"One can whine and wheedle all one likes about Spooner’s support for intellectual property or Bakunin’s anti-semitism –and let’s not even begin on Proudhon!– but you can’t compare today’s vulgar-libertarian excusists for privilege and corporate power with our fledgling predecessors. Even if there ever was an excuse for the failings of such proto-anarchists, there certainly exists no such excuse today.

We have moved on."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/william-gillis-calling-all-haters-of-anarcho-capitalism

> Can you be more specific and point to text that discuss strategies for the people to protect and increase their freedom vis a vis a "political class" that want to coerce and gaslight them.

I'd start with Revolutionary Self-Theory;

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/larry-law-revolutionary-self-theory

Society of the Spectacle by Debord goes much deeper on describing the problem, but there's not so much there in the way of tactics.

The CrimethInc. primer Days of War, Nights of Love is worth a look too;

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-days-of-war-nights-of-love

"The likely intended effect of "you are a conspiracy theorist" type of smearing is to clean the table of players who play for..."

... truth. Independent of whether said truth serves vested interests or not. The outcome is largely the same as what you said, except that not everyone who cares about freedom cares about truth, and vice versa.

"Those who would like to play for freedom have next to nothing to study."

I don't know. If you look outside the northwest European canon, there are plenty of texts to study. Just to give you a handful of examples...

The Chinese canon has texts about freedom going back at least as far as Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi. The Mediterranean canon has Socrates, Diogenes and Aristophanes from Greece, Rumi and other Sufi sages, the Egyptian mystery schools, and a number of hard case Rabbinical texts. The Indian classics are full of stories about freedom, its nature and its obstacles.

From northwest Europe there are people like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin (perhaps the first anti-Marxist). As well as Nestor Machno and other anti-Bolsheviks like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and George Orwell and Aldous Huxley (particularly Island), and Wilhelm Reich, eg

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and

The Sexual Revolution. More recently, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigm, and some of the others in the SI, Hunter S. Thompson, and more recently still, Hakim Bey, Bob Black, and some of the authors published by outfits like CrimeThinc. and C4SS.

This ignores a core tenet of anarchist theory (shared with most schools of International Relations theory), which is that a state is a monopoly of force in a geographical area. The state has authority because it has the power to imprison or shoot you, and no one can hold it accountable for doing so (expect using its own mechanisms). I'd love to see you explain to Uighurs or Palestinians that they somehow took out a contract for cultural genocide services with their local state corp. 🤣 Again, this is demonstrably not how political or legal systems actually work. But billionaires sure want you to believe that is is...

This is empty moralising. Believing it as a universal truth requires ignoring a bunch of independently verifiable facts. But hey, you do you. If you refuse to walk because your ideology tells you legs don't exist, who am I to judge 😏

"Signal is licensed under the AGPLv3 and as such, Free and Open Source."

Correct. Unfortunately it's also rigidly centralised. So state-level actors only need to block one set of servers and it's unusable (eg Signal is very hard to use in China due to the Great Firewall). Matrix is a better bet, both E2EE and Free and Open Source software, *and* a decentralised protocol anyone can implement.

"Writing petitions to politicians is meaningless and useless.

Those are NOT your "representatives" in any way."

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they have no idea what we think or know, they can't possibly represents us. Neither can the public record, which is useful when politicians pushing agendas claim they didn't know their policy would have predictably bad results.

It's also demonstrably untrue. E2EE message scanning in Chat Control was voted down by EU politicians, as nostr:nprofile1qqs2ggm7ggxdkzejx8ghrl58n09wx73dk74l9uf2xdaew5ehvxxr4sspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qzxthwden5te0wfjkccte9eeks6t5vehhycm99ehkuegprfmhxue69uhkummnw3ezucm0d9hxvatwv35hgtnrdakszl3pnh says, because of all the experts who communicated with those politicians. Net neutrality was restored in the US for the same reason.

So anyone who says communicating your views to politicians is pointless is a) wrong, or b) a shill or Useful Idiot for the people who want to push stuff like Link Taxes and Chat Control through legislatures without resistance. Or both.

"Communism - the smelly, broke cousin of fascism."

Kind of, but not the way you think;

https://shows.acast.com/pastpresentfuture/episodes/66d99b6cd4991eb8a6d39ac6

Also, hilariously irrelevant to the topic. The problem here - just like with "age verification" laws in the US - is quite clearly conservative pearl-clutching ("think of the children"). Weaponised by corporate DataFarmers, for whom robust privacy protection is bad for business. lt has fuck all to do with Communism, by any definition.

"There are some areas where stating the rules of the game is important."

Any area we you want a competitive market, for a start. The web moving from totally decentralised to totally monopolised in 5-10 years is hard empirical evidence that you don't get free markets (ie free of economic rents like "IP") without robust antitrust regulation, and enforcement with teeth.

""well-understood" regulation is nearly non-existent right now."

That's been true since Reagan and Thatcher, because regulation has been strategically demonised. By people who stood to profit from creating those monopolies, and externalising their business costs in ways regulations used to ban. The crusade against "Big Government" and "red tape" was never about our freedom, it's about theirs.

Regulation of commerce, in some form, is inherent to any peaceful, post-scarcity society. Even an anarchist one.

"Politicians and bureaucrats race to show that they're doing something (but almost always not the right something)."

Fair point. The Link Tax and Chat Control debacles are recent examples. But this is why we have democratic processes. We the people have the freedom to change who those politicians are, so they have to consult us to stay in power. If only we had that much say about what corporate executives do with our collective resources.

"We need to significantly rethink who and how regulation gets set."

I agree it's not perfect, and I think we can do better. There's been broad consensus on this - from radical left to radical right - since the GFC, which kicked off a plethora of direct democracy experiments. vTaiwan/ Pol.is and Citizens Assemblies remain my favorites so far.

Any other kiwis on Nostr? Either from Aotearoa, or living here. Please boost if you think you might have some following you...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/26/trump-orange-pilled-by-three-bitcoiners-in-puerto-rico-100-million.html

"Hoyos-López added that many miners are former Wall Street executives."

That one sentence tells you everything you need to know about how mixed the motives are among people pushing blockchains.

Like YouTub and NetFix, the concept of "cryptocurrency" really only works if there's one platform used by everyone. With blockchains, everyone can embed that platform in a ring they wear, but whoever controls 51% of mining (or stake, or whatever comes after Proof of...) has the One Ring to rule them all.

Every Wall St banker and Vulture Capitalist wants to get control of that One Ring. Now the Orange Felon too wants to be the lord of the rings ( hmm, maybe there's a story idea there 😋).

This isn't unique to blockchains as payment systems, and it's not inherent to them. Online payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, etc), credit card companies and banks have been fighting the same zero-sum war for decades. This war to control 'the payment system' is just financialisation at work.

There's a clue to a way out of this in the way we avoided AOL or CompuServe being 'the digital network', by adopting TCP/IP, and forming a network of networks. The right set of protocols could enable a peered network of payment systems, including but not limited to blockchains. So what could be the TCP of payments?

ILP (InterLedger Protocol) is one example, and I'm borrowing heavily from their elevator pitch here. But many protocol stacks were tested in early internetworking before TCP/IP emerged as the Mt Doom that prevented any one company holding the One Ring of networking. Are there any proposals competing with ILP to be the Mt Doom of payments? What are their pros and cons?

It's funny how memes mutate. In The Matrix, the difference between red pill and blue pill is whether or not you know you're in the Matrix. It's a 'fruit of the tree of knowledge' metaphor. It's logically impossible to both know and not know, so it's a hard binary.

But given the way the terms have been used as memes, "purple pill" totally resonates as shorthand for transcending polarisation 😏

FYI Amethyst on Android can delete posts. At least I can delete my own.

Maybe with a widget that suppresses a push, if the follow is within N time period after the last follow from the same account? That could filter out most of the accidental follow>unfollow>follow stuff. Follow spam has apparently been an issue in the fediverse, and connect request spam in XMPP.

... and I ought to add, given the inclinations of many of Nostr, that it would also allow right-leaning libertarians to vote for candidates who actually reflect their views, without handing the election to the authoritarian centre-right (Dems).

In either case, STV in local and state elections would diversify representation at those levels of government. Which would likely filter up to Congress and the Presidency, whether STV voting was used at that level or not. Making electoral reform there more likely to happen.

I don't either of these statements are fair comment. One could equally argue that electing Congress or the President by popular vote is to treat the people of the smaller states as less important than the 15 largest states. Which would easily determine the outcomes of those elections, giving a person who moved to one of those largest 15 states far more electoral power than if they moved to one of the smaller ones.

But this whole debate misses the point. Regardless of whether the President is elected by popular vote or not, under the current system the Presidency will always be controlled by the Republicrat party, whether its centre-right neoliberal wing, or its hard-right neoconservative wing. Breaking that duopoly is where proportionality matters most in the US system.

Replacing FPP (First Past the Post) vote counting with STV is how you do that. So people can vote for a left-wing candidate without splitting the vote and handing the election to the hard right.

> 51% shitting on the 49%

... is a big improvement on 1% shitting on the 99%.

> Tyranny of the majority

... is not great, but it's much better than tyranny of the minority.

Anyway, those who've lived in China (eg me, 2 years near Shanghai) know that majority-rules elections are not the definition of democracy. The CCP use majority-rules elections. That doesn't make China democratic.

The real differences between democracy and autocracy are more subtle. They're found in things like freedom of expression and association for citizens. Media freedoms for publishers and telecoms services. Due process under the law, which applies even to people in the highest levels of governance. A permeable border, so people can vote with their feet, rather than being effectively prisoners of the state.

A society could lack officials elected by majority vote, but if it had all those, it would be democratic.

I'm not sure I agree. In Aotearoa, a tiny country where government is fully integrated across the whole country, balancing representation according to the popular vote makes sense. But when electing a head of state in a federal system, where state governance is functionally independent in many ways? Does proportional representation makes sense in such an election?

My 2 cents for pro-democracy campaigners in the US is look into Single Transferable Vote systems. For elections at all levels of government, but particularly for Congress and the Presidency. Breaking the centre-right/ hard-right duopoly over electoral politics seems much more urgent than making sure whichever right-wing candidate wins the popular vote gets the President chair.

Bastiat sat in the left side of the French assembly, with the Jacobins. Against the aristocrats and would-be plutocrats on the right. Which side are you on?

"The government is the number 1 CAUSE of monopolies. It does not prevent them."

As I said, it can do both. All that trying to make the state "minimal" for the last 4 decades has done is strengthen certain monopolies (eg "IP", "anti-circumvention" to enforce DRM). While undermining its capacity to prevent monopolies (using policy tools like net neutrality and antitrust).

Fortunately the needle is swinging the other way. Useful Idiots who complain about this, and defend the interests of the monopolists, will benefit along with the rest of us.