this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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What have you been reading? Pretty much the only place where the people magically, spontaneously organise is in political speeches. The Patriots wouldn't have existed without guys like Jefferson, the French revolution was run by rogue military factions and exclusive political clubs, and the Leninists have it right in their name.
Oh. Shit magical and spontaneous? So there's nothing other than a master with a whip and a fucking wizard?
Its not what i favor, or what im proposing, but spontaneous organization does happen. Youve never been in a disaster, or started digging a hole at the beach, have you?
Kind of, yeah. The way I see it it's a human limitation; we need a certain level of indirection to pull off anything bigger than a band of hunter-gatherers. Some systems are more whippy than others, though.
Actually, yes I have, but never have I seen more than a handful of people get involved at once, and I never heard from that dude who started directing traffic again. I've also seen the bystander effect. Never in history. Maybe on the beach, but not in history.
You've never tried to organise any kind of activism, have you?
So, the beach thing. Why does it happen, and why does it 'not happen anywhere else'?
Have you read 'a paradise built in hell'?
Did you read my point about believing in the existence of, but not favoring spontaneous organization. A deliberate but headless structure is possible! They're actually really cool! Good thing too, because strict hierarchies are wildly inefficient and trend towards flattening the territory to match the map, which tends to lead to fascism.
And if I believed it was only a fuhrer or a grand wizard, I'd fucking kill myself and take as many as I could with me. Thankfully I've seen (and executed) proof to the contrary.
As far as I can tell, being in a novel enough situation emergency puts people in a different headspace. After a while, normality creeps back in, and if the emergency continues it looks less like a community pulling together and more like Haiti or parts of Myanmar. Mostly, though, it's an empirical observation. Besides what we've covered, it's hard as shit to get people to show up or care about activism, and if a meeting gets big enough it stops working, so you have to appoint someone to head whatever thing. This proves true over and over again.
I don't think that automatically means Hitler, though. Representative democracy seems to work if set up just right. Hopefully it's here to stay.
Theres this tendency to completely ignore the effects of peer pressure and habituation and culture and very scary men with guns pointing them at you in these arguments, and its deeply bullshit.
We tend to treat a hyper-competitive hyper-alienating authoritarian context as some sort of fundamental trait of humanity, rather than some shit we work very very hard to maintain.
And its nonsense? And I can prove it. I prefer deliberate rhizomatoc organization; its more efficient long term, but I can prove spontaneous organizing happens anywhere it isnt actively shut down, and I'll show you, in a totally non-ideological context: go to any beach, and dig a hole. Just pick a spot and start digging. Watch what happens. Nothings wrong, nobody's in trouble, its not even really for anything, and you'll have more help than you can use.
I could theorize why (being on a team feels good. Doing things is a primal joy. People generally want things to get done, etc) but the fact is; it happens, and tryimg to find reasons why it can't be the basis of a social order, or at least disaster response; seems very unnecessarily pessimistic.
That's a failure if your organizing systems. Read more (managerial and information) theory? Seriously though; hierarchal systems do not scale. Spontaneous horizontal systems don't either, but you do realize there are deliberate horizontal systems, right? That you can apply going in or retrofit to an existing organization?
Real representative democracy has never been tried? No true Scotsman? Because I'm not seeing one, and if you are, you need (new) glasses.
Oh honey. I... Maybe some acid would help this go down easier. I'm here for a hug if you need it.
Well, it's an interesting point. I've had an anarchist point out democracy was ridiculous until very recently, too. That all my lived experience and every documented sustained system is down to invisible training, and that it has no ontological momentum is an extraordinary claim, though. I need more than holes to support it; I don't even live near a beach.
No, just someone who's willing to double-volunteer. It's often me, and I have the charisma of a half-cooked noodle. I'm okay over text at least. I'm not thinking of the splashy figurehead positions.
Maybe the politicians I sometimes work with count, but honestly they just seem like normal salespeople, and I think a few of them even know what they are. In the end, nobody is in control of the big picture.
I'm good on information theory. No offense, but managerial theory seems like complete circlejerk. I don't know, do you have an example of a big horizontal organisation that does things in meatspace? I've seen a couple that say that, but then you realise they have one guy that's there "just to assist" or whatever, and you need that guy to sign off on use of any resources. As a peer, of course. /s
Well, it's certainly not direct democracy, the voters have no clue. But on the other hand, casual bribery isn't really a thing anymore in long-established democracies. Open corruption is bad for re-election, you see.
Democracy is great! Democracy is not made of elections. Elections (not voting. Elections. Though majority fptp elections are pretty undemocratic) are anti Democratic. Democracy can only happen when people are involved. Like actually involved. If you want more than holes; read the damn book I recommended. It goes over this at book length.
See, that can be a thing that happens, because that's how people know how to do things; the familiar form they defaukt to even if they know it sucks. But also, I feel like its often a legal requirement in the strictly hierarchalist systems we inhabit. Move to something that cares less about laws, and you'll see less of that.
They tend to be pretty secretive, because when they're not the cops murder them or arrest them for terrorism. See: 'food not bombs'. Show me a big hierarchal organization that isn't a recursive circle jerk shit show completely alienated from its original stated purpose used to pump up the egos and bank accounts of a fistful of kleptocrats who have barely any idea what the fuck their organization was supposed to be actually doing in the first place.
That's kind of my point. When you try to get all the information through a few choke points (which individuals become) you have to reduce it massively until its useless, you have to reduce the considerations that go into decisions until they're barely (or just not) better than random, made entirely for reasons of the decision system and not at all for reasons to do with facts on the ground. The power they weild ceases to be a power to help; in that structure it literally can't be-every form of action besides violence requires at least some understanding, and the bandwidth just isnt there, and even if it was the data has been compressed and attenuated to nonsense by the time it gets to the big man. But its still power, and its still there, and it inevitably maps to the interests of the people who believe they should be in control, which means flattening the territory to match the map, which means culling the (human) outliers. So you cede all your autonomy to a hierarchy, which then loses the power to help you, and uses everything you gave it to have some white supremacist covered in military surplus shit kick down your door, shoot your dog, and lock you in a cage for feeding hungry people. They're not actually in control, its a fantasy built on a mountain off terrorism, but it exists.
Some of it is. But the scientific stuff is interesting, studies communication and decision making. People talking about this stuff without a knowledge of that, or a broad knowledge of history and political theory, come off as ignorant as fuck. If you haven't studied human coordination, even casually, why spout off about your opinions?
So... Gimme an example of what you mean by 'long established' because I'm under the united states right now, and, uh...
Okay so youre just imagining a fantasy world based on 'should', and there's no danger of you ever actually looking outside without a blindfold.
Okay, I'll start saying elections for whatever remains of this conversation. I'm not convinced ordinary people actually taking interest in groundwater allowances far away could ever happen, which is what it sounds like you're talking about.
I'll put it on the reading list. My expectations are low though, TBH.
If you get arrested, you can't just slip the cop a hundred and leave. In many countries, that's almost always an option, to the point they'll just straight up tell you they want a "brown envelope" or whatever the local euphemism is. This was the case in all civilisations historically.
I'm familiar. My impression is that it's a brand for throwing potlucks.
Usually they splinter within like a year and then hate each other forever, if that's the sort of group you're talking about. If they don't, it's because they grow a governance system, and just push out dissenters periodically.
I have. Anthropology is great, sociology and political science are neat too. You may have noticed my interest in history. Just not "management philosophies", except enough to realise they're largely snake oil for people faking competence.
We all are.
This is actually neat to hear, so it gets it's own section. That's exactly how I think of it. The difference is that as far as I can tell it's a bottleneck between every single human, including us right now. Nobody understands things handled more than a couple of degrees of separation away, which is insufficient to directly run a complex industrial economy.
When organisations work it's because they're self-correcting regardless of some opacity. Yes, that always involves guns, even if it's at the very abstract level; pacifism gets you killed.
Well it seems you know so much about these organizations than me, despite my decade of experience, and so much more about the phenomenon, despite my years of study. I defer to your expertise.
This conversation is not generalizable to the population at large!
What youre talking about is attenuation. Also, how is an authority immune to this? Nobody who makes decisions is within five degrees of normal. There are ways around this. I can recommend a dense podcast or a dense doorstopper book+a normalish book as a primer.
K
Nah, your way doesn't threaten anyone in power.
All right, well, I'll just end off with "Fuhrers don't control anything". Look at Gorbachev; he tried to change the system and it launched multiple coups against him until he was gone. Organisations (or institutions, or whatever word you'd prefer) run themselves, there's no such a thing as a leader.
Last word is yours, I guess.
So institutions are magic and unaccountable inhuman systems are a good thing?
I remember a story about a guy, world war one vet, that war fucked him up, became a rabid Nazi literally in it for the dehumanization and (the 'I jack off to being turned into paste by a beautiful perfect machine' itallian futurist) type philosophy, Until he saw what the Bolshevik reactionaries did with Russia.
He was immediately and unironicly like 'hey, wow, this is so much worse. I'm defecting to these guys now.' and then did it.
You remind me of that. This is praise of your novelty, condemnation of your everything else. Big 'thanks, I hate it!' Vibes