Labor-based production is such 20th century thinking. Modern companies don’t try to make products, they try to acquire capital. Intellectual property, industrial capacity, housing, utilities access, etc. Cornering a market is so much more profitable than trying to compete in it.

Why do you think there’s so much money going into AI? They can’t wait to rid themselves of their human workforce so that humans starving to death won’t affect their production targets.

If capitalists get their way, capitalism will outlive humanity. Inefficient humans and their annoying ecosystem dependency will be left to boil to death or something while Von Neumann probes owned by AI-managed corporations spread across the universe. Just imagine, one share in SpaceX would be worth several galaxies. You won’t find a better ROI anywhere in the universe!

I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, “pessimism” is an odd phrase, but they’ll be glad to hear you’re warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, “abandon” is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Right now we’re clearly still making more steps in the wrong direction than the right one. Militarization, abandonment of climate research and (already too lenient) climate goals, continued investments in fossil fuels, planned obsolescence, neocolonialism, etc.

With the US turning fascist and the rest of the world massively increasing military expenditure, I’m pretty sure even the ratio between steps in the right direction and steps in the wrong direction is worse this year.

I briefly stayed at a multi-millionaire’s place. They did have a herb garden. Nice planters and automated watering systems. All provided and maintained by the groundskeeping company, of course. I sincerely doubt they ever planted anything, they just grabbed herbs when they needed them and instructed people what herbs they wanted.

I imagine richer people might similarly have food gardens maintained by waitstaff. Maybe not around their primary residence, but what if the desire to cosplay as or claim to be a farmer or plantation owner strikes them?

Unauthorized government cheese.

That literally is the opposite of a comedy.

The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.

Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.

There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else’s. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:

None of us are free until all of us are free.

Getting enough food supplies to last a season. Having plans for what to do if the power goes out for a week. Having a bug-out bag ready to go. Connecting with a community to prep for potential self-sufficiency. Learning skills that would be useful in a post-global trade scenario. Getting money out of banks and into tools and goods you can give away or sell. etc.

I strongly disagree with one of the core arguments of the article. The article describes “concentric circles of caring” - a person caring more about friends than acquaintances than compatriots than others. It then characterizes top-down action as trying to change from the outside in while bottom-up changes from the inside out.

This seems very clearly false. There are many top-down initiatives, like national welfare plans or child support subsidies, that try to work from the inside out. And there are many bottom-up initiatives, like veganism or supporting undocumented refugees, that try to work from the outside in.

As such, the question of outside in and/or inside out bears no relation to top-down or bottom-up. The conclusion of plurality of tactics remains intact, but only because it is the best position in a zero information scenario. (aka: throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks).

I think you’re giving the author too little credit. They talk of the necessity of establishing solidarity outside the preconceived circle of caring, which can directly be understood to include the rest of nature.

The author doesn’t give an indication either way, so perhaps they should have been more explicit if they agree with you, but “I don’t think it’s that simple” is a bad way to address that.

Conservatives are perfectly capable of understanding positive-sum games when they expect the privileged in-group to be the benefactor. What is a labor contract, if not a positive-sum game where the corporation sucks up all the positive gain?

Game theory as a cental tenet of the human condition is a liberal concept, which conservatives will happily discard if it doesn’t suit them. Conservatives may cloak their disapproval in the guise of liberal concerns so that they’re in a stronger debate position in liberal-dominated social circles, but what they’re really upset by is the negation of the conservative world order - a strict hierarchy with narcissistic men at the top of clearly delineated nations, struggling for dominance through pettiness and violence.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.

Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.

People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.

So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.

That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.

How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind.

Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.

So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they’re already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.

Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they’ll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.

But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn’t really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.

This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.

can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them

If you can’t find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that’s a good sign that you’re wrong about wanting to exile them.

Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?

In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on “no catcalling” norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn’t have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.

The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.

Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.

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Get in the van, no using pronouns here >:(

No true Scotsman would ever lie about Chinese spy technology.

Reuters is citing “two people familiar with the matter” and people in the US federal government not even speaking through an official announcement. While I trust Reuters not to have made up those people’s words, this does mean that so far the only source is semi-random US government employees.

So it literally is just the word of people working for Trump we’re going on.

And for context, it is quite common for reputable news agencies to misreport things, or to take the word of a government employee as final when they really shouldn’t. I personally saw a video of a car running into a climate action protest¹, only for the ‘reputable’ Dutch state news agency (NOS) simply going by the police spokesperson’s statement that the climate activists had scratched the car before it hit them². But the NOS just said the spokesperson said it, so reputation-wise they were in the clear.

Now I’m not saying the genocidal dictatorship known as the People’s Republic of China is not putting spyware on devices shipped to the west. I’m just saying that we need more than an unofficial statement by an employee working under Trump, even if that statement is being signal boosted by Reuters. Skepticism is warranted.

¹: At 48:50 in this livestream, in the left part of the splitscreen. Luckily it was at walking pace so nobody was injured as far as I know.

²: This article, in Dutch.

No matter what system you have, the luck of the draw will give some people more powerful hands than others. If that is enough to destroy your system, then your system can never be implemented in reality.

The self-managing community would have inequality, but its organisatory principles would address that inequality in the same way that they would address an inequality that is caused by natural randomness. If that method of addressing inequality is more empowering for the community than capitalist democracy, then the community would gain in power relative to capitalist communities. This inspires other communities to likewise empower themselves, and either together or alone they can fight off police action and start a revolution.

Sorry, I was trying to make a reference to an image macro. What I was trying to express is that I didn’t understand the explanation.

I’m not American, and no.