Some assholes are rich.

Psychopathy is a thing and touches a sizeable part of the population. It is unwise to dismiss their existence.

One of the most enlightening moments for me recently has been when a sociology researcher attempted an experiment on youtube to prove that we can organize without hierarchy. His main point was not what was interesting to me.

His experiment was actually flawed in a major way: he proposed a task to a group of 100 that was doable even by a single person. In such a case, organization is easy. But what I found interesting is that even in such a setting hierarchies emerged: people took some organizational power and others followed. Even if that was clearly unnecessary. And the crowd following his channel are probably less authoritarian than average.

It was a revelation to me: to have flat structures, you not only need to make it possible to organize without hierarchy, but you also need a process to constantly weed out emerging hierarchies. Another theory is that you should rather explicit some lesser-evil hierarchies to prevent the emergence of others, in the same way you may let one weed grow to prevent the emergence of other less desirable ones.

I still don’t have a theory or a praxis that goes with it, but that has been good food for thought.

fair enough

Bah c’est bien cool mais si on se met tous à parler notre langue nationale ici, on va avoir un peu de mal à échanger, non?

If you are aware of them, why don’t you join an existing cooperative like Motion Twin? I would recommend go to one first before trying to make your own

In gamedev like in many other endeavor, I would not start a coop or a regular company without some experience or without at least a clear project in mind.

Like you said, there is no big capital investment in gamedev but there is still one: time. In a coop you are asking people to invest their own time in the hope that a few months down the line, a video game will be able to make a profit in a very competitive market. You have to give people reason to do it and to do it with you instead of going solo. That’s how FOSS projects work.

You can lead the way: work a month on a project you would love and show people the result. It will be a WIP but as recruitment goes “help me finish that game” is easier to sell than “let’s get together discuss what you want but I promise there will be profit down the line, but I haven’t figured a business model yet”

Yes, participating in it does not necessarily align one consciously with anarchist ideals, just like participating in a private company does not necessarily make someone an enthusiastic capitalist, but the fact that so many people contribute or use open source allows us to use it as a practical example of the type of collaboration that we think should become the norm in an ideal society.

Ah sorry, I meant to not care about the person who authored/put forward some ideas, like Raymond or Marlinspike. Of course we care about convincing people!

Don’t care about the people (I heard weird things about Moxie too), care about the ideas and the organizations they spawn. One of the strengths of open source (that may very well come from a libertarian mindset) is that you don’t need to agree with its (technically) anarcho-communist nature to participate in it. Just like you don’t need to be an enthusiastic capitalist to engage in a wage job at a private company or to rent a place to live, despite both these things being very capitalist in nature.

Open-source and internet are two things that most people use daily. Android, libreoffice, vlc, firefox (or even chrome) are known by most people. Explaining that they come from a volunteer work (some developers were paid by their employers to participate but their employers’ participation is voluntary) has been the start of several interesting discussion on my side.

International research is also an interesting one: who is the boss of international research? Who decides the priority in e.g. machine learning research? COVID also gave a recent down-to-earth example (assuming you are not talking with conspiracy theorists) of how medical research organizes globally pretty well without the need for a hierarchy.

What is the source to claim it is #1 threat?

There is some merit in their counter-argument: mine is not an anti-statist argument but an anti-capitalist one. If they can at least agree that we don’t need capitalism for production, I will agree that these examples do not prove that we can do without statism.

These examples also prove something that I find hugely interesting IMHO: there is a upper bound to the type of projects that can be handled by hierarchical structures. Some projects are too big and complex for a state or company and can only be done in an anarchist way. Microsoft once conceded that they could not compete with the number of coders on the linux kernel.

We don’t exactly have criminals but we have bad actors. We find ways to manage them. From spam filtering to defederation. We are mostly law abiding people so we can’t get much harsher than that. (Though conservatives seem to think “cancelling” is a fascist thing to do so I guess they would surely accept that such a punishment should be enough for an orderly society? /s)

Army-wise, that’s a dangerous argument because it easily slides into defending other authoritarians but guerrilla warfare is considered about 10x more troops-effective than regular armies. It is far less hierarchical, hinges on local support, focuses on defense. Not 100% anarchist, but not a giant leap of imagination to get it there.

Big coalitions are less stable. I doubt the left is less stable that the right though.

Ok, yes I agree, ease of access is important. I just mean that lowering the material barrier of entry is not enough to make a project anarchist in nature.

I am talking about the governance of the whole thing. The IETF is a volunteer organization. Most of the protocols that fuel the whole thing are coming from its RFC, they are not enforced, purely voluntarily. We owe them principles like the net neutrality. I am saying “early internet” because I don’t know if it is still like this but it very well may be. Are we lucky that these people believed in self-organization or was it doomed to happen this way, internet being too big of a project to be steered in a different fashion? We will probably never know.

You are talking about accessibility, which is an important aspect as well, but I would argue an orthogonal one: Google search is extremely accessible, it is far from being anarchist.

I prefer to give examples by citing anarchist successes (that don’t call themselves anarchist but clearly are)

• open source
• the organization of international research
• the early internet

All of these are populated by mostly non anarchist individuals, sometimes motivated by profit or selfish incentive, yet they organize non coercively

It is not hyperbole. They were out there to kill some high ranking officials they did not like. It would have been a real, non-hyperbole, coup. It would have been a situation of actual, non-hyperbole, civil war, with military taking sides. It would have been a suspension of US democracy. They were there to install a new regime. Had Pelosi, Pence and AOC (named targets of the assailants) been killed on that day, do you really think it would be business as usual?

I want to believe that 99% of the army would know who to support and that this would have ended in 24h but even in that case, the world would be substantially different.

Geopolitics tends to be a field of analysis for experts and journalists interested in the competing fortunes of nation-states, their alliances and institutions. They bring to it a level of strategizing similar to sports commentators at Sunday football: they understand the repertoire of plays, they can suss out strengths and weaknesses, but they will never deconstruct the history of the game

We must not read the same source of geopolitics. The common question is “how does this change the game?” “Have the rules changed?”. Of particular anarchist interest is the fact that armies tend to veer towards more local autonomy rather than top down hierarchies (still a far cry from anarchism, but one can see there a vindication of our ideas). The role of UN is constantly discussed and illustrates the limits of (kinda) consensus-based non-coercive approaches. EU-Hungary politics or NATO-Turkey give a lesson on the cost of decisions by unanimity and ways to circumvent vetos. I think that is disingenuous to not interest one-self in geopolitics on the premise that country-states are undesirable. Don’t get too emotionally involved, sure, but it remains interesting.

I did not go to the end of the article, disagreeing at half the sentences. Just wanted to state a strong disagreement on that statement:

Fascists are not close to taking over

In the US? They have been extremely close to take over. There is one single person that stood between them and the officials they wanted to kill: Lt. Michael Byrd. And the luck that was with us about the one well-armed insurrectionist group that got lost in the building. Nothing has been effectively done to prevent a rematch, it was extremely close.

I’m very much pro-tech, pro-civ, pro-AI, pro-medicine and pro-LGBT & disability rights

Describes me as well and I would not stay in an anPrim circlejerk. My main hobby is trying to steer solarpunks towards techs that empower rather than enslave.

Or just a single user.

None of them are up to election.

When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?

Yes, you do that and you get some fucking political culture about the fact the president is not an emperor king and that the control of the congress matters more. You also learn that some policy take years to show some effect and that politicians are specialist about deflecting blame on predecessors while claiming their success.

The immigration/deportation/incarceration policy of the US is a fucking disgrace and it wont be solved overnight, but thinking that the party who calls for the end of the for-profit prison is as bad as the one who pardoned the creation of a racial concentration camp is just dumb. Counting drone strikes but dismissing the fact that without the disastrous GWB presidency there would have been neither the Iraq war nor the Afghanistan war, not the “war on terrorism” idiocy and possibly not even 9/11, that’s also voluntarily blinding yourself.

HARM REDUCTION DOES NOT MEAN YOU VOTE TO SUPPORT, IT LITERALLY MEANS YOU VOTE TO OPPOSE!