Five Mile Radius - or - How I learned to stop worrying and love O'ga P'ogeh
On the snow-covered morning of November 6th, 2024, as I reflected on the previous night’s news that Donald Trump would be returning to the White House, a heavy realization settled in:
no one is coming to save us
And by “us,” I mean the people physically around me—my coworkers, next-door neighbors, community members, local businesses, and families trying to make this town and this state into the enchanted place it promises to be.
In the run-up to the election, I held out hope that the next four years we might have a president that brings focus to human and labor rights, rising rents, climate action, tech monopolies, and the loneliness epidemic.
But that night it became clear: help would not be coming from the federal level. (Many might say I'm naïve for even musing on the possibility in the first place.) Instead, it was clear the federal government was about to become openly hostile toward those even discussing solutions for these issues. And the people in charge of it all would be nearly 2,000 miles away from where I stand—yet will make consequential decisions for those in my home and neighborhood and workplace.
But instead of spiraling into despair and a feeling of total powerlessness, I asked myself:
What can I do within a five-mile radius to help?
Instead of focusing my attention on the big show in Washington, how can I turn my know-how and talents and passions toward keeping an eye on my own community and the local institutions that govern us? What’s close enough for me to touch, build, or protect? What neighbors, institutions, and relationships can I invest in right now? Where can I shine a spotlight to call for help?
My answer came a month and a half after the election, when I was laid off from a solid salary Santa Fe job after 6 years.
It seems the fates thought it best I no longer work for a historically exploitative creative extraction corporation now owned, managed, and directed by NY and California Executives. If I wanted to do something helpful within a five-mile radius, I needed my time and talents needed to be available.
So here I am.
I went from being 505OMATIC’s first interviewee in its first story to its first collaborator. I went from the corporate model of collaborating on the construction of created worlds for the enjoyment of people in far away cities, to reporting on the real world around me, for the people of this city, this state, these southwestern US lands.
505OMATIC became the clearest, most immediate opportunity I had to do something about the world around me: to inform, connect, and activate the people in my orbit.
I’m so grateful Warren and Katy asked me to join this project during a pretty painful moment of transition for me, this sudden shift in the trajectory of my professional career. By inviting me into 505OMATIC, I had the opportunity to become part of something that provides the kind of value we all felt was lacking in our community. Even better, I was here, at the very beginning of this project, meaning we had time to build this thing together, carefully, from the start.
With intention. With protections. With inoculations against bad actors who will inevitably try to extract the value of what we’re building here for their own gain.
I’m seeing the pattern repeat everywhere across our modern society: solid, storied institutions grow and collapse under the weight of their own "success", then get picked apart by the most privileged self-serving winners of the corporate ladder climb who likely pushed the company towards it's demise. The systems we live under continue to demonstrate how our systems of labor are designed to promote the least trustworthy but 'most productive' individuals into top leadership roles—people who rise to power not because they are trusted by us, but because they’ve mastered the games that exploit the rest of us.
And now, we’re living through the fallout of decades and centuries of these mechanisms at work within this country. Every day we walk through a world that embodies the consequences of a society that lacks real structures to protect communities from extractive bad actors, especially when those communities manage to come together to create something beautiful and valuable for themselves.
So that's why we're trying to build something different here at 505OMATIC.
In my next newsletter, I’ll walk you through the ideas and practices we're adopting to make sure this project remains of and for the community and is resistant to the extractive mechanisms that have historically taken from here.
For now, I’ll leave you with the question that’s guided me since that snowy morning:
What can you do within a five-mile radius to help?
—J. Alex the Technologist for 505OMATIC
PS: Check out my latest story on how one community down in Las Cruces seems to have found their own way to answer this question.
And for more from J. Alex the Technologist, check out his YouTube Channel where you can find his longer form video essays.