non-ideologies, bad ideologies and non-functional aesthetics
or how I was trapped in the mire of inaction co-opting activist aesthetics via ideology
there are going to be parts of this article that make you feel called out, angry, offended or otherwise negative. that is okay. I want you to fight through that. the first half of this post is The Problem as described by me, someone who has lived it, while the second half is The Solution I found.
in my last post and adjacent posts on BlueSky, I was perhaps a bit harsh on futurist movements and ideologies.
I wrote in my post that I don’t think now is the time for solarpunk futurism, biocosmism and that anarchism, or at least Big-A Anarchism, needed to take a back seat… in the trunk. we’re living through extremely dynamic and dangerous times now, and to play make believe with silly movements that will take 50 years to reasonably build when they’re filling the camps now seems at best escapist and at worst actively harmful.
I stand by that. I think if your primary work output right now is poasting, building silly tools to advance a futurist ideology or doing academic wonky nonsense, you’re at least adjacent to The Problem.
I left out a fairly crucial part of this, though, which is that one can strive to achieve some of these ideologies in the long term while maintaining meaningful impacts in the now. I’m going to leave out some ideologies which, in reality, are veneers around non-ideologies, bad ideologies and non-functional aesthetics.
non-functional aesthetics
as much as I love solarpunk, the way that most people understand solarpunk is that it’s an art style and an aesthetic, and the myriad of ways people try to make it a thing are, at best, escapists. I think it’s cool to backyard garden, I’ve got several hundred habanero peppers in my fridge, but I don’t do that for the sake of politics. solarpunk goes in my “non-functional aesthetics” bucket, because while it’s cool and non-harmful and maybe someday will serve as part of a guide on how to treat the world, it’s not offering any answer to most questions we have in the now.
non-functional aesthetics are Very Cool Science Fiction. they are fun to think about. very fun to draw on a notepad. very cool to play pretend with your friends. very fun to write about. but they very frequently lull one into believing that fictional worldbuilding is important in material reality. yes, it’s important to imagine the world we want to build… but then you have to get off your ass and do the building. if your fictional reality is one where humans can copy their consciousness into an SD card and toss that into a new body when yours ages off, you’re either going to work at some AI startup that will literally never achieve that within the next 3 generations… or you’re playing dress up with your fellow futurist friends.
in normal times, I wouldn’t bat an eye at people ascribing to non-functional aesthetics, even people who do so in an identitarian way. LARP’ing is fine in normal times. it’s totally cool to play dress up and write fiction and the rest of it.
we’re not in normal times, though. it’s time for us to put on our big kid pants, look around, and recognize that your backyard garden and 3D printed raspberry pi automated farm and seed-bombing and cool drawings and yogurt commercials aren’t going to save us. we can LARP all the way to the camps, or we can put some of that stuff aside and figure out what aligned directions we can walk toward to actionably affect the lives of others in a positive and meaningful way.
bad ideologies
network states are simply bad ideologies. they range from “we build new states in the ashes of the old by doing US Government But Woke” to “the problem with the US Government is that it’s not capitalistic enough, there are far too many protections for minority classes and we’re controlling for safety in our critical infrastructure far too much.” I shouldn’t need to explain why network states are bad, because we’ve had two decades of the Redditor right-libertarian class slowly gaining more and more influence while they try and fail to build ocean cities and insist upon trying to make cryptocurrencies a thing. I’m going to need you to trust me on this, or do a little critical thinking.
bad ideologies can be bad for many reasons. maybe they’re just stupid. American style liberalism falls into this category to me right now. looking at a camp being built in the everglades of Florida whose explicit purpose is to hardly-house immigrants and Lesser Than’s who are living under threat of being literally fed to the alligators by white supremacists and saying “yeah, the courts will save us, we just need to vote blue no matter who” is bad ideology. liberals had their chance, and they royally screwed it up. over and over. that’s an ideology that is harmful right now.
right libertarianism or hypercapitalism is a bad ideology. believing the markets will save us in a time when the camps are being built by for-profit companies, accelerating the dying SaaS-for-the-sake-of-MRR market so maybe Gary Tan will see your tweet and consider tossing you a bone that he can steal back from you later, or focusing your efforts on personal capital accumulation and empire-building instead of materially helping people is bad ideology. you may buy your 5 bedroom fortress in the hills to escape the burning cities, but the cities will burn regardless, and whatever history is told in the aftermath will not smile fondly upon you.
I don’t really feel the need to say “Nazism and fascism are bad ideologies.” there’s a very low chance that you’re reading this and have positive feelings toward either ideology. if you do ascribe to either of the above ideologies, may I suggest a one-man round of Russian Roulette with a fully loaded sidearm of your choosing.
non-ideologies
then there are non-ideologies. these are ideologies that aren’t, belief systems that have no tangible ties to reality, no real ability to function outside of the imagination, no real effect on The Now. if they didn’t exist on BlueSky, Twitter, or Reddit, they wouldn’t exist at all. these are ideologies made up entirely by people who Think and Poast, and those doing the Thinking and Poasting have, at most, volunteered at a soup kitchen a couple times and that is the summation of their effect on material reality. these are, at best, a waste of time, and are frequently ideologies that distract from material reality and keep people from touching grass, feeding people and fighting The Bad.
there are even non-ideologies that can be philosophically co-opted by real, bad ideologies. “Woke-ism” was functionally an entirely online ideology: you yell people down for micro-aggressions, “cancel” people for this or that slight, etc. but the effects were very rarely ever in The Real World. put the “horrors of wokism” in the hands of the far right, though, and now Woke-ism is everywhere and having very real effects on the average American Joe Schmo Locker Talk. Woke-ism was one Jordan Peterson Sob Story away from Jesse Waters Prime Time, and now the Horrors of Woke have lead to university crackdowns, the burning of educational funding and, I’m sure, far worse.
the various ism’s as they manifest on Twitter, Reddit and BlueSky are non-ideologies for many of the individuals, even if there are real manifestations of them in real life. while I argue that liberalism is a bad ideology before, the liberalism of the individual campaigning and door-knocking for Zohran Mamdani is real and is not a non-ideology, but the liberalism of the social media clout farmer posting BlueAnon nonsense and doing very little other than “spreading the word” is non-ideological liberalism. the anarchism of the activist in the street is ideological, but the anarchism of the Karma-Farming Lefty Poaster on Reddit is non-ideological.
non-ideologies can be dangerous because of how common they are, and how frequently they tend to derail people who would otherwise be politically active and helpful in material reality. they can convince someone to maintain the identity of political activism while doing none of the real work. retweets for reach replaces organizing protests. making memes to decry leadership replaces movement building to depose that leadership. spreading a GoFundMe in your network replaces putting together some sandwiches to hand out to the unhoused.
okay, now let’s take a breath. you’re already building your twitter thread in your mind talking about how garbage this article is because you’re mad. perhaps we’ve had a bit of a fight or flight response. let me defuse this with some empathy:
I know about all three of these categories because I’ve lived in them for the entirety of my life.
I was in the non-ideological bucket as a conservative growing up and a liberal when I reached voting age and never voted. my ideological contributions were entirely online, and entirely pointless. the very little help I did have in material reality was non-political charity work (which is fine, by the way) but I was otherwise not at all contributing to any sort of change in material reality. I went to one protest in high school to counter-protest Westboro Baptist. I wore a Guy Fawkes mask (I know) and held a sign. that was the extent of my political activity for several years.
I have run the gamut of bad ideologies in the past, luckily none of the worst ones. I grew up in The Deepest Red in the Southeast, so growing up a neocon in post-9/11 Mississippi was a given. I ran on a carbon copy of Bush Jr.’s platform, or at least how I understood it at 12 years old, in student government. I think I won, too. I was too young to remember the WMD Excuse in 2003, but I remember believing it all the way to college, where I did the time-honored tradition of transitioning from a neocon to a liberal to a right libertarian. I was collecting dumb ideologies like Pokemon badges back then, but what I wasn’t doing was activism.
the first Muslim bans happened while I was in college. there were protests. I was angry, but not angry enough to go to the protests. there was cheap booze to drink, after all. as I grew older and graduated, the excuses for not being politically active grew with me. I had transitioned back to being a liberal around this time, finding the teachings of Ayn Rand and Peter Thiel to be… annoying. I voted once while I was in college (for a libertarian party candidate, if I remember correctly…) but never again afterwards, not even for local elections. boy did I voice my concerns on Twitter, though!
my transition to the non-ideological anarchism happened shortly afterwards, where I, again, posted a lot but did nothing at all materially to change things. then it was effective altruism (I’ll make enough money in the system to affect change by building dumb SaaS apps and change the world!) to just… not really being ideologically anything. I played around with a few non-ideologies like biocosmism and solarpunk, but at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter what ideology of the week was in my head, because I was doing nothing materially to change anything.
the solution: abandon ideology, return to material activism
I had a crisis recently. nothing dramatic, I wasn’t in danger of anything except staying where I was. I realized just how materially ineffective I’d been politically for the last decade, and I realized we are at a turning point where you can’t get away with that anymore. being a college kid and doing lazy liberal posting in 2014-2018 can be forgiven, but being a non-ideological poaster in 2025 has become more and more ethically dubious.
my crisis was one of the conscience. how would I let the world my kids will raise their kids in burn in the fires of fascist climate collapse? how would I look at them and say “no, I really didn’t do much other than post while they build the camps”?
now, I can’t really tell you where I sit, ideologically, but I can tell you that I have plans for materially affecting reality, and I’ll figure out the labels later. we’re trained by society, culture, social media, content, history and the rest of it to rely far too heavily on identitarian labelmaking. “I am a liberal, they are a communist, she is an anarchist, they are syndicalists.” these labels can be useful to very succinctly wrap up a person or group’s general ideological stances, but they’re incredibly dangerous in allowing one to capture the feeling of political activism, of labeling oneself by a political identity, but having the material effect of… nothing.
perhaps the answer is to do more and say less. no more selfies at protests (those are bad OPSEC anyways) but much more conversations with folks at protests, and please, far more protests. less social media campaigning, more calling the party headquarters and asking if you can phone bank or canvas. less RT’s for reach, more driving out to where things are happening and asking how to help. less clout farming, less aura farming, less followers, less posting, fewer groupchats, fewer YouTube videos, fewer TikToks, less desk work, less tapping away at a phone…
more material activism.