accepting our responsibility to work, of proactive reciprocity, and then doing that work is how we have a virtuous life.

richness in community, in living in harmony with the humans and nonhuman world locally, in the love with share, in expanding our capacity to love... in recognizing the abundance in existence, wallowing in the pleasure of service to the life all around us.

this is my favorite framing at the moment:

theecologist.org/2025/may/28/p…

2/2

'The praxis of reciprocity'

A review of The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

^{The Ecologist}

i'm not sure what you mean by anti-commercial. commerce, like profiteering and the stock market, i work against. trading goods and services with informed consent in a just, regulated system? i am for.

adverts forced and snuck into daily life, i am against. adverts where folks go looking to buy things, in and around market places, i am for.

capitalist-extractive practices, i work against. worker-driven practices, i support. a fully informed and consent based supply chain, with just practices, i work for.

serving the needs of a community through labor (services / production) is often commerce.

the enslaved humans doing forced labor in china i refer to: (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang…)

Chinese concentration camps in XUAR province, where religious and ethnic repression is carried out against traditionally Muslim peoples, classified as ethnocide, ethnic cleansing and genocide

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

what do mean without? adverts, is what i mean by marketing. places for sales is what i mean by market place. we have newspaper delivery four days a week and there are adverts there, where our community expects them to be.

without money? why would we stop using currency? the market places in my city use money, in both brick and mortar and pop-up markets (we have both a weekly "farmers" market that pops-up / blocks out a portion of the parking area in one of ours and a monthly speciality vending event).

workplaces... ? i've lived in a few different cities and states in the u.s. and all have human-owned (non publicly traded) workplaces, most have co-ops, some worker owned.

i have no interest in colonizing a "greater population". i am invested in serving my local community... in buying from and selling to humans i am accountable to and who i hold to account.

edit: it is a process of generations to shift from exploitation to informed consent. doing the work, is the work of my life.

activists that i know and counter-culture folks working for system change are not anti-commercial, they are anti-capitalist, anti-exploitation. they are paying a living wage to service workers and using collective non-hierarchal models, buying from consignment and resale shops and new books from human owned bookstores or indiebound.org.

they don't build a business to cash out to chains and live off the profits (which harms the community). mastodon for example... is moving to a nonprofit model instead of being sold to a media company.

i guess if i'm understanding your thread, i'm hoping to shift your framework towards incremental prosocial change as a viable option for making one's living.

@melioristicmarie well, technically what you are describing is not outside of capitalism, but for sure more social, less exploitative practices is the goal.

However growth is also a factor, especially if the goal is supporting all humans.

You mention Mastadon, currently my favourite social platform despite my technical concerns, however it's import to understand that Facebook acquires more users every couple of weeks than Mastadon has in total, in all it's history, it's growth rates and daily usage rates trail facebook by even worse margins. Mastadon employs, maybe, a couple of hundred people world wide. Facebook employs 10s of thousands.

This is important.

Of course, Mastadon is not the best example, since it's not really selling anything, but I in general projects that avoid scale struggle to become engines of change, and in the end, many people just decide that liberating everyone is too hard, and they're ok just having things they like. But the risk is that slips into lifestylism, not an engine for change, just a privileged cul-d-sac, sheltering some lucky communards from the storm, often temporarily.

british empire, pro-colonization sort of thinking? one idea is the best for a fictional universal human? so better to subjugate all for their own good, patriarchy?

i can see better why your original toot had a burke's peerage flavor of leisure as a signal for wealth... the whole breeding program system definition of landlords and such.

i do not believe that any person can know what any is best for a person in another part of world. i believe informed consent is the only moral interaction method, and in a person's right to self-determination.

facebook is an marketing site based on deception. i studied it in grad school. it is a social harm, not a pro social system.

i prefer small and honest over authoritarian paternalism.