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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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askchapo
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I ebbed and flowed. Was politically active and radical in my teen years, then entered engineering school and drank the "technology will make everything better bro trust me" kool-aid, graduated and had a pretty good job for a while, before remembering why shit was fucked. Left it all, moved across the world, and now I'm the most radical I've ever been.
How did you become politically active and radical in your teen years? There was nothing even close to that in my circles
It was all random luck. I had a few very good teachers who were passionate and knowledgeable about history, politics, and philosophy, especially my 9th grade history teacher painted such a vivid picture of 20th century History that i couldn't help but see the damage done by the right wing everywhere. I used to hang out with punks and skinheads (the communist and anti-racist kind) so I became an antifascist early, too. My city was having a resurgence of neo-nazi and right-wing groups at the time, so being part of those opposing them put me in contact with a lot of communists and anarchists who weren't shy about punching nazis.
Add this to a very strong sense of justice related to my neurodivergence, and the fact that I was a devout catholic back then and most priests I knew espoused some kind of social justice mixed with their christianity, it drew me closer to liberation theology. I even called myself a christian communist (a real thing) at one point lmao.
I grew up in a small town so I wasn't exposed to much like that outside the odd concert in the city. Very cool path
It was cool, but then I spent like 10 years being apolitical, or worse: technocratic, so… I also meant to say that the political journey isn't linear, and that we all start somewhere, or like in my case, we start really strong, and then we kind of fuck off, and then have to pick up from where we left.
ugh same. got caught up in the ridiculous tech-optimism of the early-to-mid 2010s. I thought self-driving cars and VR were the frickin' future. it's hard to imagine now but there was so little public criticism of big tech back then
It's really insidious. It feeds on the elitism top engineering schools have, too... that smug feeling of "we know calculus we're so special, if engineers ran the world instead of lawyers we wouldn't have any problems". In hindsight... yuck. I would've clowned on my past self so hard that lil' Trashcan would've transition earlier.