To be entirely honest, I don't quite know what this is.

It started, as these things tend to, with a payoff matrix scrawled on the back of a lino print, nested inside a collection of short stories that I gave to Megan before the start of summer. It became an idea for an open source collective, creating malleable, extensible technologies to take back control of software from Big Tech and bring back some of the radical utopianism of early hacker culture. We decided that we wanted to start a magazine, with art and poetry and beautifully formatted documentation of projects people had been working on. And then, as I became more and more concerned about the systemic disempowerment of humanity that our current technological trajectory seems to be leading us down, we realised the collective was part of a broader fight. A fight for our future, as we transition into a new era of technology that society is not at all prepared for.

The aim of the idealists collective is to empower people to imagine, and build out the world in which they want to live in, through philosophy, art and technology. Instead of a specific vision for what this looks like, we want the collective to be a living organism, growing and adapting alongside its members. But at its core are six principles - our DNA:

• utopian - we are not afraid to be ambitious in our visions of the future. and we are not afraid to try to make it a reality.
• autonomous - you control your tools, your data, your attention. decisions happen at the level where they matter.
• playful - we create with whimsy and joy. what is life without fun?
• alive - dynamic systems over static entities. things that grow, adapt, merge, and die when they need to.
• cooperative - we cannot succeed alone. nor would we want to.
• love - don't compromise on your integrity. don't sell your soul. do everything with love.

If any of this resonates with you, join our collective. We'd love to have you.