anarchism
Anarchism is a social movement that seeks liberation from oppressive systems of control including but not limited to the state, capitalism, racism, sexism, speciesism, and religion. Anarchists advocate a self-managed, classless, stateless society without borders, bosses, or rulers where everyone takes collective responsibility for the health and prosperity of themselves and the environment.
Theory
Introductory Anarchist Theory
- Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin
- Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman
- Anarchy Works by Peter Genderloos
- Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide by Ruth Kinna
- Anarchism and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein
- Anarchy In Action by Colin Ward
- On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky & Nathan Schneider
- Anarchy by Errico Malatesta
Anarcho-Capitalism
Discord Legacy A collaborative doc of books and other materials compiled by the #anarchism channel on the Discord, containing texts and materials for all sorts of tendencies and affinities.
The Theory List :) https://hackmd.io/AJzzPSyIQz-BRxfY3fKBig?view Feel free to make an account and edit to your hearts content, or just DM me your suggestions ^~^ - The_Dawn
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I haven’t explicitly studied cybernetics, but I’ve studied distributed systems and decentralization a bit and something that struck me is just how much more complicated the systems tend to be once you involve asynchronous communication. And then once you remove centralized things like supervisor nodes with the ability to spawn and despawn other nodes, it’s more complicated still.
I don't understand why async communication is so hard for a lot of people. I know not everyone can devolve discrete math problems in their head but it frustrates me to the point where I'm like have y'all ever been at a sandwich counter? Every fast casual counter service restaurant that separates ordering, constructing, and paying is a prime example of async communication that involves the customer in the process transparently.
The good thing about anarchist systems is that unlike computer systems the boundary between "internal and external" doesn't exist in the same way. For a computer system there is often a usage boundary where that system needs to abstract itself into a different form, e.g. distributed async to seemingly centralized sync (from a users perspective). Anarchism doesn't have that boundary.
I agree that the informational boundaries (I’d probably identify them as bottlenecks) for computer systems are not nearly as well defined as they are in computer systems and that is a good differentiator as most of my experience is with computer systems. I’d also point out that most sandwich counters use queues, which is a common tool to throw at distributed systems in computer systems as well.
As far as async communications being hard, that’s very subjective. I’m a firm believer in Rich Hickey’s differentiation between Easy/Hard and Simple/Complex. They’re orthogonal concepts. I think what makes that complexity hard for some people when designing asynchronous systems is that they want to recreate synchronous systems with the same invariants rather than using a toolkit more suited to asynchrony. So ease is largely about familiarity imo, even if the systems do tend to be more complex.
I’d say a similar dynamic exists for designing anarchist systems as well where people will attempt to recreate hierarchical dynamics within horizontal organizations and get frustrated when things don’t directly translate.
Yeah I also subscribe to Easy/Hard - Simple/Complex.
Async is simply multiplying by 2 for Complexity
If
myResult = doMyThingWithMy(args)is a 1 thenIs a 2.
If you're adding in error and flow control complexity, we're simply arguing about how everyone cargo cults bullshit syntax and practices instead of using sensible things like a Maybe/Result monad where you have
Result<success, value>and exceptions always crash.Which is just multiplying complexity in these cases by 3. If Complexity is a logarithmic scale it's just the next order. rather than the next next order.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: