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?
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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.
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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).
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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.