Sometimes, briefly, I miss my days as an influencer online. That was never my plan, but as you know, the former Twitter used Algorithms. The more engagement you made, the higher your presence became. My followers have always been higher than the amount I follow. The more I follow, the less I see, caught up in a fast moving stream of (mostly garbage) ReTweets. #ENGAGEMENT is not Boosting or Liking, it's responding, dialogue, comments, and conversation. #Influencer#Klout#Twitter#Gifts#Thread
In their book “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow provide multiple accounts by early European settler colonists of the indigenous societies they encountered in the woodlands of northeastern North America.
Over and over, these Europeans noted that these societies were well and truly stateless, lacking rulers, laws, courts, police, prisons, or anything like what they were used to in Europe.
They quote one Jesuit, writing in 1644 about the Wendat:
“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”
A very, very common question I’ve seen when discussing anarchism goes something like this:
“Once people are free of state violence and hierarchy, how can they just stop some bad actor from taking over?”
The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other.
(The question is usually accompanied by some invocation of the dreaded “war lord” whom the questioner assumes will inevitably overrun a nonstate or non-hierarchical community.)
So, I thought I would take a crack at answering this as comprehensively as I can!
ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products.
Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users.
Philips knew about this right away. It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a decade to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died.
Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica:
In his book “Debt,” David Graeber relayed an anecdote about the Gunwinggu people of Western Amhem Land in Australia, observed by anthropologist Ronald Berndt in the 1940s. Two groups of strangers encountered each other and negotiated with each other to barter over trade goods—in this case, spears made by one group and cloth owned by the other.
Conflict between these strangers was of course possible, and the situation was undoubtedly tense. The ritual they engaged in began with a dance, followed by singing, followed by a kind of formalized bullying—women from each side insult and hit the men from the other.
Customary on weekends, I take a little time to write a short story, about our adventures.
As a background, in case you are new, here's who we are: 2 seniors, my wife is disabled (I'm crippling up too), defying difficult trails to show that it can be done.
Hashtag shown is relative to places in #NovaScotia, that others might never have seen, but will want to visit.
"When Are You Coming To Visit?"
► #WAYCTV ◄
During one of our exploring trips around the coast, we never finished the continuous trails on the south side of Antigonish. That's why we went back. You can't brag about places you've never been.
Since I was a kid, my family travelled the #EasternShore of #Halifax (when it was a County)
Most of my relatives start at Tangier, and stop at the end of the Municipality. My parents had a cottage in Necum Teuch.
#StoryTime
My FRIDAY and SUNDAY memories went like this: #Weekend#Thread#memories
Packing the car, Unpacking the car. And usually, throwing up, in the car. I always got car sick.
(County signs were Green, Municipality signs are Blue)
My correspondent below makes the argument that any effort by an exploited class to end its exploitation will necessarily be violent.
People will want revenge. It will be bloody. The poor will rise up against the rich and murder them; all we have to do is look at an historical example like, say, the Romanovs of Russia to see that this is true.
Everyone had major damage, myself included. We huddled in a safe location inside while the winds tore the front off my house and many shingles from the roof. I lost one big tree, a white pine.
My damage, while extensive, was superficial. You can live with siding off. When we had a phone service, I had to put in an insurance claim.
My brother texted me “what smart dimmer should I get?”
Little did he know he kicked off a multi-hour chat about Matter, Thread, LAN control, Nest, Google Home, Zigbee, hubs, border routers, controllers, HomeKit, IKEA TRÅDFRI, and XKCD 927.
Thousands of years ago, people were experimenting with all sorts of complex, dense social forms. Over 11,000 years ago, at Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, people were erecting some of the world’s first monumental stone architecture. 11,000 years ago at Jericho, in Palestine, people were settling in one of the world’s first cities. At Çatalhöyük, also in Turkey, people 9,000 years ago built a complicated, honeycomb-like city. 5 to 6,000 years ago, people in what is now Ukraine built sprawling settlements. People were experimenting with urban life, with agriculture, with writing and all sorts of new phenomena.
Then, a little more than 5,000 years ago, in what is now southern Iraq, something entirely new began to emerge in some of the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia: the state.
Ich persönlich empfinde es als mysteriös, dass es bei Bluesky so lange dauert, bis es "fertig" ist. Für mich bleibt das offene Fediverse, das viel größer als nur Mastodon ist, die einzige öffentliche Kommunikation Lösung. Das erst bereit sein für angemeldete FrühuserInnen ist plumpes Marketing, da anscheinend nur Priviligierte Zugang erhalten.
I occasionally come across the following objection to anarchism:
“We’ve already seen what life is like in places like Somalia where the state has collapsed, and it’s very bad, so we should have states instead of anarchism.”
You’ve probably seen some variation of this argument; maybe the place cited wasn’t Somalia but it almost certainly was a country populated by brown people whom, the critic implies, cannot govern themselves.
The problem with this argument is that it conflates #StateCollapse and #StateFailure with #anarchism, but I would argue that these are very different phenomena.
Sometimes, I tell a little story, early in the morning, before I do other things. I was building images to match. #Thread
HOW FAR BACK, CAN YOU REMEMBER, AS A CHILD?
I was 3 in this story, #Petawawa Ontario, and as a background for those who don't know me, I was #ADHD then, also. It's important to wear down my excess energy, I used to run 10 miles before work, to spare my co-workers. My father used to walk me around.
AI put a little boy (me) ON tracks!
As I watched the 25th anniversary service yesterday, I remember where I was then:
As a senior Navy member, I was standing Base Chief Duty Watch at (CFB #Halifax ) Stadacona.
A nervous junior officer was with me. I told him to step out for a smoke, I'd be fine without him. I've been standing this watch on & off for 16 years..
What we hadn’t realized until a couple of sharp-eyed #Examiner subscribers brought it to our attention was that #SaltWire, which owns the #ChronicleHerald, is also seeking new subscribers. And the brain trust at the newspaper chain has chosen to attract new readers with a pitch that has already alienated people.
Twitter threatens legal action over Threads app 😂 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66129215 More than 55 million people have signed up for the new app, according to Meta. Twitter lost a large proportion of its 7,500 employees, as high as 80%, in waves of redundancies following Mr Musk's takeover last October. Some of them joined Meta to build this new app. #twitter#thread
About 4,000 years ago, at a site called Pingliangtai in eastern China, Neolithic people had to deal with frequent and unpredictable flooding, driven by summer monsoon rains. These stone age people responded very resourcefully: they built a wall around their community, surrounded by a moat to capture rain water; they dug ditches around their homes; and, most impressive, they built an elaborate system of ceramic drainage pipes, made of interconnected clay segments.
And they did it all without any indication of state authority.