I miss globalisation

I miss living in a globalised world. Thinking of a friend from online I made a bowl for, I procrastinated posting it, and now I can't send it to her at all. Thinking of websites increasingly being geolocked, not available due to GDPR compliance or OSA compliance or whatever it is they're doing in Mississippi. Thinking of men being threatening outside of refugee accommodations. Thinking about how I know what the term "GPSR" means, and why it's a pain for friends with small online shops. Thinking of the queue for passport control, the questions, the stamp in my black passport when I visit my brother, my niece & my nephew in Denmark.

I guess it's the inevitable downstream consequence of the global superpower (the USA) losing its grip on that power. The "weaponisation of interdependence" I've heard it called. When there's a power struggle, empires are going to pull on every string they can grab - the common good comes in a distant second place. And this globalisation was indeed a secondary effect from American empire - markets opened up, made dependent on the dollar, Americans able to trade their stable common currency for endless consumer goods and the oil to power them. That the opening up also enabled the life that I have taken joy in... that's just a byproduct, a happy accident, a good case study for imperial propaganda.

But at the same time - I have built a life and a career in a nexus of friends who live around the world - or at least, mostly the rich countries. The indie game scene does depend on geography, but it's also a scene joined by an international round of festivals and events and awards and discussion. It came into being when digital distribution allowed games to be distributed without worrying about supply chains, it was formed from people in forums hyping each other up, and it was perpetuated by people seeing photos from cool events elsewhere and saying "hey, we could do that". I know not everything is like this - obviously most jobs are more connected to the places where they are performed - but many of us do work in the kind of space where our peers could live anywhere. I guess these spaces are the left leaning, queer kinds of spaces that are under attack right now - academia, nerd culture, tech. So I don't have much hope for loud voices from the political mainstream to spring to their defence. But I do want to say: I miss it.