I've been attracted to many punk "communities" over the years (cyberpunk, steampunk, solarpunk, etc.) but I'm always disappointed to find out that they are often not about doing things. They are instead about a style, or an aesthetic or at most about art which are all cool things, but not really something I feel like I can contribute a lot to and definitely not something that moves us concretely toward a better future.
This would be fine but for the fact that the people in these communities often actively reject efforts to go beyond the aesthetic. Reactions to such expressions of action are at best ignored and at worst actively alienated and subverted.
This is something that I do not understand, and for a long time assumed that there was something wrong with me, something that made me fail at being part of a group or a community. I'm trying to stop thinking like that.
The problem is more likely that I need to stop looking for a community to fit into and instead just keep doing what I do and let whatever happens happen organically. The strength of joining an existing group is attractive, and we're constantly told how important community is. But I think the idea of forming a community before doing the work puts the cart before the horse because it can't possibly test the compatibility of the groups members when it comes time to actually work together. A group that forms spontaneously, through an organic process of doing the work, on the other hand, will only form from compatible individuals or else it *won't form at all*.
So instead of wasting time and energy trying to find the right label to conform to I'm just going to go back to doing the work, sharing it as widely as I can and see what happens next.
