Out last night watching some boxing on the pay per view with The Girth, then over to shoot a little pool at the ACME. The omnipresent question between the two of us is what the hell we're doing with our lives as "careers" begin to take off but everything else stagnates and the world around us seems to veer inexorably toward the ditch. What does it take to get a little satisfaction?

Harkening back to my post on Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs, there's something wired into me and most of my friends that drives us to want to help people out, to look outward with a problem-solving eye. There's a kind of juice one gets from this that can't be replicated any other way, the cheap and generally unprofitable thrill of Doin' Right.

Mark's hooked on this too, via Americorps. There might be more money in being an artisan handyman, building fences from special Japanese cedar boards for the neo-bohemian HC bourgeoisie, but at the end of the day he says it can't touch the rush of helping a kid with a fucked up life steady his or her feet and move in a positive direction as a human being. Even though the latter pays less than minimum wage -- Americorps workers get s "stipend" and instructions on applying for food stamps, something that I find extremely unjust -- he's back again for another tour of duty.

For my part, I don't get this feeling too much from my work. Bootstrapping a business is kind of a cutthroat process, or at least one that requires a primary focus on self-interest. While I got a good charge out of starting the Drupal Dojo, and a healthy portion of our clients are do-gooders of one stripe or another, the main thing for the past 10 months has been figuring out how to pay the bills in a steady and dependable fashion.

While I expect more opportunities to pursue interesting things and passion-projects now that we're over that initial hump, clearly I need to be looking beyond my work for my reason d'etre.

Public vs. Private vs. Pirate Utopia

The world can be a better place than it is. My various and sundry experiences with alternative cultures and festivals suggest that it is possible to live in dense communities without crime, that economies can flourish without exploitation, that the shit-work of society can be divided up and made meaningful and even rewarding, that human beings can be granted much more freedom as individuals without destroying society.

I usually think of the various semi-subterranean examples I've found as instances of Pirate Utopia -- a concept I pull from William S. Burroughs with his ultra-dry jaded ex-junky eye, rather than the anarchist boosterism of Hakim Bay -- which is something to celebrate and enjoy, but ultimately leaves me rather unsatisfied in my Velvet Revolutionary heart.

And this is because in almost every instance, Pirate Utopians espouse a philosophy which includes the liberation and uplift of all humanity, but in practice tend to be pretty conservative. They're only really Pirates in the sense that they're outlaws, and maybe have a parasitic relationship to the square world.

In spirit, these are often a kind of Private Utopia. I see a lot of energy expended protecting the scene from external interference -- the kind that comes when you, you know, start messing with the outside world, convincing their children to run off and join the circus, etc -- and the inevitable internal change that results from fresh folks joining, old folks leaving, and new power-centers emerging from within.

The logical counterpoint, some kind of Public Utopia is hard to conceive. It would be immediately subject to the Tragedy of the Commons, attracting a bunch of lamp-ray lowlifes looking to leach off the luxury. Can you have a velvet rope and still pretend you're reaching out to all comers? I don't quite know.

Sterling Fucking Newberry laid down three tests for any Great Social Idea to pass in a post I can't find anymore, so I'll just reiterate them here:

• Accessibility: Is your thing really open and accessible, or is it cloistered and elite. More open is more better.
• Sustainability: Can you operate under your own power or are you dependent on external resource infusions to keep rolling? In a perfect world, you get your power from the sun and don't fuck with the carbon, water or nitrogen cycles. Closer to that is better.
• Scalability: Can everyone in the world do what you are doing? If so, you've got a good idea.

Nothing will ever be perfect on any, let alone all, of these axes. Like I said, they're good vectors to test along.

For instance, no literally geographic community can be globally accessible or scalable, but it can have open borders, and if it scores will enough on the Sustainability model and doesn't require fancy tricks or some special local resource, you could have a model that scales accessibly.

My interest in politics is influenced by this thinking too: I don't really want to just have my nice community and nice house and so forth, I want a nice world. It's certainly better than nothing, but I'm hardly satisfied by my bullshit health insurance. In very real ways, I don't believe any of us are truly free unless all of us are along for the ride.

What's the spiritual value of not having to refuse beggars every day on the street, of not having to read about war and genocide? One might move to a posh or remote enough place that panhandling isn't an issue, and you can always ignore the news, but those are just some of the many tactics used in constructing Private Utopias. Boo, gated communities.

The third way, the model I mentioned above, calls to mind another Burroughs idea, the "cultural virus." This seems to be part of what I've been up to for the past several years, trying to get some better contagions going, pushing participation and post-consumer culture, leading an open-source life with the implied hope of being an inspiration to someone at some point, maybe helping us all live a little better.

As I continue growing up in my own way, I feel the need to get more serious and organized and communitarian about that. I feel like preaching. I'm not going to settle down into a conventional middle-class track (as if that really exists anymore anyway), but what I'm headed towards as an alternative isn't quite clear yet. Nobody ever said reinventing the American Dream would be easy.