bloomer

The suburbs are gone, transformed into either farmland or back to nature. Most people live in dense clusters around rail stations, of which there is a robust network, seamless mixes of high speed rail, light rail, and metro/subway systems. The highways are a tiny fraction of what they were, and mostly exist for moving resources that the rail network can’t easily move; personal transit is highly restricted on them. The station towns are built to be walkable, personal vehicles are small and not used for daily life. But because of their density, their denizens can easily access the green space on the edges of the towns. The kids can play on the streets because there simply aren’t many cars for them to worry about.

There’s a real sense of community, not the vision of “community” reactionaries use to gussy up their hatred. We work fewer hours and spend way less time commuting so we have more time to spend on enrichment, in community groups, with our families. That extra time and the restructured socialist political economy means we have a lot more inputs into how our day to day lives go, not just political theater giving us the empty calories version of engagement.

You ever been to a concert or out on the town recently? It always seems like the thing-to-do is to spend money on merch and drink alcohol. Maybe there's music and a dance floor. But we're not all doing the dance. It's just an empty space that's implied to be for dancing. If they even have that, it might just be a bar or arranged seating to see someone perform (or see the TV because you're so far away).

Well, when it's not just a race to the bottom to squeeze money out of you, there can be activities! There can be things to do with your hands. You can hire someone who thinks of fun activities to do and how to make them happen instead of designing it so that your wallet has the least amount of friction to purchase things. Petting zoos and giant pin art boards. Wrestling rings and giant basketball hoops for beach balls. Sand pits and foam pits. Unified cafeterias and art exhibits where the old rent-a-shop style used to be. You still need competition for art and food? Fuck it! It's a competition circuit where hopeful dishes are served at smaller events - so you would go to smaller events because you'd get exotic food and avant garde art there. Your work doesn't drain your soul and time so you have the energy to go to events - no, you're encouraged! We took Marx to heart so your win condition in society isn't going to the theater as little as possible to get ahead to preserve capital, you get some sort of encouragement+incentive+ELO to be involved with the community.

Gemstone crab, wintertodt, and tempeross society! Low barrier to entry to help! The government app gives bonus rewards for doing activities that need help. Not a lot of people making food? You get double reward points for going to the cafeteria. Your education helps you participate in society by qualifying you for high reward point tasks or specializes you into a career when you're ready. Reward points get you cosmetics, QoLs, and votes on how to design things. F2P/Casual is a viable way to contribute to society.

The water droplets finally bore through the stone, and I was one of them.

Hello people of Hexbear.

I originally made this post here in 2025 and have now returned to post a message on it from the year 2060. Some amazing scientists from Beijing have made it possible to send messages through time and they gave me this opportunity as I have been around for the world revolution. We thought it would be important to let our comrades of the past know that it will indeed get better.

I suppose you would be interested in knowing how and what has happened. I cannot go into the details too much as protecting the timeline is a worry, but I will say that everything happened a lot faster than we ever expected in 2025. The USA essentially balkanized after the AI bubble burst and the power grid failed there due to the energy demands that were greated by the same bubble. Revolutionary conditions formed seemingly overnight in hindsight in several places of the Earth. Dollar hegemony ended and so did nato, all the US military outposts faced slow ruin and China with the Global South really took the lead on where the Earth will go next. There were and still are problems, but this isn't a message about those.

About three decades ago the Earth Alliance was formed and today this socialist project includes most of the nation states that in 2025 made up Asia, Africa, Latin America, The Middle East and Europe. Some areas of the former USA are also newly joint in the alliance, but unfortunately some areas have turned to isolationism and are currently out of our reach. Their resources are however streched very thin as they refuse to trade with the Earth Alliance so it is expected their population will demand they join sooner or later. We support our comrades in those places in all the ways we can.

I still live in what was then the Nordic countries. I got to build the socialist project as a part of my local governance as I previously worked in social services under capitalism. I am now retired, but still have a voice in these matters, just like everyone else.

Our first job was to make ourselves obsolete and we set out to provide things like housing for all a few decades ago now. I am happy to tell you that homelesness and poverty have globally mostly been abolished and resources reshuffled in a way that makes sure everyone has their needs met. There is meticulous central planning on a global scale and this was mostly modelled on the Chinese lessons of building socialism. We are still in the beginning  chapters of this work, but I am happy to tell you that we are able to build for abundance with the resources we now have, instead of scarcity. For the last decade I got to work in community work that focused on local food production and it turned out to be the most meaningful thing I ever did.

What has really changed the way the world looks now compared to 2025 are things like letting go of militaries and national borders. This has opened up lots of resources and people are now freely able to travel and move within the Alliance nations. Just last year I visited the Free Nation of Palestine and got to see the recovery of the olive groves over the last decades that the people there are tending. It made my heart happy after all these years and I remember the dark times of 2025 very well, we all do. Palestine was one of the sparks that freed us all and we will never forget that.

On the environmental front I am happy to tell you that fossil fuels have been phased out and the move to green energy and sustainable farming has really made an impact on the climate and the wellbeing of everyone. Other animals are no longer consumed as food and this has become common sense. Some people still grow farm animals as hobbyists but there is no need to kill animals for food. Pigs and chicken have become more like housepets and cows are mainly kept for pasturing and land restoration, not milk and meat.

Tech is used videly, but engineers now get to build things as solutions and not as grifts. Automation is used where it is deemed smart, but people also get to work on things they are good at and we make sure humans are involved in all decision making and planning.

Dreams of going to space have mostly been put on the backburner for humanity. People are these days far more interested in exploring the Earth, their home. Both on a local and a global scale. High speed rails and various engineering marvels now make exploration easy and affordable for everyone. But nowadays we are doing it to learn and appreciate our joint home and the various peoples in it, not to escape life and exploit others like we did before. Travel is restricted in many ways as well to protect our habitats, but it is possible for everyone to visit the Great Wall of China or the Amazon rainforest now, you only have to wait for your turn.

Education, healthcare, infrastructure and labor all reflect the changes of the past decades. Suffice to say that everything has changed for the better.

Gender is slowly becoming a non-question as people are better educated and pathriarchal insitutions are turning more and more obsolete due to material equality getting better. The unserious woke wars are very much behind us now, but the examples of those times are used in education actively, all reaction has definitely not disappreaded in such a short time. But we are getting there.

It very much looks like we are well on our way to communism as a species. And we have our comrades of the past to thank for this. So my message to you is: Never give up the fight, never stop believing, it will happen. It has happened.

I'm in Cleveland, which is built on two bodies of water: Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga is famous for being the "burning river" - it caught on fire over a dozen times through Cleveland's industrial peak, and the final conflagration was such an enormous controversy that it lead to the creation of the creation of the EPA and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The river's a lot cleaner now (it's got beavers!). Lake Erie is still in a pretty bad way, though. I think about how communities under socialism might build their futures in, on, and along the water to repair ecology and restore our role within nature.

Land reform will be essential in a socialist USA, just like in every other socialist revolution. But what does that look like? Imagine a community on the lake - there's a big old public housing project in poor condition near my office, just off the shore. Give them collective ownership of the project, but more than that, give them the opportunity for new land.

Along the shore are wave breaks that extend out hundreds of meters and protect the city from the lake when it gets feisty. These are very simple, constructed out of big boulders that host no life but resting cormorants and seagulls. Perhaps that public housing community by the lake is given ownership of this wave break and given the funds to make it something entirely new. Replace the lifeless stone with sand and soil, creating an ecologically active peninsula. Widen it substantially, and, inspired by the chinampa agriculture of Tenochtitlan, layer soil and organic matter to build many smaller perpendicular extrusions into the water. The community holds this new hyper-fertile, always watered land in common. It is an ecological refuge that hosts a huge variety of birds, fish, small mammals, insects, and other animals that thrive in the fragile Great Lake lakeside biome. It is an incredibly productive food resource, where residents perform multistrata companion planting agriculture (three sisters, etc), farm molluscs for pearls and food, and fish from the miles and miles of new, sheltered coastline where fry thrive. All of this captures carbon and cleans the water. The people labor and live together.

The land and the community are co-created, each dialectically dependent on the other, every step that restores and empowers building a stronger, more just, and more sustainable base for further co-creation.

After decades of building this, an old revolutionary sits on the shoreline and watches naked children swim between the twisted shores that burst with life. Insects and birds and the constant lapping of waves harmonize with the songs and laughter and chatter. The sun sets over the water, the revolutionary's time comes to an end, and they are laid to rest in the land that will sustain their people for generations.