dantescanline

joined 1 year ago
 

In a country where days of national mourning are like weekends, every national tear for the dead of the social and class war is also a sob of hypocrisy. At the same time as the local alignment with the international anti-immigration policy of terror and death drowns more than 300 people on the Greek sea border, the Greek national team holds a minute’s silence and the political staff conducts memorials for the wronged. What hypocrisy! That the nation should mourn those it murders in order to keep the Greek ideal untainted and ironclad.

 

" I run Anna’s Archive, the world’s largest open-source non-profit search engine for shadow libraries, like Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and Z-Library. Our goal is to make knowledge and culture readily accessible, and ultimately to build a community of people who together archive and preserve all the books in the world ... In this article I’ll show how we run this website, and the unique challenges that come with operating a website with questionable legal status, since there is no “AWS for shadow charities”."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

the simple or flavorful use of 'authority' usually just means someone is well respected on a topic "She's an authority on electrical motors" or that they posses some leadership qualities and are well liked.

the second and more dictionary definition of authority is authorization to rule. literally to dominate others because they are seen as legitimate.

your example of a club is a good test ground for these differences. it's up to you to run your club, make agreements with other members and share responsibilities even if people are happy to let you decide things or do most of the work. but your club doesn't have any claim to legitimacy, to true authority, because it doesn't seek to control ALL activities of that type. in the case of government, it very much does claim authority over the entire nation, to determine who can move where, who can work where and how, who must fight and who must be put to death.

there's no competition allowed with a structure like government. either obey or resist and face consequences. i'd much prefer a world of overlapping autonomous 'clubs' whose members decide for themselves than a world divided up by the greediest and most violent mafias.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

From my perspective "necessary authority" is a meaningless phrase. Authority is always justified to those who support it, and unjustified to those suffering under it. For example, the authority of a particular country to enforce it's borders is "justified" in order to preserve those borders. The authority of a catholic priest is "necessary" to uphold the values of the church against sin and pollution of the faith. But if you don't believe in those institutions then the justification is very silly! Anarchists just take this one step further and realize there is no single true authorized power structure.

Anarchists can do away with authority and just act directly. If some of us agreed to live a certain way it's us deciding that we want to do that. We don't need to hit others over the head with a magic scroll or manifesto to prove we are justified, and we don't need to ask their permission first. Likewise, if someone wants to push us around we don't give them the benefit of the doubt through authority. They're just another person trying to push us around, whether they're a government agent or a highway bandit.

How you approach others is what makes your world the way it is. If you want to treat others as equals, directly, and engage with them without an intermediary we could say you're an anarchist. If you think you need government (an authority, legitimate justified power) to push others around, i'd say you're not.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah it's the issue with this 'middle ground' of federation. some ideal world would be fully p2p, identities fundamentally would rest with the user's device or backed up somewhere public and encrypted, then servers just become meeting hubs or caches of content. there's some protocols that already do this at a technical level, secure scuttlebutt and nostr are two. there's other issues that crop up, for one moderation and content discovery starts to be a lot more complicated.

so, not a solved problem by any means, but federation at least gives us a bit more freedom than a singular centralized service.