March 14 - 10 of Pentacles

The ten of pentacles, Gerard Winstanley (1609-1676). His portrait is in the center of a disc decorated by sun, stars, and moon, along with the title of one of his pamphlets: "A new-yeers gift for the Parliament and Army: shewing what the kingly power is; and that the cause of those that they call Diggers is the life and marrow of that cause the Parliament hath declared for, and the Army fought for; the perfecting of which work, will prove England to be the first of nations, of the tenth part of the city Babylon, that fals off from the Beast first, and that sets the Crown upon Christs head, to govern the world in righteousness" (a mouthful!). Above the disc are the names The True Levellers and The Diggers and a drawing of a man tilling a field. Below rays extend from the disc with the words "Communal Ownership of Public Lands" and "social economic organization in small agrarian communities"

Foundations and security.

I was just thinking today that this project, despite all the ambivalent and bad features of the history of technology that this deck draws upon, has ultimately left me feeling more optimistic about technology than I think I was at the start. And this card is a good encapsulation of why.

Gerrard Winstanley founded the True Levellers or Diggers, who basically tore up hedgerows and plowed enclosed land to turn it back into common farmland, and would use this as an opportunity to experiment in communal subsistence farming. So much of technology, the web especially, has been enclosed into platforms that insist on holding values that don't appeal to me, and operate in ways that don't nourish me...

I think I will always have to scavenge, fight for my own small space, dig out a nook for myself in the corpse of "big technology," because the bigness has never served me, but the opportunities chipping away at it, investigating it, turning it around and using it for my own purposes to do cool stuff with others have offered are essential to the kind of person I am...

What can you dig up, plow through, or pull up from the roots to reclaim some space from these enclosed platforms? If a few more people do it here and there and over there, can we tear down all the walls that make their way of doing things so ubiquitous?