The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.
As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.
You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.
I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.
Lemmy.world looks like this
This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.
You put yourself on very thin ice when you attempt to define what is and isn't art. This isn't a conversation I'm interested in having because I find it exhausting and largely irrelevant, but I don't agree that AI art is theft or that it doesn't qualify as art.
Anyways, my suggestion is a work in progress. But one fundamental aspect would be pulling back from operating in large organizations and communities. I am quite certain that the sheer scale of most human institutions today is a major reason for their inability to function properly.
Something like the American political system is simply too large, with too many divergent inputs, outputs, and incentives, to be managed by human minds. And that's just a particularly egregious example, but I would apply that argument to the vast majority of hierarchical systems that exist in the world today. Any solution would necessitate aligning the incentives of groups of people such that people were not inherently and inevitably thrown into conflict with just about everyone else in their lives.
For instance, most children come into conflict with our parents as we grow, because they have an overriding incentive to make us fit into a system that is inherently uncomfortable for us on an instinctual level. It's hard for us to understand this until we start thinking about having children of our own, and realizing that if we don't force out children into this mold, then either society will do so in a less gentle manner, or they will be maladjusted and lonely.
Parents will always have conflict with their children, but if being successful in life didn't entail participating in a soulless system that is simultaneously destroying the planet and the lives of the people who make it work, then it'd probably be a bit less strenuous to convince your kids to follow in your path. Each new generation has to grapple with the wrongness of modern civilization anew, and it is often expressed in the tension added to familial relationships, which frequently modulate our interaction with society as a while.
I don't suggest violence, but rather disengagement from capitalism and construction of self sufficient communities that can exist in parallel to capitalism and serve as a space from which people can criticize mainstream society more freely, no longer being ensconced in it's propaganda and dependent on it for survival.
Sound like something familiar? I think Lemmy is a great example of the kind of new structure/institution I'm talking about, albeit only on a more superficial digital level. Eventually I'd like to take it much further, but this is a cool start.
Good talk man, this was fun but I'm gonna close out with this comment. That was really a doozy, even for me 😅