Hey friends 👋

It's been some time since the last Update. Truth be told, I've been unsure of whether or not I should continue this project. On the one hand, Thumbs Up has been one of the most creatively fulfilling things I've ever done in my life, and I say that as someone who has spent most of their life bouncing from one creative profession to the next. On the other hand, I feel an immense burden, shaped in large part by the direction my content has taken over the past few years.

There's a funny thing that happens when you do something you're actually good at. Eventually you build up this idea of how people perceive you, how you perceive yourself. Before you know it, you start to feel like you can't live up to the expectations you've created for yourself.

For those who don't know the backstory of this project, I wrote about it in detail in "Logging Off", so I wont go over it all again here. In brief, I will say that once upon a time, my motivation was to make money doing creative work; and I succeeded in that goal. Over time, however, my goal shifted. I wanted not just to explain how things worked, but to inspire people to think differently about the world. I don't know; maybe it's because I spent so much of my time listening to Chomsky and Vitalik, but I wanted to pontificate, to philosophize.

But who would listen?

I've always gone against the grain. Even as a young leftist, I spent equal time arguing with Marxist-Leninists about how a powerful state could be corrupted and abused, and with anarchists about how the power vacuum of a stateless society could lead to a reversion to feudalism. To some degree, I still believe both of these things, though my understanding of what anarchists actually believe has certainly become less naive.

Just for fun, if you fancy yourself a "leftist" check out this political spectrum quiz. Just don't take the results too seriously. I'll explain why below.

LeftValues

Click here to start! LeftValues is a leftist quiz inspired by and based upon the 8values quiz that seeks to identify your position on the left-wing spectrum. If you are not a leftist, this quiz is obviously not suited for you.

https://leftvalues.github.io

Despite the many political spectrum quizzes I've taken. I often don't know how to label myself. And you'll notice if you've been following for long enough that I use a number of non-synonymous terms to describe myself: socialist, ancom, leftist, libertarian socialist, anarchist, minarchist, democratic socialist, anarcho-syndicalist, market anarchist, market socialist, decentralization enthusiast, and so on and so forth. But why?

Well in reality, I feel labels are harder to strictly apply than we imply them to be. On a given political question, I might answer exactly how a democratic socialist would. With nuance, I might tweak my answer to sound more libertarian. This might seem contradictory but to me it feels honest.

I don't believe the world is black and white, nor grey. As you may have noticed, living in reality, there are in fact, many colours that make up the world we perceive. I guess I'm a pluralist, though a deeply anti-capitalist one.

But as I alluded to before, the implication that I am this or that, creates a tribal association; one which I do not feel qualified to hold, less so to influence on behalf of. And so one of the motivators of my withdrawal from writing has been exactly that: my fear of becoming a poor representative for my causes.

Of course that's not the only reason I've stepped back from blogging.

There was a time when creating content (namely, explainers and tutorials about DeFi apps) was bringing in about 1/3 of my yearly income. Back then it was easy to motivate myself to come home from my 9-5 and put in several more hours of work. And I'm very grateful that I did for it was the catalyst for much of the positive outcomes I've experienced in this chapter of my life.

But a few things happened that changed the dynamic for me.

1. The shift from DeFi to memecoins as the dominant narrative in crypto made it harder to achieve most KPIs even with high quality content. As a result, eventually no one was really paying anymore. AI didn't help.

2. That same shift meant that a number of memecoins paid out big. DEGEN, as one example, changed my life. It allowed me to pay off the remainder of my debt, travel the world, and return to school (more on that later).

3. The genocide in Gaza, Trump's reelection, and the West's overt shift towards fascism, gave me cause to reevaluate my priorities. After all, what's the point in trying to achieve upwards mobility in a society I feel is destined for collapse.

So I took a moment, around the time of the election, and I decided not to publish anything. I began to sell off every token that entered my wallet to keep myself financially stable IRL, and to find new ways to pass the time, that weren't so heavily influenced by what's happening onchain.

Another thing I decided was that I would return to university.

There is a narrative in the modern discourse, mostly from monarchists and the antidemocratic, that universities are merely brainwashing facilities. They take in pure, unadulterated minds and mould them into identical clones espousing supposedly woke propaganda.

This is, quite obviously, anti-intellectual, anti-humanist, misdirection. How do I know? Well I've spent many years in university. First pursuing an arts degree, then taking dozens of general interest courses, and more recently as part of a technical program.

What I've experienced of higher education is that it is a place where people come together to share ideas, to make friends, and to exercise critical thinking. I won't defend all the institutions of higher education, least of all the for-profit sector and the ivy league. There is much just criticism to be levied there.

As you can imagine, lefty that I am, I believe all education should be free, broadly accessible, and class agnostic. I also believe that the attestations (GPA, honours, and even diplomas) could be abandoned completely. These create opportunities for gamification, perverse incentives, and stoke the populist narratives about elites vs everyday people. The goal, as far as I'm concerned is to learn, to collaborate, and to be challenged.

To those who have and will again debate me on this, I agree with the premise that learning can be done outside of institutions. We can go to our local library and study the same books we'd be assigned in a class; we can form book clubs and makerspaces for STEM experiments; we can debate Platonic and Hegelian worldviews on reddit; we can be inspired by our elders, our peers, master craftsmen, and verifiable experts.

But for me, university brings together the valuable social aspect of learning and the curation and structure of a course syllabus. And that's something I personally benefit from. And while I won't suggest that it should be mandatory to go to university, I will argue that it would be beneficial to most.

Anyway, that's not all that's been keeping me from blogging, so let's take a minute to step away from this particular debate.

Last year I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel the world. I spent months across multiple continents, practicing speaking other languages, making friends, sipping wine, and reflecting on what I value in life.

The answer can be broken down into three categories:

• people

• places

• things

Nouns 🤣 ...I know that's an absurd thing to say, but hear me out; I'm going somewhere with this.

The thing I love most about social networks like farcaster are the people I've met from all around the world. We've shared discussions, recommendations, and even debates. I'm grateful for everyone I get to interact with online and how they shape my perspective and inspire me.

But sharing these experiences with people IRL, "in the meatspace", hits different. It brings a humanity that no amount of spelling mistakes and run on sentences can provide. There's also almost no chance that they are cleverly disguised bots and I find that refreshing. So for the past few years, especially more recently, I've made an effort to spend as much time as possible with my fellow humans. And I think, at the risk of sounding trite, that it's made me more human as well.

As I said, I spent a lot of the past year travelling. I came into a good amount of money, from crypto and elsewhere and I'm not optimistic enough about the future to put it all into a retirement account, so I parted ways with it the best why I know how: travel.

But eventually all good things must come to an end, and so, especially as I've been in school, I haven't been doing much travel, but I have been going for hikes, walks, and bike rides all year. Touching grass has become a bit of euphemism for logging off for most people, but for me it's become a mantra, a ritual. I make an effort to consciously nestle my hands in the grass, to grab a hold of leaves, and to get my hands dirty every chance I get. Daily, if possible.

This reconnection to the earth is deeply calming to me. And alongside daily meditations, probably the most valuable thing I do for my mental health.

Those who don't understand the meaning of capitalism (ownership of productive capacity by those with capital rather than those who do the actual work) often criticize me for being a bad socialist. Why? Because I own a Macbook and an iPhone, a Steamdeck and Nintendo Switch, a fancy road bike, restaurant quality kitchen equipment, and nice furniture.

But these aren't status symbols for me. They are things I use and enjoy daily. I love to cook, to create art, to exercise, and to play video games to unwind. And well the iPhone and macbook those are just computational essentials that happen to be Apple flavoured—eventually I'll go all in on Linux and GrapheneOS, if for nothing else than to quell the haters.

Why am I saying all this? Well, believe it or not, it's actually a segue.

This past year, I've pushed myself to reduce my screen time. And I've been quite successful. From 2020-2022, I was spending upwards of 10 hours a day on my phone, much of that on social media (instagram, reddit, twitter, discord and all others combined). Slowly I've pulled back, to 8, 7, 6 hours.

More recently, by pushing myself towards video games, music and other creative outlets (as well as touching grass), I've had days where I spend only a few hours, sometimes, under one hour, on my phone. If that doesn't impress you, you are the outlier, at least as far as crypto twitter is concerned.

This reduction in doomscrolling is helping me sleep better, feel less of a sense of dread, and believe it or not, helping me enjoy the time I do spend online more.

I'm still an anti-capitalist though, so if you want to know how I acquire most of my games and movies these days, or to hear my case for piracy and emulation, check out my posts "Peer-to-Peer Review" and "Culture Quest." I've also been pretty active in the /homelabs channel on Farcaster discussing Jellyfin and my exit from most paid streaming apps.

That's another segue, by the way.

First up, on the subject of homelabs: I think everyone should try to exit from corporate media as much as possible. You can do so by going directly to grassroots creators on platforms like YouTube, Patreon, Nebula, and MeansTV; by getting content from your public library, including video games, DVDs, and even steaming video with Kanopy; or you can take the black flag approach and download content for free with torrents via Steamio, Jellyseer, Sonarr and Radarr.

I also recommend getting off Spotify. Tidal is a decent alternative (paying artists as much as three times more than Spotify), Qobuz lets you buy songs and/or stream (also with better pay to artists), and Bandcamp is still the best. I've been keeping my eyes on Subvert too. It's an artist owned Bandcamp competitor, launching soon.

And regardless of where you get your media, you can stream it all—music, movies, TV shows, audiobooks and more—via your own personal cloud. It's easier than you'd imagine, just search "homelab media server" on youtube, or visit the farcaster /homelabs channel.

Homelabs

Nerd out with self-hosted services and media on your spare computer!

Farcaster

Another option for ditching big tech is Fileverse, a crypto native, decentralized and immutable google docs alternative. Here's an example of one way to use it: CryptoKibbutz shared this "Crypto Left Privacy Toolset Guide" and no one, except the author, can take it offline. That's censorship resistance in action. Great guide by the way; check it out.

Fileverse: Privacy-first & decentralized collaboration

Decentralized, onchain alternatives to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and Notion for privacy-enhancing, end-to-end encrypted collaboration.

https://fileverse.io

That's already a lot of recommendations, but here's one last one. Go play video games! Books are wonderful, blogs are great, classic cinema is timeless, time with friends is core to the human experience, sports combine being social with fitness. All of these all good, but video games in particular—at least for me—really clear out the cobwebs in a way nothing else can. They're puzzling, tests of dexterity. They're provocative, imaginative, and experiential. They are the sum of every game and method of storytelling hitherto invented and they should celebrated as a medium for entertainment.

Lately I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on Steam and I just set up Ship of Harkinian (The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time PC port, complete with mods). I've also been big into emulation for a while now. But this PC port thing is new and really exciting.

Ship of Harkinian

Ship of Harkinian

https://www.shipofharkinian.com

The tl;dr of this section is "it's good to do things that aren't productive." And if this post had any overarching theme at all, it's that anything and everything is better than doomscrolling.

I don't know if this will be a kickstart back into blogging, a requisite annual check-in, or the unofficial farewell issue of Thumbs' Update. All I know is I felt like it was time to say something. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it.

Until next time,

Thumbs Up

In the past, you've seen me use this section to thank my Subs Up patrons. Given the infrequency of my posts and inconsistency of support of this kind, I've decided to retire my Hypersub patronage subscriptions.

I was thinking maybe we could do something differently for this issue. As I wrote above I've become pretty enamoured with playing video games, especially retro emulation as an alternative to doomscrolling.

There's one device in particular I've been dreaming of picking up, but it's way out of my budget. That's the AYN Thor. It's a dual screen android handheld inspired by the Nintendo DS, but capable of playing games on systems all the way up to PS3 and Switch.

If you enjoy my writing, and rather than some sort of collectible or blanked patronage, you want to help me cover the cost of this specific purchase, I welcome tips. Here's a few ways you can do so easily 👇

1. Tip via Farcaster or send tokens directly to thumbsup.eth.
   

2. You can also use tip.md via the button below:

1. For the privacy minded patron, I accept anonymous tips with Zcash to my shielded address:

zs17a2mhl6xeu56cqqeqync9kddyg8gggcy6253l5evjdyw8l8j8f60eg40exr4wk27hnvfgkkgnju

or Monero

83Sm73Hie35AE8QKEceqDWH4Qj2tarexcX7rLfX4vaevd3iuJ5WiS29gtoUhXvxkc84NFfvvQDsRzCdn3nvciPAYPVoiEPw

You can also collect this article as a coin, though I don't get much from that. Coining is pretty stupid in my opinion and I only enabled it because I felt like I'm supposed to.