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My main takeaway from that series was the anecdotes about the communes living in geodesic domes who operated under a hierarchy-less system but all of them alleg

My main takeaway from that series was the anecdotes about the communes living in geodesic domes who operated under a hierarchy-less system but all of them allegedly imploded due to a common mechanism: In a community that has no explicit rules, implicit rules emerge. Power accumulates quietly to the people who know the rules and can bend them often. In those situations the powerless are even more vulnerable to the powerful because of the lack of an explicit power structure with rules that would usually require checks and balances in order for people to opt into the system.

mjburgess 2y ago
And how often do we hear a demand to 'direct' democracy, egalitarianism, the end of policing, and so on.. from those with a-little-to-much but clearly not-enough, power? There's rarely anything more in people's political prescriptions other than, "I do not have enough power, and I want more" -- and there's nothing inherently wrong with this demand. Only that when it is disguised by the false promise of power for everyone, it means power for almost no one.
- soco 2y ago
  Now now, let's not forget that there are already direct democracies at work in the world ahemtzerland and the general inland consensus is that they work.
  - dbspin 2y ago
    Yes - and there are hundreds of thousands of small groups applying principles of direct democracy in practice, from democratic schools to consensus based art centres. People have been collectively organising movements and spaces for many decades now, and the processes are pretty well worked out. Comparing utopian dropouts in the 60's running farms on vibes to dedicated activists establishing and maintaining consensus based social contracts is disingenuous. There's plenty to be criticised in terms of the practical aspects of these systems - from implementation to scalability, and good luck to the folks doing the hard work of improving them. But dismissing them out of hand is an argument from ignorance.
    - Nevermark 2y ago
      > small groups applying principles of direct democracy Small groups. That is the problem. It can work but doesn't scale. As the number of people go up, the need and benefits of more complex coordination go up. People's interactions, dependencies, needs, understandings and problems multiply in quantity, complexity and diversity. People O(n). Decisions O(n^2). Direct coordination becomes too costly in time and effort. And people get asked to make decisions in areas where they have no skin in the game, so put little care into their decisions, or seek selfish benefits opportunistically. Things get difficult and ugly. The default is a descent into anarchy, which gets counter weighted by emergent initiatives that centralize decision making around people who care, have expertise, are good at taking power, etc. Acknowledged or not, "direct", as the universal principle of decision making, no longer works. Better to see it coming and as directly and openly as possible, prescribe how indirect governance is to be done. As openly and accountably as possible. Organizations and societies, like computer memory and and processing cores in server centers, need to bifurcate and modularize into different levels, types and policies, to remain efficient and reliable at scale.
      - soco 2y ago
        Once again for the last row: Switzerland. 9 millions inhabitants, 5.5 millions with voting rights, 0 anarchy. Is that still not big enough for the no true scotsman?
        Nevermark 2y ago
        They have councils and parties, classic institutions of centralization and decision delegation. The people in those organizations, especially the leaders, have tremendous outsized power to decide and frame what issues and candidates are exposed to votes by the democracy as a whole. And of course, in the best position to maintain their own positions or set up their successors chances. So no - they are not a direct democracy. For the unavoidable reasons I gave. However yes, they are doing a fantastic and inspiring job of maintaining as much directness as possible. And at keeping the centralized and indirect processes formalized, open and accountable. Vs. the US, where even the president isn't elected directly; lower offices are heavily controlled by whoever draws district maps, often the incumbents; only two parties have much power, and conspire together to maintain that - reducing citizen choices to only two preset menus of policies & governance styles; parties enforce litmus tests on their own candidates at all levels of office, vastly increasing party leadership power at the expense of eliminating 99% of potential alternative views. The result of all this power hoarding are many laws in significant opposition to majority views, and an institutionalization of two way service and influence with the rich. The highest court nomination process and members of the highest court have become aggressively politicized and brazenly unethical. Overall, the US system has become increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, divisive and dystopian. Switzerland is amazing.
  - eru 2y ago
    Switzerland works because it's Switzerland, and despite the direct democracy. Day to day their government is run via elected representatives, just like almost anywhere else.
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  All the goals you named are about literally removing tyranny and adding structured egalitarianism. Curious that you only mention leftist policy issues when rightoids are the ones whose entire ideology is about the will to power
  - mionhe 2y ago
    Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate. Looking at it that way, though, I find myself concerned with the people who are setting themselves up as the arbiters of my fate. Regardless of party affiliations, they don't seem to think very highly of me or care about my personal happiness. Seeing that is the case, I'd rather they stay out of the business of pursuing my happiness and instead support my freedom to pursue happiness. I can be responsible for my own happiness.
    - wredcoll 2y ago
      > Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate. I find this meme, in the original sense, rather odd. Speaking as an american, over the last 40 years the right wing of our political institutions have been extremely hierarchical and authoritarian. Right wing ideologies are almost entirely based on which group should obey which other group and why. The term left-wing has gotten a little vague recently, but I think you could say that the common premise of most of their political theory is that there's already/always going to be a powerful government that everyone has to obey so we might as well make that government the best it can possibly be for as many people as possible. (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)
      - BigFnTelly 2y ago
        > (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.) This journal article discusses power in two forms: - 'Power to' (freedom, from others): a variable-sum game - 'Power over' (others, ultimately denying freedoms): a zero-sum game I'm no scientist and this is just from the abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1827960 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1...
kreyenborgi 2y ago
> In a community that has no explicit rules, implicit rules emerge This is The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- BigFnTelly 2y ago
  this was a great read, thanks
  - bothsidesnow 2y ago
    Obligatory response: The Tyranny of Tyranny by Cathy levine https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyranny-of-tyranny https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyr...

mjburgess 2y ago

And how often do we hear a demand to 'direct' democracy, egalitarianism, the end of policing, and so on.. from those with a-little-to-much but clearly not-enough, power? There's rarely anything more in people's political prescriptions other than, "I do not have enough power, and I want more" -- and there's nothing inherently wrong with this demand. Only that when it is disguised by the false promise of power for everyone, it means power for almost no one.

soco 2y ago
Now now, let's not forget that there are already direct democracies at work in the world ahemtzerland and the general inland consensus is that they work.
- dbspin 2y ago
  Yes - and there are hundreds of thousands of small groups applying principles of direct democracy in practice, from democratic schools to consensus based art centres. People have been collectively organising movements and spaces for many decades now, and the processes are pretty well worked out. Comparing utopian dropouts in the 60's running farms on vibes to dedicated activists establishing and maintaining consensus based social contracts is disingenuous. There's plenty to be criticised in terms of the practical aspects of these systems - from implementation to scalability, and good luck to the folks doing the hard work of improving them. But dismissing them out of hand is an argument from ignorance.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    > small groups applying principles of direct democracy Small groups. That is the problem. It can work but doesn't scale. As the number of people go up, the need and benefits of more complex coordination go up. People's interactions, dependencies, needs, understandings and problems multiply in quantity, complexity and diversity. People O(n). Decisions O(n^2). Direct coordination becomes too costly in time and effort. And people get asked to make decisions in areas where they have no skin in the game, so put little care into their decisions, or seek selfish benefits opportunistically. Things get difficult and ugly. The default is a descent into anarchy, which gets counter weighted by emergent initiatives that centralize decision making around people who care, have expertise, are good at taking power, etc. Acknowledged or not, "direct", as the universal principle of decision making, no longer works. Better to see it coming and as directly and openly as possible, prescribe how indirect governance is to be done. As openly and accountably as possible. Organizations and societies, like computer memory and and processing cores in server centers, need to bifurcate and modularize into different levels, types and policies, to remain efficient and reliable at scale.
    - soco 2y ago
      Once again for the last row: Switzerland. 9 millions inhabitants, 5.5 millions with voting rights, 0 anarchy. Is that still not big enough for the no true scotsman?
      - Nevermark 2y ago
        They have councils and parties, classic institutions of centralization and decision delegation. The people in those organizations, especially the leaders, have tremendous outsized power to decide and frame what issues and candidates are exposed to votes by the democracy as a whole. And of course, in the best position to maintain their own positions or set up their successors chances. So no - they are not a direct democracy. For the unavoidable reasons I gave. However yes, they are doing a fantastic and inspiring job of maintaining as much directness as possible. And at keeping the centralized and indirect processes formalized, open and accountable. Vs. the US, where even the president isn't elected directly; lower offices are heavily controlled by whoever draws district maps, often the incumbents; only two parties have much power, and conspire together to maintain that - reducing citizen choices to only two preset menus of policies & governance styles; parties enforce litmus tests on their own candidates at all levels of office, vastly increasing party leadership power at the expense of eliminating 99% of potential alternative views. The result of all this power hoarding are many laws in significant opposition to majority views, and an institutionalization of two way service and influence with the rich. The highest court nomination process and members of the highest court have become aggressively politicized and brazenly unethical. Overall, the US system has become increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, divisive and dystopian. Switzerland is amazing.
- eru 2y ago
  Switzerland works because it's Switzerland, and despite the direct democracy. Day to day their government is run via elected representatives, just like almost anywhere else.
marxisttemp 2y ago
All the goals you named are about literally removing tyranny and adding structured egalitarianism. Curious that you only mention leftist policy issues when rightoids are the ones whose entire ideology is about the will to power
- mionhe 2y ago
  Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate. Looking at it that way, though, I find myself concerned with the people who are setting themselves up as the arbiters of my fate. Regardless of party affiliations, they don't seem to think very highly of me or care about my personal happiness. Seeing that is the case, I'd rather they stay out of the business of pursuing my happiness and instead support my freedom to pursue happiness. I can be responsible for my own happiness.
  - wredcoll 2y ago
    > Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate. I find this meme, in the original sense, rather odd. Speaking as an american, over the last 40 years the right wing of our political institutions have been extremely hierarchical and authoritarian. Right wing ideologies are almost entirely based on which group should obey which other group and why. The term left-wing has gotten a little vague recently, but I think you could say that the common premise of most of their political theory is that there's already/always going to be a powerful government that everyone has to obey so we might as well make that government the best it can possibly be for as many people as possible. (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)
    - BigFnTelly 2y ago
      > (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.) This journal article discusses power in two forms: - 'Power to' (freedom, from others): a variable-sum game - 'Power over' (others, ultimately denying freedoms): a zero-sum game I'm no scientist and this is just from the abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1827960 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1...

kreyenborgi 2y ago

> In a community that has no explicit rules, implicit rules emerge This is The Tyranny of Structurelessness: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

BigFnTelly 2y ago
this was a great read, thanks
- bothsidesnow 2y ago
  Obligatory response: The Tyranny of Tyranny by Cathy levine https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyranny-of-tyranny https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/cathy-levine-the-tyr...