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> reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway Sorry i'm not a native speaker and

> reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway Sorry i'm not a native speaker and i don't understand this sentence (promise i'm not GPT-3 ;)). > What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy? Yes, exactly. As long as power is concentrated in some hands (authority), there's many incentives for injustice, and the attack surface to take over the entire system is much bigger. And when you have police, prisons and military to impose the rule of the few by force, you end up in the worst timeline we're currently in where we have an abundance of resources and yet screaming poverty, and our ruling elites keep on fucking up the planet even more instead of redistributing resources so that in the end our entire species (and millions of others) will be wiped out. If you want to see how alternative political systems could look in practice, i strongly recommend to check out the zapatistas (and their caracoles) in Chiapas or to some extent democratic confederalism in Rojava (which is less centered on horizontal power and more centered better representation of multi-cultural societies [0]). While much of the world is seeing setbacks on political freedoms and economic justice, these two regions are going in the opposite direction. Also, on principle i'm not opposed to some technology helping collective processes. But blockchain as we know it (PoW, PoS) is deeply flawed, and whatever digital system we'll come up with will never be as accessible and auditable as local public decision-making. I understand that public votes in a local-first world could exacerbate some inequalities locally (eg. with an oppressed ethnic/religious/sexual minority in a given commune), but i'm convinced the overall gains would far outweigh those downsides including for oppressed minorities (and can argue on that point if someone is not convinced). The problem with Nation States is comparable to blockchain. Consensus building is hard but can be done with a limited set of peers (a commune) in which there are existing trust relationships. Trying to build a wide-scale consensus among untrusted peers is doomed to failure and in the best scenario results in "dictatorship of the majority" which is not a good outcome for minorities, and more realistically ends up with an oligarchy controlling much of the network. In that sense, i would argue DHTs and Bittorrent-like protocols are more anarchist than blockchain: there is a notion of global consensus (content-addressed storage enforced by cryptographic hashes) but neither the DHT nor trackers (who federate between autonomous nodes/communes) end up dictating what your local computing/politics should be like. Does that make sense to you? [0] Rojava is under constant military threat by Daech and turkish military, and the influential PKK while undergoing anti-authoritarian self-critique has decades of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practice to deconstruct. Both point don't help to build true local democracy (anarchy), although i would argue the region as a whole is moving in a better direction than most Nation States around the planet are.

robbiep 5y ago
Thanks for the explanation. I’m very aware of the possibility and methods of a number of different organisational structures, but mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things (probably the biggest and most well done example I would think would be the Mars Trilogy, but also anything by Ken MacLeod, Ursula K Le Guin). I take your points but am not convinced that the scale of the decision making entity, or the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking. I also think the transition to some such state would be messy as hell (but mostly for reasons tou identify like the desire of groups to maintain authority). You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities). I’m also not convinced at all that we are living in the worst of all possible worlds. Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions, and some places are vastly worse than others, but such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter, etc that it’s hard to make an argument that this isn’t the best point to be alive in all of human history.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things That's cool! But if you want to do some more reading on actual anarchism, i would recommend for example to read about the zapatistas in today's Chiapas, or the spanish revolution, or the ukraine commune. Or maybe read on the history of anarcho-syndicalism in your area, for example the history of the IWW in north-america. Anarchism takes many forms across the places and ages. Some people even make connections in their anarchism to much older ideologies such as christianity or taoism (among others). I personally find it important to recognize that anarchism is not a single ideology but an axiom (abolishing authority) with which to build specific political frameworks. In that sense, it's a very rich and diverse body of thought that's worth exploring in my view. > [i am not convinced that] the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking. I believe it is. The antifascist militias in revolutionary spain in the 1930s and the Makhnovshchina in Ukraine in the 1910s are good examples. They both were crushed due to being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Franco's army was heavily supported by both Hitler and Mussolini. The peasant's self-organized army in Ukraine had been successful at defending territories from both German troops (WWI) and the white army (royalists supporting the ousted tsar).. it's only after being weakened by all that, that the Red Army led by Trotsky was successful in betraying (they had an alliance) and defeating them. > You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities). I may be naive, but i personally think well-armed local communities cooperating for mutual interest is a much better situation than the current generalized injustice we live in where local populations are mostly powerless against State-backed industrial projects to expropriate them from their land or pollute their territories. I'm happy to elaborate on that topic (ZADs, forret occupations, etc) if you will. > Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions I personally think things would be better if there was no people in charge. Without a centralized police apparatus to arrest/imprison people, there would be zero homeless, given that there's an abundance of empty dwellings and that the vast majority of the population supports fighting homelessness (instead of fighting the homeless as our governments are doing). If there was no police and no State apparatus, we could almost literally snap fingers and have everyone housed: well that's a metaphor of course we'd need drills or lockpicks ;) > such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter I think this is a very reductionist and dangerous argument. I'm not arguing that the past was a golden age of happiness and leisure, but there's certainly countless metrics that have significantly worsened over the years, as well as an unmeasurable "quality of life" that's also worsened. We could for example mention free time (peasants from the middle ages had a lot more of that), clean environment (1/3 of the world population now drinks lead, and there's a lot more pollution sources than lead), as well as environmental changes (desertification) due to industry and monoculture. Just because some communities are/were poor in a materialist understanding of the world does not mean they have a poor/unhappy life. I understand that the argument for "progress" is appealing, but i personally believe it does not stand scrutiny. There's a lot of great advances (for example in medicine) that i wouldn't want to live without, but there's also many social/technological developments that i personally believe to be entirely hostile to humanity and countless other species not threatened by what some people refer to as "capitalocene". My point that we live in the worst timeline does not imply that everything is going bad, but rather that for some measure of some things going good, there's countless other things going really bad, bad enough to threaten a new massive extinction of species. How is that not the worst timeline? ;)

robbiep 5y ago

Thanks for the explanation. I’m very aware of the possibility and methods of a number of different organisational structures, but mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things (probably the biggest and most well done example I would think would be the Mars Trilogy, but also anything by Ken MacLeod, Ursula K Le Guin). I take your points but am not convinced that the scale of the decision making entity, or the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking. I also think the transition to some such state would be messy as hell (but mostly for reasons tou identify like the desire of groups to maintain authority). You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities). I’m also not convinced at all that we are living in the worst of all possible worlds. Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions, and some places are vastly worse than others, but such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter, etc that it’s hard to make an argument that this isn’t the best point to be alive in all of human history.

southerntofu 5y ago
> mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things That's cool! But if you want to do some more reading on actual anarchism, i would recommend for example to read about the zapatistas in today's Chiapas, or the spanish revolution, or the ukraine commune. Or maybe read on the history of anarcho-syndicalism in your area, for example the history of the IWW in north-america. Anarchism takes many forms across the places and ages. Some people even make connections in their anarchism to much older ideologies such as christianity or taoism (among others). I personally find it important to recognize that anarchism is not a single ideology but an axiom (abolishing authority) with which to build specific political frameworks. In that sense, it's a very rich and diverse body of thought that's worth exploring in my view. > [i am not convinced that] the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking. I believe it is. The antifascist militias in revolutionary spain in the 1930s and the Makhnovshchina in Ukraine in the 1910s are good examples. They both were crushed due to being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Franco's army was heavily supported by both Hitler and Mussolini. The peasant's self-organized army in Ukraine had been successful at defending territories from both German troops (WWI) and the white army (royalists supporting the ousted tsar).. it's only after being weakened by all that, that the Red Army led by Trotsky was successful in betraying (they had an alliance) and defeating them. > You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities). I may be naive, but i personally think well-armed local communities cooperating for mutual interest is a much better situation than the current generalized injustice we live in where local populations are mostly powerless against State-backed industrial projects to expropriate them from their land or pollute their territories. I'm happy to elaborate on that topic (ZADs, forret occupations, etc) if you will. > Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions I personally think things would be better if there was no people in charge. Without a centralized police apparatus to arrest/imprison people, there would be zero homeless, given that there's an abundance of empty dwellings and that the vast majority of the population supports fighting homelessness (instead of fighting the homeless as our governments are doing). If there was no police and no State apparatus, we could almost literally snap fingers and have everyone housed: well that's a metaphor of course we'd need drills or lockpicks ;) > such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter I think this is a very reductionist and dangerous argument. I'm not arguing that the past was a golden age of happiness and leisure, but there's certainly countless metrics that have significantly worsened over the years, as well as an unmeasurable "quality of life" that's also worsened. We could for example mention free time (peasants from the middle ages had a lot more of that), clean environment (1/3 of the world population now drinks lead, and there's a lot more pollution sources than lead), as well as environmental changes (desertification) due to industry and monoculture. Just because some communities are/were poor in a materialist understanding of the world does not mean they have a poor/unhappy life. I understand that the argument for "progress" is appealing, but i personally believe it does not stand scrutiny. There's a lot of great advances (for example in medicine) that i wouldn't want to live without, but there's also many social/technological developments that i personally believe to be entirely hostile to humanity and countless other species not threatened by what some people refer to as "capitalocene". My point that we live in the worst timeline does not imply that everything is going bad, but rather that for some measure of some things going good, there's countless other things going really bad, bad enough to threaten a new massive extinction of species. How is that not the worst timeline? ;)