Category: Uncategorized

Let me preface this by saying I’m the kind of people who are most critical of those they love, and harshly critical only of those they love most.

I love me some C4SS. I miss the days before their blog went no-comment; the current no-comment nature of their blog being the main reason C4SS is a recurring subject in the present blog.

Two recent posts have caught my attention—Action Is Sometimes Clearer Than Talk: Why We Will Always Need Trade, by William Gillis and Does Anarchism Skirt the Calculation Problem by Logan Marie Glitterbomb. Gillis in particular is the quintessential anti-anagorist and has produced a large body of work explaining why non-market economics is a non-starter. His recent article is a particularly exhaustive drum-down of the catalog of objections to markets, particularly the market aspect of market anarchism. Many of these objections can be found in my own posts in the present blog over the years. These include hope for the possibility of non-centralized economic planning, the idea of explicitly communicating preferences rather than “revealing” them through painful (i.e. costly) economic transactions, reasonably objective classification of luxuries and necessities, rejection of the capitalist doctrine of infinite want, Red Plenty and Cybersyn, Cockshott and Cottrell, and gift economies. In this article he shoots down both of my pet projects, anagorism, and also pubwan (extreme transparency):

I have grown partial to fully public ledger markets, more akin to the informal markets that emerge prior to state “standardization” and forced anonymization. One of the claims against capitalism is that firm competition drives secrecy, impeding accurate clearing. This is certainly true, and we can argue about the degree to which this norm is able to persist only thanks to the various distortions brought on by state violence, but a market once freed will still reflect an aggregate of our desires and thus our values, we must still work to see our most emphatically held values embodied or normalized. Transparency is a hard won and unending struggle in any context. Removing, marginalizing, or severely impairing anonymous transactions would do wonders for firm transparency, but aggressive reporting and broad social expectations will still be needed. If sometimes actors fail to communicate relevant tacit information to create and exploit asymmetries in markets, well they certainly do the same in collective meetings and every other non-market context ever proposed.

What I increasingly suspect, however, is that just as anarcho-communists and anarcho-collectivists will never be able to fully suppress black markets, we will have to live in a world cut with veins of secrecy, deliberately opaque transactions and relations. The real anarchist economic contest, I believe, will eventually be recognized as over how that secrecy is embraced, contained, and navigated.

My reasons for proposing pubwan, a crowdsourced effort to reverse engineer against data asymmetries between business and society, were motivated largely by the desire to create a volunteer-run, nonproprietary, deeply searchable “catalog of the economy.” The Internet contains many websites that purport to facilitate comparison shopping for various products, but these are invariably for-profit businesses in their own right. They dispense 10 or 20 single data points (embedded of course in bloated web pages) in response to queries, not direct access to the database itself. And which firms’ prices are or are not included in results are most likely a matter of behind-the-scenes exclusivity deals.

Hopefully we will see the development of social norms that disparage secrecy in supply chain matters.

William Gillis is perhaps the closest thing I have to a philosophical arch-enemy, although I consider him a political ally. Logan Marie Glitterbomb takes a different, less confrontational (to my interests) approach, arguing that the economic calculation argument is irrelevant and that the point is that people gonna trade no matter what, so get used to it.

My reasons for being anagorist (that is, anti-market) are deeply personal. The realization of a “freed market” won’t trigger in me an unconditional acceptance of the new status quo.

My own struggle has reached a point where my head is capitalist (I don’t distinguish between markets and capitalism) and my heart is (anarcho-)communist. Since I’m (broadly speaking) an INFJ, my heart has more votes than my head when it comes to the tone and implications of what comes out of my mouth, and I’m not in the market (forgive the pun) for a new personality.

I’m not interested in being a citizen of a nation of shopkeepers.

Voluntary economy is an oxymoron. The relevant question is whether you have as efficient a tradeoff between voluntary and economy as is possible. For me, subjectively, this means stateless society, of course, but with eternal vigilance to make sure cooperation holds its own against competition, and the gift economy against the market economy.

Aral Balkan:

Whoever you are, wherever you are, we have a common enemy: the nationalist international.

Heather Marsh:

Most systems are now run by competitive organizations. Competition creates redundancy, is slow and wastes resources on idea protection, advertisement, and more. Competition also requires secrecy which blocks progress and auditing and causes lost opportunities and ideas.

Michael O. Church:

At a nuclear or higher technology level, post-scarcity automated luxury communism is the only economic system that stands a chance, and we should race to it.

Red Mike:

Every job I’ve ever had has required me to do things and behave in ways I am not comfortable doing, and I don’t think this is unique or rare, its just that the Slasher is an extreme case.

The Fool:

A society free of exploitation and extortion means that nobody gets rich.

I long ago gave up on “right livelihood,” concluding that it’s literally an oxymoron. This is of a piece with my conclusion that there is no possibility of monetization without value subtraction. Consquently, I’ve concluded that the least pro-social jobs are probably those dues-paying jobs for people starting out in some hypercompetitive white collar field such as financial trading or biglaw, which basically amount to hazing by sleep deprivation, and even more importantly (I think), systematic elimination of leisure time from waking hours. I think it should probably be considered a form of brainwashing. The effective altruism community mantra about it taking 10,000 hours to level up to an 80,000-hour career, I’m guessing, can only make matters worse.

But I’m a generation X slacker, so what do I know?

It’s (by definition) not labor-saving technology if more jobs are created than destroyed. The problem with “level up” as a strategy for dealing with it is that the jobs to be “leveled up” to are fewer in number, so it takes a much larger GDP to support the same number of jobs. A red queen race, or perhaps a pyramid scheme, to maintain employment levels. Or a constantly raising bar for workers (and race to the bottom for standards) if we don’t.

“It’s really corporatism you’re against” has become quite a cliché talking point. The problem is, “corporatism” being the problem is always a wind-up for a pitch for “laissez-faire” being the solution, whether that means “separation of economy and state” or a “subsidy-free society” or a society free of “rent extraction.” The underlying theory behind “it’s really corporatism you’re against” seems to be that when private actors do bad things, there’s INVARIABLY a public actor subsidizing them, or otherwise shielding them from what otherwise (according to the theory) would be the consequences of their actions.

I simply don’t buy that theory.

I’m quite certain that wealth would tend toward power in the absence of subsidy; in fact that the problem would be even worse. I’m OK with calling out rent seekers as long as I’m “punching up” when doing so, and even then, I can almost always (and prefer to) frame my objection to their conduct as something other than rent seeking. That’s why I’m always suspicious of people using the “corporatism” frame, they’re invariably libertarians whose rhetorical gambit (toward a left audience) is to bait our “anti-corporate” attitudes and switch us to what is nevertheless a pro-business position. I’m anti-business.

Human escape from natural constrains sounds like a worthy project. Destruction of nature seems, well, destructive, but of course so does nature. I’m of two minds on the subject. I try to sleep at night by imagining that self awareness is unique to humans, but remain aware that notions of human exceptionalism, like notions of pie in the sky, are a feature of religion, not science. Consciousness as a result of evolution, where evolution is a result of natural selection, is quite the trap. Cruel enough to tempt me to pendulum swing all the way past atheism to Manichaeism or some other type of demiurgical belief system.

COVID-19’s effects on media (and on the national Zeitgeist) are reminiscent of those of 9/11. The media have gone into full hero-worship mode, and the professions hailed as heroic are precisely the professions whose vetting process is basically hazing—the military, the police, the firefighters, the doctors and the nurses. Put another way, shit hitting fans in dramatic world-changing ways is the diametric opposite of Jesus’ prophecy about the meek inheriting the earth.

As I see it, the job of a HTTP client (browser) is to correctly implement the open standards that define the web, no more and no less.

I’m political enough about open source that I’ll endure a fair amount of inconvenience in order to avoid proprietary (or even commercial) software, but I also disagree on most points with the direction Firefox has been going, especially with UI and extensions. Maybe being political about open source is an empty gesture like fair trade coffee. It certainly seems sometimes like Firefox is an example of openwashing, which is scary, as browsers are basically the key underlying technology of the web, and the HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript standard is getting complex enough that only a multigazillion dollar organization can build a web browser (in particular, a rendering engine) from scratch that correctly implements the standards. I used to laud the idea of industry standards, as I saw them as the correct alternative to proprietary kludges becoming de-facto standards, but since the bodies making the standards are basically industry consortia, or organizations whose members are organizations (mostly of the for-profit type), what standards-making has turned into is a conspiracy of the commercial participants against the noncommercial participants.

This post was originally a comment to /u/DarSakhar’s Reddit post, If, for some unknown reason, this subreddit disappeared completely one day, how would you connect with other AnComs?

In general, choose DIY platforms over commercial platforms. Choose blogging over social media, and if possible self-host a blog (or other type of web site) rather than go with a blog-platform-in-a-can like Blogger or WordPress-dot-com.

Admittedly, I still use commercial social media, as evidenced by the present comment. There are some audiences that I’ll never, ever reach except through social media. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend muting your voice just to say you’re boycotting social media. But one practice I have adopted is, if I notice that I’ve put a fair amount of effort into a post or comment on social media, I immediately copypaste it into my now-self-hosted blog. I want the public domain to have my best work.

If you’re an OTA viewer you’re feeding on cultural leftovers, quite literally. If you’re not, your baseline cost of living is poverty line times 1.5 or something. Sure Netflix is somethingteen dollars a month (or is it more by now? I don’t follow such things), but for all practical purposes assumes you have wired Internet access. Figure a hundred a month, or no paywalled programming, back to diet of slop. Even going to the movies once-every-few-months (not cheap, but at least not a monthly commitment) leaves you out of some loops, as parts of the feature films business is going into Netflix-exclusive distribution and the like. I rationalize it as, oh, well, I’m a grownup, I’ve made my own bed, should have known the starving artist life might not be the best way to “feed my head.” But now even children watching Sesame Street on PBS are feeding on the leftovers of the children of HBO subscribers. This may have unforeseen social impact. If you’re out of the pop culture loop, you have less to bring to the water cooler, so to speak. It could in theory even hobble some people’s career development (because networking) for example. I mean, let’s be blunt, almost all the advertising that’s commercially viable on the “simulcast” channels, really any of the OTA channels outside what’s left of the part of network prime time that’s still at least half-a__edly vying for Emmys (targeted by Target), literally shouts “hey loser” at its audence. It’s pretty much down to lawsuit bait and Medicare scams. What else you gonna sell to a penniless audence?