}
A post with no pictures? What the hell is that? Who's going to read such a thing? People with brains, that's who. If you're reading this, that's probably you!
This mad freewrite isn't a contest entry. I didn't come here to win all your contests. I came here to shake the cage, to mess with your preconceptions, and to make people uncomfortable. I'm here to support and suppress you, define and deny you, resist and refine you. If you're taking a liking to me, then I'm fucking this up.
Let me tell you why I bothered writing a post for this WOTW at all. This account is an alt, that I created mostly because my Twitter account was suspended. Twitter was my space for verbal comabtiveness, and I didn't want to let that attitude bleed into my first account. Also, I wanted to see how easy the sign-up process was with Ecency. Enter this old soul, new bee.
I'd been wanting to come kick up some dust in POB for a while; this seemed to be the place where people who've been crushed by the status quo came to vent. I have not been crushed by the status quo, but I do like listening to people vent. I vented a bit myself, tried to go against the grain, and then took second place in my first WOTW contest. I learned about math, got in a fight about space, staked over 150 POB in my first week, and was feeling good about things. Everything was going perfect.
To top all that off, after staking my winnings from that first contest, I saw the word for the next contest... paradox. One of my favorite subjects. ParadoxTMA has been my online handle for over 20 years. This is too easy, I thought to myself. This is too... perfect!
I don't like the word perfect. People toss it around casually, never really contemplating the deep meaning of the word. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is without flaw. Show me any thing, and I can show you something wrong with it. The ONLY thing that is perfect, is no thing. Is that confusing? It should be, it's a paradox!
Your god is not omnipotent. Omnipotence is a paradox. It's an expression of perfect power, and there's no such thing. That's why god can't microwave a burrito so hot that even god can't eat it, but that's not really important to this post. I just like picking on gods.
That's what originally drew me to POB. A lot of people here were complaining about whales and their voting habits, and I was intrigued by that drama. The deeper I dug (not deep at all), the more it seemed that the people here were trying to make a more perfect Hive, much like Hive had (for similar reasons) sought to make a more perfect Steemit (or is it just Steem?)
I support the drive to be perfect, but I also understand that it's unattainable. A state of constant improvement is the closest to perfection we can hope to achieve, which is why I find these kinds of power struggles so amusing. The people wanting to make things better are always, always unhappy with decisions being made at the top. The people at the top are always, always just trying to stay on top. This is just how people behave, and no re-shuffling of power structures is ever going to change that. For as long as there are people at the top, there will be people below them trying to work their way into the top. Neither of these groups is ever really thinking about the group, they're just trying to improve things for themselves.
I have no suggestions for how we might break this cycle. Too many people need power structures to understand where they are in the world. Until we can change our nature, we can't change the cycle of power and corruption. Limiting access to power (term limits) is the best way we've developed so far to avoid the inevitable corruption of people in power. The people building power structures are naturally disinclined to limit their own power. Wash, rinse, repeat. We just can't make better systems until we become better people.
Did you actually read all the way to end of this? Give yourself a pat on the back, there's not too many people left who will read all the way to the end of a post without words. Especially one that's not a contest entry, and doesn't make any outlandish claims or useful points.
Why would I even put together a post with no picture?
I wanted the picture to be perfect.
Thus concludes my paradoxical non-entry. If you liked it, just say so in the comments. For the love of all our imperfect gods, please don't make this mess of word diarrhea a winner.