Small scale work and taking chances

One of the things that regularly haunts/stresses/depresses me is the feeling that anything/everything I do---hell that any of us in the smolnet do---might not amount to a damn thing.

It's a hard, scary feeling in part because there's no good comfort to be had: we are, in fact, a bunch of odd-ones-out going agsinst the flow of accumulating computational capital, with most of us put together probably having less cultural power and influence on the computational world than a single exec on the AWS team.

When power is so concentrated and a small number of people can inflict such madness on the world, what are we?

And, look, I know the answer is that anything big and capable of enacting real change has to start as somethign small. But also I want to face the possibility that nothing I do will particularly matter.

Because maybe it won't! Maybe nothing I do will actually matter!

So I don't think randomness is a metaphysically accurate way of thinking of these things but here I think it's helpful to think statisticallly: the more of us who try to make a difference on sustainable computing and redistributing power, the more chances there are that something will stick and make a difference.

Which means that even if I fail trying still matters.