r/revolution Jan 26 '26

Notes from the Front Lines

3 Upvotes

It is true that we should live in harmony with each other.

That we should be at peace with our neighbors, tolerate differences, give people the support that they need to live their best life. That we should see each other as fellow humans who are all simply trying to navigate this wonderful world together.

It is true that we should have abundance, that our sacrifices be rewarded, and that we have the conditions for the best and most fulfilling lives that we can imagine.

But the distance between what should be, and what is possible, is vast.

There’s a funny problem in the world. The people who don’t do anything are free to criticize those who do. The people who put forth the most time and effort, who make the most sacrifice, take the most chances, and create the world we inhabit - are the ones criticized the most - by the people who do the least.

Throw a party? The people who attend will judge it. Make a movie? The critics will tear you apart. Start a company and make a billion dollars? The masses will ignore the risk and uncertainty you faced and take the conclusion as foregone.

You are now just a lucky person who deserves nothing you’ve created and who exploited workers for greed. People will see in you whatever they wish to see, regardless of truth.

People regularly criticize Elon Musk by calling him dumb - a man who has ushered in a new space age, pioneered electric vehicles, and helped blanket the world in satellite internet. Whatever else one believes about Elon Musk, “dumb” clearly does not describe him.

It’s hard to do great things. It’s easy to criticize those who do them.

I grew up like many of my generation, a leftist. To whom it was obvious that the ills of the world were caused by greedy, power hungry men, who bettered themselves at the expenses of others. Who were uniquely selfish and evil in a world full of good, honest people just trying to get by.

I have spent my life trying to figure out why we can't just all get along - and how we might.

When I was in my 20s I spent a few years of my life standing on street corners with signs that said “free hugs”. I would bring extra blank signs and t-shirts along with stencils and spraypaint.

When people, mostly young people, would say they’ve heard about this and have always wanted to do it I’d offer to let them make a t-shirt and sign to keep - if they wanted today to be the day. Most took me up on it. Every weekend I would gather a small army of 15-50 people.

It was amazing to see the joy that we could spread to others. A small bit of hope and connection in a world that seemed devoid of it.

A breakdown of the barriers which generally exist on the streets between strangers.

All the while it was an experiment to understand how groups form, how systems emerge, and how people interrelate. My goal for the experiment was to see if I could inspire others to take the energy and come up with their own ideas for spreading joy and love in the world. But after a while I noticed I was the only one who ever organized anything.

Free hugs weren’t the only thing we did. I did a few different kinds of events to spread joy. One of them I had kept a stack of blank signs in my apartment for a few months, and everyone who came by I had make a sign with something positive on it.

After I had amassed a large stack of them I called about 15 people and told them to be at my house within a half hour. No one asked why or what we were doing and all showed up. I explained that we were going to split up into teams, break the city into quadrants, and each team’s job was to cover that area in these signs.

No one hesitated. No one asked if it was legal. No one asked if they were risks. No one cared. They just did it. It was fun and exciting and we felt like we were doing something great. It went off without a hitch. We made the local news and I was interviewed. They covered both sides of the story - by finding someone who liked it and someone who said it was tacky and inappropriate.

It was great fun for me too - but it made me reflect on the nature of what I was doing and what I had created. It felt to me as if I had accidentally started a cult. That I was its leader. And that this was not what I had intended. So I stopped.

After that I continued building models of how the world functions, attempting to understand it deeper. Eventually I came up with an idea I called my “general theory of revolution”, in which I posited that it is only possible to wage a revolution on the front lines of power.

That in a world where violence rules - violent revolution is possible. In a world in which political power dominates, a political revolution is possible. And so on.

This led me to reflect on what the front lines of power were at that time. Eventually I settled on money and technology. Which led me to cryptocurrency and my ultimate involvement in ethereum.

It came to me in a flash as a vision in which I saw the blockchain technology’s capacity for empowering human value encoding and coordination. My theory played out the way I predicted.

There was a secondary effect of this involvement though that has been more informative than all of my previous research could have ever been.

And I got rich.

I went from being a guy who slept on couches for a decade so he could have the maximum time to think - someone who hung out with communists, socialists, self-described revolutionaries, leftists, and hippies, and who came from a small town in the middle of the country - to someone who lived in a multimillion dollar home in Bay Area.

This wasn’t totally unexpected. Another part of my thinking was that if the problem was a deficit of good people amassing money and power, that the obvious solution would be that someone like myself, a person who prided himself on his innate goodness, should do the hard work necessary to attain money and power.

But I wasn’t prepared for it at all.

My plan was to get money and do what no one had ever done for me - give the people around me a hand up.

I would invest in the people I believed in and supercharge their paths. As soon as I could I helped as many people as I could, in an attempt to help them achieve their dreams and reach their potential.

But it didn’t work.

They ended up flying so close to the sun that their wings melted immediately, and the amount of momentum was minimal, if not backwards.

This was incredibly disappointing to me. How could this have happened? Why didn’t it help them? Why in some cases did the help actively hurt them?

Another thing that happened was that people didn’t seem to be happy for me. They didn’t seem to see it as good. They seemed threatened, or jealous. Overnight the majority of people I had relied on for human connection just - couldn’t connect with me anymore. The ease and playfulness that marked friendship were just gone.

I’d make the kinds of jokes I’d made with them thousands of times before, and all the sudden they were “offensive” and I was “talking down to them.” People would come to me for money, and become irate anytime I offered hard earned advice.

Instead of hearing about the positive aspects of people’s lives when we talked, it seemed everyone just had problems. Problems that could be solved.

If only they had the money.

If I attempted to share any of my problems with anyone I was met with dismissals - to them I had money, therefore I had no problems.

I had known lots of rich people from my time in Silicon Valley. I never found it difficult to see a person independent of their money. I never experienced jealousy. When someone was successful I felt happy for them and inspired that it was possible. It made me believe that I could achieve the same things.

I had never been this alienated before. I thrived on connection. I didn’t know how to live life without sharing what I was going through.

Because despite what people believe - hitting the lottery doesn’t feel like you imagine. It feels closer to being strapped to a rocket and launched into the sky than relief that all of your money problems are gone.

I owned a home for the first time. A nice one. Owning a home required that I hire people for various services. The people who smiled in my face the most were the ones that would inevitably multiply the price they quoted me the most.

I had been somewhere between middle class and below poverty my entire life. I knew people who built houses. I have a memory for what things cost.

My heart sank every time someone I wanted to hire tried to rip me off because they saw a nice house and figured I could afford it.

In the worst case, a contractor tried to charge me four times the cost of a water heater. When I paid what was already double the fair price, he became hostile - sending harassing messages, attempting emotional manipulation, publishing my personal information online, and showing up at my house repeatedly demanding payment.

It was the first time I experienced, viscerally, how quickly perceived wealth turns ordinary interactions adversarial - and how easily kindness is mistaken for weakness.

My worldview previously had been that most people are good. I’d traveled the world. Lived in cities all over the country. I had so much evidence for this belief. I had met so many wonderful people. I had thought.

But all of the sudden the people I thought were so wonderful… weren’t. And all the new people I met all seemed to see me as a mark. Instead of my kindness being repaid with kindness it was seen as weakness and something to exploit.

I lived in New York City during Occupy. I spent time in Zuccotti Park, I marched during Occupy Wall St. But now all of those people didn’t see me as one of them who had made it to a position of power that could be useful. They saw me as the enemy, the 1%. My reasons and my politics didn’t matter. I was evil, greedy, and they wanted to eat me.

And I had been on the other side - I knew they weren’t joking.

So I found myself in a strange position of having to reconcile the ideals that drove me to the position I was in, with the realities I had discovered along the way.

People weren’t mostly good. The people at the top weren’t uniquely evil. There wasn’t a grand conspiracy to keep people down. People kept themselves down even when I gave them every opportunity. The system isn’t broken because the people in control are preying on the people at the bottom.

The reality was much more complex. It’s easy to see people as good when you have nothing they want. When they see you as harmless and in the same economic situation. When you have something they want - they become jealous, weird, or duplicitous.

The people at the bottom “fighting the good fight” didn’t seem so good anymore. They were fighting ghosts. They didn’t know how to create, so they did the only thing they could think of, picked a collective scapegoat - and yelled very loudly how disappointed they were.

And the people at the top didn’t seem so evil. How would you manage an evolving world with competing interests, the lives of eight billion people at stake - each one with their own hopes, dreams, desires, and motivations. People living under completely different cultures, totally unable to conceptualize the reality of the other.

With large groups of people living in a fantasy world - one in which everyone is inherently the same and the only thing separating us are the evil men in charge.

They believe that we all inhabit an obvious and universal moral framework, and the only thing standing between world peace is tearing it down and the good guys (them) replacing it with a utopia. They cannot fathom the differences.

And another group who understands that this is not true. They attempt to enforce borders, rules, and order. But every time they attempt to explain the reality they see or attempt to enforce the laws required by that reality - they are perceived as racist, sexist, fascist, or, very often, as literal Nazis. A political party that peaked almost 100 years ago in Germany.

And the media - which requires your constant attention to sell advertising space - stokes these fires relentlessly.

So before you get online to “speak truth to power”, or march through the streets in an attempt to enact your own personal idea of utopia by yelling loudly, confronting law enforcement, and trying to destroy the structures of power that hold the world around you up - ask yourself a question.

What do you hope to accomplish?

Who is actually stopping you from achieving your dreams and building the world you want to see?

Or is it possible that the model of the world you’re using doesn’t map to reality—and that no amount of moral certainty can compensate for a bad map? And wouldn't the world function a lot better if we were all working together to solve common problems?

We all want the same things - opportunity, the freedom to live our lives, and safe communities to live in and raise our children.

I was on the streets during Occupy. I saw hundreds of thousands of people march in the streets. It felt exciting and important. And it did nothing.

I can promise you something - your problems aren't due to the people at the top conspiring to hold you down. They're too busy desperately trying to hold together a world that can slip into chaos at any moment.

And you can choose to do the hard thing - taking a risk, confronting reality, building something from nothing, and solving problems that have never been solved before.

Despite what you may have been told - it doesn’t require power, connections or money to start - only the willingness to risk, to follow through, and to face reality.

Or you can sit on the sidelines and criticize the people trying.

Your call.


r/revolution Feb 14 '25

If you have come here to have a histrionic meltdown about Trump and Musk you will be banned.

0 Upvotes

The rest of reddit is filled with your hysterical, propaganda-driven leftist mania, this is not a safe space for it.


r/revolution 2h ago

is there any hope in americans to fight back

2 Upvotes

Every time there’s a new news article of something MAJOR happening, TikTok or any social media platform either makes it a meme or rubs it off. And TikTok is already being censored heavily. so I moved to reddit to get better updates about the world. but looking back at TikTok i realize that the dead internet theory is real and its all propaganda for people to be desensitize or forget about actual real world problems.

How do we even fight back? with ai and everything we cant tell who or what is real or fake. so i could be arguing with someone on the internet that is completely fake. ive been seeing a lot of maga and ice support by fake Tiktok accounts and all ai generated propaganda and this is getting bad.

especially with flock cameras and having literally everything tracking you, we have no privacy, even if we have nothing to hide. We are being surveillance, and this is exactly like the book 1984.


r/revolution 1h ago

Am I back to 1947 ?

Thumbnail
Upvotes

r/revolution 12h ago

This protest is shit

4 Upvotes

Do you really think peaceful protest will do anything or any harm to those sitting on those golden chairs? Salute to the guys that brought the youth together, we are the most powerful in the country but are we utilizing our power? Or just wasting it marching around the city.

We need to fight back and not just stay silent. Its time we hit them back hard and deeper. Its not the face that should change but the SYSTEM COVERED BY THE FACE.

LETS STRIKE BACK


r/revolution 5h ago

I'm disappointed in our country

Post image
1 Upvotes

What have we turned into?

When I was a child, I used to look up at our government as someone to respect. The largest democracy in our world. My parents said "If you ever feel unsafe and we're not around, go to a police station. The people there will treat you well".

And in democracies, peaceful protests happen, and it's the people's right to do so, and one's happening right now, but lord, my lord, the stuff we're looking at right now?

100+ protesters injured, 7 year old child hurt, women being harassed, using expired tear gas rounds, using batons with nails on it, who are police dealing with, criminals? Rapists? Terrorists? THEY'RE DEALING WITH STUDENTS FOR FUCK'S SAKE!!!

And the police too, is following the government's orders as if they collectively chose a sodium free diet. I wonder how they sleep in the night after hitting students and peaceful protestors. THEY POINTED GUNS AT PEACEFUL PROTESTERS! These sick fucks would've fired with zero hesitation I bet.

And you know the worst thing I've learnt from this protest?

  1. The government doesn't give a fuck. A man hasn't eaten for a month in protest, and they took him away against his own will. Protest happening for a month, and ZERO action by them. They're shoving it in our faces.

  2. The so-called "free press" freely chose to NOT cover the protest till day 17 of the protest. It was delayed, the news channels are actively manipulated by the state and they warp the narrative for the unassuming.

And one other thing. When lawyers took the issue of police brutality to the CJI with proper evidence, his response was "no time to watch videos".

I'm truly disappointed in India. I'm disappointed in the government. Where's the India whose idea was sold to us? What happened to "for the people, by the people, of the people"? Don't we listen to problems? We are not North Korea. We are not Israel. We are not Nazi Germany.

We're a democracy. We're India

And still, they manage to disappoint.


r/revolution 17h ago

Let’s start a strike and not revolution

4 Upvotes

Why are we sitting idle and not doing anything and just protesting like gandhi did, remember gandhi was not correct, he was too a silent goon if the britishers and silence doesnt bring anything but sacrifice for people on the weaker side. We have the power and now we should become one and strike back. If everyone is with me comment strike.


r/revolution 13h ago

Now Call it Democracy or Anti-Social,if anyone wants to..

Post image
1 Upvotes

r/revolution 15h ago

Stand with the students—It’s time to support their fight against systemic failure!

Thumbnail
1 Upvotes

r/revolution 16h ago

Please fight against the corrupt system

Thumbnail youtube.com
1 Upvotes

PLEASE BRO SHARE IT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE


r/revolution 18h ago

Democracy feels like an illusion

Thumbnail
1 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

Okay people, but like we need to start the revolution.

5 Upvotes

Think about it, 10 years ago if you got told there would be people in the streets sh00ting and murd3ring innocent civilians on the streets why would you believe it. You didn’t have to worry about that 10-15years ago, unfortunately now it’s about every day! YOU ARENT MAD ENOUGH!!! They take people out of their homes. They take people from their jobs. They take CHILDREN out of their school’s. They are aiding the execution of an entire country. GET THIS, the first people to live stream their country’s destruction as their hospitals and blown up, their schools, their lives, but they get told that they need to watch their wording because the men doing it to them do not like the words they are using to describe what is happening to them. We as the people are playing for other people to sit on their high chairs while OUR kids go to school hungry! While we just had out first trillionaire, WE CANT AFFORD A DOCTOR!!!


r/revolution 1d ago

When one voice points forward, an entire generation follows. José Martí’s revolutionary legacy links the struggle for independence to the revolution of 1959.

Post image
2 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

We must rebuild democracy

1 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

Most problems are solved or made better with critical thinking and accountability followed up with systems thinking.

3 Upvotes

The title says it all really but the number one change that would make the most difference in our country is for there to be more critical thinking followed up with accountability and systems thinking.

This is as opposed to emotional populism with little critical thinking.

Take any issue and ask "What could go wrong?". Rewrite your solution with that in mind and you will have a better solution. In a year or two ask "Is my solution working?".

If it's not then go back and do something different. That's being accountable. Systems thinking is to break the solution apart and look for the weak links and fix those.

Instead we just fall for inaccurate media stories, repeat those, become upset and start to blame everyone but ourselves for our personal outcomes.

Don't do that:)


r/revolution 1d ago

Sign the Petition

Thumbnail change.org
1 Upvotes

Please sign this petition if you understand the reality behind everything happening currently in India!


r/revolution 1d ago

Collecting souls to rewrite the rules of this broken society.

1 Upvotes

There’s nothing to join, nothing to pay for – just a call to action to use your creative skills to help envision the world we want to see.

There are many examples of art that does that already, now it’s our turn to give people a picture of what could be.

We as artists have an important role in this. Art is more important than ever.

Part of this project is a podcast (I know, roll your eyes). 👀 I'm going to run it differently though, here’s a 2-min overview.

I’m not a leader, I’m just writing the manifesto and “instruction manual.”


r/revolution 1d ago

inquilab zindabad long live the revolution

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

Hows the protest ?

1 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

Resignation Of A Corrupt Individual

1 Upvotes

All The fellow students of this country needed a simple fucking resignation of a corrupt official , the protests were peaceful , A Great Being Like Sonam Wangchuk and Other Students put their lives on a stake just for a resignation ,

What needs to get resigned ? I mean you've already proved corrupt and have yourself participated in many leaks of qn paper in some previous years too .

So just for the resignation of a corrupt individual , Students should do hunger strike ? Students should leave their house and come and gather at a wide open place with lakhs lakhs of students and have to do protests while leaving their home leading their parents to be tensed ? Students should live a whole month suffering and barely living off foods while those corrupt individuals living a healthy life ?

You poke the students first , when students repel you also beat up the students ? You Recklessly beat a girl child ? Kill a 16 year old girl ? Tearing of many clothes ? Hitting with those sticks on the head of Every individual ? Do these students deserve this ? Does anybody deserve this ?

You sent force to beat up those students and other individuals because your fucking government is frightened and can't take accountability of its actions , so you beat up the students .

ALL IT NEEDED WAS A RESIGNATION OF A CORRUPT INDIVIDUAL , IT NEEDS NOTHING TO BE RESIGNED JUST A SIMPLE PIECE OF PAPER AND ORDER FROM THE HIGHER OFFICIALS ,

BUT THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS THOSE CORRUPT INDIVIDUALS TO STAY WHERE THEY ARE CAUSE THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS THEM TO FUCKING EXPLOIT THE COUNTRY

THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THESE STUDENTS , INSTEAD THEY BEAT UP AND WANTS TO BREAK THE WILL OF PROTESTING OF THESE STUDENTS .

THAT PROVES HOW MUCH CORRUPT AND SPINELESS THIS FUCKING PARTY IS .

IF YOU DON'T WANT US TO REBEL , IF YOU CANT HANDLE THE TRUTH , THAT MEANS YOU ARE CORRUPTED .


r/revolution 1d ago

If not now then WHEN ???....

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

1 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

They cant stop it now ,Its too late for it. Get up wake up young generation let's uproot the corrupted government from ground wake up now or it will be late!!🥹

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2 Upvotes

r/revolution 1d ago

Today's protest

1 Upvotes

Power has an unfortunate habit of believing that ignored voices eventually disappear. They don't. They simply become quieter while they gather weight.

We all know thousands protested. We also know most of us only have pieces of the truth because we weren't on the ground. But negligence is easy to recognize. Ignore a child long enough, and one day they'll do something no one expected. Ignore people long enough, and societies behave no differently.

The saddest part is that ignorance is now a choice. Every answer is two seconds away. AI has put more knowledge into a phone than entire libraries once held. Yet many who sit in power continue to think like yesterday.

Those who govern often believe consequences arrive with a warning. They rarely do. History has a habit of revealing, far too late, why certain tragedies became inevitable. By then, everyone asks, 'How did this happen?' The better question is, 'How long was it ignored?'

A wise ruler fears losing the trust of the people, not because of elections, but because once people stop believing anyone is listening, anger begins to replace reason. History has never been kind to those who mistake patience for weakness.


r/revolution 2d ago

WHAT IS HAPPENING??!!

4 Upvotes

Lathi pe nails lagake Maar rhe the

Tear gas

Pathar

Sar phod diya hai logon ka

Ladkiyon ke kapde phad rhe the

Kaise desh mai rehti hoon main?

Democracy,

OF the people

BY the people

FOR the people

Par ab lag raha hai

OF THE DICTATOR

BY THE DICTATOR

FOR THE DICTATOR

CHI HAI ESI SAARKAR PE!!


r/revolution 2d ago

So, what are we doing?

8 Upvotes

I'm seeing a lot of people asking why nothing is happening to make things better or why there has not been a revolution yet, and I'm feeling the same way. I'm beyond angry. I'm not sure how much more I can take. Planet on fire, a cabal of evil child eating demons are running the world, G-sides everywhere I turn, just an endless stream of terror as our rights, safety and future are taken from us. And like most people here I'm looking for the answer to what and how I can do something, anything, to make this revolution happen. We know we can't vote our way out of this, which also means these cutesy No Kings marches and protests like them are useless. We have moved past the whole "working withing the system to fix things" road. We have taken all the action that we should be able to do to get things to change and make things better, and yet, here we are, worse off then ever before. Watching our world end as we become an unaffordable surveillance state run by kiddy-diddler cannibals who are building data centers and oil pipelines and waging wars for a buck at the cost of our lives.
What do we do? And how?
Well, I think we all know the answer to the question. But as we are in a surveillance state, and we can't say what that is at the risk of being banned from Reddit. Or worse.
And we know there will be some guy in the comments of every post trying to sow decent or assume he is clever by saying things like "you're doing so much to help by posting on reddit blah blah blah." As we all roll our eyes at yet another troll.

So once we get past all of that, and put our want for change back to the forefront of the discussion, I too am asking; What are we doing? How do we do this? And how can I help? I have some ideas, but I'm pretty sure they are not that brilliant. And we can't talk about a lot of things here. But maybe one of you has something to contribute and we can find a forum to discuss and plan. I don't know. I don't have the answers. But I have the time. I have the drive. And I have a feeling I'm not the only one. Lets talk and figure this out.