I don’t think I was ever not radicalized. But I’ve been disillusioned a lot over the years.

I reject the notion that I am “radical”.

We’re primitive talking chimps conducting a parasitic unplanned terraform of our home planet; the only place designed for our existence in the known universe, that has supported life for hundreds of millions of years, and we are killing it all in the blink of an eye due to our tribal ignorance, greed, and selfishness. That isn’t just “radical”. It is psychotic. It is mentally-ill. It is a planetary crime. We are a joke; just a complete fucking clown show.

Living next to russia.

I don’t know that it would be a single thing.

Star Trek always seemed the right way for the future to be (yes the writers involved things sometimes that made it not fit, I’m going off concept here) - no one hungry, merit based on the pursuit of knowledge that all are given an opportunity for, etc.

When I was a teenager and the internet was a ‘new thing’, it seemed like the start. Linux was new and even usable - a direct attack on the corporations that seemed to be strangling innovation and progress.

I was in HS when Columbine happened. My friends mom was a counselor that was recommended and brought in. She obviously didn’t share their experiences with us, but I saw the news, I saw the pain she felt after grieving with students and families, and recognized the combination of fear and gratitude when she just needed comfort after. I also saw the absolute complete lack of anything meaningful being done that wasn’t directly from those getting involved.

I had thought everyone saw Reduce-Reuse-Recycle as the path forward. I saw concept cars with solar panels and charge station concepts, along with windmills and geothermal and hydro power and all kinds of ideas around energy that would lead us away from the idea of just burning things to create energy from incredibly limited resources. I saw CFCs get banned and thought the world was on the right track, and yet corporations (and the politicians they owned) would then start to push coal and oil and gas and more destructive means of getting access to these fundamentally unnecessary resources. It only has gotten worse from there.

I saw people getting motivated by grassroots campaigns, only to see those campaigns actually being funded and run by the worst sort of people, using marketing tricks to twist people away from their initial motivations.

I saw progress in acceptance, understanding, and a visible movement away from bigotry and hate, only to see it continue in the worst ways possible.

So I guess what radicalized me - and I’m not sure if thats even the right word, because to me it should be a commonly accepted view - was seeing small groups of people ruin everything that was working towards a better future for their own greed and hate, and with each passing year seemingly undoing years of prior progress for the sake of a meaningless and completely unnecessary profit for those who already had way too much, taking from those with way too little.

Existing

Lots of things, but the biggest ones were the hardships I’ve faced due to my identity and the current political climate.

Robert Evans

I saw on the one hand,

• Media IPs I loved repeatedly get wrecked by the companies that own them for the sake of easy profit.
• Politics turning ever more into an adrenaline-injecting, thought-deadening clown show.
• Most of the food sold to us in stores is full of weird garbage and I have to wash the fruits and vegetables at home for fear it’s coated in residual poison.
• Even with working constantly, it’s extremely difficult to afford a home that is actually your own, leaving basically everyone as perpetual debt or wage slaves for a mortgage or rent. You will then also be dependent on paying utility companies for your basic needs.

I saw on the other hand,

• Random people produce amazing creative outputs all the time just because they like to, and then they share it, without being paid.
• I saw things like the Libertarian Party platform and people on r/anarchism101 making calm, thougut-out arguments. (I know the Libertarian Party is rather different than anarchism but the point is it was a radical step for me at the time and it told me that people outside the 2-party system were making an actual attempt to be thoughtful.)
• Almost everyone I’ve ever known who gardens vegetables or farms eggs produce more than they eat, and all of them gladly give surplus away to friends and acquaintances.
• I discovered nomadism, have lived in an RV for a year, experimented with solar power, and stayed at friends’ houses with well water, and discovered that what I actually need to be comfortable is far smaller, less expensive, and more achievable than the housing and rental markets would make it seem, and that there are a surprisingly large number of other people who have tried and discovered the same thing.

I could go on. All of this stuff had built up for years. The specific turning point was probably meeting an actual anarchist in person, hearing him describe direct action and mutual aid, and going, “Hey that sounds almost the same as what I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”

For me it was climate change. We are quickly heading towards the collapse of civilization and unless there’s radical change, there will be mass death

Jordan Peterson pointing out that the average person produces seven times more resources than they consume, along with the continued failings of the liberal establishment.

The numbers he used are bad (he divided the US GDP by the average salary) but the general ratio isn’t completely off, and the implications for the 99% are immediately obvious to anyone that isn’t a brain damaged cryptofascist.

When I was in primary school a homeless man froze next to a dumpster. It never made sense to me. Years later I started to understand why it made no sense to me and that our society can de better.

Life

Nice try, CIA /s

Poverty

I read Civil Disobedience by Thoreau in I think third or fourth grade? (Yes I was that much of a nerd in third or fourth grade 😆. It was in our class textbook and I was bored by whatever we were supposed to be reading.) I drifted around online individualist and lolbertarian essays in grammar school until I read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in high school.

I’ve had several events in my life, the lives of my social circle, and predominantly national and international news that have reinvigorated my anarchism, but I was privileged enough to be able to learn about these things before they actually happened to me. E.g. I supported police abolition before I ever got harassed by a cop.