It is also non-coercitive.

I would argue that when you have 1000+ people, you will necessarily have subgroups, teams, you wont have 1000 on 1000 communication. There will be subtasks, people a bit more specialized at organization and communication. Topologically, you will have a graph of people passing through specialized communication nodes. I think it is unavoidable.

There is no reason however for seeing these nodes as “above” the others. It is out of habit that we organize things as a pyramid, but the fact is if a dev or a maintainer disagree, they have no way to force each other. Resolution comes from overall consensus, and the reason why Linus Torvalds is often the arbiter of these cases is because he is very respected by the rest of the community, but whole forks have existed (and have been reintegrated).

Open source politics is quite different from what people are used to. The ability to fork a whole project gives a mean of resistance that no other organization has.

The linux development team

I am part of a citizen’s collective that promotes direct democracy. They did not theorize the narcissism-authoritarian link explicitly, but gave a few tricks that worked here to make some bad actors flee:

• Avoid one-on-one conversations with potential bad actors, have a public channel and put things there even when they insist on communicating directly (they hated that)
• Talk explicitly about how positions of powers are going to be distributed but also how they are NOT going to be. The earlier you have them tag you as a dead end for their political career, the better.

And I think that we failed on that account here: recognize that they are going to go from friendly to hostile in the blink of an eye and be ready for it.

One thing I will do differently in the future is that I will not waste too much time with people who can’t clarify their positions and disagreements.

I am really happy that this question led to so much elaboration. It does come from a person I know IRL who talks a lot about the psychology of power structures, having had to deal with too many psychopaths himself. If you are interested in the profile of authoritarian followers, which is different from leaders, there is an abundant literature on RWA profiles (right wing authoritarianism, but a bit ill named as stalinists followed similar patterns)

Power/authority needs to be based on trust, and it needs to be lost at the same instant as the trust that supports it is. The overhead of getting everyone together to hold a vote of no-confidence is way too high.

We should reverse the logic of the ‘signing onto law’ where a final formality gives a president, a chancellor or a queen an actual but rare veto power.

There should be something like a representative assembly that has to give a ‘go’ vote for coercive power to be exerted. Nowadays it can be very lightweight: remote voting can be secure easily if it is not anonymous (representatives, one can argue, should vote publicly).

It should be almost automatic when trust is there, but if it is absent, mere doubts should be enough to block an action.

We would live ina very different world if the representatives of a neighborhood had to give the ‘go’ for a police operation

can Anarchists build and maintain public infrastructure?

Internet

Wikipedia

Many open source projects

One could argue that international research efforts are generally done in a non-coercivie way

Anarchist ways can maintain public infrastructure, but they need to be built differently with that modus operandi in mind.

Over the past years, reading more about the dark triad/quadriad, I am becoming more and more convinced that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that it is 100% of the explanation, that there is nothing more to it. Want to fight authoritarianism? Stop narcissist. It is not a matter of ideology, of left or right, of reformist vs revolutionary, it is just a matter of psychological profile. Stop the narcissist, that’s all.

How do we build systems that are resilient to sabotage without falling into authoritarian logic?

I had a eye-opening moment with this videp, whose title (“Can 100 people self-organize without a leader”) is actually misleading, as it (IMHO) failed to demonstrate what it wanted to test, but demonstrated something much more interesting. The task given to 100 people was too simple to require multiple people (a “hack” they forbade has shown that one person was enough to do the full task) yet, a hierarchy “naturally” emerged. Even though the sample population is biased towards people who would not be very hierarchical.

My main takeaway was that an organization that does not want a hierarchy does not only need to make it possible to self-organize, but needs to actively “weed out” hierarchies. That’s hard, I don’t know of any examples of it.

Yes, I meant as a client. I thought you were looking at options to hook up guests to a openssh-sftp-server

Filezilla is also a popular option

That’s interesting! Thanks

sFTP. If you have a machine with a ssh server, it has sFTP capabilities.

Accountability is the #1 enemy of any narcissist. The responses you’ll get will be absolutely insane.

I think everyone agrees that there is a connection between narcissism and authoritarianism. This conversation makes me wonder though, if there is not more than a mere correlation. Could it be that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that there is literally nothing else there?

Some people are oppressors and these are usually found in the right wing. Inside of the rest though there’s a lot of variety. Some wouldn’t mind at all taking the rôle of the oppressors.

They are not from their caste or from their social circles. This is the only reason why they need a revolution. They look like comrades because they appear to have the same enemy. Yet their goal is just a reversal of the situation not an abolition of the oppression.

I am sure some troll farm amplify them but I have met some IRL. Left wing authoritarianism is a thing, historically and nowadays.

I don’t think it’s an all or nothing question, it’s a matter of knowing where you are putting the cursor. And I think we agree that thinking in terms of punishment is counterproductive. I prefer to think in terms of incentives.

According to Graebber, we do have a lot of empirical data because primitive populations were basically using either gift economy or debt/reputation economies. Contrary to popular belief, barter was not a common way of doing transactions. Thing is, that was held by some sort of xenophobia where you can’t really accept people from outside to partake in it unless they accept a ton of often pretty regressive social rules. So that’s not exactly a model, but this is a lot of data we can examine.

I don’t really know cases of gift economies being tried and failing, but it’s possible that it often isn’t reported if it happens.

Anytime a non-profit stops for lack of volunteers, that’s a gift economy that’s failing. Whether it is goods or service that you are giving, that’s part of a gift economy.

And many, many, many experiments since the 60s and the 70s have been done in that respect. And none managed to grow organically.

In terms of social predictive reasoning, you could make the argument that openly telling resellers “it’s fine if you resell it if you need the money but please donate or contribute if you can, and please tell people about us” is way more effective than turning it into a game of wits

One of the eye-opening themes that recently added a layer of depth to my views on anarchism was neurodiversity. I realized that the reasons that made me prefer anarchism and gift economies and reputation economies were mostly psychological and that not having them did not make people idiots or less moral than I am. Therefore, if I want to see a society where I am comfortable and where I fit, I have to make it work within a system where other psychological profiles are also comfortable.

A lot of people will naturally abide by rules that are given, even if they have no teeth. Some people like us will infer rules from a really free market about the fact that one should not resell things that are given. But I have met enough people to know that there is also a very common profile that considers that if you can get away with free stuff, you are smart. And the people who made these rules are dumb. And it’s totally fine to “win” by taking away what you can.

These people exist. And it’s not a rare profile. They are not going to be stopped by a sign that just says “please”. And I don’t want a system where we have policemen chasing them and beating them up if they don’t obey the rules. It’s unavoidable, we have to play their game of wits to some extent.

It is a constraint, but it is the same type of constraints that you have when you have to design something for colorblind people or to make it accessible to wheelchairs.

I don’t know if I would call it teeth, but I think a sufficient incentive can simply be access. You want to participate in a gift economy? Yes? then welcome. You are partaking action that would destroy it? Then no, you’re stuck to the less efficient capitalist system then, and we are only going to sell things to you that we have would have given to other people.

Thing is it requires some sort of tracking of the people or some sort of in-group.

Who would do the nastiest-jobs except for pay?

On that specific subject, I think that the question is biased. I think that some jobs developed to be particularly nasty because we have no shortage of people who are desperate to accept minimum wage. Otherwise, the nastiest job would be very high pay. I mean, it is more fun to be a programmer than a sewer cleaner. In theory, that would mean that the sewer cleaner’s job would have higher pay.

If on the other hand we switch the question in terms of how can we attract volunteers, things change radically. I have been to a rice harvest event that were basically the social event of the village and that ended up with a party where everyone is exhausted but happy looking at the rice dry.

Many people take pride in their work and it doesn’t take a lot to make it attractive to volunteers. Strangely, the highest paying jobs are often the most desirable and the most enjoyable to do.

In the end of the day, my goal is to keep stuff out of the landfill

A commendable goal and indeed you don’t care much if people reuse or resell in that context. However if your goal is to create and grow a bubble of non-merchant economy, the problem becomes different.

I recognize that it is unavoidable that some people may resell and it should not be a show stopper, but it should be part of the thought around how to set it up.

If you give me apples, it is easier for me to give apple pies.

If you give them to someone who will sell them to me, it will be harder for me to give the pies for free.

If you are a farmer that gives away a lot of raw vegetables to people who cook them and give the meals away, including to you, it frees you time or money to give more. Someone who takes your vegetable to sell them exits them from the gift economy you try to create.

I am not saying it is useless, and it is actually inevitable that these things happen, but I am saying that this is a factor that prevents these markets to grow into something that allows people to free themselves from capitalism.

I have 3 anecdotal evidence from France:

• Not at this exact same type of event but there has been a trend for a few years in France to put old fridges in the street and transform them into drop-off bookshelves where people can drop and take books. They are not powered, but being watertight allows book to survive outside. Very quickly the books in a good state are removed and resold on second-hand online shops.
• There is a gift economy group in the city I go to to work. When you join you have to promise to not resell the things you get, because they had too much of it in the past.
• In flea markets, you will see some regulars at the opening times. They come and get all the good deals quickly in order to resell them online.

Don’t mark me wrong: I am a huge proponent of the gift economy, but I think that within a capitalist society, in order to exist it has to be paired with some sort of reputations economics.

That’s a totally fair mindset to have in these events.

However if your intent is to kickstart a gift economy, this phenomenon limits the possibilities of it taking off.

The main problem these sort of things are confronted with is people who take free stuff and resell it. It limits them to low value items