Hi! I wanted to let y'all know about a social media design I've been thinking about recently and how I think it might better combat misinformation compared to the social media we're familiar with (both traditional and fediverse).

Digital gardens are basically personal wikis that have pages that are public to all. You might also think of it as a blog, but where every post is being actively maintained rather than just posted and forgotten about. So a page on hexbear might get updated to talk about some new information or personal feelings you have about the site, rather than that change going to a new separate page/post.

The idea for the social media platform is one where everyone can maintain a digital garden, and follow friends' digital gardens. Instead of liking or sharing posts, you're just seeing the changes other people make to their pages, and you can decide to take those changes (or a part of them) into your own, possibly adding your own insight. These pages could be over topics, specific events, etc. - them being personal let's people decide what organizational structure works best for them. I think this would cause a certain number of effects that lead to a healthier social media platform and users:

• adding friction to sharing/liking makes it so you're more likely to critically engage with an idea before aiding it's spread
• ideas are iterated upon as they spread, and essentially the entire network can build the topic to a very complete (perhaps even nuanced) form
• corrections to misinformation will notify people essentially along the same channels, aiding their ability to be seen by all who saw the original incorrect information
• while ideas and movements can spread, the original post and post creator do not, preventing things like unintentional and unconsensual vitality of a "nobody" (because going viral sucks and brings with it lots of harassment)
• it could literally just be updating your pages and a notifications list. No algorithmic timeline, no algorithmic suppression, no doomscrolling.

In general I think such a platform would also democratize influence a bit, rather than letting it consolidate in the hands of a few "influencers". And the end result is a very cool network of information that I think can be really useful as a personal reference, something to direct others to, etc.

What are y'all's thoughts?

I recently got sent this page on sociocracy. I noticed it sounded a lot like how I've envisioned an anarchist society, as I've described here on hexbear. I found it weird that it doesn't mention anarchism, but perhaps they just are using the term "self governance" to refer to anarchism but not by name (due to its stigmatization). It specifically tried to differentiate consent versus consensus as decision making processes, but honestly I thought consensus already worked how they described consent to work. So if that's the case, I guess I'm actually a fan of consent decision making, not consensus. I was wondering if any leftists (esp anarchists) on here could vouch for their interpretation and clarify if you find it a feasible and good form of anarchist society.

I'm also wondering how a society that's purely online would work like this. Like a video game or something that teaches anarchist values by just being like a survival game where cooperation is clearly beneficial but there's no built in party or guild system, so people form anarchist organizations instead. But I'd be concerned about people forming hierarchies within those organizations anyways, and not allow players to come and go as per free association. That's perhaps off topic from the first part of this post, but I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on how a game might encourage players, purely through gameplay, to form anarchist organizations.

Since the George Floyd protests I've learned a lot about the arguments of prison abolition, and found them quite persuasive. I have a couple questions though that I was hoping I could find answers to here, as they relate to dialectical materialism which doesn't seem to come up that much when looking into abolition online.

I've been reading through elementary principles of philosophy, and while doing so I had the realization materialism applied to one of the common prison abolitionist arguments: that the idea that some people are "naturally" bad (thus un-rehabilitatible and must be removed from society), is untrue and has been used historically to dehumanize people in the past, often those with disabilities. My current understanding of materialism would follow that the material conditions surrounding someone significantly impacts their ideas and, therefore, behaviors. So a materialist and abolitionist would find common ground saying that if everyone's basic needs were met (and if the proletariat owned the means of production, for the materialist), then anti-social behaviors would essentially go away. Is this a correct interpretation? And if so, does that mean a marxist-leninist would be in favor of prison abolition (in a society with no imperialist threat and after sufficient time to ensure everyone was in fact having their needs met)?

I've been thinking about social constructs a lot and doing a lot of research into them, and I've basically come to support the idea of constructivism: that essentially all of reality is a social construct, and that everything only exists through our subjective experience of it. That even science itself is our constructed understanding of the physical world, not the physical world itself. That basically everything new we experience is manipulated by the context of our own previous experiences, which is both shaped by and shapes our understanding of the world.

I think this understanding is important, because it disproves all arguments that essentially go "that's just the way it is", or otherwise try to root themselves in alleged objective truths about the world. For example, transphobes have used sex (as opposed to gender) as "objective" so they can argue about fairness in sports or some other transphobic bs. But our definition of sex is just as subjective - socially constructed - let alone any notion of fairness in sports being at all objective.

But on here, with everyone talking about materialism vs idealism, it sure seems like constructivism is the same idea as idealism, which Marx et al argued against. I've read through the prolewiki pages on idealism and dialectical materialism and it seems its just the part about objective reality that I disagree on. e.g. I agree with all but the first bullet point in the list in the introduction of https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism.

To put the sex and gender example above in idealist vs materialist terms, I think my understanding is that an idealist would argue that sex and gender are subjective, and that by changing our ideas about sex and gender we can make material change on things like trans rights. A materialist would argue that there is an objective natural phenomena that we refer to as sex, but that that phenomena is in constant motion and by guiding that change we can change our ideas of sex and gender. To me, the idealist just makes a lot more sense here, but I'm frustrated by that because apparently Marx considered materialism a foundational theory for leftist ideologies, and I don't know how to reconcile this.

I have a job in software development, and I enjoy the work I do, my coworkers, and the pay is quite good. However, management keeps the work environment very... unsympathetic. Despite it being a programming job it's very strict on working in office, and there's a vibe of everyone just being a mistake or two away from being fired. This came to a head for me when I had a child recently and when my spouse was a couple weeks from her due date she started struggling to get out of bed to use the restroom or get food. However, when I requested to work from home so I could just briefly help her out a couple times a day (a frequency and duration of break which is totally fine in the office), I was made to start my paternity leave early.

I worry about coming across as out of touch, since having paternity leave at all makes me super fortunate, but it feels absolutely terrible having to give that time up and spend it without my kid because of my company's resoluteness on this matter. (Side note: they've explained it to me as not wanting to make exceptions / "play favorites", while not acknowledging that they themselves can just make the rule that you can be remote at will, when your spouse needs help, etc.) It's enough for me to start looking at other opportunities when I am able, but I'm back at work without any bites. I just wish to work someplace that feels like it cares about its employees more. But man, job hunts are just so draining, and since my salary expectations are quite a bit higher than they were when I first got this job, the hunt hasn't actually gotten any easier from me having professional experience. I just want somewhere I can work remote so I can spend more time with my kids, and as a pie in the sky optional requirement I want a democratic workplace, where I can more realistically expect business decisions to be in the employees' best interests. But the very very few of those that exist are not really looking for new members, and with the kid already here I can't take a risk on starting a new co-op that could take months to years to become financially solvent, if ever.

Realistically I can just keep working here which I realize puts me in a much more fortunate position than so many fellow humans, but I can feel the stress increase as the employees continue to get spread thinner and thinner, while the company's massive success YOY does not proportionally scale to our own benefits or salaries increasing, and the parental leave incident has just left an incredibly sour taste in my mouth. I'm just not sure what to do.