Infrastructure reveals what we really mean by abundance. Do we believe that prosperity is engineered from the top down (cities as a complicated machine)? Or do we recognize that it must be cultivated from the bottom up, one place at a time (cities as a complex, adaptive system)?

Abundance without humility is a dangerous fantasy, especially when it comes to infrastructure. We’ve tried the grand solutions before, and we’re still living with the fragility they created. The true abundance worth striving for is the kind that comes from co-creation: from neighbors working together, from feedback loops that keep us honest, from the dedicated effort of building prosperity in place.

That’s not abundance as a one-time breakthrough. It’s abundance as compound interest: a steady accumulation of small, thoughtful choices, year after year, generation after generation. It’s not always flashy, but it lasts.

This article doesn’t use the word “degrowth” anywhere, but its vision for a sustainable, abundant community is the ideal of a degrowth community - a community that doesn’t need to obsessively expand in order to survive, that meets the needs of its people not through massive projects and government grants but through the small, humble, incremental work of its people’s own hands.

Cory Doctorow is rightfully enraged:

This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don’t comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It’s a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.

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I’m sure you may have seen a lot of “how to inoculate yourself against climate disinformation” posts, but we’re experiencing a huge amount of content paid for by Fossil Fuel Interest’s to put pressure on the internet. And it’s been really concentrated for a few months.

The funding is pushing for a cultural shift for people who are undecided in the climate conversation and are possibly more easily swayed. And it’s important to remember, fossil fuel interests wouldn’t pay for it if they didn’t need it.

Most of the disinfo looks like “yeah climate change is real but we can’t possibly do anything to fix it” or “these solutions simply don’t work.” about solutions that are tried and true. They look a lot like nuanced takes, but specifically are trying to motivate inaction.

So if you wake up today and ask “what can I do today that makes a difference?” is honestly post a lot to tip the scales regarding the presentation climate solutions. Silly or serious, for example posting about renewables getting you excited, community food forests that are feeding people, cool solutions to targeting methane, etc. Post about a climate book or show you liked, or whatever. Just make sure it’s clear to an onlooker that there are people who believe climate change is anthropogenic, it was mostly caused by extractive practices and fossil fuel use, and that we can still demand rapid action to fix it. And all of this is true, because the science supports it.