Hierarchists oftentimes say that we need the machine to ensure that we are provided for. In this sense I like to think of the machine as a mother. The motherly machine nurtures us. Gives us hospitals, passports, car infrastructure, gives us internet, gives us supermarkets.

But she can’t nurture us without vessels which pumps force of life to her. The one raising and maintaining the vessels is the fatherly machine.

Our father is efficient, and does whatever he needs to do to accomplish this. He deathen forests to set up farms. He penetrates the ground for metals, he exploits labour to the degree that it is possible, fully if possible. He grabs around that which he can, from the very biggest, to the very smallest. He sucks up life from the ocean. And penetrates the crust of Gaja to vessel oil.

The issue here is that in fern for the machine to preserve itself, it needs people to look away from the fatherly machine, because then it can get away with more providing. This is easy for the machine, because all the machine has to do is to claim responsibility for being non-exploitative. It is moving responsibility away from people towards itself.

The lokening is therefore to take back responsibility.

By doing so, we remove the dependence upon the motherly machine, and therefore also the fatherly machine.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36736389

The inspiration for this poem is this mural and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron

I like to use the analogy of dreaming and painting when I think about movements.

The painter

The painter wants to communicate with himself or an audience through a language culture. The language culture is the medium in which something is communicated. Languages has strengths and weaknesses based on what is deemed as important by the language users. Based on the language culture, some ideas will be easier to communicate, whilst other ideas will be harder. The language culture is what set's the framing before an idea is being shaped.

Particularily we can say that the architect has a different language culture than a farmer. Their awareness is different. So if you have the language culture of the architect, you can paint something that the farmer might not able able to fully appreciate.

In a farement context, we can say that the language culture is democratic confederalism or solar punk.

The painter has an idea which is the cloud, and expresses something in the given language culture. Using the juggling language culture, one can say "doing a windmill while doing siteswap 531". The cloud is an abstract idea that the painter want to realize.

The cloud in democratic confederalism could be "mining away asphalt to give space for gardening" or "collaborative work".

From the cloud we can sketch the structure. With juggling it would be to get the conceptual understand the internal workings of a "windmill while doing siteswap 531". With "mining away asphalt to give space for gardeninig", it would be understanding how to do it safely, with as little conflict as possible. Sketching is the skeleton which we can put meat upon.

After sketching comes painting which is where we take all the research and describes a story that takes in all the elements. With "mining away the asphalt to give space for gardening" it would be do perhaps, make a short story of how the neighborhood came to concent about mining up majority of the asphalt to plant valuable foods.

Dream

Dreaming is like painting. You start from a language culture, make a cloud, sketch and paint. By working on all steps, we make distant utopias become real in our heads.

In particular, it is the painting process that makes stuff feel real. It is when we can read books or watch movies in vivid details and realism, that it feels real.

The thing about dreams is that the bigger and more vivid they are, the more people are going to feel invested in them. It shows that somebody put in the effort in making something they believed in, or at least that's what it seems like.

Dragments and dreaming

A dragment is the attempt to drag a dream into reality. It is to realize a dream.

It's easier to drag vivid dreams into reality, because then it has become reality in our minds. It's like taking a painting and saying: "I want my town to be like this". And then coordinate with neighbors about the vision.

Analysis of cyberpunk

We can see this in cyberpunk. A lot of people has invested louds of time painting a future where humans and technology goes together. Some are utopias and some are distopias, but they agree that this is the future. They paint cyberpunk wonders, and changes how we interact with society. Their worlds are painted forth in details such that their world feels real.

By making it real in our heads, technology companies can use these stories to drag elements of them into reality.

Cyberpunk can therefore be described as a dragment.

Analysis of Solarpunk

When we see beautiful towns filled with small scale energy production, gardening, childrens playing, a sailboat in the distance, we can't help but feel like we want to be there.

By doing this, we sow a seed into somebodies head, that it is possible to move away from the machine, because how else would that town exist?

dream drag analogy

The dream drag analogy makes us appreciate the role of culture in dragging for a better future.

An interesting rebuttal to the last point was made on his youtube page by a person named mm-rj3vo. Figured I'd include it here:

You said in the article that...

"Anarchism cannot shield us from social dynamics of rumour, bias, or mob mentality. Those come with being human."

But I disagree, as a matter of education on critical thinking, anarchism is perfectly capable of giving us tools to understand social structures, biases, and mob mentality such that we are capable of avoiding them. To your point, of course, we can only do so to varying degrees of success and failure.

Something I've dubbed "informational anarchism".

Informational anarchism is when you treat knowledge, and lies, as power, or when you understand them as motivators for people's actions. A simple conversion to see the implications of, upon considering "What does someone believe, and how will it affect their actions?"

I'd actually love to have a longer conversation on that aspect as it relates to things like misinformation, personal responsibility for the informational safety of others, etc.

Suffice it so say, I hear the sentiment behind the sentence, and agree with certain aspects of it, but I think it's missing some vital approaches to that thing I've dubbed "informational anarchism", which I'm sure some other anarchist has probably already expounded upon at some point in the past.

One can train one's self to enter an introspective state when they hear someone say something seemingly spurious, to recognize when a rumor has been uttered, to use critical thinking and skepticism to protect themselves and other from the spread of misinformation and I truly believe that these strategies are forms of "informational anarchism".

Anarchism is about self governing. Another way to put it is that it is about self discipline, not the rigid kind, but the exact opposite.

A discipline of openness, a discipline of fair critique of one's own conceptions, and those of others. A discipline of kindness and gentleness, and recognizing when one's self or others have failed to do so.

I see your point, though, in that such things as bias and rumor and mob mentality are easy to fall into.

But there are always a miriad of diverse ways to prevent those thought traps

Hi, I'm not sure if any of you have read Murder in the Tool Library (a quite good solarpunk murder mystery, I think) but I'm working on a story with an investigation and I'm wondering how close AE Marling's answers are to being a drop-in solution for that particular concept, and sort of whether it passes basic scrutiny by anarchists.

If you haven't read it, the basic idea is that the setting's eutopian city doesn't have a police force but it does have a large and active civilian investigative society which normally investigates more mundane situations but can be temporarily empowered with access to additional information by the community on a case-by-case basis, such as when someone is murdered for seemingly no reason. They lacked any sort of qualified immunity and the community seemed to have an existing system based around rehabilitation and restitution that they answered to. It seemed to be very croudsourcing-oriented but members had to pass a fairly-strict qualification process to screen out those who would misuse their access.

They also seemed to have a much broader scope of what they normally investigated than the modern day police do (finding lost pets and such), as crimes seemed to be much more rare in the setting, given the other safety nets available to catch things earlier.

So I suppose most of my questions are around does this seem viable to you? When I asked some of these questions on the xmpp channel it was pointed out that an organization charged with investigating crimes outside its own members but at least nominally accountable to the community is police under another name, which is probably fair. So I guess my question boils down to: are there anarchist answers to how to do policing?

The anarchist manifestos I've tried seemed to be listing all the problems with modern police, which I agree with, and saying that if you solve all of society's other problems you won't need police, prisons etc. which, I don't really doubt that but it also doesn't feel attainable to me. Especially when one of my most frequently-reused comments over on the subreddit is explaining that yes you can still have conflicts (and thus story plots) in a better, more eutopian society. All kinds of crimes, shortcuts and disagreements can arise without desperate necessity and even between people who 95% agree with each other.

So is there a halfway-to-utopia answer?

Part of the trouble is that though my story centers around an investigation (a treasure hunt for thousands of tons of industrial waste illegally dumped decades earlier, and a modern day conspiracy to cover it up and block the investigation), I have a lot less room for deep dives into the organization itself. Marling was able to devote much of his story to exploring a lot of concepts and nuances around the abolishment of police and prisons, how they try to screen for people with sociopathic or abusive tendencies and how the investigative society still has some hierarchy which puts it at risk to people who prioritize ladder climbing and power, (long with the nuts and bolts of how things might be done when the worst case scenario happens and someone commits murder despite all the other social safety nets).

So thanks for reading my question, and for any thoughts you might have. I guess I'm wondering if this existing idea seems basically viable, and what specifics you'd want called out where I can fit them. If you think it doesn't work, I'd be very interested in any alternatives (and I'm happy to read relevant articles, screeds, manifestos etc!). Thanks

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/43929647

Being armed does NOT give you political power. At least not by itself. In this video, I break down the four steps to actually build political power in the real world, and talk about the role firearms play in that.