John Chandler Burnham

Also Kernighan scared the hell out of everyone with Reflections on Trusting Trust users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712....

So there's also a strong technical reason against closed-source proprietary compilers, they can smuggle backdoors into your system.

Also, if it turns out that the solution to enshittification is robust government regulation that's more or less exactly what liberalism would predict.

A new commons opens up, pioneers build beautiful things, predators take the beautiful things, the state comes in with rules to protect the commons

Yeah 100%, FOSS is not pure anarchist utopia, not by any stretch of the imagination. Also unclear whether FOSS and the open Internet can survive centralized enshittification

But Stallman is/was a radical and these ideas did change the world, and I think it's important to acknowledge that

That’s true, the world of bits subsists in the world of atoms.

But FOSS creates a kind of negative space of IP law which lets devs use ideas with minimal friction. IP, Patent and liability law is all still there, but it’s pushed to the margin

MIT/Apache is even better for this than GPL though.

*are very different and dynamic

Like, whats crazy here is not “We should try to invent a way to make power from nuclear fusion for abundant clean energy” it’s

“We radicals have long possessed fusion reactor technology but have been prevented from using it by the forces of evil. You have to put us in charge before you can see it”

Idk, this was true for a long time, but I don’t think it is any more. Like, we have Proton now, so you can even play 99.9% of all games on Linux. Device drivers still an issue sometimes

I think people give Windows a bit of a pass on this (genuinely janky). MacOS is a better point of comparison

Right, I agree with all that, the anarchism in FOSS is more about pushing IP (i.e. state monopolies) to the margin via licensing, and a culture of open collaboration

Hierarchies are still present, but are very and dynamic. Like Linus is not really a dictator, kernel devs can and do fork (Android)

That’s why I distinguished “bits” from “atoms”

Atoms are scarce, rivalrous and kinetic, and anarchism doesn’t has far less compelling solutions there.

But it’s not crazy for people to look at the anarchism in the world of bits and dream.

Maybe start with grocery stores before countries though

oh man, you picked maybe the single best argument *for* market anarchism: the Free Software Movement, GNU/Linux and the Internet datenteiler.de/pdfs/Anarchy...

The world of bits is not the world of atoms, but credit where credit's due, anarchist principles get some glory here.

starting to think we should give "strange women lying in ponds distributing swords" a chance as a basis for our system of government

War is politics by other means, so tell me why your politics is good at war before you tell me your politics is good

the autonomous bottom-up free association societies were all devoured by warlords

the paris commune? devoured by a warlord
strandzha? warlord
catalonia? warlord
makhnovshchina? warlord
every pre-industrial society? warlord

solve the warlord problem first please

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0...

Anarchism: The Organized, Dogmatic Belief That Game Theoretic Coordination Problems Do Not Exist

You know, it's ironic that for someone whose stated goal is to destroy power, that your approach here is pure flame-war.

Best of luck to you, I've enjoyed a lot of your C4SS writings.

Also, it's very common when liberal states suppress violent rebellion for those rebellions to end up winning later on by transmutation of their cause into popular support.

For example, John Brown was violently suppressed. John Brown won.

The liberal state does not fully suppress *the capacity* to rebel. It suppresses specific acts of violent rebellion. This is an important distinction, because liberalism requires a civil society which has independent violent capacity, that is ordinarlly peacefully channeled through the ballot box

1) Non-military government officials are civilians, and ought not to be tarred and feathered (tortured) in a peaceful society.

2) Therefore there must be peaceful and legitimate means to solve problems. Voting is the best we've come up with so far at scale.

Yes! State power was used to prevent other groups from going into government buildings and brutalizing officials like the Whiskey rebels did.

Both by showing that rebellion was *not* an effective means to achieve political ends, but that voting *was*.

Very very far from "ruthless"

*Shay's Rebellion

The Whiskey rebellion is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The Federalists suppressed the rebellion, which was popular, and then lost the election of 1800 and the taxes were repealed.

Compare and contrast with Shay's Febellion, which brought down the Articles of Confederation

In this context, liberalism articulates the civil rights movement not as the erosion of centralized state power, but an expansion of the apparatus of decentral state power, which makes that power more legitimate and just.

This is an important theme in the history of liberalism!

In liberal theory, the state does not have total centralized control over violence. A limited monopoly on violence is granted to various (overlapping!) state powers by the consent of an armed People.

That's from the Declaration of Independence, the militia clauses, federalism, etc.

- Seek to destroy power (a beautiful dream)
- Embrace power for its own sake (cartoon villainy)
- Think you can wield power for good (muddling through an imperfect world as best we can)

so “liberalism” is when the government does stuff (with popular legitimacy)? And the more the government does (with more legitimacy) the more liberal it is?

And when the government does everything, (with maximal legitimacy), that’s marxism?

Okay we ball:

Liberalism: The Government People Want™️

Underneath that there is still an innovation tradition, largely sustained by open-source software, university research programs, and the still significant number of companies that do real things

But companies focused on froth and hype have made so much money that the incentives are really bad

The rot is straightforward. Sarbanes-Oxley made it impossible for small companies to go public and ZIRP injected huge cash into VC/PE. This shifted the culture from innovation to rent-seeking. The present "tech-lash" is those rentiers mad about the end of their ZIRP-bucks

Intellectual property is intellectual theft

"Anyone who denies the principle of non-contradiction should be subtweeted and blocked, until they admit that to be subtweeted is not the same as not to be subtweeted, and to be blocked is not the same as not to be blocked."

This is the part where I note that Bill Clinton righteously killed a bunch of Serbs over this kinda shit