The personal is not the political – Treating everything as personal conflict is a dead end

Let’s focus on being honest, the most exhausting and destructive habit in activist and alternative tech spaces is the blinded reflex to turn disagreement into personal conflict. Someone challenges an idea, and it becomes an attack, names a pattern of behaviour, and suddenly it’s a vendetta. Someone points at structural problems and gets accused of targeting individuals. This is #stupidindividualism in its purest form, and it’s #nothingnew. It’s not only about difficult personalities or bad intent, it’s the result of forty years of #neoliberal conditioning. The #deathcult of “common sense” market logic has trained us to see everything as personal, personal responsibility, personal success, personal failure, personal conflict. The frameworks for understanding structural problems have been stripped away, so when structural problems are talked about, people fall back on the only tool they’ve been given – finding someone to blame. The result is nasty and predictable, good projects collapse…