MISSION

who is gamithra?

I am a person of machines, of hacker communities, of solarpunk, of listening to jungle, Overmono, and Scooter; of raves, of robots, numbers, and cybernetics, of Disco Elysium and Windows XP (the last time I think we still allowed ourselves to be in love with machines before they flipped the script and turned us into machines instead).

My favourite show is Rehearsal, my favourite movie is 24 Hour Party People, and my favourite book is The Psalm For the Wild-Built. I do not have a favourite color but dark blue is unacceptable.

I am a person of systems and action. I believe choosing courage over comfort is inherently good as long as action stems from kindness (it's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice). And if comfort stems from connection and not capitalism in a trench coat, I choose it too. I embrace impermanence and complexity, and I believe the future is not something that happens to us like weather. We engineer it together.

I have Guidelines for myself that I tattooed on my body, and I designed variables to regularly measure how I'm doing (and they design me back, which was not expected but should have been).

Things that feel especially exciting to the current iteration of gamithra: cyberanthropology, ecstatic politics, cultural economics, cybernetics, complex systems, solarpunk, incentive systems, cool shapes.

where do I want to go?

I want to live in a world that shares, self-hosts, builds, and raves. I want to live in a world that protects humanity, expression, and feeling alive. I want to live in a world where connection is abundant, protocols are open, knowledge is shared, resources are beautifully managed, communication is kind, and structures are co-created. A world of empowered communities that gracefully govern themselves and their commons in harmony with all beings.

That world looks lush and green and wonderfully complex to me, with technology and machines woven into processes that are built to support and share. It is a world that is culturally and naturally diverse, where different desires and values flow peacefully. There is time to be in that world, time to think of new beautiful things, and time to listen to each other over cups of tea.

Small, local utopias already exist. I've visited and lived in spaces where things were shared, connections were abundant, and ownership felt cooperative. In these systems, fundamental human questions still exist: is there anyone else out there in the known universe? what the fuck are relationships and does this other person like me back? how do we define ourselves if our identities are no longer defined by our productive output? why does my stomach hurt? who is going to do the laundry, and what should we have for dinner?

Those questions are beautiful and they are important, and they're the essence of being human, and I wish we all had a lot more time for them.

where have I been?

These dreams are entirely feasible, but many of them are suffocated by authoritarian structures that profit from extraction, exploitation, and suppressing expression. And as long as we need authoritarian structures for our essentials, we can't be free of them. I've intuitively known that for a long time, but I haven't known where to begin.

I worked at companies and observed people getting addicted to metrics that measured extraction instead of creation. I founded a start-up and banged my head against massive walls of skewed incentives that discourage innovation and encourage power hunger. I joined a political party that began with important ideals without a clear narrative for the future, and watched the same tired power games that killed every revolution before it. I lived in hacker communities where we built perfect little utopias in repurposed buildings while the rest of the world burned outside. I found friends in effective altruism circles who could calculate the optimal distribution of mosquito nets but couldn't ask the fundamental question of why some people have malaria and others have venture capital. I founded a non-profit and poured my soul into it only to meet the same old incentives that do not value systemic change.

GOD SAVE THE RAVE

The pattern that emerges: every institution I touched was trying to solve real problems with real dedication, but they were all optimizing for the current system instead of building the infrastructure for what comes after. Not because they were captured or corrupt, but because that's what the incentives reward and that's what feels practical and achievable. But practical and achievable within broken systems just gets you better ways to manage the brokenness. In the pursuit of measurable goals, immeasurable value and future visions are slowly washed away.

The contents of what we build matter less than the values and quality of attention we build it with. And those are determined by how information flows between the people (and computers) doing the building. The outcome of any system is defined not by what you want it to do, but by the processes that create it, and the quality of communication between the people (or computers) that govern it. Goals shift constantly based on what you actually measure and how you measure it. We are all quite bad at defining goals and understanding what we actually want to happen, and get lost in arbitrary dopamine hits, and that's human. We can get better at it.

What I learned from my institutional road trip is that an incomplete understanding of all of the world's processes is good enough if you're actually building something. Implementation beats interpretation every time. Too many brilliant people get stuck reading theory about the Big Problems until they're too enlightened to act. Starting to solve a problem, armed with the right values and processes, generates solutions (and friends) along the way.

WINDOWS XP

Innovation is beautiful but it's also political. It has a direction as well as a growth rate. We need to rebuild our trust in technology that we've largely lost. Technology used to be about empowerment and all the exciting things we can do with machines; now it's a symbol of wealth concentration and value extraction.

The worlds we want to imagine (growing our own food, generating our own electricity, caring for our own health, moving around the planet without harming it) are all futures that require technological progress. Unless we reclaim innovation as something that empowers people and their communities instead of them (whoever them is this week), we won't get there.

This leads to good people creating inequality and bad outcomes downstream, not because they want to, but because the incentive structures are designed that way.

SOLARPUNK FUTURES

We can't wait for governments to catch up, because governments move like molasses through bureaucracy while the planet burns. We can start building the infrastructure of the future right now. Not preparing for collapse and hoarding wealth anxiously, but creating systems so robust that they work regardless of what breaks around them. If we build new systems that depend on the old broken ones, they'll just break again, and we might no longer be there to help.

The question isn't whether we're supposed to get ready for the new collapse. The question is: what do we build that makes us antifragile? What grows stronger when the old systems fail?

what needs to happen?

In the previous iterations of my mission statements, I had very specific outlines for projects to work on, and they were good—specificity is great and implementation is everything!

However, having explored the far end of my own capacity a few too many times, in this edition I am choosing to think of myself more as a part of processes rather than a vehicle for specific output. It is about the quality of attention to work that I create, of the values embodied in the structures I support, and the help that I can lend to projects that exist within this mission. I hope more things might get built because I defined a mission for myself, and more missions may get defined.

Alright! Let's get ready to engineer our own futures; a world that:

• shares,
• self-hosts,
• builds,
• and raves.

A WORLD THAT SHARES

(POETRY IS WRITTEN BY ALL)

Collective governance means decisions flow from the people who live with the consequences. Not representation democracy where we vote once every four years and hope for the best, but ongoing participation democracy where communities continuously shape their conditions. Worker cooperatives where the people doing the work own the enterprise. Community land trusts where housing is held in common stewardship, not individual speculation. Platform cooperatives where the users own the platforms instead of being the product.

The key infrastructure that needs to be built is decision-making protocols that actually work at scale. Communication systems that help groups think together instead of fragmenting into tribes. New answers to "what is work?" when automation handles the drudgery and we get to focus on care, creativity, and community building.

Our collective narrative of what we create together must be of a world that shares the surplus. Universal basic dividends from automation and extra productivity that get shared between everyone instead of being hoarded by the few must become the norm, not the utopia.

Collective governance starts with self-governance. Before we can make decisions together, we need people who can communicate with themselves through understanding one's own brain and making friends with it, through processing trauma, through exploring one's conciousness and taking responsibility for the quality of one's mind, through the courage to leave comfort zones for long-term good. Self-empowerment isn't a buzzword, it's cognitive infrastructure on which behaviour is built, and the capacity to truly change one's circumstances instead of just adapting to them.

Governance is important and cool and we need leadership, but kind and sensitive leaders are scared of it because it's associated with authoritarian rule instead of gentle assertiveness and guidance. The narrative around leadership must be changed, too.

A WORLD THAT SELF-HOSTS

(POWER TO THE HUMANS)

We run our own infrastructure instead of renting it from surveillance capitalists. Community-owned internet, local energy grids, neighborhood tool libraries, distributed manufacturing capabilities. Not because we're against connection, but because resilient networks need each node to function independently while sharing resources and knowledge freely. Open protocols for everything essential: if it's necessary for human flourishing, it shouldn't be locked behind patents or paywalls.

This means creating a culture of platform cooperatives that route around extraction, and demanding that our central banks serve communities, not capital. We must understand the importance of mesh networks that can't be shut down by authoritarianism and markets that exist within democratic frameworks, not above them. Instead of allowing our digital public spaces to be owned and policed by corporations, we create our own.

Owning our own data and choosing to donate it for collective good can enable large-scale data collaborations to produce new cybernetic innovations. Imagine a GitHub for human biology where medical knowledge and data flow peer-to-peer instead of through pharmaceutical gatekeepers, or Wikipedia for regenerative agriculture where farming techniques get refined through collective experimentation; and collectively owning community makerspaces with the tools to repair anything and fabricate solutions to local problems.

The goal isn't technological self-sufficiency (impossible and undesirable) but technological sovereignty, where communities control their essential infrastructure and can choose how to connect with others.

Self-hosting also means hosting ourselves: having the physical and social infrastructure to support people through transitions, breakups, creative breakthroughs, and the general beautiful messiness of being human; and a culture of taking responsibility for oneself and the planet.

A WORLD THAT BUILDS

(FROM DISCO TO ELYSIUM)

Communities need goals that are bigger than individual projects but concrete enough to coordinate action. Not vague aspirations like "make the world better" but specific missions like "this neighborhood generates its own clean energy by 2027" or "every person in our network has access to basic healthcare diagnostics." How we share is how we collectively decide on these missions. How we own infrastructure is how we accomplish them.

Innovation is political, and right now it's serving the wrong politics. We need to reclaim building as a fundamentally empowering activity not optimization for extraction, but creation for flourishing.

This means mission-oriented innovation at community scale. Instead of waiting for venture capitalists to fund solutions, communities identify what they need and build it collectively. Solar installations designed by neighbors who live with them. Educational platforms created by the people who use them. Healthcare tools developed by patients and practitioners together.

We build antifragile systems that get stronger under pressure. We build technologies that enhance human capacity instead of replacing it. We build with the knowledge that the process shapes the outcome, so we build through collaboration, experimentation, and genuine care for what we're creating.

A WORLD THAT RAVES

(HARD CORE TO THE MEGA)

Culture needs to be innovated as much as technology. There are many, many ways of being and experiencing and moving our bodies that create meaning and value we haven't discovered yet. If we're no longer defined by the work we do (because automation handles the drudgery), then how do we introduce ourselves at parties? What new forms of celebration emerge when communities control their own time and space?

Raving is political technology. Dancing until 6am is a form of resistance against systems that want us tired, isolated, and consuming rather than creating and connecting. Ecstatic experiences (whether through music, movement, psychedelics, or conversations that last until dawn) remind us what aliveness feels like and why it's worth protecting.

We need sanctuaries for expression that can't be monetized or optimized by algorithms. Spaces where the point isn't productivity or performance but pure human weirdness and joy. Where people can explore identity and desire and creativity without it being data for someone else's profit model or serving the needs of institutions that were not built to serve us.

Cultural innovation means new formats for poetry, for intimacy, for learning, for celebrating. New ways of processing collective trauma and imagining collective futures. Rave energy channeled into community building, into creative problem-solving, into the kind of collaborative joy that makes people want to show up for the boring infrastructure work too.

We rave because the future needs to be more alive than the present, not just more efficient.