2025-05-08 Not doing the thing
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I was reading stuff on fedi, as one does, wrote a reply, deleted it,
moved on, read some more, wrote a reply, deleted it. In both cases I
wanted say that the thing people were talking about seemed to me to be
that pattern in capitalism where "not doing a thing" gives you less
power over time, so people always end up doing something.

Like "buy this to save money" instead of "don't buy this to save
money" or "buy this keyboard to fight the pain in your wrists" instead
of "work less to fight the pain in your wrists".

If you advocate for not doing a thing, there's no money changing hands
and therefore no ads to buy, no voice to gain, no political decisions
going your way. Which is a slightly different explanation than greed
and greenwashing for the failure of degrowth to take hold: If you sell
flights and buy carbon offsets you'll always be growing unlike the
competition that sells less flights to lower emissions. Even if the
employees of the second company are feeling no need to grow, in the
general population, their message will tend to get lost, their
percentage of the market, even if enough for them, will continue to
shrink, and eventually people will not have heard about them.

I don't know how to change that except by laws against doing all the
things I think we need to stop doing. Because the entire market, the
public speech, the commercial activity, it is all dominated by people
who do the thing. Sure, it's greed, in a way, but it's also a ratchet,
unstoppable, step by step, a selection process that is ongoing.

Do right and stop doing the thing and you leave that public sphere.
Like Voltaire says, tend to your own garden. You'll be happy but the
political storms raging around you will seem more and more alien.
Because the people that didn't drop out will no longer hear you or see
you. The next generation will not learn from you.

So one needs to stay in politics? Fight for the thing even though all
the money goes to towards doing the things that we shouldn't be doing?

I don't know what to do.

The entire thing reminds me of How to Do Nothing.

@dredmorbius@toot.cat answered with "Don't just do something, stand
there!" What a great reversal of "Don't just stand there, do
something!" (Quote Investigator).

@smlckz@c.im reminded me of tǎng píng, Chinese for "lying flat"
(instead of working hard). In a world of efficiency and productivity,
lying flat is resistance. Or is checking out a way to avoid
responsibility? Or the admission of powerlessness? I feel it all.

@ewen@photog.social noted a similar problem in medicine where "the
three biggest factors in long term health are getting more sleep,
drinking more water and getting a little exercise." Which can't be
monetised, of course. So somebody else must be talking about this.
This reminds me of the reversal at the Chinese imperial court I heard
of at one point. No idea if it is true, but the idea seems
interesting: there's a physician and they get paid if the patients is
healthy. We could get there in part with healthcare paid 100% by
taxes, maybe? After all, the state usually pays for campaigns of
public health, for the ads, the education, the measures, all of it.

@pkw@snac.d34d.net said: "This is a massive problem with our society.
We have no conception or appreciation for the absence of things so
they never get attention." Two examples were provided: regulations and
browser features.

And I agree, it’s difficult to take things away. As far as the two
examples go, I’m not sure.

Perhaps most additions to legislation (speaking from a Swiss
perspective) serve a purpose – we just don't know about it. When I
listened to the discussion of The Power Broker on the 99% Invisible
podcast, there discussion at end included comments about all the
regulations that we introduced so that people can no longer be treated
as harshly as they were treated by Robert Moses. These days, of
course, people who'd like to move quickly and don't mind breaking
things would support complaining about the regulations holding them
back. But like all calamities, the longer we remember them and the
lessons learned at the time, the longer we can avoid repeating the
mistakes.

The decisions regarding browsers aren't clear to me, either. It’s
possible to reject HTML and serve Gopher or Gemini like I do, but
without modern browsers we also drop online applications. Gopher and
Gemini have reduced accessibility except for basic text reading, so I
feel torn: which part of the browser should we drop? They dropped RSS
feeds! Oh no!! They kept VRML? Oh no!! It’s confusing and apparently
not as easy to decide what to keep and what to drop because our needs
are diverse. I appreciate all the browser features but I don’t
appreciate the surveillance. I appreciate all the browser features but
I don’t appreciate bloater Electron apps. I guess I still have a hard
time deciding. Or worse: why not both and now we have Gopher, Gemini
and the modern web. Good? Bad? I don’t know.

I still don't know.