David Rolfe Graeber (/ˈɡreɪbər/; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.
I posted more about this below, but I think it would work, it would just take much longer. Coordination takes more time, but if there isn’t a time constraint (which I think can be true in a functionally post-scarcity world) then that is much less of an issue.
Maybe it would take several decades to do what it would have taken 5 years before. But if the fundamentals are covered in the meantime, why is that an issue?
i’d argue that slow scientific progress is morally questionable… people live longer and quality of life increases dramatically with new scientific research. to extend that time would need a pretty big offset to that to make up for it
I dunno, I feel like rushing forward and making hasty generalizations and doing shoddy science is also morally questionable, and also ultimately gets worse results. And I see a lot of that in the tech industry anyways.
Just a had a convo today with one my mentors about javascript framework benchmarks, and how the main ones don’t actually measure accurately at all because of the way the engine inlines and optimizes things. He went through all the trouble of building a tool to make it easier to do rigorous measurements, because engineers at the company had been doing these shoddy benchmarks, using it to justify shipping “optimizations”, getting a nice raise, and then he would come in and realize that they had really just moved the work elsewhere and it actually caused a regression here or there.
And nobody really cared in the end. They used it for a while, then it fell by the wayside.
Real scientific rigor isn’t really respected in the same way it used to be, if it ever was. It’s more about marketing, finding an angle you can sell. Because when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, everyone starts gaming it. And money and productivity have become the ultimate metric.
and none of these big projects that we’re talking about are shoddy science. they’re highly structured, complex, peer-reviewed affairs with thousands of people involved. we could use far more money towards these things and peoples’ lives would get significantly better
Yeah, we could. But the structures of capital as they are currently running are funneling money away from that, and toward what makes profit. Look at what they’ve done to Boeing, once an engineer led giant, now a hollow shell.
I think worker collectives and more distributed decision making would slow things down at first, but in the long run would lead to more stability, more ownership, and eventually in the long term, more speedup as we build out infrastructure. I also don’t think we’ll ever get to a fully decentralized society, for a variety of reasons. But the first step in that direction would be something like more democratic company decision making and ownership (e.g. like the German model where workers elect a board member on large companies).
totally agree that at the smaller level more democratic decision making is the way to go. on the larger scale though i think there needs to be more direction and planning. if you take that small organisation-level decision making and make it plan for others, then you essentially have a government department
i think that small groups are great for small groups but big and complex achievements are just big and complex, and need appropriately sized infrastructure (including human and organisational infrastructure) to properly manage and complete. society is kinda past small achievements - the things we have to learn are big and complex
thus, we need appropriate big and complex organisations… the structure of those i’m not sure, but they’re always going to be somewhat autocratic - you can’t just have small groups decide not to cooperate because they don’t like something that they don’t agree with. sometimes people have to do things that aren’t in their best interest because it’s in the best interests of others… NIMBY is the antithesis of a functioning society - we all give up something so others can be better off, and others give up lots of little things so we are also much better off
Yeah, absolutely, and as far as I understand it anarchism doesn’t really prevent large organizations from forming and coordinating.
My understanding of pure anarchism would have two main conditions for such coordinated orgs or efforts:
Now, these conditions aren’t realistic for real life all the time. Sometimes we need to be able to make decisions with a time constraint, and consensus is very, very slow. And likewise, sometimes resources are constrained and one can’t just leave and do their own thing. But if we see this as an ideal sort of direction, we can aim to get closer over time.
And this is actually how many professional organizations and technical groups work. For instance, TC39 is the committee that defines the JavaScript the language, and it works via consensus - any member can prevent a proposal from moving forward at any time. This makes it a very, very slow process, and people complain about this a lot (myself included, I was impatient when I first started working on proposals). But JavaScript also has the constraint of “no breaking changes, ever”. So these proposals are permanent, and we live with the consequences of earlier ones today. So a process that forces more thought, discussion, and agreement, that really makes us make sure it’s a good idea, is a good one here.
There are varying levels of this. 2/3rds majority rather than 51%. Requiring at least 50% and not a plurality. Approval voting is more in line with this than first-past-the-post. Etc etc.
Like I said, it’s not about preventing things from moving forward. It’s about slowing down a bit, and using that time to shore up infrastructure, solve general problems (like how do we get basic amenities for every person, or at least many more people), and getting society as a whole out of a scarcity, zero-sum mindset.