The only role of the ballot is to signify the winner of the game. Using it for other purposes, or creatively bending the rules to re-orient pedagogy, fails and reproduces the failures of modernity in comparatively more insidious ways as long as it’s tied to competitive incentives. You should err towards learning from the shortcomings of debate while recuperating the tools of self-reflection and alternative-building that it can still provide us.

System walk out (alternatives ‘with guarantees’) enunciates a commitment to develop alternatives to modernity that will not reproduce its violences. Alternative communities and epistemologies are developed or reclaimed in spaces that may be external or marginal to mainstream institutions, either as supplementary, transitional, or wholesale alternatives. While ‘walking out’ often leads to remarkably creative and generative spaces, these spaces may nonetheless reproduce at least some of the same problems as modernity, as they are still broadly situated within its teleological grammar, particularly in its dialectically structured desire for an uncontaminated ‘outside’. This focus on alternatives ‘with guarantees’ tends to support the same affective investments (e.g. in fixed teleologies, normativity, consensus, and innocence) and can lead to the foreclosure of the complexities and complicities that arise in the making of alternatives.

System hacking involves creating spaces within the system, using its resources, where people can be educated about the violences of the system and have their desires re-oriented away from it. This requires ‘playing the game’ of institutions at the same time that rules are bent to generate alternative outcomes. This strategy can also be remarkably creative and generative; however, it can be difficult to recognize when one is ‘hacking’ the system or ‘being hacked’ by it. In addition, like system walk outs, the risk of reproducing modernity’s violence precisely when one is trying to move beyond it remains high as the success of initiatives is measured in identifiable outcomes, and identities may become scripted around vanguardist heroism that inadvertently recentres individuals.

In contrast to system walk out, system ‘hospicing’ recognizes that although ultimately new systems are necessary, alternatives articulated from within modernity’s frames will tend to reproduce it. In identifying modernity’s metaphysical enclosures, hospicing problematizes the desire to embrace or reject modernity as a form of desire where modern subjects demand the world conform to our will (Silva, 2014). Instead, hospicing would entail sitting with a system in decline, learning from its history, offering palliative care, seeing oneself in that which is dying, attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums, incontinence, anger and hopelessness, ‘cleaning up’, and clearing the space for something new. This is unlikely to be a glamorous process; it will entail many frustrations, an uncertain timeline, and unforeseeable outcomes without guarantees.

Our definition of hospicing entails three different insights. One, that the modern global capitalist system is unsustainable, and that it is already collapsing. Two, that our current languages, identities and sense-making are inescapably historically connected to it. Three, that we need to be properly taught by the system’s successes and failures by facing its death and attending to its affliction rather than turning our back or attempting to murder it before it is ready to go. Hospicing enacts a willingness to learn enough from the (re)current mistakes of the current system in order to make different mistakes in caring for the arrival of something new. Going through the pains of this death, and recognizing we have been both bewildered and enchanted by the mythology of the Enlightenment, may be the only way we can really understand the depth of modernity’s limits (within us) and recognize its real gifts.

Hospicing demands a critique that is self-implicated rather than heroic, vanguardist or ‘innocent’. It demands a kind of courage that is un-neurotic (not invested in self-affirmation): a kind of courage that helps us to look the bull in the eye, to recognize ourselves in the bull, and to see the bull as a teacher, precisely when it is trying to kill us. In practice, this means that experimenting with alternatives is perceived as important not for generating predetermined solutions, but rather as a means to be taught by the successes and failures of the experimentation process. These teachings are indispensible for exploring the depths of the existing system, and for learning to discern between its poisons and its medicines. In this space, the effects of violence and pain are attended to; at the same time that there is also an acute attention to the roots and mechanisms of the disease so that its death leaves a legacy of prudence that grounds the emergence of something radically new and potentially wiser. We represent this possibility as a question mark in our forth space where other modes of existence grounded on different cosmologies operate. The question mark indicates that these are unintelligible to those entrapped in the metaphysics of modernity (which does not mean they are separate from our experience, or beyond meaning and understanding).