Thanks!

Yeah, Kairos is a project I've been working on for a bit. The goal is to turn it into a book. I think I've got the majority of the first draft done. I have one or two more sections to write, then I need to clean it up.

I realized you are hex, are you also Kairos? That's exciting, and I'm happy to be a part of it. "A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power" is a great quote that obviously pays homage to Clarke's third law, and is delightfully pithy and original.

For what it's worth, this is also a bit of a draft. I'm basically writing a book in public. Feedback, including grammar, pointing out spelling and typos, or any clarifying questions, is all very welcome. I have added a section to the intro (for right now) to include acknowledgements. If you provide feedback, please let me know if you would not like to be included or if you'd like to be included in a specific way other than just your handle.

Exactly. Part of my thinking here was definitely influenced by Butler's "Parable of the Sower." She made pretty on point predictions about the direction of things by just observing the world. It's pretty clear where this is going, and that's exactly it.

Like... this is already Flint. This is already Detroit. The suburban ponzi scheme is running really thin. Things are going to change really radically or this is happening in the next 10 years (and probably a lot sooner).

I'll have to remember to add a link to that in the essay. Thanks for the heads up!

Edit: updated, also added a link to this sub.

This is quite apropos of what I've been trying to tell people all along:

When it's no longer possible for the oligarchy to extract wealth from the population(because we've run out of money), they're going to shut off the water, the gas, the electricity, and the telecommunications networks. They'll start issuing leins to collect the "debt" the population "owes" and when people start to panic, they'll cry "THEY'RE GETTING VIOLENT!" and send in PMC shock troops to "secure the property".

Also see !disasterresponse@slrpnk.net 👍

But yeah, this article summarizes a lot of good ideas, and even in state-run disaster response organisations the devolution of power and hierachy is usually quite strong to avoid issues with communication breakdowns.

A sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness and response program is indistinguishable from a revolutionary counter-power.

I agree.

Also, if a society has a higher degree of autonomy and freedom (ability to function without central coordination), people will have considerably less fear of anarchist movements and experiments.

Hey, what a cool way to find out about a really interesting community and term of which I hadn't been aware. Cool stuff, subscribed!

I found this insightful:

Part of this involves challenging the ideological distinction between the personal and the political. On this view, things like what happens in parliaments and governments count as political, while things that especially privileged people don’t really want to think and talk about – like how house-work and child-rearing is organised, widespread racist practices and attitudes, and so on – are labelled merely ‘personal’. The familiar function of insisting that something is ‘personal’ rather than ‘political’ is to effectively exclude things from critical scrutiny, debate, and deliberate change. The effect of this is often to silence marginalised voices, like women speaking out against marital rape, because this is seen as something personal rather than something political that deserves critical scrutiny and deliberate change. It also ignores the ways in which states have already been intervening in the personal lives of oppressed people in many ways already, from the beginnings of European colonialism to slavery, police harassment, and much more. It’s also based on a deeply liberal and anti-socialist view that underestimates how interconnected humans are. We are profoundly shaped by our personal experiences, from how we grow up to our romantic relationships and how we treat each other day-to-day. And there’s no good reason to arbitrarily rule much of this out as things worth critically thinking about and changing if we find them lacking.

Whenever you find someone dismissing a matter as "not political", or claiming "I'm not political", you know there's ideology and assumed privilege at work. And that can be a problem on platforms like Lemmy which require you to decide whether a post goes to a politics community or somewhere else. By rejecting posts as "not politics" because they don't directly involve politicians, mods or users can be, often inadvertently, pushing a specific political agenda.

I don't like this usurping of the term "Digital Divide". That term has always meant: the division of those with digital literacy to operate and integrate in today's modern computerized world VS those that do not have technical knowledge and are increasingly left out of resources and opportunities as a result.

Repurposing the term "Digital Divide" means the groups lacking digital literacy are having their entire concern erased from the public consciousnesses. These folks are often the most marginalized already, and doing this to them is a further disservice in our society.

Very interesting article and comments.

I take note of some things that the article comments, and especially:

Bonnano calls for people to engage in struggle as though it were play

However, Bonnano cautions that, “Those who use these tools must not become slaves to them. Just as those who do not know how to use them must not become slaves to those who do. The dictatorship of the tool is the worst kind of dictatorship.”

In Spain, for almost a year, we self-managed 25% of the territory and industry through assemblies thanks to anarcho-syndicalism. From what I've read, amidst the complexity of the event, the most pointed factors of self-criticism tend to be the lack of instruments to balance forces and the lack of sufficient training.

North-shore is currently MIA. Archive link

It's also a great way to stress-test social/political/economic theories. If you only wait until after the revolution to start putting a theory into practice, reality can ensue and have terrible consequences. But if your system already helps >5,000 people despite active sabotage and commodification efforts by capitalism, chances are it'll work for millions. Meanwhile systems that don't work don't work, so they can't amass enough power to take over.

We can emancipate ourselves only if we start building the new society within the shell of the old one.

For me, this is it.

In a way, I believe that capitalist system has power on us also because we use it. To use it less and less, we need to create other networks to just start using at first, and then be able to rely upon them. The more we use these alternatives the less we use or depend on the existing system, and consequently, the less power they have on us.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying this is the only thing to do, just that imo this is something that needs to be done, among other things.