast to the hard, alienating city life. But I'd argue that sure, dense urban environments can be alienating in certain ways, but they're also in many ways more utopian simply in that they force people to learn to peacefully co-exist as a community with others very different from themselves. The rural village appears to live in idyllic consensus because everyone who did not fit in has either been ostracized away, worn down into conformity, or has voluntarily fled to the nearest big city as soon as they were old enough.

your cat was an honor to see in the window

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid