♎︎ Libra

These days, justice has become synonymous with images of suits, courthouses, and political trappings. It is my sincere wish that as soon as possible this dated ‘modern’ aesthetic goes the way of powdered wigs, and we can get rid of this ‘professional’ facade and fallacy. My favorite depiction of democracy is of course ancient Greece, where each in the senate had a white stone and a black one by which to cast votes. Simple, clean, elegant, accountable.  Which is very much the vibe of Libra, Buckminster Fuller says "When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."   Elegance is a natural byproduct of fit, in a way that’s how we really check our work and I think that applies to less physically obvious structures as well. 

 

There is a lot of fear mongering surrounding automation and AI, the narrative is very nihilistic as has every wave of job replacing technology before it. In late stage capitalism, we have become so utterly dependent upon our job as our identity and reason for being, despite increasing instability in the global market and decreasing security of what once were thought of as solid jobs.The whole point of developing technology is to replace tasks which are demeaning to the human spirit, or that are better to be automated, and our ancestors toiled for thousands of years so that we could reach the pinnacle of that today. It is an immense disrespect to their sacrifices that we are not using it for its intended purpose and now trying to lay blame at its feet. So in a way, there is a profoundly physical reality to AI, but also a spiritual one. We have so many movies about golems, androids, robots turning on their masters as though we expect and deserve it, it begs the question why we even go on if we are so fearful about atoning for what we’ve done. Modern translations of ancient mythology echo this sentiment that the gods were somehow afraid of their human creations, and sought to lord over them tyrannically and try to control their potential to overthrow them, but that seems like an awfully convenient narrative for a monotheistic colonist to impose on a pagan culture they were looking to subdue no? What might scifi look like if instead we choose not to carry that narrative forward?

 

There is so much concern over what on earth we would do with our time, if we didn’t have to work a grind job all day just to keep a roof over our heads, and yet the recent social experiment of quarantine revealed a lot of people have taken the opportunity to pursue hobbies and crafts they wouldn’t otherwise have time for, spend time with their families, reflect with themselves, organize their living spaces, start businesses…the proof is in the pudding. Time will tell what adaptations might have been born out of the temporary reprieve, which allowed for a reevaluation of priorities. Two key takeaways from our global pandemic experience fall directly under the Libra mission: commuting to office jobs is not a thing we should do anymore and the fact that we devoted so much of our city structure to that end in particular now needs to be dealt with, and eliminating a lot of the extraneous administrative paper pushing jobs and repetitive tasks altogether, replacing them with AI or automation is essential to our ability to move on to figuring out what is actually generative and worthwhile for human beings to do. 

 

It might be weird to call the phenomenon of urban sprawl reclamation as ‘justice’, but I think it’s highly appropriate. The land was stolen to begin with. Equality hinges upon finding a way to distribute space to those who can actually do something productive with it, including but not limited to the first nation people who were its original caretakers. Doing away with private company ownerships of common utilities like water and power is a dream not too far off on the horizon; how that really works and what it looks like on a large scale hasn’t necessarily been seen yet. We have so many irrational fears about people overusing when something isn’t capped off and kept under lock and key… yet we allow corporations to exploit natural resources as fast as they are able. If there was no profit motive at play, and no critical supply failure to create a threat of scarcity, there would be absolutely no reason for the individual to take more than they need. Early experiments on universal basic income have been deeply upsetting to the status quo, and each step in that direction does its part to erode the rock solid yet, shockingly YOUNG institutions. The vast majority of publicly traded companies don’t live past 50 years old, though the life expectancy of a single human is much longer than that!