Unfortunately, Poe’s Law

“But I’ve been indemnified!” yelled the oil ghoul as he was carried off to be burned at the stake by pitchfork wielding pesants…

China is the same, but better at propaganda. There can be no centralized solution.

I talked about it in a previous chapter, but basically the antidote to all of these is immediately revocable authority (basically, free association). This is what makes the mastodon a good model vs centralized social media. By being federated, you can leave without (necessarily) losing your connections and (with account transfer) you can even move the rest of the data.

Any bureaucracy can be exactly as corrupt as it is able to keep people under it’s control. If it can be dissolved or those under it’s control can leave at will, things can only get so bad.

To make this all concrete (using slrpnk.net as an example), I could imagine an affinity group (as described here) recognizing the value of this site. A services committee meeting may then agree that a couple of members of the affinity group should support administration. So then these folks would ask to join the admin team. The works committee could determine that they should use general funds to donate to hosting on a regular basis.

Perhaps members of the existing admin team here might start their own affinity group. Their works committee provides labor and funds to support the site. At some point the two affinity groups discover each other and federate into a collective. Via some collective agreements the second affinity group agrees to take some portion of the hosting cost on occasion in acorn bread and mead made by the first affinity group. The second affinity group transfers the money they would have spent on food and booze to hosting and spends a bit less over all, the first spends a little bit less since they’re making things themselves, both get to support the project.

The micro-bureaucracy of slrpnk.net becomes the responsibility of the collective to support, but that doesn’t mean it’s then taken over by the collective. It remains an open public good. This becomes an example of the especifismo concept of “social insertion” (at least as best as I understand it).

I think there are a number of definitions in use. The term often implies hierarchy (through, that’s not how it’s being used here). Here it’s being used to describe an entity that systematically manages resources (including knowing). I probably could have continued with the microservice metaphor, but I felt like that would alienate folks who aren’t familiar with tech.

There’s definitely a negative connotation. I feel like I need to read “Utopia of Rules” to have a better understanding of his critique. I am sort of referencing the “forms of domination” from Dawn of Everything, in that a large bureaucracy can be leveraged into power over people. That is, if you manage a resource for someone you can end up with power over them. Thus making it smaller reduces the impact in case the system must be abandoned or replaced.

Really, we’re talking about various forms of commons management (folks should refer to Elinor Ostrom’s work). Everything we do or share together is a type of commons, and the term here is referring to the machinery of management.

I would probably go on to say that slrpnk.net is itself a commons managed by this type of micro-bureaucracy. I mean this in a good way. In saying this, I also mean that the VSM would be a good tool for auditing the health of the organization (it’s always good to keep in mind and keep healthy). Graeber was an amazing anthropologist and thinker, but I don’t think his critique was informed by cybernetics or organizational theory. I think that I have a more positive connotation for the word than the negative one I get from his writing.

Unless you are working at a cooperative, people are getting paid for their hours not for their labor. You absolutely should not improve things at work in any way unless you can get value out of it, because doing so feeds capitalism at the expense of everything else. Capitalism is a game where each side tries to get the maximum value out of the time. The capitalist wins when they maximize the value of your time, the worker wins when they maximize the amount of money they get for the minimum effort.

Some people are overwhelmed, some people are just trying to survive. A lot of people see that any effort they put in making things better, like at work, will just be turned against them to make the world worse. It’s really hopeless sometimes. A lot of time there just isn’t any space in people’s lives to even think outside survival.

But don’t confuse masking for happiness. People are angry and depressed. Very very few people are happy with the world the way it is. A lot of folks have just given up. People telling you that you should give up only want to feel better about their own failure, their own acquiescence to the void. Trauma does this to people. It traps people. It makes people give up. It makes people feel hopeless. It makes people uncreative. It makes it hard for people to believe in the possibility of hope.

Your work is probably not the place to focus on improving things, unless you’re either working in a cooperative or you’re organizing a union.

Personally, I think we’re all thinking about this whole thing wrong. Capitalism is a death cult. But in spite of that, we have hope. We have faith that we can create a better world, and we have evidence that is true. The world we live in is full of zero-sum games, games that pit us against each other. When we can turn these games into non-zero-sum games, games of cooperation, we can change everything. Capitalist labor markets are zero-sum because whoever wins it’s always at the expense of the other player (spoiler, the game is rigged for capitalists to win almost all the time).

The choice to cooperate or compete is similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. There is a clear optimal strategy for a single game of the prisoner’s dilemma: betray your opponent. But things get interesting when you play multiple times. Iterated prisoners dilemma (that is, playing the game multiple times while knowing all the previous moves) flips that strategy, making the optimal strategy one of guarded cooperation.

The secret here is that you need to have other people. At a high enough density, cooperation defeats competition. The better news is that you are here. From this core, we can support each other in building this world. We can continue to support bringing hope into the world.

There’s a book called Change: How to Make Big Things Happen. It’s about how movements happen. At first they are invisible, or small. But at a certain point they cascade and move very quickly. I’d recommend reading this book to think about how everything changes. I’d also focus locally. The thing that snaps people out of this hopelessness is actually just seeing what is possible. Make something that seems impossible happen. Start small, and build from there. What solar punk thing can you make real?

Can you start a tool library? What about even just a media library among friends? What’s the smallest thing you could do to bring a bit of the solar punk world you want into the current dystopia? Do one thing to prove it’s possible, then see what becomes possible next.

A bit… But it’s still very much a work in progress.

In Parable of the Sower, only the rich drive cars and those are basically armored vehicles… Which Octavia Butler predicted in 1993. Still on track for that I see.

My first thought was Cooperation Jackson. They have something about municipalism on their site. I’ve run across a few, but none pop to mind at the moment.

They will absolutely not. But nothing stops us from helping the people they’re leading realize that they need an escalation plan, and leadership will not ever give them one.

The first 50501 was completely self-organized before being co-opted by DNC adjacent orgs. Those orgs may not be able to control the protests forever, especially if we have a say in it.

Elinor Ostrom is cited a lot by anarchists, and her work is super relevant to post-capitalist societies.

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Well, lobbying in the US means “bribing” and if you’re just going to talk to them without money in hand they don’t give a fuck. Since the film is set in the US, that kind of matters. Lobbying against oil anywhere in the world is basically just ignored. Again, direct action gets the goods.

Lobbying is “begging for permission” from people who have been paid to not care. “Direct action gets the goods.”

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

Evergreen: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too

Related, there’s actually a rundown on a bunch of the opsec problems with it: https://anarchist-archive.org/library/en/hakan-geijer-popsec-how-not-to-blow-up-a-pipeline

It’s a good story, and would be extremely bad to follow as a recipe. But it would be a good movie to watch with a very small group of like-minded friends.

Wow, I really hope no one writes “How to Blow Up a Fractionating Column With a $20 Drone.” Pipelines are pretty easy to mass produce, but attacks on distillation towers like we’ve seen come out of Ukraine can knock out a refinery for years.

it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict.

I don’t disagree, exactly, but I have a few thoughts on this. The first is just… “how is that different from now?” You’re just describing modern geopolitics. If we’re comparing two systems and they both have the same flaws but one has some benefits, then the flaws really don’t matter. This doesn’t put us any worse than we are now, and it actually makes things much better… which comes to the second point (not well addressed in the doc).

I think this is where people tend to fundamentally misunderstand conflict. War is incredibly resource intensive. Carrying out war ultimately makes the warring society untenable, and we’ve seen this with the collapse of every empire. There’s a section in The Art of War (I can’t remember exactly) that discusses logistics. Sun Tzu essentially says that each soldier deployed requires seven people in the field (growing grain, harvesting, etc) to support. Soldiers and equipment have only become more expensive for offensive deployment. Meanwhile, asymmetric warfare has decreased the cost of defense and campaigns to destabilize empires. Ursula K le Guin’s Always Coming Home touches on this point at the end (not to spoil it, for anyone down to take on the challenge but she argues that under some cases defense may not even be necessary at all).

A large empire may be able to maintain enough excess to support global oppression for decades or centuries, especially with complex financial manipulation. Bigger systems can just absorb more chaos without destabilizing quickly. I think of aquaponics, where the larger the tank the longer you have to adjust the system before critical failure: more water means more thermal mass, more oxygen in the water, more capacity to absorb waste before it becomes toxic. Small tanks can crash rapidly. A small leak can drain all the water. A broken pump can mean quickly running out of air or toxifying water. The system just doesn’t have room.

A local economy is the same. Russia may be able to survive an almost total economic blockade for 6 years (by current estimates), but it will still collapse (perhaps quite soon). How long could Cleveland Ohio survive such a blockade? Most major cities would collapse in less than a week.

So yes, this type of system requires federation and cooperation between localities but it doesn’t actually require a central authority. Which is a good thing, since we have no central authority now and we’ve never figured out how to have a top level central authority. There has never been a top level central authority globally. The best we’ve ever come up with were the League of Nations and the United Nations, and those both seem to have mostly failed for pretty much the same reasons.

Edit: The original text does touch on sanctions and blockades, but yeah, I read it as being vaguely liberal and the liberal solution of “we need a central authority” always runs out of turtles somewhere.