Anthony

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] This one generated a mention in my fediverse server, for what it’s worth.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Though I’m probably a bit older than you both, occupy was also the moment where I first engaged in a protest for a sustained period of time and then continued to do so after. There was a lot of incoherence around occupy that took me years to get my head around. But I’ve come to believe a totally horizontal, leaderless movement organized through social media platforms is dead on arrival. I thought I’d throw a few observations into the mix if that’s OK.

It was pointed out above that such a thing is like shouting “NO!” at the government; I fully agree with that. Bevins argues (at least in interviews; haven’t had a chance to read his book yet) that these spontaneous NOs can be dangerous: if they go far enough they can create a power vacuum that the most prepared (read: organized and ruthless) forces quickly move to fill. This is the real story of what happened in several countries during the Arab Spring, by Bevins’s read (I take it). So while folks are excitedly believing they’re participating in the birth of a new form of democracy, what they’re really doing is inflicting a dark Shock Doctrine on themselves. I have to confess that I, too, did not see this at the time.

There must be some kind of theory of change, pre-organizing to build power, and a clear-eyed recognition of the situation to avoid these DOA movements and have some hope of bringing lasting, meaningful change for a lot of people. Much of the US left (such as it is) seems allergic to looking reality squarely in the face. I’d almost go so far as saying there should not be attempts at lefty mass protest until such power is built, such theory is developed, and widespread recognition of our situation, grounded in reality, exists, exactly because of the danger that actors with very different goals from ours are better positioned to take advantage of the chaos mass protests generate.

Personally I’d refer to (what used to be) social media as “surveillance media”. The form the modern US state takes is public-private partnership, with many state functions dispatched by private corporations and actors. Though Musk clearly has his own aims, he is almost surely playing a state role with Twitter not too different from the one he plays through SpaceX. So, though social media’s always been corporate mediated, I’d add that recognizing the role of public-private partnerships in the modern US context leads to the probability that Twitter has become something else. In that view, the finances are almost irrelevant, and LOLing about this or that number going down or this or that many advertisers leaving the platform amounts to copium. If Twitter really is performing useful functions for the state then it will continue to exist no matter how much money it “loses”; failing to perform those functions is what would put it in jeopardy, not revenue figures.

@[email protected] That’d be such a great thing to see in data. I was alluding more to the theory of voting systems, like rational choice theory. The setup in those is something like you have a set of people, and there’s a choice they need to make collectively. Each person can have a different preference about what the choice should be. Arrow’s impossibility theorem states, roughly, that in most cases no matter what system you use to take account of the people’s preferences and make the final choice, at least one person’s preferences will be violated (they won’t like the choice).

What I was imagining was, in the same setup, everybody modifies their preferences based on what they think the other people’s preferences are. So now the choice isn’t being made based on their preferences, it’s being made on the modification of their preferences. Arrow’s impossibility theorem still holds, so no matter how the final choice is made some people will still be unhappy with it. But, I think it’s possible that even more people will be unhappy than if they’d just stuck with their original preferences. Or, maybe the people who’d already have been unhappy are even more unhappy. I’d have to actually sit down and work it out though, which I haven’t.

The example of your dad talking himself out of voting for Buttigieg because he thinks other people won’t vote for Buttigieg is exactly the kind of case I was thinking of! Except I was thinking more theoretically than data-wise. It’d be great to see data on it too, for sure.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I swear one day I’m going to sit down and do the actual math to prove that voting systems are broken by having a majority of voters factor their perception of “electoral math” into their preferences even when their perceptions are accurate. Arrow’s impossibility theorem is already pretty discouraging without all this meta stuff.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Since most people spend most of their best hours at the workplace, what this person is really saying is that there shouldn’t be any politics at all. I.e., this is a confession: “I am an authoritarian”.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Sorry to dive in uninvited, but from a different angle I’d recommend reading Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Thomas Murphy ( https://staging.open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980 ). Murphy is an astrophysicist and the book is an entry-level introduction to energy, its use in human societies, and all the implications that flow from our energy use. It’s quite accessible if you’re comfortable reading STEM textbooks; it might be a bit tough if you find reading about physics and math boring or difficult. He does provide a lot of handholds and personally I think it’s worth the struggle.

The reason I suggest this book in this context is that I find a lot of people tend to be “energy blind”, meaning they don’t see the implications of human energy use and what it would actually mean to do something like reduce fossil fuel usage. Reducing fossil fuel usage would necessarily reduce quality of life for billions of people, for instance–there’s almost no way around it. The book goes into why. This simple fact is deeply relevant to any theory of change. How can you convince several billion people to purposely lower their quality of life or forego apparent opportunities to increase their quality of life in order to force the reduction in fossil fuel use that is necessary to keep human civilization from ending altogether? How do you do this without falling back on authoritarian structures, especially as the situation becomes increasingly desperate-looking?

I think another ideology we need to get past, one a lot of people seem to be deeply defensive about, is the one built on the belief that we can have large amounts of energy whenever we want it and the supply will continue to go up in perpetuity. This belief is false–it’s like believing the Earth is flat, or that your maladies are caused by unbalanced humors–but a large number of people in the so-called developed world take it as a fact or at least as an operating principle (before anyone dives down my throat about this: read Murphy’s book. Seriously. Read it with care). “The economy” is fundamentally grounded in this false ideology. “Car culture” in the US is grounded in it. What many of us think “work” and “a job” are/should be is grounded in it. What many of us think of as “fairness” and “equity” is grounded in it. Etc etc etc.

Yes.

Right! And the US Democratic party seems to be obsessed with means testing, so that many times when there is government assistance available people who need it are forced to subject themselves to intrusive surveillance, frequent paperwork and sometimes shifting requirements, etc. It’s rare (in my experience) to hear anyone critique this state of affairs, let alone make substantive moves to change it.

@[email protected] You don’t have any idea what I’m interested in.

I am definitely not interested in being condescended to, that’s for sure, so bye.

@[email protected] Thank you for supplying the “someone has to pay for it” canard, which is one of many reasons the US doesn’t have a functional left politics. Neoclassical economics brain poisoning.

@[email protected] I did not draw a dichotomy nor make a universal definition. I stated that the left is concerned with freedom from domination, which is undeniably true. What else do words like “equality” and “equity” mean? I did not state or suggest that this was the only concern, but it’s clearly an important one.

@[email protected] One way to think about “the left” is that it values freedom from domination. Who in the US is fighting to reduce the level of domination we experience in important areas of life (health care, education, food, housing to name a few)? Should we really have to pay and put ourselves into debt–thereby becoming dominated–to go to school, live somewhere, or maintain our health? Even the so-called left in the US supports this arrangement generally; at best they fight over the details, not the structure itself.

@[email protected] In 1995 I worked at a company with several active web sites. Early days of the web, very important to the company. I was hired to take care of the hardware and software running the existing web sites and help in developing new ones.

One day I walked into my office, which had the production web server in it, carrying a Diet Coke (I was young and inexperienced). I opened the Diet Coke and it spewed an epic fountain right onto the production server. It was as if that server had a gravitational pull that drew all liquid towards it. I panicked and started unplugging every cable in sight, thinking this was better than risking a hardware-destroying short.

Needless to say the web sites were down for awhile. I believe I managed to save the hardware from myself though.

What’s the point of writing software without users?

Software developers excel at creating ever-more-elaborate ways to heat up a CPU.

CC: @[email protected]