It's a War: None of Your Damn Business
I am an academic. My job is to understand and teach new knowledge. And lately I find it increasingly hard to sit down and do any of that without the weight of what's happening in the world pressing down on my chest. One of the problems that's causing this is War. Witenssing wars from agressors like Russia, Israel, and the US over the weak foreign states like Ukraine, Palestine, Iran, Venezuela. Civil wars in countries like Myanmar, Sudan, and many African countries. Killing hundrends of thousands of innocent civilians. All of this in the 21st century. And I'm supposed to be studying computers and publishing papers.
Since most of us are unfamiliar with this subject and it feels like it's beyond our control, what do we do? What do I do? What do you do?
Millions of ordinary citizens including academics such as myself and students, and doctors, engineers, lawyers, software developers, are walking around with this same quiet unease.
Well, we must first accept that there will always be an aggressor with no morals. There will always be the strong and the weak, the advanced and the desperate. History has proven, with exhausting repetition, that at some point the powerful move against the vulnerable. Even in the 21st century. So whether we like it or not, we are never really outside of it. We are always on either offense or defense side.
Many of us misinterepret war and defense. Fight vs. fighting back. War, the organized, financed, politically sanctioned action, where men in suits make decisions in AC rooms, and young people with nothing to lose die in the desert for it. Conflating war and defense is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and we all fall for it every time.
It's not just the violence. It's the concentration of power that makes the violence so easy to choose. A small number of people who never face real accountability, make decisions that kill thousands, displace millions, and reshape the world. The rest of us find out on our phones. We are not consulted. We are, at best, informed after the fact.
Since most of us do not know how to react to these circumstances, the first thing we can do is to refuse ignorance as a coping mechanism. This is with no hesitation meant for my academic community in particular. Ironically we are one of the most embarassingly ignorant communities on this subject. I understand the impulse, the news is genuinely unbearable, and there's a real argument for protecting mental health. But there is a difference between managing media consumption and simply looking away. Consuming high quality information is helpful for most of the time. Informed people are harder to manipulate, and right now the entire political economy of war runs on public ignorance and manufactured consent.
The second thing is to stop treating politics as someone else's profession. We have somehow arrived at a world where a software engineer will spend years mastering how to write code but won't spend two hours understanding how their government makes foreign policy decisions. A doctor will read fifty papers on a new treatment but couldn't name their own representative. The unseriousness of our generation quite frankly is emabarassing to witness. We have outsourced our civic lives entirely, and the people who filled that vacuum are not filling it well. I'm not saying everyone needs to run for office, though frankly, we need more scientists, engineers, and doctors in politics, desperately, but disengagement is simply stupidity. It is a gift to the people already in the room.
The third thing, and I say this as someone who works in technology, is to be deeply skeptical of the idea that our technological tools will save us. We are pouring extraordinary resources into technology, into the next platform, the next optimization. And I believe in that work. But technology does not have values. It reflects ours. And right now we are applying our most sophisticated tools to serving ads and maximizing engagement while using almost none of that capacity to strengthen democratic institutions, reduce corruption, or make power more accountable.
The least we can do is stay awake. And be more active. Be deliberate. Because the alternative is sleepwalking through a life scripted by others.