Human Iterations

2009-10-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

(Nutty LTV Partisans & All You Can Eat Buffets)

Consider: I spend a bunch of labor making a giant batch of lemonade. I slap a tap on it and offer to charge people by the hour (or by session) to have at it freely, maybe changing my price weekly. I'm renting the motherfucker.

Yes, it will eventually expire -- but so will a house.

Agorists and most market anarchists who support the freedom to usury ground their notions of property rights in labor-mixing. In other words, an additional value in the structural arrangement of a material -- which is inherently something that can entropy. Simple occupancy uses up a house. Even viewing (shining light on) a painting significantly degrades it over time (this is a major concern of museums). And then there are issues of risk, responsibility and variable use.

But there is no logical reason whatsoever to consider the immediate market value of a good bought in full to represent the full labor cost of that good. Prices change over time. If I expect a good to increase in value over time or simply bring in more than it might from an immediate purchase on the part of someone who only needs it for a relatively short period (even if that single sale is paid in installments), why shouldn't I be able to sell it off incrementally?

Those who insist that the laborers who built a house should only be allowed to be remunerated for their labor at whatever price they can make selling the whole of it at once are depriving those workers of the full product of their labor.

2009-10-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

(One Update Per Month And It's A Whedon)

Yeah, Buffy kicked unholy ass, Zoe was Mal's Terminatrix-like enforcer, Faith begat Echo and Echo is the baddest ass Kung Fu Whore TV has ever seen, and yet, aside from the fact these girls have done some push ups and punched masculinity in its shriveled balls time and again, the idea that Whedon is some sort of hyper-feminist stinks as bad as Eliza Dushku's "acting."

Joss shoots his actresses most lovingly when they're wet and crying and curled up in the fetal position, pressed up against a wall, broken, mascara running, bleeding, and reaching out. And what are they typically reaching out for? Some dude (or vampire or werewolf) and the dick he's attached to.

That's it. That's as complex as it gets. Sound familiar? That's because it's also the image of women we get from every other movie or show written by men. And yet when a lisping nerd who tritely describes himself as "a lesbian in a man's body" does it to a high-school cheerleader, it's "feminist." This is like when Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "The First Black President." You could only say such a thing if you were THAT willing to settle. His two most artistically successful shows are Angel and Firefly, both centered on men, and written from a male point of view. If I wanted to be glib (and I usually do) Angel and Firefly worked because they're basically "Batman in LA" and "Han Solo, the TV Show," respectively.

(thanks Roman)

Now there's nothing wrong with centering shows on male characters. And Firefly is perfection incarnate with no failings whatsoever. But, for christ sake, it shouldn't be controversial to say that Whedon is not particularly good on gender. It's not like he doesn't know a couple things and it's not like he doesn't, you know, try every once in a while. But the problem is he's insanely cocky about it. He's proud of what he's accomplished. And most of the time? What he's accomplished is pretty shallow. Both in the scope of what he chooses to address and the depth by which he does so. (I dare you to watch Dollhouse without picturing a 13 year old girl going "this isn't really who I am all these identities are just like masks that I wear!!")

The problem with his cheerleaders is that they tend to just accept these premises on face-value. Since Whedon is a 'great feminist' the things he explores must be important and the ways he goes about doing so must be sufficient. And in doing so they absolutely ruin the discourse.

2009-09-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

(From Whence Do Property Titles Arise?)

[I apologize, this skips through certain concepts a bit fast for some people, but it's already a long piece and I'd rather bridge things in broad strokes first before hashing out every particular.]

Many market theorists take property titles as axiomatic and then develop coercive apparatuses to enforce them -- justifying such coercion by appealing to notions like implicit consent and/or the justness of contracts that sell off part of one's agency in the future. This rightfully bugs the crap out of many anarcho-communists. Market theorists in turn tend to write off these apprehensions as a contention over differing ideal systems of property -- ie differences over what constitutes abandonment and the general viability of collective property.

But this, as I've argued time and time again, is a profoundly limited understanding of the criticisms being lobbed against them.

First off, not every system of mediating between different people's desires or uses for objects is describable in terms of property titles. Property titles are claims by discrete agents to absolute veto power over the use of an object; they're a construct used for negotiating between the justness of uses by individuals with competing intentions for an object. Property titles solve the problem by determining whether A or B then gets to personally make the decision between direction 1 or 2 for a given object. But this clearly isn't the only way to approach such situations.

When anarcho-communists talk of societies without the concept of property they often mean a social system where decisions over how to use any specific object or resource are never limited to a discrete body of select individuals but are rather discussions open to anyone and everyone with a stake, desire or idea to contribute. There the critical economic entities are directions rather than veto-titles, concepts rather than individuals. The mediation processes possible can be incredibly complex and dynamic. So on a protozoic level you might have simple discussion or unchallenged focus (I specialize in the use of a single toothbrush and consequently, given that toothbrushes' historical context, not many people are going to have a more useful proposal for its use). While aggregate systems of more advanced mechanisms are visible in the open source development. In short where the most scarce resource is personal time and the weight of one's voice is the nearest thing to currency. At the same time there are often scarcities in space (functionally identical to material) for widely varying projects and in response entire ecosystems of discussion open up. It's worth noting that under many systems of property-titles if the legal experts cannot reach consensus on who is the legitimate owner of an object nothing is done with the object in the meantime. Those involved in contending differing uses for an object in a property-less society are directly capable of far more diverse means of negotiation, but so to, if they can't reach consensus, then nothing is done with the object. Because literally everyone in the world has the capacity to veto.

To some this might appear -- while a philosophically coherent counter-proposal to property, and even briefly workable on a small level -- completely batshit insane. And maybe so. But in practice such external-to-property approaches are often workable enough. The lone immature interjecting troublemaker, or any other conceivable exploit of consensus, simply doesn't exist after a few social iterations. Because everyone is dependent upon everyone else, no matter how distant a community they come from and thus its in their interest to maintain, develop and convey goodwill.

Obviously however, just because such differing economic approaches might make better software for a fraction of the energy Microsoft spends doesn't mean that it can do things like move goods between locations to satisfy demand efficiently or signal all the costs of one consumption versus another. Without the capacity to assign value to spatial/physical relationships (as with the realm of actors and objects) one can't concretely mediate between those relationships. And whatever the dominant dilemmas might be in primitive cultures of plenty or posthuman hives of nanobots, it shouldn't be particularly controversial to assert that the placement of material objects is the central calculational problem in the world today. Some form of property titles seems called for, however sticky, however collectively or individually managed.

The point is that's a debate over fitness. While it may be undesirable, it remains entirely possible to construct a society outside of property altogether.

Following the popular slogan "Everything for Everyone" the stubborn market theorist might still proclaim that such a society would still count as a system with property title expanded to everyone. While practically meaningless this wouldn't necessarily be wrong. But as a theoretical framework in such instance property titles would be missing the point. No one in that society would think in anything approaching such terms.

Which leads us to a second critique of property.

It's not hard to come to the conclusion that the very adoption of property titles in our minds leads toward a worldview of increasing compartmentalization and taxonomy. Indeed this is a popular assumption. By progressively chopping up the world around us, the notion goes, we become inclined to view the world solely as a tally sheet of ownership.

Forgive the digression to my 90s Nickelodeon childhood, but in illustration I am reminded of an episode of Angry Beavers in which the brothers suddenly discover that they each have a musk pouch capable of marking items with a colored personal stench that repels everyone but themselves. This quickly sets off a war of personal claim until the entire world is divvied up with one stench or the other, each brother more and more completely obsessed with the tally until they can think of nothing else.

This is perhaps the most classic criticism of capitalism -- one of simple psychology -- and yet it seems to be a critique market theorists are incapable of parsing. To many an anti-capitalist the problem with the capitalist framework is its inherent bent towards materialism, ultimately to the point of treating human beings as objects. But this is incomprehensible for Libertarians because they see respect for property titles as entirely stemming from a respect for personal agency. In practical, everyday terms respect for another person's agency often comes down to a respect for the inviolability of their body. Do not shoot them, do not rape them, do not torture them. Because humans are tool using creatures like hermit crabs there is often no clear line between our biomass and our possessions (we use clothes instead of fur, retain dead mass excreted as hair follicles, etc.), and so a respect for another's person seems to extend in some ways to a respect for things that they use. Begin to talk of Rights and these associations must be drawn more absolutely. And sure enough we already have a common sense proscription often enforced in absolutist terms that matches this intuition; do not steal.

Yet the anti-capitalists are clearly on to something. Even setting aside the evolutionary cognitive biases of homo sapiens, we as individuals have limited processing. We can't think everything at the same time. If some of the thought processes necessary to succeed and flourish under in a given system run out of control and take up more and more space, others -- like those behind why we adopted that system in the first place -- will get pushed to the periphery.

If a certain metric is set as the alpha and omega of a society, whether it be the acquisition of a specific universal currency or simply aggregate atoms, its status as the requirement or key to any pursuit or desire can end up having an effect upon those pursuits and desires.

Anti-capitalists often disingenuously blur the distinction between wealth and coercive power -- wealth and/or disequilibria in wealth do not inherently have to grant any capacity for social control -- but it's certainly true that direct pursuits of power and wealth share the same form. Singlemindedness is progressively rewarded, until the inertia of this approach crowds out of mind the reason we originally assigned value to wealth or power.

Consequently, rather than focus on accumulating property titles or money as a gateway to opportunity, anarcho-communists argue, we should focus on accumulating goodwill.

I don't disagree.

But once you characterize this focus on goodwill in market terms, a la something similar to Doctorow's reputation markets, the path out of all these tangles becomes apparent. It seems pretty damn clear that property titles are a tool with incredible utility in the world as it exists today and the technical challenges we face. As such it stands to reason that those within a goodwill focused anarcho-communist society stand a comparative advantage to negotiate and adopt a second-order system for developing and recognizing property titles. Regardless of precisely how their market ends up dynamically mediating this, goodwill would remain the primary good capable of being turned into, among other things, selective veto use titles to physical objects. As such we can clear the psychological hurtle: without a state coerced enforcement system underpinning property titles or centralized banks and currency, property titles are not as stable or universally applicable an investment as goodwill. And goodwill, as opposed to property titles, is directly, methodologically tied to appreciating and respecting people as agents.*

This suggests a way to tackle fringe conditions in ownership. Rothbard readily recognized, for instance, that a world in which one man held title to everything would clearly be indiscernible from tyranny. Expand the number of owners and you'd still have an oligarchy. Even granting a token amount of wealth to the rest of the populace wouldn't necessarily jump start the market and allow it to drift back in a more dynamic and egalitarian direction, because said wealth may simply be insufficient as capital.

However, if property is a second-order good derived from market institutions based in reputation/goodwill/credit, then if one class systematically fucked over their credit with all of another class the underclass would no longer have any incentive to respect their title claims because no individual within it would fear even marginal sanction or loss of goodwill for occupying and appropriating their wealth. Simply put, if before anyone else can do anything on a new colony I create robots to till the entire surface of the planet, that doesn't inherently create an incentive among the rest of the colonists to respect a veto-use claim on my part to the entire planet. If others admire and derive value from my mass-tilling project (or from the potential products of it) then my voice is more likely to be respected in discussion over its uses, but if I want to obtain acceptance of a veto-use claim, it would have to derive from the desire of others' desire of social conditions of respect conducive to undertaking their own projects and having their own stuff respected. One gravitates towards adopting property titles because through their exchange one can much further maximize the satiation of one's desires (agreeing to butt the hell out of other people's decisions when it comes to the use of certain objects in exchange for them butting the hell out of your decisions with other objects). Accepting my ownership of literally everything would make that impossible.

Not only does this cope with such boundary conditions, but it also addresses old marxist paranoia about the runaway accumulation of wealth through usury.

Viewed in the light of a reputation market, Jeremy Weiland's old point is even more apt: without the state the more wealth you control the more ridiculously you stand to risk having to pay through the nose to secure against theft and betrayal from those you're paying.

"It's easier to steal a million dollars from the bank, or a vault, than to rob a thousand or so common people. ... It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards profit and enrichment."

It's a distinction between information and objects; ultimately you can't steal good credit. People's trust, goodwill and their whole panorama of intention towards you exists within them internally. It's accessible by anyone anywhere, but they're the only ones capable of changing it. There are no banks it can be kept within, only distributed collective or institutional relay points through which it can be conveyed. And trust critically underlies all material transactions.

Incidentally this renders the entire debate over proposed systematic prohibitions of wages, rent, and interest moot. Obviously all will be, in some contexts, however fringe, desirably or neutrally regarded by all parties. But even if they crop up as large phenomenon, that's not reason to panic, flip the fuck out and organize shit like armed roving 'homesteaders' with ideologically precise definitions of legitimate property. Instead the market will already be ready to grind down or impede any vast swathes of accumulated wealth because it will be the market that negotiates the acceptance of said wealth. Not necessarily through malicious crime, but through higher-level market mechanisms that ultimately give rise the extent and strength of claim.

As a market it might not look much like the idealized American myth of our simplistic contemporary 'market.' But then we knew it wouldn't.

* There is a point to be made here about the problem of manipulation, but I think it's a much broader point that no structural system can address directly, because on such a level we can't dictate intent, we can only recognize and work around biases. So it's no more a fundamental problem than it is for anarcho-communism. That said, I think intent and psychological issues of control are rightfully at the very core of the anarchist project. It just falls outside the purview of this discussion.

2009-09-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

(You Assholes Already Have Your Incense Candles And Your "Internal Combustion Engines")

Sometimes I feel like I must be the only anarchist in the goddamn world who's not looking forward to the day when the government finally repeals marijuana prohibition. Rah rah rah, personal choice, liberty, freedom, etc. Of course. But that shit is going to be Obnoxious.

These days everyone on earth knows that tobacco is a big pile of deadly poison but everyone also knows that marijuana is as harmless to your longterm health as a cuddly puppy wrapped in rainbows. Consequently second hand tobacco smoke has built up sharp connotations of incivility that marijuana smoke doesn't have. Because the government has cracked down on it so hard, marijuana's legal status is the only sanction people stop to think about. These days people will automatically go outside to smoke a cigarette so as to not be rude only to then walk back in and light up a huge blunt beside you without askance or a second thought.

If our culture takes just as long to develop some frail standards of decency as it did on tobacco smoke then you can bet your ass for a long while every fucking bus stop will be Tragedy of the Commons 101.

Look, all I'm saying is that when I feel like momentarily sabotaging my neural net I don't go around spitting the whiskey I'm drinking into other people's mouths. *shake fist*

2009-09-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

(A Brief Defense of Transhumanism & Its Abolition)

Shit is accelerating.

Not just Language to Algebra to Calculus to Transistors. We are more aware of and referential to everything.

There's a certain sector of society of which this is especially true; that understands and embraces this. And pretty much nobody else matters. For the very first time in history the brightest of the brightest are associating more and more, challenging one another and developing free of traditionalist frameworks. They are doing this in direct combat with the premise of social power dynamics. All along various distributions, people are challenging themselves to climb higher and they are finding places to go. The empathic are engaged like never before, entirely new vistas of understanding opening to them. Those focused on autistic explorations of the inert are running wild. We are going somewhere.

And yet everyone is preoccupied with those who haven't caught up or -- even more amusingly -- those who don't want to. No doubt the spasms of their development or suicide will be enormous, and it goes without saying that we should mind their waves. But now is no longer the time to be preoccupied with them.

Of course we're going to plant stuff in our neurocortexes, bypass language and see an explosion in the bandwidth of interrelation between these whirling hurricanes we call minds. Of course we're going to jump the fuck beyond the chains of this deplorable gravity well, chew up regolith, tap ice and mine the strewn bits of metal candy just fucking floating there. Of course we're going to figure out how to replicate or metastasize the constituent material of our hurricanes and share the party outward and outward until we have to bifurcate to deal with relativistic limitations.

Of fucking course.

Transhumanism is not a bunch of white guys sitting in a room watching slides of poorly translated advances in biology. It's not about taking our toys home and waiting for the robots to rescue us from reality.

It's not an ideology -- and insofar as it may drift in that direction it should be abolished. Insofar as it matters though, it is an idealism. Shorter still, an ideal: that of motion. We are not afraid of change. We are change. When we reach out beyond the present context we don't do so in ignorance of it. Just dismissal of its value unto itself. A hundred million years is short term. You put on your shoes every morning, but you don't live for the act of knotting shoelaces. In a matter of decades we have compounded more than a billion years of evolution. Things are only getting faster. And that's still just the short term.

Transhumanism is not an ideology, transhumanism is a space to have discussions about our struggles in the present day without having to defend the very notion of change.

Transhumanism is a safe space for those who recognize that the future exists.

2009-08-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

(What If A Shareholder Blocks? And What Exactly Is Their Process For Standasides?)

Explain to me again why corporations and cooperatives come to decisions through majoritarian democracy? I mean seriously. That doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever. And I've been struggling to comprehend this for nearly a decade. Seriously. What on earth could be more arbitrary and totally irrelevant to the efficient management or allocation of resources? I mean it really strains credulity. ...For god's sake, there could be hostile takeovers.

~ some brief response and commentary @ no third solution ~

2009-08-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

(Att: Liberal Arts Majors)

"Social reality" is a contradiction in terms. Reality is what an infant can figure out playing and exploring alone on a desert island. The social is all the clutter that gets in the way of that kind of understanding. ...Look, there can be bananas lying about, I'm not cruel. You're missing the point.

2009-08-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

(Holy Shit, Indeed)

"Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

-- Thomas Jefferson.

2009-08-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

(Another Instance Of The Technocratic Elite, Hand In Hand With Capital, Fulfilling Science's Only Use And True Goal: The Subjugation Of The Workers And The Commodification Of Everyday Life)

No doubt the high priests of technocracy with their gospel of automation -- their love affair with the architecture of control, and acolythistic faith in unending "progress" -- don't want you to see this video which exposes the inherent character of their religion for what it is: a shibboleth of unspeakable proportions, with no purpose besides our alienation from the natural world.

...

edit: it's called a fucking joke, people. link contradicts body. for context see practically every piece of leftist (and post-leftist) lit in the last twenty years.

2009-08-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

(Silly Brits)

"Whereas race- or gender-based struggles strive for recognition as equals and for coexistence; class struggle aims not at workers and bosses all getting along, but on the contrary aggravating their differences to the point of rupture and social revolution."

I think this quote [pdf] perfectly exemplifies just how out of touch, antiquated and irrelevant Libcom is. The struggles encompassing race and gender are vast and varied. But the native Anarchist stance is not one of equitable segregation or the peaceful maintenance of some status quo -- as Anarchists our campaign is their rupture and complete dissolution. Just what do they think Bash Back is all about? The point is not to reform gender or race relations, but to blow those structural realities to smithereens.

2009-08-11T00:19:00.000-07:00

(Books!)

I really wish that Magpie had included writers that actually matter in the modern world (like Ken Macleod, Iain Banks, Charlie Stross, etc.) as opposed to horribly embarrassing shit like Starhawk and Jensen. Nevertheless, the interviews he's compiled in Mythmakers & Lawbreakers are impressive, hard-won and occasionally rather fun. No longer a hypothetical or perpetual project, the book's cover has just been released on his blog, with AK Press allegedly shipping in September.

If you need something to crack in the meantime you might consider the recently Suffled How it Gush, an engaging anarchist travelogue through the various (A) communities and projects in the Balkans. The new edition is particularly apropos since several of author Shon Meckfessel's friends (working in Northern Iraq) were abducted by the Iranian government last week.

2009-08-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

(Cry Little Girl, Cry)

To much horror and outrage, it appears that WalMart has begun underselling the Girl Scouts. I want to be clear: This is fair and desirable. Of course both sides benefit from monopoly privileges and artificial economies of scale, both through the usual diffuse effects of the state and, more broadly, through our market's general indolence. But while this action may be characterized as unfeeling or rude on the part of WalMart -- violating an implicit social and cultural agreement to uphold the Girl Scouts' cookie monopoly, an act of charity through inaction -- I'm going to take the classic Libertarian position here and say that such disrespectful greed is an unqualified good thing.

Blah, blah, blah, before going into the details obviously more dynamism is always a good thing in the long term as it promotes evolutionary fitness among all parties and the most efficient and democratic satiation of desires. Betraying my Austrian dalliances, in any given situation my default allegiances tend to lie with the consumers and $4 for a box of samoas once a year is arguably quite exploitative of those of us laboring under their cruel addiction. But more specifically monopolies corrupt and while Girl Scouts of America may not be rolling tanks under the Arc de Triomphe, the centralized production and sale of said cookies (an incredibly profitable branch of the Kellogg empire, thank you for asking) is pretty much the sole force holding up the GSA's council system and national hierarchy.

And here we get to the root of the problem. Retaining the hierarchical notions of the progressive movement from whence it was born, the Girl Scouts are not the loose free-forming federation of cooperation and mutual aid one would assume. The centralized corporate structure of their cookie business holds the reigns on a centralized empire that brokers almost no alternatives in scouting (the coed Campfire alone serves as the perennially struggling exception) and tightly controls the practices of local clusters of parents and children. While not as profoundly and militantly deist and homophobic as the Boy Scouts of America, the GSA's monopoly status nevertheless forces the suppression of queer girls and the valorization of religious faith in every troop. Without local entrepreneurial deviation and experiment in such basic areas there is simply no way to efficiently deliver the experiences parents and girls desire, much less maintain or develop the scouting tradition.

The current cookie system works well for the Girl Scouts because their centralized national body is able to utilize Kellogg's economies of scale to produce them en masse (Kellogg's in turn sells more thanks to their "charity" branding), then the girls themselves (forbidden by the arbitrary strictures of child labor laws from earning cash through other operations) do the delivery, promotion and general retail footwork. But, as the emotionless market calculating machine of WalMart has figured out, Kellogg's and the GSA aren't the only ones with access to an optionless cheap labor pool or the ability to exploit state-created economies of scale. The only thing they don't have is the brand -- or, less cynically, the public goodwill. The logical response for the Girl Scouts is to re-tailor their business model to fully utilize this advantage. And, if I may be so bold as to offer some Left Libertarian advice, the best way to do that would be to embrace the autonomous nature of the scouting tradition, localizing and personalizing their efforts where WalMart homogenizes. There ain't nothing wrong with a bake sale. The possibilities for work are endless, from native-plantlife restoring landscaping to bike repair. Of course the government actively suppresses such wildcat production and commerce, but imagine how awesome it would be to be greeted at the supermarket doors by scouts selling just-burnt smores from portable gas stoves that they made themselves.

That's why WalMart's greed is a good thing. Not because callous disregard for others is a virtue, but because the vigilant application of self-interested rational thought and direct action -- even among evil constructs of state-capitalism -- allow us to collectively negotiate varying wants and desires towards a conclusion that best satiates everyone: S'mores.

2009-07-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

(Some Particularly Concise Words)

The non-aggression principle is not an axiom. By the term "axiom" I more or less mean something that is self-evident and irreducible, a stand-alone principle that functions as an obvious starting point from which everything else springs. This is not to say that I don't advocate the non-aggression principle or do not think that it is important, but it is to say that I think that its treatment in this way, as an "axiom", is a serious mistake that has had the consequence of oversimplifying libertarianism and providing no basis out of which to stop it from fragmenting into a multitude of contradicting social philosophies.

Brainpolice FTW. Of course, speaking personally, I don't advocate the non-aggression principle, because I don't think it can be strongly derived from any non-arbitrary moral arguments. But it would be nice if more Libertarians were competent or introspective enough to be open to that discussion. All too frequently the NAP is pulled out of a hat to justify some random delineation between realms of acceptable and unacceptable action. And then any critique is countered on the most hazily inducted rule-utilitarian grounds that every possible non-NAP formulation of ethics = Stalinist Death Camps.

2009-07-21T17:47:00.001-07:00

(Another Anarcho-Punk Spanging On The Side Of The Street)

In a ridiculous act of harassment and thuggery, the state of Alabama has just randomly swiped everything in Roderick Long's bank accounts -- and his mother's, just to ice the cake -- leaving him without a cent for food or housing until September. What Caesar giveth and all that. Read the details here. There are few enough anarchist philosopher extraordinaires in the world so if you're the sort of person with walkin' around money, consider this a major karma investment opportunity.

2009-07-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

(Three Thousand Years)

'On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself - previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years - was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.'

I've oft quoted some of the archeological explorations of non-hierarchical town and city cultures in Turkey, mostly because they directly refute primitivism at its core. As Ken comments in the above post, there was "no evidence so far of any social division between the sexes, and no evidence of any deaths by violence, over a very long time. That's staggeringly unusual." Something that simply cannot be emphasized enough. But as I was not aware and Ken documents further, not only is there great evidence to suggest that this state of affairs came about through a revolution, this completely game-changing society "spread for thousands of miles and remained free, equal, happy and peaceful for three thousand years." Three thousand years.

2009-06-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

(In Case Kinsella Asks)

I absolutely refuse to condemn the Iranian protesters throwing molotovs or smashing and overturning property in the streets as impediments to the riot cops. Because I am a vandarchist.

2009-06-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

(And Then, Of Course, The Comments Section Just Fails)

I realize I've been a bit lax on the snark and the SF/culture commentary here, most of that jazz has migrated to my Facebook feed -- now with 300% more insularity and arXiv links! But while I'm trying to shift the focus here to hard political texts, if you need a fix of old school Human Iterations you should head over over to this bit by China Mieville that perfectly channels the infinitely meta-ed snark.

2009-05-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

(You Always Bring Me The Very Best Math)

It's an uphill battle to avoid turning this blog into a pile of esoteric links to awesome papers in the physics arXiv. But in this case I'm going to have to make an exception. You're only required to read the extract:

Many mechanisms for the emergence and maintenance of altruistic behavior in social dilemma situations have been proposed. Indirect reciprocity is one such mechanism, where altruistic actions of a player are eventually rewarded by other players with whom the original player has not interacted. The upstream reciprocity (also called generalized indirect reciprocity) is a type of indirect reciprocity and represents the concept that those helped by somebody will help other unspecified players. In spite of the evidence for the enhancement of altruistic behavior by upstream reciprocity in rats and humans, this mechanism has not been really supported in theory. In the present study, we numerically investigate upstream reciprocity in heterogeneous contact networks, in which the players generally have different number of neighbors. We show that heterogeneous networks considerably enhance cooperation in a game of upstream reciprocity. In heterogeneous networks, the most generous strategy, by which a player helps a neighbor on being helped and in addition initiates helping behavior, first occupies hubs in a network and then disseminates to other players.

The key bit, highlighted more prevalently in the paper itself, is that while altruistic strategies can be effective through "what goes around, comes around" mechanisms, they can end up doing so best in jumbled, heterogeneous societies and further, in such cases, do so disproportionately. Those individuals that have the most connections -- or the most relevant connections -- with others will end up benefiting the most.

I know the point here is nothing new to many of us but, given the frequent assumptions and general state of affairs in the activist community, forgive me if it seems worth reiterating:

The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.

If the benefactors of such expansions have a random component to their selection, then we can retain and advance any advantages of heterogeneous societies while simultaneously avoiding both the martyred suppression of the most connected nodes as well as any perpetuated unequal accumulation of benefits.

This provides an interesting context from which to evaluate evolutionary fitness claims regarding Dunbar's Number. But it also clarifies the very real problem that faces major radical activists and organizers as well as simply folks in communities built on mutual aid wherein the scope of our personal connections both seems to best facilitate collaborative benefits for all, but also places us in -- what should at least damn well be -- an uncomfortable situation vis a vis the advantages that come back to us personally, compounding and further embedding us in such roles. I think it's incumbent upon us as anarchists to respond to these advantages not necessarily by hobbling or martyring ourselves through severing our personal connections but by acting consciously to expand and deepen the connections of others. And, in such rare homogeneous situations where everyone is as connected as they can be and this is less efficient than a more heterogeneous arrangement -- given contextual limitations -- periodically, in different ways, we can make the choice to step back and let others function in a more hub-like capacity. Weirdly enough, such a meta-strategy can even be in our best interest individually.

2009-05-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

(Fractured Rulership)

Is power stronger when it's centralized or when it's decentralized?

It seems quite strange to assert that the psychoses of power are capable of accomplishing far more when centralized as opposed to decentralized, when this is not true for anything else. Empire is not magically apart from the psychological roots that give rise to it. So why should the project of oppressing people be accomplished more efficiently by the centralization of those efforts rather than through diffuse decentralized approaches?

Certainly it's worth noting that, somewhat unique among goals, power has the property of diminishing the strength of the mind its rooted in, but I fail to see how this makes the many-minded pursuit of power different from more single, collective or centralized approaches. It's not like the trivially differing particulars between individual power-goals conflict with one another in any non-trivial way. Introduce yet another prince or warlord to a conflict seeking to personally rule all and you hardly lower the body count or the efficiency of enslavement.

Indeed one is left to wonder why those who are otherwise quite aware of the innate inefficiencies and diseconomies of scale in corporations or communism, nevertheless approach the state's attempts to subjugate us as though they were exempt from the same realities. Surely all of Hitler's meticulous clockwork of genocide was proven fundamentally out-gunned in speed and gumption by poorly armed peasants in Rwanda.

It has always appeared quite clear to me that we should consider ourselves lucky to live in a world defined by global Empire. Obviously our world is still a horrific one, whose innate evil and daily atrocities we, as anarchists, can never begin to accept. But while we work tirelessly to overcome and eradicate power, seizing every opportunity to change the parameters of the game, it does not seem clear to me that we should simply leap upon developments that remove the largest impediment our enemies currently have.

2009-05-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

(Alright, But That Won't Stop Me From Calling Them "Twats")

The thing about writing is that good reasons for avoiding it often promote bad reasons. You will always have a million things to write; emails to follow up on and comment threads to finish. Your time will always be compressed between blocks of weighty Importance. But when you're gifted with a formal and much wider public space like this the trick is not to try and paint it as another responsibility, but as a release valve for yourself. Inspiration can't be caught or relaxed into. It can't be systematically stoked like a fire because you can't separate it from yourself. And trying to does violence to you both.

As an excuse for this post I see that Chris Acheson has put together an easy to use, portable package of Firefox with crypto for the simpletons among us like me. I'll link to it through the @H+ blog so as to spread the much needed props all around.

Returning somewhat to the initial topic, How The Other Half Writes is an enviable defense of Twitter. Of course the specifics of Twitter are inseparable from the internet's current context of centralized services rather than truly networking protocols. If the dominant use of certain technologies appears inane or dehumanizing rather than connective, it's worth remembering that their boundaries are shaped just as much by the luddite pushback against the potentials we so champion.

2009-04-22T02:44:00.000-07:00

(Direct Action)

We had been complaining about how hot it was for years, but management refused to buy a fan or install air conditioning because it was "too expensive." At the same time, our store was pulling in $30,000 a week.

One morning, four of my coworkers walked into the back room of our store and gave the boss an ultimatum: "Will you buy the store a fan? Yes or no?" He stalled....so my four coworkers walked off the job, got in a car and drove to Target, leaving the boss to cover the floor. He was livid.

About 20 minutes later, my coworkers walked back in with a $14 box fan. They plugged it in, wrote "Courtesy of the IWW," drew a small black "Sabotage cat" [the IWW logo] on it, and enjoyed the breeze.

This left management with a choice. They could either remove the fan, in which case they would look like jerks. Or they could leave it there, as a monument to their own negligence.

To their credit, they did the right thing. Two days later, the district manager arrived with a $150 industrial floor fan. Two weeks later, they began installing air conditioning. This is the power of direct action. One week, $40 is too much to spend to bring the temperature in the store to within OSHA standards. The next week, management is spending $10,000 to keep the workers happy.

Every time I hear this story I fall in love all over again.

Congrats on the Bank of America shout-out.

2009-04-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

(The Union Makes Us Weak)

I wrote a pretty lengthy response to Iain McKay's recent bit on post-leftism and was asked to repost it beyond Infoshop.

First, let's ignore the non sequitur anti-science and anti-tech bullshit for now, since perspectives on either have absolutely nothing to do with post-leftism. After all while there are primmies and anti-civs within the post-left, there are also a plethora of transhumanists, cyberpunx and general internet-loving radicals who see invention and exploration as inherently liberatory acts.

Post Left Anarchists are functionally distinct from Left Anarchists in our distaste and suspicion of organization. That is to say our focus on critiquing the drive for organization-as-an-ends-unto-itself. Yes, we recognize that for all the profound changes in social and economic context since the days of yore, there are still workers and bosses and that very real advantages can be wrung out of the system through collective action. But we find the drive for mass and momentum as a primary ends to be constricting and ultimately self-crippling. We see Left Anarchists, and the Left as a whole, as instinctively clinging to the idea of numbers as a solution. Perhaps this is primarily a relic of those ancient days when any social adversary could be squashed by simply throwing enough bodies at it, or perhaps it is a perversion wrought by years of indoctrination in democratic ideals. Modern politics views building mass as the definition of success -- and certainly we will not see anything near true anarchy until every single human being comes to the realization that power relations are always evil -- but getting people to march under a banner is not the same thing as bringing them to a fuller appreciation of the nature of power. (Similarly, discussions on class-relations circa 1917 will not lay the groundwork to the better interpersonal relations that must come before any larger project.) And yet we feel that too often conventional Left Anarchists focus on getting people into the organization (as well as building the solidity of said organization and its brand name) to the detriment of these fundamentals.

Maybe that was pragmatic a century ago, but today mass matters a whole heck of a lot less. The state, the class system, etc, are underpinned less through the application of blunt social force and more through complicated machinations. The ecosystems of power relations we find ourselves embedded within can sustain great pressure, they can handle mass. The key to winning the war today is not mass -- we're not out to win some Revolution as though it were an election by another name -- the key is intelligent proactive exploitation of weak spots. Killing the motherfucker will involve a whole lot less brute grappling and a whole lot more hacking. We will win not as an army of soldiers but an insurrection of generals.

Hence our annoyance with the inclination to build a sense of structure and mass first and apply it -- or figure out how to apply it -- second. We've always seen the world we're building as an ad hoc one of projects and discussions, not organizations and federations. Our take away from this dream is the realization that if a project needs to focus on structure and lines of inclusion and exclusion in order to motivate action then, in the words of a cute kitten, "ur doin' it wrong." The Union hasn't made us strong, the Union's made us weak. It's wasted our time, suppressed our innovation and chained us to groupthink.

That's not to say that we're completely different from Left Anarchists. Certainly they as well have at times expressed a mild realization of the problems with this, just as we have participated in large federations and wasted hours of our life in rooms debating process documents. But even if it's only a matter of degree, in practice this difference of opinion/desire/strategy is still an important distinction.

And, if we are to be allowed to make this distinction, it's worth noting that our perspective is quite at odds with the overwhelming historical nature of the Left. Or, at the very least, the Left outside of Anarchism. So why the hell not define the Left in these terms of mass and structure worship and ourselves as outside it?

"Perhaps it is the American political climate which demonises "socialism" (in all its forms, equating it to Stalinism usually), a climate they are adjusting themselves to?"

And why shouldn't we?!

Putting aside Iain's smug british-chauvinism in this quote, it's worth wondering just why in the hell anyone should want to continue fighting a definitional war over "The Left." The Left-Right polarity in politics has shifted dramatically throughout history and is grounded in an almost meaningless obscurity. There were radical free market folks of worse behavior than the worst ancap today who sat to the left of the president's chair. Even worse the revolutionary distinction between "left and right" was in the popular mind considered one of action vs theory. Seriously none of us want to chain ourselves to one of those at the total expense of the other?

Yes, in America "The Left" is largely synonymous with authoritarian socialism and paternalism... just as it is in the rest of the world. Even if the devastating effects of the Soviet Union's influence could be overcome in the public's mind, that's not a battle most anarchists around the world are fighting. In much of Latin America and Eastern Europe anarchists have completely abandoned self-identification as Leftists. Western Europe is a more complicated matter, but there are plenty of anarcho-syndicalists who refuse to call themselves left. Just as similar although not entirely overlapping numbers of folk have abandoned the term "socialism". Indeed, on a global scale, the British Isles seem to be the only ones making a shrill fuss about this.

Yes there's a history that's important to be aware of. Folks who took exception to the same things we take exception to but worked under the Left nonetheless because it was the only possible game in town back then. But things have changed and the example of the rest of the Left and Socialism, much less their influence, have become serious concrete blocks on our feet. We fight over the definition of the word "anarchy" because we're forced to. Because an-archy has a clear etymological definition that it'll never shed and we have a drastically different evaluation of "without rulership." We're going to have to die on that hill no matter how strategically inopportune. But "social-ism" much less "left" are fluid, entirely fucking arbitrary words. They're defined by what they're associated with. And that's pretty awful company.

2009-04-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

(Space... The Final Revolt)

Sometimes I really wonder why I ever bother thumbing through old leftist texts. And then I find something pretty.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: the revolt that will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils.

--Internationale Situationniste, 1969.

2009-04-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

(Preoccupied)

In the meantime enjoy this quote from someone who is famous. And on TV.

Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.

--Charlie Brooker, in a column semi-endorsing Class War UK.

2009-03-22T02:12:00.000-07:00

(Best Review Ever)

"and then everybody decides to be freegans and live in dirt huts and make life suck for themselves even worse than on New Caprica, because cities are evil. Sam pilots the entire Fleet into the sun so that just in case anybody starts getting the idea that progress and intellectual development and the human urge to excellence lie anywhere other than somewhere on a scale between inconvenient and vile."

[...]

"Once again, the only emotionally resonant part is Gaius and Caprica, who are back in love and ready to make a go of it as farmers. This is intense because of how Gaius has always defined himself as not-farmer, and so after all the letting go and handing the cult over to Paulla really only has one lie left. It's maybe the biggest emotional step he's taken this whole show, and it's amazing. The angels show up and explain that there wasn't really a point to all of their bullshit except to keep Hera safe long enough to get her to Earth, and then Other Earth. Meanwhile, Helo and Athena teach Hera to surf and grow beans, and the Chief heads off to invent Ireland."

Thanks, tvpity. We wouldn't have been able to make it through this goddamn show without you.

Me? I'm having a hard time writing anything longer than Arrogant Liberals are Arrogant.