All these builders telling me I now have the power to do what I want when all I want is to figure out what I should want 🤔

These true believers of builderology vastly overestimate the ability of us non-building users to make choices of any sort, even random ones. Let alone tasteful ones shaped by clear goals and preferences.

Even for a decision as simple as what flavor of icecream to get, you can reduce me to terminal robotic indecision stasis by removing chocolate and pistachio from the menu. Most of us are Buridan's asses under a thin veneer of agentic human.

To me this idea of “builderology” is less about satisfying arbitrary desires like which ice cream flavor and more about autonomy in solving your own problems 

But still I don’t mean to negate VGR here exactly because in the end it’s all the same 

Mass access exposes mass incapacity 

When everyone is told “you can figure it out,” but many people can’t, it breeds frustration

The Farcaster formerly known as Kchamp. Books, beats, bodybuilding, bright ideas and beautiful things.

katherinechampagne.com

I am as guilty of this as anyone. I literally just open sourced a hackathon project with the promise that anyone can take it and run, and deep down know its not true but I am 90s liberalism baby through and through and can’t undo the heart that growing up in that culture imbued me with

cofounder @canvas, prev @common, raymond.xyz

Yes but also knowledge was way way way more tightly controlled 

The projects and ideals came part and parcel with structures that ensured the only builders were the ones capable of doing so 

Only elite classes could even read! Now everyone has tools information etc and is free to build their own meaning

This wasn’t always been the way, people used to have projects and ideals they believed in

Who was it that said postmodernism means people will become fascinating obstacles to each other

This is such a clear-eyed tension: wanting to empower others but knowing not everyone wants, or knows how to build. Still, making the tools available matters