It seems like it’s just one of the early videos that was fake, made coast on the existing story. Or I misunderstood?

Maybe I went a bit overboard with my post above, I do have some optimism but I wanted to explain why there is a big tendency to be pessimistic.

I see, thanks, your comments are interesting also because they are representative of what many people feel, it is what I see in social media as well as in “real” life. Plenty of people take the pessimism far enough to stop planning for future generations. That is, some people might choose not to procreate for other reasons, but widely spread pessimism is indeed systemic I find, and I think you point it out as well. I guess my main point that I think it’s a pity people do not find a way to be inspired for constructing better future while there are conditions for doing so. I work in science and technology, natural sciences, and I saw progress in my lifetime which to me is amazing and inspiring confidence in what people can do if they want. This also not only potential for transformational technological progress, but also societal change.

Frankly even the fact that people as a specie are successful enough to change the planet as a whole (some species managed this in the past, but not quite so fast) is kind if inspiring in a strange way. It’s like for an young individual getting strong enough to lift a large weight, it’s impressive, but also a cause to think maybe where we want this weight to be where it will not fall and break someone’s leg or worse.

Oh I am definitely not at the doomer stage. I do think that we will be able to limit the heating of the climate to something of the effect of 2,x Kelvin. That’s pretty shitty though and will still cause a lot of global change. I do agree, we likely will have even better ways in the future. What annoys me is that we have technology right now that would be way better than oil/gas based systems for heating houses and driving vehicles.

Although I grew up in eastern Europe, I spent much of my life in rather wealthier parts of western Europe, especially Switzerland, and I see better technologies really establishing: heat pumps, extensive solar panels, high-performance energy storage etc. In recent years even rather selfish and skeptical people realized these technologies are actually a very good investment, in part driven by the energy crisis, in part by accelerating progress in renewable technologies. I think in so much as these privileged spaces are morally acceptable at this time, they can at least be at the cutting edge of sustainable development by concentrating effort, and I think recently this possibility has really started to materialize.

Yes, but very very slowly. That’s because there are two blocks left unconvinced: People that just flat out deny climate changes is human based, or claim that it will not affect us germans in a meaningful way. These are relatively few but still substantial. Somewhere between 10 and 20% in Germany.

Here I see a challenge of knowledge industry, even philosophy of science. Internet started with a promise of actual knowledge for everybody, but shaped as free-for-all anarchistic space, leading soon for all kinds of fantasy for everybody. Then, just as with free market, turns out it does not on it’s own, automatically, lead to more fair and clear knowledge. Instead, it lead to a form of digital feudalism with no regard even for fairly universal values, favoring instead basic tribal reactions. Just recently, regulations are emerging which are creating institutions necessary for actually positively free and fair space in the web. EU and Germany in particular are making key contribution to this process. Will this be enough I am not sure. But I guess we can all see some at least impact general digital space (even GDPR), and academia (the source of the authoritative knowledge on practical questions) has made a lot more progress than it might be visible from outside. And it is ongoing. Fediverse is somehow related to this process too.

People who prioritize in a shorter timeframe. A lot of people have to think about today and tomorrow just to get by. They hear that the changes needed to protect the climate will make some things even more expensive, or just more inconvenient and do not want that because they think they won’t be able to handle the additional burden. These are a lot more than the first group.

There is no doubt there is a downturn in many concrete aspects of development, as you listed. This makes it harder to plan ahead, and people make worse choices, accelerating the downturn. Even if these people could actually sustain work for the future since they are not so disadvantaged. How to reverse this trend? I think at least it really helps to also remember what positive progress was made more and less recently. Really, literally, learn, teach, and communicate about technologies, history.

We also see that while a lot of people (around 65%) claim that they support the climate protection movement in general acceptance of specific laws is always way lower. Meaning that they have not fully realized that to protect the climate we need to actually change some things, and sometimes dramatically so.

For me this probably falls into the veracity of knowledge industry category. Knowing as much as we can what action makes which effect helps to prevent false sense of security that ritual of sorting garbage on it’s own is enough to reverse antropogenic climate change.

For that to be a cause for optimism would require me believing that we as a people will want to and be able to seize that potential for action. Which I seriously doubt at least for germany.

Germany produced some remarkable technology, and is on forefront of some sustainable developments. And my own experience with Germans shows reasonably optimistic attitude - although my sample is very biased, and I do really know enough. Do you think there is something which could inspire Germans? It’s not like the majority are living in poverty, so they must have goals beyond survival, right?

The reason driving a lot people towards conservatives and even the fascist parties in germany is their promise of “getting back to the good old days” which the conservatives are actually currently failing to communicate well because they have a elected a leadership that is pretty market liberal which makes the party currently a weird economically liberal and socially conservative amalgam which do not always go well together. Compared to that the AfD is publicly still putting up the charade of keeping and upholding the “good old values” while getting more and more obviously racist and fascist. Both these developments additionally to a lot of people who, out of protest against the last and the current government, vote for them to make a statement, have made them poll at more than 20% with no tendency of stopping.

So no, I don’t think people turn to fascism for change, at least not here. They turn to fascism because of the promis of keeping everything as it is or even go back a few steps.

So I had some German friends who voted to AfD, surprisingly, for a reason I could not really quite understand, since they seemed like fairly reasonable people, although a bit angry. Or maybe more than just a bit angry, quite unhappy and angry about the way things are going, and angry for being ignored by the mainstream, and finding return to “good old days” to be the answer, since “obviously” the problem is all the new progressive stuff. So my guess is that this reactionary position is a response to lack of future vision.

But maybe some people just inherently fascist, but I do not find most people to be like that.

Anyway it is a problem that even those who focused on reactionary “solution” proving them wrong is hard since the very origin of their position makes it hard to accept a mistake. I do not know what to do about that, especially in Germany, since I am not really in touch. Maybe creating new inclusive narrative for future could help here too. I’d say it’s good to talk to them, but it may border on compromising with fascists which is hard to accept. But if I may suggest, as external observer, very cautiously, I think German can not continue ignoring the`right wing problem, and it can not just arrest them all too, so something resembling dialog might be needed, not speaking to their solution, but to the root of their concern which might be elsewhere. Not sure, dangerous road.

I think, very broadly, climate change can be tackled by collective action or/and technologies which make climate-friendly action economically favorable. There was a lot of progress recently on the second part, including sizable contribution of Germany: rapidly growing contribution of renewables, electric transport, better heating and insulation, etc? I think good people putting themself to work on an important goal can achieve a lot for common good, I see this a lot in my area of research and technology. I realize there is a danger of thinking “technology will solve all” and relaxing, but what I am saying that it’s part of the solution, and at least a cause for some optimism fueling further action. Furthermore, I see that as Europe gained a privileged position due to historical circumstances, it is its moral duty to leverage this position for helping to advance the necessary technologies.

For the first part it’s harder since there is no consensus but I suspect this will be facilitated by progress in technology (yet, it’s important to work on consensus). Also I see that some understanding of the need to act is increasing in the Western Europe population, is it not?

Maybe part of the challenge with US, Arab spring, and far right, is that after the fall of Soviet Union there was too much confidence in neoliberal system automatically bringing democracy, prosperity, and fairness everywhere. While delivering democracy as a gift of historic process is somehow antithetic to the idea of democracy, which implies active agency, individual and collective action. People grew complacent assuming that all gets solved for them by the market, and politics became sometimes a dirty word. Instead, it’d be better if people continued to practice political discourse about tough questions in respectable but honest way. But now it is becoming next to impossible to avoid engagement, which makes some people loose any hope, some turn to fascism, and some searching for a better solution. I think the last, better, way is not yet lost.

Technology development itself raises further difficult political questions, about ownership of new tools deriving from commons (like LLM AI), viability of common space in privately managed companies (social networks), and so on. People need to be engaged in this else the decisions will be made for them and not in their interest (even if their consent may be sometimes formally acquired following some misleading campaign).

This potential for action, and recent history of progress, in two related directions, technology and political agency, seems to be the cause for optimism. Even raise of fascism, as worrying as it is, indicates that people are striving for change, they just do not see a better option since it is not sufficiently developed and communicated to them yet.

Those are just reformulation of the same concept which has nothing to do with communism, just with soviet state nostalgia. Plus a few were banned after Russia’s invasion for supporting the invaders (and they are related to the soviet nostalgia kind). Anyway they lost almost all support, I was even a bit surprised that any Ukrainian I know, even Russian-speaking pro-Russia-ties people are very anti-Russia now - being invaded feels even more like an betrayal for them. Of course I do not exclude that some Ukrainians genuinely support the Russia’s narrative, but among hundreds I know personally there is not a single one.

Banning certain parties is along the same lines as Germany banning Nazi party, or would you suggest that’s oppression of freedom as well?

Clearly, I do not enjoy this division with Russia, I have Russian family, friends, colleagues. But what their state did is just not the way to do things, it damaged irreparably relations and any remaining pro-Russian political parties or sentiments in Ukraine for a generation. I rather prefer some balance and discourse would continue but nobody did more to push Ukraine away from any pro-Russian politics (even shaped as soviet nostalgia with “communist” banner) than Russia itself.

What you are saying is not wrong, but it can also be true that the left is quite divided and lacks a narrative which can be convincing to the same working class the left aims to empower. In fact, the left got quite disconnected from the working class on a number of issues. The lie may be easier to make convincing, but the truth has some advantages too. In fact, some talking points of the right, like the anti-elite sentiment, are straight out of the left playbook. Why did the left not manage to deliver this point better?

This is so much better than relying on tweeter assuming it can be medium for some sort of commons!

You paid into sustaining social contract between generations, and you are also making it more difficult to continue sustaining it. It’s commendable and honest that you are willing to forgo what is attributed to you in this contract and it is your right of course. I just think that a better, more inspiring, future exists.

I think that’s the point, I used peertube for video sharing along with mastodon post for reach. I guess there is not a way to link mastodon snd peertube accounts, but that’s not unheard of also in non-federated social media.

Fascists are gaining power because the left could not offer a viable response to the majority concerns. And it sounds like what’s left of it is just giving up unfortunately.

I am often surprised by so much pessimism of people in Western Europe. There are of course big problems, but if taken seriously, can they not be addressed? I do not deny that many people have reasons to be pessimistic, but maybe the cause is more lack of ideas for building better future. So much was achieved, in art, science, technology, reflecting in high quality of life, how can this be seen as a hellhole?

You will, however, presumably, rely on social care supported by less and less working people, potentially leading to very unfortunate choices made by these people. Or do you prefer not to retire?

Time zones are kind of useful though.

What is banned is communist party, and not because it was communist (it was not) but because it was pro-imperialist restoration, and also just for old people who wanted to remember their youth.

I am ukrainian and have ukrainian communist friends, and they are now just as fiercly antirussianimperialism as every one I know in Ukraine. It just shows that the leftist ideas live on, especially among young people (but also their parents, who in 2014 protested for ideas of their children, when children were assaulted for now good reason, starting all the violence). The problem is that any explicit reference to communism or state socialism is very tainted. So you can see why the title meme makes a lot of sense.

Regulated capitalism can be a lot of things. Even good things, I claim. Furthermore, unregulated capitalism turns into feudalism, which is someything we see now in digital sphere a lot. EU tries to regulate capitalism to get the best parts of it, like rewarding fair competetive environment - paradoxically, fair competetion favors collaboration. An alternative to favoring individual and collectove agency is authocracy, and dictors never remain benevolent for long.

There was a soviet joke about a banner “our party is fighting for the title ‘communist’”. I can not translate it well, but it shows that people sensed the absurdity of the continious slogans about fighting for something they forgot is related to the meaning of the world communism. In the last decades especially, thd pride in building a better future through emancipation was replaced by simply nationalist pride and the pride in ww2 victory.

As AI gets more involved in decision making, the politics of AI will become a big point I think. Reponsibility, accountability, and maybe something resembing rights, or maybe access capacities. It may be a tool, but it is gaining something like an agency. So the polics of AI might be communist one.

As someone from postsoviet state, I could not agree more. Those pushing soviet union as example of comunist project are really not doing any good for the comunist projext.

The story of ukrainian anarchist communist, Machno, is interesting in this resect. Bolsheviks treated his so well. Russian revolution, although started occasionally with good ideas, quickly revealed itself as authorithian russian nationist imperialism.

In ChatGPT there is no accountabilty or expectation of veracity. It was really just a demostration. Hopefully newer models will do better than that.

I guess that’s the best way put it I saw in this post. I’d just add that after growing up in soviet and postsoviet state, and later coming to western Europe, my first impression was that they somehow almost managed to build here what “communist” soviet party tried to build so unsuccessfully.

Even Marx thought that path to communism is through capitalism, what soviet state did is something very different.