theluddite

theluddite, 1 year ago

When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?

This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.

Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.

So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.

This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.

theluddite, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

We are usually not given a good example of how bad things actually happen. We imagine the barbarians storming the gate, raping and pillaging. That does happen, but more often, things getting worse is more complicated, and it affects different people at different times.

For the one in five (!!) children facing hunger, our society has failed. For a poor person with diabetes and no medical insurance, our society has already failed. For an uber driver with no family support whose car broke down and missed rent, facing an eviction, society is about to break down for them. I’m a dude in my mid thirties that writes code, so for me, things are fine, but if I get hit by a bus tomorrow and lose the ability to use my hands, society will probably fail for me.

More and more people are experiencing that failure. Most of us are fine, but our being fine is becoming incredibly fucking precarious. More often than not, society collapsing looks like a daily constitution saving throw that becomes harder and harder to pass, and more and more of us who have a stroke of bad luck here or there fail.

Understanding society this way is important, and it’s why solidarity is the foundation of leftist politics. I march for people without healthcare because I care about them, and also, because there but for the grace of god go I. Bakunin put this beautifully almost 200 years ago:

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

theluddite, 1 year ago

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

theluddite, 1 year ago (edited 6 months ago)

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

theluddite, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

If you’re a US citizen, consider joining the DSA. I’m a long-time member. I think it’s safe to say the DSA has, historically, been a disorganized parody of a leftist organization (as much as I love and respect many of the people in it that I’ve worked with), but things are changing. There’s an effort with momentum to turn it into a functioning political party, and not a bullshit green party style party which runs a candidate every four years while being functionally indistinguishable from a grift, but to put in the real work from the ground up to make a party that cares about winning elections and materially making our lives better.

The time to do this was 20 years ago, but we can’t keep delaying it. It’s now fully unconscionable to throw up our hands after some halfhearted discussions about FPTP and game theory every four years while actively watching our world deteriorate. There are other ways, but they don’t start at the ballot box, and they all involve organizing. This is true even if your politics and mine are different. If you care about our death machine funding a genocide, get involved with something, even if it’s the democratic party. It’s fucking boring. It feels like a larp. It’s a tedious ways to spend your Thursday nights after work. I get all that, but we need people who care about human life involved, even if our politics aren’t perfectly aligned, because that’s how you make broad, functioning, powerful coalitions that get shit done.

theluddite, 1 year ago

1 fast 1 furious

theluddite, 1 year ago

The Nordic countries are also on Earth, which we are destroying. Some of their wealth comes directly from that destruction. Norway is the 5th and 3rd largest oil and natural gas exporter, respectively, making their happiness the result of good social policy that makes up for capitalist inequality which is directly funded by destroying the Earth and fueling capitalism elsewhere.

Even setting the climate aside (a ridiculous thing to do, really), the Nordic model isn’t possible to sustainably replicate elsewhere on Earth on capitalism’s own term, because we can’t make every country a net exporter of the most desired commodities for obvious reasons, or the beneficiary of complex historical circumstances, like neutrality during ww2 (Sweden), or a long-time colonial power (Denmark).

Put another way, there is no Nordic model available for Bangladesh, whose workers work six days a week in factories to make the cheap clothing that happy Norwegians wear. Norways needs Bangladeshes to keep their standard of living.

In a previous job, I spent a good amount of time in a Bangladeshi garment factory. That specific factory in which I worked had been on strike a few years prior, requesting a raise to dozens of dollars per month. That’s not a typo – per month!. The police fired into their picket line, killing and wounding hundreds. This fall, Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike again, demanding a tripling of the minimum wage from its current ~75USD per month.

The urban poverty that makes my life possible, so far away, out of sight and out of mind, is an absolute fucking disgrace. We should talk about it daily. When they go on strike, as those garment workers are now, every single westerner ought to strike in solidarity, even if motivated by nothing but shame. Instead, we don’t even know that it’s happening, at least in the anglosphere.

I’ve since become convinced that there’'s only one path to a just and verdant world – international solidarity. Communists and anarchists have filled libraries with ideas for what that might look like. I’ve read some tiny sliver of that corpus. If you actually want to know why some of us want capitalism defeated (beyond the anecdote that I just relayed), or if you’re curious how much better some of us think the world could be, I’d be happy to point you towards books that spoke to me.

theluddite, 1 year ago

Yup!

theluddite, 1 year ago (edited 11 months ago)

Going to give a wide range of answers based on topic, so you can pick up what interests you. Happy to give more if none of these appeal to you.

If you work in tech, Stafford Beer’s Designing Freedom. It’s very short, accessible, and full of so many big ideas about what computers are for that it exposes the tech industry’s absolute fucking poverty of vision.

If you’re interested in deep dives on more technical topics, David Graeber’s Debt. It’s a fucking tome, but it’s also amazing. So much of what we take for granted in our world is completely arbitrary and made up, but no less powerful, and there’s nothing quite as arbitrary and powerful as the concept of debt.

If reading a cinder block based on an internet stranger’s recommendation is too much for you, maybe try Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, or his The Utopia of Rules instead, depending on which topic interests you more. Graeber is a great place to start because he’s accessible but also his mind isn’t limited by the confines of capitalist realism in a very special way. He was truly one of our best.

If you want something that’s extremely light and fiction, I recommend William Morris’s News from Nowhere. It’s extremely cringe in a way that only 100-year-old socialist utopian fiction could be. It’s excessively sincere, even naive, in a way that rings hollow to our cynical modern selves, but it’s such a short read, and it’s so adorable. I like the way that he challenges the concept of work. I think that the modern left should revive that line of criticism. I also enjoyed that you can see early versions of things that we associate with more modern movements in his utopian vision, especially degrowth and reforestation/environmentalism, not just for “the environment,” but with nature as a part of and inseparable from the human experience.

Finally, if you like philosophy, and you want in depth analyses of capitalism, and don’t mind something that’s maybe less accessible, I recommend Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay The Culture Industry. It was written in the 1940s, and it reads prescient today. They saw the rise of capitalist mass media as more than just a threat to independent thought, but a pacifying, homogenizing, almost all-consuming force. If you want something longer than The Culture Industry, and probably slightly less accessible, I recommend their Frankfurt School colleague Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. He basically argues that capitalism, and more specifically what he calls “technical rationality,” has conquered our culture and our very ability to reason, at scales big and small.

theluddite, 1 year ago

Aww thanks so much friend 💖 I’m so glad to hear that!!

theluddite, 1 year ago

I’m going to recommend Old Forester 1910. A lot of people prefer the 1920, which is a bit pricier, and I can see why they might, but I actually prefer the 1910. It’s complex enough to think about but easy enough to just enjoy. It’s got some classic sweet bourbon flavors (people usually describe the flavor as deserty: molasses, vanilla, etc.), and a wonderfully luxurious mouthfeel that’s very bourbon and sticks around for a long time.

theluddite, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

A +1 for Woodford Reserve and Knob Creek, especially Woodford’s nicer offerings. Those are great choices.

I’m going to disagree on the Basil Hayden and the Bulleit. I wouldn’t recommend them to a bourbon enthusiast (or to anyone really). Bulleit in particular I think doesn’t really offer a lot of the classic bourbon experience that someone who is into bourbon might get excited about. To me, it drinks quite hot and is pretty thin.

theluddite, 1 year ago

From Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything:

For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety. But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.

Over the last several centuries, there have been numerous occasions when individuals found themselves in a position to make precisely this choice – and they almost never go the way Pinker would have predicted. Some have left us clear, rational explanations for why they made the choices they did.

Graeber goes on to give a couple of these accounts. They tend to mention a loneliness associated with “western civilization,” as well as a feeling that I think lines up very well with what Marx described as alienation.

Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.

Later in the book, and I apologize that I can’t find the reference right now, he comes back to this topic for a little bit, and talks about the depths of relationships that these people describe, and how their relationships in the “civilized” world are more shallow and less satisfying. Deep human relationships are the opposite of fake, so I think here we have a point in favor of “yes.”

Add to that that the concept of “privacy” as we know it is relatively new. It’s been 10+ years since I read a book about this, the title of which I can’t even remember, but it argued that the expectation of domestic privacy, even from one’s own family, is a phenomenon from the last few hundred years, especially outside the elite. People lived far, far more communally, with the expectation that they just were in each other’s business more. I’d argue that it’s a lot harder to be fake if you can’t hide who you really are.

Between those two things, I think it’s reasonable to argue that yes, society has gotten more fake.

theluddite, 1 year ago

People have been coming up with theories about this forever, from perspectives and time periods as diverse as Aristotle, St. Augustine, Gandhi, and Trotsky. You put a lot of very difficult questions in your post, but you didn’t put forth a criteria for what “justified” means to you. I think you’re going to need to interrogate that before being able to even think about any of these questions. For example, is violence justified by better outcomes, or by some absolute individual right to fight your oppressor? Is justification a question of morality, legality, tactical value, or something entirely different?

theluddite, 1 year ago

My beloved internet friend, thank you so, so much. I like duolingo for expanding my vocabulary, but the infantilizing gamification drives me nuts, to the point where when I run out of hearts, I just don’t use it for weeks. This little trick will make it so that I actually use it!