The Poplicola Manifesto

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what this blog represents for the past few weeks.  There was this feeling that a common thread pulled together the entire thing – the posts on desktop backgrounds, environmentalism, and social applications.  Not to mention the rehashing of old comics and (seemingly) random posts on Andrew Martin and Illinois politics.  Looking at that long list of topics, it’s hard to blame anyone for asking the question: does this blog have any direction?

Anyway, thinking about all of these things for so long finally brought about some general sense of what I (soon to be we, hopefully) was doing here.  For the past few years, and really ever since I graduated, I’ve been concerned about living a more independent and inventive life.  Let me stress that this isn’t in any sense the conservative “self-reliance” mantra.  No, this is more a rejection of the reliance we have on outsourcing practically everything in our lives in order to give ourselves more time to do… well… nothing.  There’s nothing wrong with relying on other people, but there is something wrong with laziness for the sake of it[1. While I'm being very careful in not coming off as a Republican here, I'd have to say that both Democrats and Republicans can be blamed for behaving like this.].  This includes, especially, intellectual laziness!

Which brings me to Poplicola.  Most of my interests involve my learning or doing something; in other words, I enjoy bettering myself.  Building with my hands, backpacking, programming, writing… producing something in this society that seems so very much to feed off of itself rather than create something new.  This is Poplicola: the rejection of being commonplace, the quirky interests that produce stupid little tutorials on creating desktop backgrounds, and soon, hopefully, the production of interviews with various low-level politicians and people who are just trying to help make things better.

I should also have something special for you all to preview tomorrow.  Something that I’ve been working on with a few other people that’s a bit more specific in scope than Poplicola, but has the potential to be much more interesting…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 11:23 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.