Oddbean new post about login | logout As I've read more about the history of the internet and digital spaces, I am beginning to think that there's something inherently leftist about the internet. Or at least, the dominant culture of nostr isn't traditional right, it's more of a libertarian right, which creates lots of problems that can only be solved either through top-down structures or grassroots collectivism. Of course the former is not palatable in our current authoritarian political context, and so resorting to traditionally collectivist institutions for taming wild individualism is all that's left.
I agree @hodlbod, I see the way we avoid top down centralization in a social space is by creating voluntary bottom up grassroots collectivism.
I've always strongly identified as firmly right-wing, but I find myself embracing my inner classical liberal more and more, as I grow in my appreciation of natural law and individual liberty. But "embracing the chaos" creates a vacuum of structure that has to be filled somehow. Authoritarianism naturally fills that vacuum by means of power. I'd much rather be under a right-authoritarian regime than a left-authoritarian regime, but what if avoiding authoritarianism is an option? I'm not sure the bottom-right-hand corner of the political compass can actually exist, because it will always result in a tragedy of the commons, and/or a different kind of authoritarianism (e.g. corporatism). Solving social problems with technology at first seems to lead to technocracy, which is just another kind of authoritarianism that arises out of right-libertarianism. But maybe sufficiently decentralized technologies are a leftist mechanism that moves the center of gravity away from authoritarianism? But of course many past efforts at using technology to fix social problems either collapse into centralization, or have flaws that have to be fixed with social solutions, which only lasts until the ones providing the social capital burn out (cf yesterweb). You can tell I'm thinking out loud here because I have no paragraph breaks.
the way to avoid authoritarianism is to reject idolatry. period.
Can you explain your definition of idolatry?
I really appreciate your contributions to building nostr @hodlbod because we’ve got really different political views but know that to build nostr we need to make it for many different kinds of people and groups to manage their own affairs.
Honest question because my chipmunk brain doesn't compute this: what does "voluntary bottom up grassroots collectivism" mean? I'm guessing you mean people working together open sourcey to build something (nostr) so as to avoid something like ISP run internet or Facebook-like social media? The "collectivism" word is what makes me nervous.
I get it. Authoritarians use the term collectivism for a kind of top down control of other people in a way that ends up abusive. What I mean is you’re voluntarily able to choose what collectives you want to participate in as a way of solving problems, organizing work, and resources together. In this case often this is the informal social labor of sustaining an online community like inviting people, welcoming them, setting norms, and in cases where it’s needed moderation. In the case of a fediverse server you end up stuck, they own your content, connections, and identity itself. That’s not voluntary because you can’t leave or fork the community. With subreddits you have a bit more agency but there’s still the issue of the mods being whoever created the subreddit or their self appointed successors. With Nostr we can have groups and communities which exist as something more than a network of individuals, a collective as it were, but where participation in the larger network is locked open and permissionless. If you don’t like a group on Nostr you can much more established fork the group, or make your own relay. The awesome thing is users who want can put the same post in both the original and forked group. I use the example of the meth users and anti-woke meth users subreddits. 99% of posts are just about using meth, and should easily be able to exist in both places at the same time. But some posts might be about politics and should only be in one or the other. In Nostr we can do that. Plus we can also make encrypted groups for people who want to have some privacy with then do their illegal drug advocacy and mutual aid.
what is wrong with politics is that justice is a jurisprudence problem, and the best solution is a market solution of competing judges, just like what was in Jericho for (supposedly) 9000 years most of the "left" are on about justice, isn't it? do the "left" have a monopoly on leaderless organisations? i doubt it, i think stalin was pretty far left too, and actually though many designate literal hitler as right, he was very fond of the government regulating things, and what was the purpose? oh yeah, justice the left wants justice, the right wants freedom where is the conflict between these two things unless you invert these two concepts?
Funny, I would have said the opposite. The right wants law and justice, the left wants freedom. But it all depends on the definition of those terms, which makes it hard to even talk about. I think a better distinction is that the left is visionary/utopian while the right is stagnant/realistic. Utopianism tests new ideas, but the thesis always collapses as reality modulates it. Leftism is unstable and dangerous if it fails to learn from history, but the progressive impulse is really a valuable thing. Maybe China has it right; they are extremely authoritarian and stable in the mainland, but use Hong Kong as a playground for economic innovation, that they can then import as it proves itself.
the separation, caused by the human tendency to want everything to be an eye, or everything to be the heart, instead of understanding the way parts make up the whole body, creates the camps in which disfunction thrives. (Apostle Paul paraphrase)
yeah, the progressive/conservative side of it is probably the most important left tends to progressive, and this makes it vulnerable to the erasure of history... i could talk about the problems of the "adding features" side of the engineering form of this mentality right is more practical, and this is why the modern right is what used to be called left, the liberal, and freedom oriented there's a lot of moving parts to this but i think fundamentally the thing about modern leftism focuses on equity, which is literally a law concept and the right focuses on freedom and privacy, and that is somewhat contrary to statism, so i'd say that leftism is also more statist than right the left right thing is retarded anyway, it's part of the vulnerability of humans to manipulation, we have on one side, reason, and forward time, and on the other, creativity and reverse time the two things are in constant conflict with each other, inherently