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Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
Possibly the most comprehensive criticism of the controversial "Deep Green Resistance" movement:
http://anarchiststudies.org/2015/08/09/against-deep-green-resistance-by-michelle-renee-matisons-and-alexander-reid-ross/
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
Was this part also written 19 years ago? Because it reminds me of that time, when everyone was so optimistic about the net. It seemed like it was going to change everything, for the better, an electric global transnational temporary autonomous zone that we could all participate in and that would bring out the best in us, individually and collectively.
Now that all seems so naive. It's been integrated seamlessly into state and corporate apparatus. It's become a platform for surveillance and marketing, and has contributed to a steady erosion between those two insidious activities. Cyberpunk has lot its aura of cool, because it too accurately describes the world we are actually living in.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
Only the quoted paragraph about Trotsky was 19 years ago. The part you're referring to I guess follows two others about identity and credibility, and an extrapolation of Andy Warhol on fame:
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The old ways of building credibility are fading with the internet. It used to be an adage among politicians that "You are no better than your credibility" and candidates would spend years carefully crafting their image, shaking hands and kissing babies, each bit of credibility they add to their name contributing to their future ability to use association fallacy to get their bad ideas implemented. When society is structured like a pyramid, people want to be sure those above them are trustworthy.
This is already starting to fade with the internet, and years spent on crafting credibility and honing reputation in the future will become more and more a waste of time. Those who are successful will be the ones who are good at packing all the good stuff into one idea bomb. With ideas coming from all directions and distances in the network, people will spend less and less time checking your credentials, and more and more time on the idea itself, before quickly moving on to the next idea. Even identity itself is becoming less permanent - people flit between accounts - or post completely anonymously. The old political tactics dealing with credibility and reputation are fading as well - character assassination doesn't work on those who change accounts or are anonymous - trying to paint Jewish or Chinese people as sneaky isn't going to work if the politician you're trying to target is always a faceless 4chan or reddit commentator.
If Paul has a close friend who has good ideas, he might often share those ideas with his twitter or youtube following. But if one day he decides Jesus is off his rocker about some topic, he might instead add in some points from his new acquaintance Muhammad. But what do Paul's followers do with Paul's ideas? They treat them like Paul treats the ideas of Jesus and Muhammad - to them, they are all just random internet inputs - some they disregard, some they take to heart, some they forget, some they won't remember until years later - and it's on to the next twitter or youtube posting from some other random prophet.
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In the distant past, the lack of technology limited the amount of information people could get. As a result, it was very difficult to hear about people beyond your immediate vicinity. Thus very few people were famous. You might know the name of a religious figure, and possibly the name of your king, but very few others had an impact on your life. If your king was replaced, you might not know for weeks, maybe even never.
As technology improved, it was easier to get information about outside your immediate area. More people got famous, but because there were more of them, each took up less mindshare among those who knew about them. It became more difficult to become God-King because people didn't obsess as much about a single person anymore.
In the internet age, it is now very easy for millions of people to hear about a great many other people, but it is getting much more difficult for individuals to dominate mindshare like they did in the past. For people who dream of being happy when they are famous like their legendary idols, they will be disappointed. If they can't figure out other ways to be happy, then they will be in for unfulfilled lives.
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
That doesn't seem like a recipe for success; "credibility" is not just a cynical political ploy. Someone who is trustworthy and has expertise in a particular field is worth listening on certain subjects more so than somebody who has proven themselves to be a liar and who has no credentials. The environment you're describing seems more like a boon for advertisers and government psyops than a digital utopia. Reducing everything to a soundbite is not the kind of equality I'm looking for, and it's certainly not conducive for evaluating ideas on their own merits.
Again, I could see people saying some of this stuff 20 years ago in the net's childhood, but nowadays we have online resumes and social networking sites that put all of your history - and hence, your credentials and credibility - posted publicly. So reputation and credibility aren't going away. People's activities and locations are made public like never before - and they are held to account for their words and actions like never before, often by a screaming mob on twitter or reddit. People don't spend their time online carefully considering groundbreaking ideas, they spend their time reacting to manufactured outrages when they aren't manufacturing the outrages themselves. And so much of this activity is monetized - even the activity on this website. Is that really freedom?
This sounds like a cyberpunk world that never was, not the world that is.
Politicians are far from faceless. And increasingly the web is all about "transparency" - in the era of Facebook, the screen name is increasingly an anachronism. Yes, there are reddit and 4chan but that is hardly a freedom from reputation and credibility - one builds up credibility on reddit through upvotes and karma, for example. People tend to use the same screen name because that means they can build up credibility, and even if they change names there are ways of tracking them.
As for your comment about racial prejudice, the internet is a wretched hive of right wing echo chambers. Look at Stormfront and the various online communities for Nazis and Neoconfeds and bigots of all stripes.
This is simply not true. Ours is not the first age of globalization - there were numerous links between civilizations in the past, and ideas have spread like wildfire throughout the world long before we invented fiber optic cables or computers. Some of the most successful and notorious websites even allude to these historical networks - like SilkRoad, for instace.
Again, this doesn't sound like the world I live in. How many people in the US are obsessed with Kim Kardashian's bottom? How many people are obsessed with which clown is going to occupy the White House in 2016?
Celebrity worship is nothing new, and our ancestors had plenty of their own celebrities to choose from.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
I think much of the discord comes from which has primacy - the internet, or "The Real World". Increasingly, it is the internet that is the new "Real World" - this even affects social relationships. For example, you might hear this on the internet a lot: "The only people I know are on the internet, but I have no friends in real life." This is because the existing culture is in a state of turmoil - people are still stuck with traditional values when evaluating their relationships, and think that only meatspace friends matter, and they look down on the "fake" friends they have on the internet. But this is only our current era - in the future, either these two types of relationships will be considered equivalent, or internet relationships may even take primacy.
The same applies to politics. Right now many people still think that it's really meatspace politics that matter, and that internet politics is just sort of a side branch that is only useful if it feeds into meatspace politics. In the future, this will be reversed. Meatspace politicians will be merely mouthpieces for what they see on the internet. This isn't to say you wouldn't want a trained surgeon to do operations on you, but consider your own behavior on the internet, and the behavior of those you know. How much time do you spend checking the credentials of internet articles, and how much time do you spend on what's written in the article? Do you check my credentials before evaluating this post? In the internet age, even if someone associates "correctness" with your account name, they'll soon realize it may actually be multiple people behind that account name, or that account name might even be hijacked by pirates or intelligence agencies.
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
It's not so much this, as that the Internet you're talking about no longer exists, if indeed it ever did. Techno utopians of the 1990s made almost exactly the same predictions you are - none of them have come true, and the internet has evolved in a completely different way.
As I said, the net is now about individual transparency, collective surveillance and monetization of everything. Socially, it seems to have made people more divided and narrow minded than ever, as various ideologies construct air tight echo chambers with nary a dissenting opinion to be heard among them.
I see no evidence that politicians will be "mouthpieces for what they see on the internet" - instead, they will likely control what appears on the internet, either through restricting access or by planting commentators and trolls on various websites. The internet is nothing more than the mirror of capital, which means it is subject to the same power structures that define life in "meatspace".
As resources become scarcer and more expensive, the increasing cost of managing the internet (which of course is dependent on infastructure that must be build and maintained and upgraded in "meatspace") may become too much for it to be offered commercially, and we may very well see it decline to the point where it is used mainly by the military, universities, and government agencies as it was in its infancy.
I don't consider the internet a reliable source of information. When I do find information online, it comes from sources whose credibility and reliability I have already reasonably established. You've been posting opinion pieces on a game website, an activity which require no credentials at all, anymore than my posts do.
The information that is of most interest to states and corporations is not content, as you seem to be implying, but data about who is consuming content. It's data which is monetized and tracked that has become the main focus of activity on the net.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
Why bother engaging in political discussion on the internet if it doesn't matter? If you truly believe that discussion on some website inspired by Max Barry affects nothing, then you wouldn't be responding to what I write, and you wouldn't even bother reading this forum.
Of course, the NSA does attempt to influence internet discussion boards - there's plenty of evidence of that, but it's not because they don't think it matters, but because they think it matters too much. It is the clash between the old world and the new world.
I myself argue against those who downplay capitalist control of the mass media by saying the internet itself is an adequate alternative. While I do believe that in the future, the internet will be adequate, between now and then, there will be a time when control of the existing old media will be overthrown - either by force (for example, local communities or employees assuming control of their local media outlets) or by starvation - in which pyramid structured media outlets are simply abandoned and ignored as a vestigial remnant of a past civilization.
Post by Tokeyo mew mew suppressed by Perrais.
Konnichiwa anarchy been ejected from Japan
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
I discuss purely because I enjoy it. I don't expect it to change anything or have any kind of effect on the political situation.
I would summarize my disagreement with you on this issue by saying that at this point, capitalists also control the internet - it's just a different set of capitalists with a different strategy, one better suited to the online medium.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
You seek to learn, just like agents of the NSA, and sometimes even capitalists ;)
Let's just say that as long as the old mass media has a pyramid structure, the ruling class would always be polluting the internet with their half-truths. The world is a big place - there will always be some hierarchical organizations here and there hooked up to the net. There will be other types of organizations too. The internet certainly is not homogeneous, but there are different ways heterogeneity manifests.
In a hierarchical society, one would expect the introduction of the internet to be met with various hierarchical nodes plugged into the superstructure - the superstructure itself is close to anarchism, but at each endpoint are pyramid-like structures. As the internet matures, more individuals will be plugged into the net, as peers to other hierarchical organizations. Will the internet go straight from that mixture, into a web of all non-hierarchical endpoints? I would say this is unlikely for our future. Instead, what the internet does is introduce and grow anarchic forms of organization, even as hierarchical organizations continue to exist on the net - however, after a certain point of maturity, the anarchic organizations birthed on the net will overthrow the hierarchical organizations in "Real Life" and those formerly hierarchical endpoints would be converted into non-hierarchical ones.
Note this isn't to say that there will be pitched battles between people outside pyramid structures and the people inside pyramid structures (although sometimes this will happy as well) - but more commonly, everyone is already part of many organizations - some of which are hierarchical, some of which are not, so as the internet matures, hierarchy will rot from the inside.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
I forgot to mention, the more authoritarian a society, the more vulnerable it is to conversion, ironically. Why? Because the more authoritarian a society, the more one person (or a handful of people) can affect the whole system. For example, if the whole world were under the thumb of one emperor, all you need to do is convert that emperor, and the world changes. It becomes harder as power becomes distributed. If the world were run by, say, 5 people, and they all happen to follow the same guy on twitter, if that twitter guy manages to convert (or corrupt) all 5 people, whether consciously or subconsciously, then the world changes.
It is actually an anarchic society that is more resistant to sweeping change, since you would have to convert each person individually, rather than just convince the person at the top of some pyramid, then have that change be rammed down everyone's throats.
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
True. :) The difference is, my learning is open ended and undertaken out of genuine curiosity and joy; the NSA and capitalists learn so that they can control and dominate.
Can you give an example of some anarchic organizations birthed on the net? Most of the organizations that the net has given birth to are corporations - Google, Facebook, Uber, etc - and it goes without saying that these are hierarchical organizations.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
If your propaganda and psychological tactics are well honed enough, you can control and dominate the government agents that monitor your communication. If you don't believe that's possible, you just haven't trained your skills adequately ;)
I would say authoritarianism appears on a spectrum - some organizations are much more authoritarian than others. A good rule of thumb is probably the level of debate and discussion on a website. If the debate is wild, then it's less authoritarian. If people are afraid that what they say will get them censored or banned, then that area is more authoritarian.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
As far as propaganda and psychological tactics go, I should add that it is much easier to perform well when you actually believe in the movement you're trying to push. Government agents suffer from a natural weakness that many don't realize. The weakness is that the opinions they are tasked to push, are not their own opinions - they are assigned opinions from someone else. This makes their propaganda naturally less effective, since it is always easier to sound sincere when you actually believe what you say. If you don't even believe in the cause you're pushing, then your "creative" ideas often come off flat - if you haven't managed to even brainwash yourself yet, how can you possibly brainwash others?
Post by West kurdistan suppressed by Perrais.
I asked if you could name any non hierarchical organizations that have emerged from the internet, but discussion on a website is not the same thing as an organization. What do you make of a company that has a hierarchical corporate structure, donates millions of dollars to Presidential campaigns and develops technology for use by the government as a contractor, allows states access to its data for snooping, but allows for "wild debate" on its online platforms?
When surveillance and the selling of data is your game - and today, it is the only game in town on the internet, played by large, hierarchical organizations - it behooves you to not only tolerate, but to even encourage "wild debate", since this allows for more accurate monitoring and modeling of behavior and trends. The trends you laud as "less authoritarian" actually go hand in glove with the authoritarian goals and modus operendi of highly hierarchal structures of power.
Thinking that the internet liberates is just another piece of propaganda that serves the interests of the powerful, who would like nothing better than for you to congregate online so they can watch you, sell you things, and sell other people the information they've gathered from watching you. It's a lot easier for them to control, and a lot more manageable, than attempting to engage in action in the real world.
Post by Renewed dissonance suppressed by Perrais.
Anonymous and other hacktivist groups; every free and open source software project ever; ditto for free and open source hardware projects; arguably Wikipedia and WikiLeaks; arguably the Arab Spring; all kinds of anti-globalization groups, movements, and protests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_activism lists a bunch, along with pros and cons, etc).
Social network connections that spread cellphone video of police brutality and the like to millions of pairs of eyes in hours (if not minutes) certainly counts at well -- these are simply a digital extension of "word of mouth" which is a non-hierarchical organizational method as old as language itself.
If this was (entirely) true, then none of the phenomena listed above would be allowed to exist. Try as they might, powerful interests cannot even begin to stop those things. Or, at least, the technological measures it would take would defeat their own purposes.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
Indeed most organizations dating from the pre-internet world are structured as hierarchical pyramids. If they do allow open debate, then they risk "disintegrating into anarchy" - if they do not allow open debate, then they stifle their own creativity and fall prey to more open organizations.
This isn't to say that ideal anarchy will happen overnight, but that is the path before us - and yes, before reaching it, media organizations with a pyramid structure will be overthrown (or abandoned).
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
I think the main resistance is from people who still believe in hierarchy and are afraid that the alternative is even worse than what we have now. (Usually it's the people closer to the top of the power structure who are afraid of the alternatives - the comfortable have good reason to fear those who suffer.) They don't believe the internet can solve all their problems, because obviously they still have problems - everyone has problems. The pessimistic ones believe their problems are enduring, the optimistic ones believe crowdsourcing billions of people will find solutions in no time - and there are people in between - it's just a matter of how soon various different people think the internet can come up with a solution to their problem. The ones who believe never, will never trust anything the internet says. The ones who believe very soon, will try to find ways to help unleash the collective power of billions of interconnected minds. Emergent intelligence happens after our neurons connect - what will happen if something similar is done with individual people? We are in the process of finding out.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
The most basic of conflicts is when one person wants A and another person wants not-A. One would think this is a problem that can never be solved by the internet, since the two people want mutually exclusive things. For example, one person wants to have coffee with West Kurdistan on Monday, and the other person wants to go to the beach with West Kurdistan at the same time on Monday. There's no way this conflict can be resolved perfectly right, since the choices are mutually exclusive. Your kids might also fight over who gets to play with some toy.
Here are some solutions off the top of my head:
1. Convince the first person to want something else. Maybe they can go to Paris with Renewed Dissonance.
2. Convince the second person to want something else. Maybe they want visit a monastery.
3. Convince both people to want something else. Maybe they both go to a concert together, and leave you alone. Maybe they go off to do 500 different things.
4. Convince both people to not want anything at all and become ascetics.
Those are just off the top of my head - a crowdsourced internet can problem come up with a thousand other solutions without breaking a sweat. Maybe those aren't even my solutions, but what I crowdsourced off the internet myself ;)
Post by Kincoboh fao i suppressed by Perrais.
Heyyooo. This is Kincoboh reporting in. I'm leaving this foreign affairs outpost here. :)
Post by Renewed dissonance suppressed by Perrais.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
I'm going to have to assume those kids were friends from a previous playthrough of the Game of Life ;)
Post by Renewed dissonance suppressed by Perrais.
Last time I played Life, I had 15 kids. Then I played Oregon Trail, and they all died of the teeth.
Makes you think.
Post by Seeya suppressed by Perrais.
Makes me wonder what would make someone voluntarily erase their memory before joining the game again. Seems the only real reason to me would be when the game got too easy and you just wanted a real challenge ^^
Post by Renewed dissonance suppressed by Perrais.
There's some absurd levels of political freedom in this here region. The Singular Multitude approves.
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