“But I’ve been indemnified!” yelled the oil ghoul as he was carried off to be burned at the stake by pitchfork wielding pesants…

China is the same, but better at propaganda. There can be no centralized solution.

Evergreen: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too

it still relies on a larger governing body of some sort to police inter-local conflict.

I don’t disagree, exactly, but I have a few thoughts on this. The first is just… “how is that different from now?” You’re just describing modern geopolitics. If we’re comparing two systems and they both have the same flaws but one has some benefits, then the flaws really don’t matter. This doesn’t put us any worse than we are now, and it actually makes things much better… which comes to the second point (not well addressed in the doc).

I think this is where people tend to fundamentally misunderstand conflict. War is incredibly resource intensive. Carrying out war ultimately makes the warring society untenable, and we’ve seen this with the collapse of every empire. There’s a section in The Art of War (I can’t remember exactly) that discusses logistics. Sun Tzu essentially says that each soldier deployed requires seven people in the field (growing grain, harvesting, etc) to support. Soldiers and equipment have only become more expensive for offensive deployment. Meanwhile, asymmetric warfare has decreased the cost of defense and campaigns to destabilize empires. Ursula K le Guin’s Always Coming Home touches on this point at the end (not to spoil it, for anyone down to take on the challenge but she argues that under some cases defense may not even be necessary at all).

A large empire may be able to maintain enough excess to support global oppression for decades or centuries, especially with complex financial manipulation. Bigger systems can just absorb more chaos without destabilizing quickly. I think of aquaponics, where the larger the tank the longer you have to adjust the system before critical failure: more water means more thermal mass, more oxygen in the water, more capacity to absorb waste before it becomes toxic. Small tanks can crash rapidly. A small leak can drain all the water. A broken pump can mean quickly running out of air or toxifying water. The system just doesn’t have room.

A local economy is the same. Russia may be able to survive an almost total economic blockade for 6 years (by current estimates), but it will still collapse (perhaps quite soon). How long could Cleveland Ohio survive such a blockade? Most major cities would collapse in less than a week.

So yes, this type of system requires federation and cooperation between localities but it doesn’t actually require a central authority. Which is a good thing, since we have no central authority now and we’ve never figured out how to have a top level central authority. There has never been a top level central authority globally. The best we’ve ever come up with were the League of Nations and the United Nations, and those both seem to have mostly failed for pretty much the same reasons.

Edit: The original text does touch on sanctions and blockades, but yeah, I read it as being vaguely liberal and the liberal solution of “we need a central authority” always runs out of turtles somewhere.

I like the direction, but a couple of things stand out to me. The most important is that there are absolutely no clear actions that almost anyone can take to move towards this. “Change X law” is not actionable for most people.

But there’s a larger issue here. Capitalism defines a fitness function, in the evolutionary sense. The “fitness” for survival in the capitalist system is maximization of capital. The more capital an organization can leverage, the longer it survives. The longer it survives, the more people it influences, the more it’s traits show up in future organizations.

This document fails to address the fact that this fitness function is ultimately the problem. The principles and practices try to constrain the behavior of the system, but the fitness function ultimately defines the behavior of the system. Within modern capitalism, we’ve seen every similar constraint be dismantled because the fitness function is ultimately the only thing that matters in any system. The side effects of the fitness function will eventually find a way to neutralize any constraint.

The fitness function is what has to change. What, exactly, is it that we want our society to do??

I think there is a fairly natural fitness function: make reproducing the system as easy as possible. In simple terms, “make parenting easier.” This potentially helps everyone once and some people more than that. This fitness function has a bunch of good side effects. You can’t reproduce an unsustainable system, so you have to solve (ecological, economic, etc) sustainability as a side effect. It’s also more “local” than “localism.”

If you, personally, choose to live by this fitness function (instead of the dominant market fitness function) you can make personal decisions and organize groups to realize this objective… and you can do that begging anyone in power to let you do it. Go babysit your friend’s kids. Make or buy dinner for them some time. Organize a free childcare collective, or even a sliding scale one. Even having a little bit of time can make the lives of parents way better, and thereby make the lives of kids better. This is literally why some people go to church. Start a stuff library where parents can borrow (and maybe never return, with no penalty) kids stuff so they don’t have to buy hundreds of socks, or diapers. Start a free diaper washing service. Listen to parents talk about their lives and figure out how you can help.

This is the core of mutual aid. The more stress you take off an overburdened parent, the better they’re able to parent, and the less likely their kid (or someone like them) will steal your shit or stab you in the future. It’s pretty simple. The parents you help are more likely to raise kids who will be able to contribute rather than detract, who will be a net benefit. Some of those kids will grow up and figure out how to cure diseases, or will take care of you when you get old. Show them compassion now, so they know what it looks like when they’re taking care of you.

When people finally ask you why you’re offering help, you walk them through the logic. Parents who get this support and understand why are much more likely to pay it back when they get out from under the burden of parenting. Kids who understand will grow up primed to pay it forward.

You can basically derive the rest of localism from that starting point. The thing that matters is the fitness function.

edit: Go start an anarchist movie night once or twice a month and offer free childcare, and you’ll turn at least a few parents in to anarchists just by way of offering free childcare.

Behold, the eco fascist in the wild, promoting mass murder as a solution to something that can only be solved with cooperation.

Edit: There are extremely specific people who would benefit the world by ceasing to exist, and those people are billionaires. There are way to make billionaires not exist other then killing them.

Check out meshtastic devices. It’s possible to get GPS info on encrypted channels, completely outside of normal networks. There are a few caveats. I’m not sure how well a GPS receiver would work under a car, and you have to be close or be on the same network as a physically close node.

The United States will cease to exist well before 2035.

Thanks, good call. Let me add a working definition here for now.

The definition that’s most applicable here is “a type of object that is isomorphic (has the same shape) at multiple levels.” I’m basically using the Hofstadter definition of “isomorphism” from “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” which is more loose than the strict mathematical meaning.

To say “fractal” here is really to say that something is a recursive structure (defined by itself, or repeating the same pattern at different layers) where metaphors that allow us to understand one layer can also apply to other layers with minimal loss.

The example of authoritarianism starts at interpersonal abuse dynamics, showing that those dynamics apply with similar rules in mass as authoritarian systems, but also within the individual. The authoritarian is afraid, dominated by their own ego, and compensating externally, oppressing others as the individual’s fragile ego oppresses their own identity.

I’m also cheating a bit in my definition of fractal here because a fractal is technically infinitely self-similar. We could probably enrich the metaphor (towards the macro) by talking about the relationship of social subgroups to a society, and the relationships of societies to each other. Since we don’t know any aliens, we can’t really go past that. Going the other direction, towards the micro, we could maybe talk about the relationships between neural clusters or individual neuros, but we run in to the limits of knowledge and maybe knowable things pretty quickly. Consciousness may be truly fractal, but we probably can’t ever know.

So I’m using the term to simply describe multiple iterations of self-similariry, where the domain of self similarity is the ability to losslessly apply metaphors from one to the other. A mathematician might be a bit upset at the use of terms.

One connection to psychedelics (as in the title) is that people tend to see fractal structures while hallucinating on high doses.

Edit: My definition may have made things more confusing.

Liberals would rather blame leftists than actually fight fascism.