C4SS

Hi everyone,

We are the original authors of the post and thought we'd offer some very brief clarifications since there seems to be some good discussion about both the intent of the piece and our approach to the technology. Our hope is to let you know where we wanted to see the conversation go in. Where it actually goes is, of course, something of a collective choice.

We'll keep this short since some people have already provided good responses in some threads that we don't have much to add to.

First, on useful but ultimately tangential technologies:

fsflover writes:

> I2P does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks.

mackrevinack writes:

> the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files

Munksgaard writes:

> I think gemini is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible

Others have suggested similar overlay networks, including GNUnet, Tor, and so on.

As we state in the article, overlay networks are useful, but they are by their very definition reliant upon existing hardware devices to provide the underlying network over which these networks lay. One of the goals of our article is to point out that a hyper-focusing on such overlay networks misses the point of "owning your own infrastructure" at a deeper (hardware) level. What good…

> Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems.

Oh, well, I disagree, and the evidence supports my position. The people who capitalism has most rewarded are billionaires. Billionaires became as rich as they are through cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness. I challenge you to find me a billionaire without these qualities in spades.

I'm happy to hear arguments that other modes of economic organization may also reward these values if it makes you feel better, but I maintain my point that capitalism rewards them also. In comparison, gift economies reward the opposite values.

> Not universlly, and that's the problem.

I do agree that it's worth a hedge, however, it appears these values are as near-universal as is possible for humans. Every religion I've ever learned about teaches these lessons, Confucianism for the most part as well, we can read about these values in Plato, Aristotle, ancient Greek myths, ancient native american myths... certainly there are outlier cultures, but for these values to be an underlying current in so many cultures... what else could we call universal?

> . And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism.

But, under capitalism, the majority of people…

> In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently)

"sometimes violently" is a bit of an understatement.

With the use of our current system we are literally making the world uninhabitable for human existence. We are systemically destroying mother earth's carrying capacity through ecological destruction, not to mention the misery caused by Magical Voluntarism and labour rights abuses the world over.

I'm still finding ways to describe the issues with our economic system and it's apparatus, and the meaningful changes proposed by one of the projects I follow, in a way that acknowledges that in a way we are all victims to this current system (including neo-Imperialist USA), as today's money does not respect the law of requisite variety [1]. My above critique might sound anti-American, but America (together with other formal colonial powers in the Global North) is just the most powerful player in a game with outdated, harmful and inadequate economic models and governance systems. It's a painful era where we are using inadequate wealth acknowledgement systems, where the old Platform Capitalism paradigm is breaking down and showing it's flaws, and where the potentiality for Protocol Cooperativism is starting to emerge. Money is an information technology created by humans, operating a set of protocols. Tomorrow's world is governed by the practice of…

>If you're going to refer me to the existing literature, please at least make a specific reference.

This should be a good starting point.

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html

>Somalia's been trying it out for years. The results don't look promising

http://c4ss.org/content/1201

>If you invaded the US, I think Syrians would be quite passive about it indeed.

The point is that, yes people tend to only care about their group but there are different levels of group. For example, when the Russians had their "communist" revolution practically the whole world cared because they were terrified it would happen in their country as well (and in some cases like Spain, it did).

>People have always formed groups and not cared about people outside of their group.

As just shown, while this may be technically true group size changes depending on the level of threat up to and including "group human".

>That's how humans work.

Now you're moving toward a more interesting argument. We see how humans behave but how much of that is because of our nature and how much is because of the environment we grow up in? There's tons of interesting research about this question (one starting point: http://www.charleswarner.us/articles/competit.htm).

>You're assuming I'm dismissing anarchism without considering the arguments for it or anything. Actually, I'm dismissing it after a lot of consideration, partially about anarchism and partially about idealistic, theoretical political…

http://c4ss.org/content/1201*

My argument is that in the absence of a strong government, various warlords and the like will attempt to seize power for themselves. So thank you for supporting it.

Again, if you want to get into an intellectual wanking session about how nice it would be if we lived in a world where absolutely no one attempted to use violence or seize power over other people, I'll kindly provide Somalia as empirical evidence that we live in a very different world and turn my attentions to the question of how a society of actual human beings* can function, and hopefully can function better than it currently does.

Now you're moving toward a more interesting argument. We see how humans behave but how much of that is because of our nature and how much is because of the environment we grow up in?

Yes, and? How exactly do we get those environments? Co-recursively, of course--the environment influences human behavior and human behavior influences the environment. In general that's the kind of system that, hopefully, reaches a steady state at some point. Empirically we've observed two--primitivism and governed civilization. Anarchic civilization doesn't seem to be an option. (I'm actually fairly open to considerations of primitivism, which is likely as anarchic as humans can get.)

I'm assuming you dismiss it after working it out in your own head without consulting the existing body of knowledge on the subject, and it sounds like you just confirmed that my…

>>I’d love to see less government interference in people’s reproductive rights, in education like the massive censorship around US history of slavery and genocide and the slightest mention of lgbtq people.

I bet I can test your resolve to both of them and show you really do not want more freedom, you just want different government controls than "the other team"

For example Education. Do you support backpack funded school choice, putting the power of what schools people go to in the hands of the parents?

Reproductive Rights.. How about "Financial Abortion" or Default Joint Custody with no support to either parent? Or mandatory DNA validation before entering names on birth certificates.

>Government protecting corporations from their responsibilities to the safety of the public and toward our ecosystems is extremely oppressive

Corporations are a creation of government, the entire purpose of a corporation is to protect them from liberality. That is really the sole reason for their existence. I always love when strong government supports rail on and on about corporations when strong government is the source of power for corporations.

The stronger the government the stronger the corporations. The more centralized the government, the larger the corporations.

Since We have been putting more and more regulation an power under the pervue of the federal government the largest corporations have gone from about 20% market share on average to 80% market share on…