# III. Background & Struggles Our current world faces the anthropocene with an urgent need of change. Centuries of death, exploitation, addiction and violence have affected our local contexts directly. Arts Collaboratory shares common dreams of change from the embedded notions of value that neoliberalism and postcolonialism impose, as well as shifting paradigms in the micropolitics of our relationships with others, with our communities, ourselves, and most importantly, our living, breathing environment. > *’Goodbye, capital, time for you to go, we are going to create other ways of living, other ways of relating to one another, both among humans and between humans and other forms of life, ways of living that are not determined by money and the pursuit of profit, but by our own collective decisions.’* > > \- John Holloway > *’It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging and on the way to new economies of giving, taking, being with and for...’* > > -Jack Halberstam --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://arts-collaboratory.gitbook.io/arts-collaboratory/futureplan/iii.-background-and-struggles.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.