My fourth Year of the Dragon

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

(I’ve been reading Thoreau, so, unavoidably, some of this is going to
sound a bit awkward, and seem a bit disconnected, one sentence or
paragraph to the next.  I promise that the connections are there, even
if not obvious.)

This week begins the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar.

I am a Dragon.  I was born in late 1976.  This is the fourth Year of
the Dragon I have lived through; I will likely live to see six or
seven.  

The previous one was late 2000 to early 2001.  That Year of the Dragon
was eventful for me: I bought my first house on my own (though Marilyn
and I had bought one before together); I separated from Marilyn; I
joined my first startup; moved to Seattle; I learned Python and
JavaScript as a central member of one of the teams that pioneered
Comet; I began to learn Chinese; we began the divorce process --- very
painful, although easy as divorces go; we got funded by Kleiner
Perkins; I moved to Silicon Valley; and I began to meet Bab5.

Since then, Beatrice and I met and married, and I spent several years
working in and around the startup world, honing my programming skills.
In early 2005, I spent some time thinking about what was important to
me and what I should do; in effect, for the first time, I made plans
for the rest of my life, which I’ve updated since then.

Because of these plans, I left my job in 2006.  After that, Beatrice
and I lived in a van, then moved to South America, where we’ve been
living in Buenos Aires ever since.  I’ve learned an enormous amount,
both about myself and about the world.  And I’ve become much more
physically healthy.  But several people I love have died while I was
gone, and in some cases I wonder if they would still be alive if I’d
been there instead --- one suicide and one drug overdose.  And I have
no money, only debt; at the moment no income; and Beatrice is very
unsatisfied with the state of our relationship.  So our choice to live
abroad has been painful.

However it may appear to conventional eyes, this leaves me in
reasonably good shape for the 2015 goals I set out in 2005.  I’ve
still never smoked pot, drunk alcohol, or taken any other recreational
drugs.  (As Dalí apocryphally said, I don’t do drugs; I AM drugs.)  I
haven’t had recreational sex.  I’ve more or less learned Spanish.  I’m
well on my way to permanent legal residency in Argentina.  To my
knowledge, I’m not targeted by any fatwas or no-fly orders or the
like.  I’m much more aware of how the world works.  I have no children
and very few unnecessary expenses.  And it’s been years since I was
such an asshole that I permanently alienated a close friend, as far as
I know --- despite still being approximately as uncompromising as
ever.

So what will I do this year?

These last few years have mostly been years of learning, of study, of
questioning myself and my culture; of meditation and movement, of
vagabondage and volunteering, of dance and bicycle repair, of
innumerable late nights debating epistemology in Spanish, and of
gradually building and deepening ties to thousands of people around
the world.

Meanwhile, my fellows, like Julian Assange, Richard Stallman, and
Jacob Appelbaum have been wearing themselves out with international
travel, starting revolutions, protecting dissidents and journalists,
endlessly giving speeches, and suffering international persecution
campaigns.  And that’s saying nothing of the courage and sacrifice of
the Egyptian revolutionaries, who one year ago today, began throwing
off the shackles of a brutal military dictatorship --- the greatest
historical event in a decade, as I said on January 28th last year:

<http://canonical.org/~kragen/egypt-massacre-sotu.html>

Today, January 25th, Egypt’s Liberty Square has more revolutionaries
than ever, standing for justice in the face of organized violence and
oppression; and now I am confident that they will prevail.  And their
movement has spread around the world, even to the United States,
something I didn’t think possible.

But me, I’ve intentionally been keeping a low profile as I studied,
seeking the right course of action.

Twelve years ago, everything changed for me.

This year, everything changes again.

While I’ve been focusing on this theoric and poietic world of
meditation and epistemology, my power to take action, my skill at
praxis, has atrophied.  I’ve let myself become depressed and isolated
at times, and my output of solid code has dropped almost to zero.
Some days, I’ve been so paralyzed by my own concerns that nothing I
hoped to do at dawn is done by dusk, and I crawl into bed exhausted
from pursuing trivia.

This is the year I re-engage in praxis, reclaiming the leadership of
my own life, and empowering my tribe not just to think about the
world, but to change it.  This is the year I return to employment, to
legal residency, to positive net assets, and to some kind of
manageable residence instead of the endless home-renovation white
elephant that is Beatrice’s parents’ San Telmo house.  I continue to
read and learn, but the time has come to take action; I cannot any
longer stand by powerless as our culture, our planet, the integrity of
our institutions, and our hopes for peace --- in short, our
civilization --- are shredded by cynical profit-seekers.

Despite the parallels, I don’t expect to separate from Beatrice,
although she’s described our relationship as “fragile”.  In the decade
we’ve spent together, we married, members of our families died, we
moved, and we left our jobs and what was then our country.  I expect
that this single year will have more change and stress for us than
that whole decade did. I hope our relationship can withstand the
stress, because I love her very much.  Perhaps this message should be
more about what *she* wants and needs, but I think what she needs
*from me* is exactly this: that I refocus on praxis.

I’ve said before that it was not a coincidence that I first set foot
in South America on the anniversary of Bolívar’s birth.  The
liberation from colonialism that he began is still unfinished.  Today
the wars of colonial subjugation are not fought with warships and
infantry, but by other means: through proxy dictatorships,
“antiterrorism” laws, trade agreements, and smuggled suitcases full of
interrogation equipment; and the Americans have won substantial
independence from the colonial powers (today we can add the US to the
list of colonial powers); but they are still fought, and they still
strangle the human potential of half a continent, where it is still
taken for granted that progress is something imported from abroad, and
anything made domestically is inferior.

I cannot lead half a continent as Bolívar did, nor do I think South
America needs a leader; but I do not think it can finish liberating
itself without the knowledge and vision I have.

The nature of human society will change more in the next few decades
than we can imagine today, and that change will turn the social order
topsy-turvy in a way we haven’t seen in 200 or perhaps 500 years.
When I left the US in 2006 and came to Argentina, I said, “I am
leaving because the US is the past, but Argentina is the future,”
which is more evident now than then.  How we accommodate these
inevitable changes can make our new social order is more just or more
oppressive.  Nobody understands the changes very well, but I
understand them as well as anyone, and much better than almost
everyone.

So, beginning this year, I take active part in these changes again,
weaker in some ways but much stronger in others.

Others cannot write the essays I am to write, as I cannot write the
essays others are to write.  Others cannot discover and make what I am
to discover and make, as I cannot discover and make the things they
are to discover and make.  Others cannot unite the people I can unite,
as I cannot unite the people others can unite.

This year, the Dragon awakens.  The time to drive away the demons has
come.  Our civilization is under attack and in peril.