Solarpunk Cyborg

There's two-level consequentialism.

Rule consequentialism for when you need to respond quickly and can't think everything out.

Act consequentialism for when you're in a position to consider everything in detail.

Also, come on, the Kate Bush scene was fucking brilliant.

A surprisingly sincere dialogue that builds on the themes of parenthood and growth from the first movie, undercut by absolute hilarity, which itself is undercut by a serious and somewhat tragic line about parent-child miscommunication.

And it's not even one of those things where you're like, "Oh, I know it's not good, but I like it anyway."

No.

I legitimately think that I'm right and almost everybody else is wrong.

It was funny, surprisingly heartfelt, and showed actual growth in both themes and characters from the first movie.

a woman in a futuristic costume looks at the camera with a blurred background ALT: a woman in a futuristic costume looks at the camera with a blurred background

This has nothing to do with anything and will seem really out of left field, but...

Almost everyone is wrong about M3GAN 2.0. This movie was so much fun.

I just really wanted to get that off my chest because people whose opinions I normally respect are either meh or negative on this movie.

(5)
Personally, I think the best way to view the topic philosophically is to view direct participatory democracy as a BRIDGE between what we have now and a truly radical form of social anarchy

So democracy is not a synonym for anarchy, as some claim, but nor is it something totally divorced from it

(4)
However, I would hope that even the anto-democracy anarchists can appreciate that what the other side mean by an anarchist form of "democratisation" would be the perfect grounds from which to create the more substantive type of autonomy and free association that they crave.

(3)
But it amounts to the same thing in practice.

The real split only comes into effect later on when, hypothetically, we've achieved a much fuller form of self-directed and co-federated organization.

And yes, this is an issue we'll eventually have to worry about.

(2)
... I don't see any difference that can't be overcome — at least in terms of struggling for greater autonomy and horizontality in the jere and now.

We all want to increase self-directed cooperation and decrease heteronomy.

To the former, this is "democratisation", to the latter, something else

(1)

Regarding the "pro-democracy" vs "anti-democracy" split within social anarchism...

I used to be much more firmly in the former camp, but lately, I've come around to more of a "Can't we all get along?" position.

To at least some extent, it's a semantic issue, and to the extent it's not ...

I'm not sure what to call this idea, though.

It's certainly still communist in the older anarchist sense of being marketless and moneyless and non-rivalrous.

Though I think we should ditch the c word because. It tends to confuse more often than it informs

There would still be some degree of decentralised planning by networks of voluntary associations.

But I think having a more stigmergy-reliant system would take some of the strain off of this process.

The basic idea is that we set things up in such a way that the actions of individuals using things in the economy provide feedback to the system itself on how things get distributed.

Like a "free market", but without money or inter-enterprise competition.

For example, more fully incorporating the idea of stigmergy into our models of how coordination of goods and services should be handled.

Replace price signals with "use signals" and place the focus less on planning (however decentralist) and more on the distributed actions of individuals.

re: A future social anarchist economic system

While I haven't changed with regard to wanting a future economy that's stateless, marketless, and moneyless ...

I think we need to move beyond the old idea of how this will look. There's actually a few things that can be learned from market anarchists.

Calling all anarchist/libertarian socialist academics.

There is work being done right now to create the editorial board for a scholarly journal focusing on anarchist/libertarian socialist political science and philosophy. A university associated publisher is already arranged.

You could say that it's just a faster version of Wikipedia, but you can't ask Wikipedia how well at geodesic dome would protect against various universal movie monsters and have it answer in a completely straight manner

Yeah, it's good once you learn how to use it in a certain way.

● Watch out for hallucinations

● Ask for sources

● Try to ignore how sycophantic it can be ("That's such a thoughtful observation!")

Plus, most of the discourse about generative AI bots "stealing" information reeks of intellectual property apologia.

I don't like the corporations that control them either, but the technology itself, I think, could be more useful than not in the right hands

While I know that my side of the political divide tends to be more distrustful and oppositional than not towards generative AI, I have to say that I personally find ChatGPT really helpful as an autistic person

It's nice having an AI to pester with inane questions instead of bothering real people

I like to think that I have a 900-page book in me somewhere outlining such a system.

But at present, I'm just too goddamn lazy to get around to it.

SAMRA (Social Anarchist Metatheory of Reality and Agency) alas lies dormant in my various scattered scribblings around the house

I think by "theory" she's mainly thinking about the kind of macroscopic frameworks that can be used to analyze everything from the history of political economy to the latest season of The White Lotus.

The kind of thing you can make a system out of

Kevin A. Carson from Homebrew Industrial Revolution onwards.

Especially Exodus — which is almost like a textbook for creating the economy of a solarpunk anarchist world

As somebody who's followed your work since the early New Statesmen days, I have to admit I'm one of those people who thought, "Wait, didn't they already come out as autistic?"

I knew (besides politics) there was I reason I gravitated towards your stuff. Welcome to the club! 💚

What we need is a shared universe of social anarchist holiday movies.

Stories set in a cozy winter town in a moneyless commons economy where the villain is usually some asshole who wants to commercialise the town chocolate factory.

I'm convinced that most Christmas movies take place in an imaginary mutualist economy.

How else do you explain all of the small niche businesses (candlemakers, hot chocolate shops) and lack of any great wealth disparities?

It has little to do with infrastructure.

It has to do with the principles of decentralisation, harmonising technology with nature, unity-in-diversity, and participatory organisation.

I imagine physical infrastructure could take many forms through following the above.

That's why I put the word in quotation marks.

If what you imagine to be "solarpunk" can only be achieved through techno-bureaucracy, then that's not the thing that I want.

Then I don't want "solarpunk".

"Techno-bureaucrats" doesn't refer to scientists and engineers and specialists, but to a class of people who are given the power to manage other people on the basis of having more knowledge.

Similar to what's often called the PMC (professional-managerial class)

Productive relations = economics

Productive forces = technology

Karl Marx makes the same distinction with what he calls relations of production and forces of production. It's taken from him

Which is funny because he actually provided quite a good critique of Marx himself regarding his economic theories, one which I largely agree with.