L’ultimo capitolo di “L’alba di tutto” di Graeber e Wengrow

Da L’alba di tutto, di David Graeber e David Wengrow

12
Conclusione
L’alba di ogni cosa

Questo libro è iniziato con un appello a porre domande più efficaci. Abbiamo cominciato osservando che indagare sulle origini della disuguaglianza significa necessariamente creare un mito, una caduta in disgrazia, una trasposizione dei primi capitoli della Genesi, che nelle versioni contemporanee prende la forma di una narrazione mitica, spogliata di qualunque prospettiva di redenzione. In questi resoconti, il massimo che noi esseri umani possiamo augurarci è qualche piccolo miglioramento della nostra condizione intrinsecamente squallida e, si spera, un’azione drastica per impedire qualsiasi imminente disastro assoluto. L’unica altra teoria disponibile finora è l’ipotesi che la disuguaglianza non abbia origini, perché gli esseri umani sono, per natura, creature aggressive e i nostri esordi furono infelici e violenti; nel qual caso il «progresso» o la «civiltà», stimolati in gran parte dalla nostra indole egoista e competitiva, furono essi stessi capaci di redenzione. Questa idea gode dell’approvazione dei miliardari, ma non convince nessun altro, compresi gli scienziati, consapevoli che non rispecchia i fatti.

Continua a leggere L’ultimo capitolo di “L’alba di tutto” di Graeber e Wengrow

Le specie non sono reali

Da La concezione anarchica del vivente,
di Jean-Jacques Kupiec (Elèuthera, 2021),
introduzione al capitolo quarto

Il darwinismo e la genetica insieme formano il quadro teorico della biologia moderna che si è deciso di chiamare «teoria sintetica dell’evoluzione» o «neodarwinismo»1. Queste due teorie sono solitamente ritenute complementari al punto che opporsi a una vorrebbe dire opporsi anche all’altra. Può quindi sembrare paradossale criticare la genetica e al tempo stesso puntare i riflettori sulla teoria di Darwin. Ma non dimentichiamo che storicamente la loro sintesi è stata difficile. C’è voluto quasi un secolo per appianare alcune importanti divergenze2. Lungi dall’essere la teoria cristallina che si pensa, questa teoria sintetica nasconde una contrapposizione di fondo. Il darwinismo e la genetica si concentrano su aspetti diversi del vivente, o meglio su aspetti fra loro contraddittori. Darwin si interessa all’evoluzione e quindi alla variazione dei caratteri che ne costituisce il substrato, mentre la genetica cerca di spiegare la trasmissione intergenerazionale dei caratteri, cosa che all’opposto presuppone la conservazione degli stessi. Quando si è compiuta la sintesi fra le due, è andato perduto l’aspetto più radicale e innovativo del pensiero darwiniano. Mentre Darwin aveva rotto con i naturalisti che l’avevano preceduto, considerando la variazione come la proprietà primaria del vivente, la genetica ha riportato in auge l’invarianza.

Per cogliere fino a che punto il darwinismo è stato snaturato bisogna tornare alla genesi della teoria dell’evoluzione. La teoria della selezione naturale non è semplicemente il risultato di un accumulo di osservazioni che apportano prove empiriche a partire dalle quali la deduzione della teoria è obbligata. Essa è anche il compimento di una rivoluzione ontologica che tocca la questione della specie. Si tratta di un problema filosofico molto antico le cui implicazioni per la scienza sono critiche. Il termine «specie» indica gruppi di individui che si assomigliano, ma qual è lo statuto di questi raggruppamenti? Sono oggettivi o soggettivi? Le specie indicano classi reali esistenti indipendentemente dalla soggettività dei classificatori? A seconda della risposta data a questa questione concepiamo il mondo in maniera differente. Se le specie sono reali, esiste un ordine oggettivo corrispondente a queste specie. Se sono soggettive, cioè se sono solo raggruppamenti arbitrari che dipendono dal nostro potere di discernimento o comunque da criteri di nostra scelta, l’ordine che percepiamo non è reale. È relativo alla nostra percezione e alla nostra capacità cognitiva. I filosofi e i naturalisti hanno sostenuto due categorie di risposte. Le specie sono reali per i «realisti», ovvero indipendenti dalla nostra soggettività. Mentre per i «nominalisti» le specie non sono reali, ma sono costruzioni arbitrarie elaborate dagli umani3.

In questo capitolo riesamineremo la teoria sintetica. L’analisi mostrerà che è necessario dissociare darwinismo e genetica. In un primo tempo verrà esaminata la rottura che Darwin ha operato rispetto ai suoi predecessori. Vedremo che il fatto di non riuscire a sbarazzarsi dell’idea di un ordine naturale è ciò che ha impedito loro di formulare una teoria dell’evoluzione compiuta. Tale ordine corrisponde, in ultima analisi, alla messa in atto del disegno divino, che induce alla creazione di specie fisse nella loro essenza e nelle relazioni fra loro. All’opposto, Darwin ha confutato il realismo della specie e si è fatto carico di un nominalismo che riconosce la variazione come il principio primo del vivente. In virtù di questo fatto, il vivente è, a suo parere, un flusso continuo che fa variare gli esseri all’infinito, annichilendo ogni possibilità di instaurare un ordine naturale. Le ontologie antagoniste di darwinismo e genetica non sono mai state riconciliate nella loro cosiddetta sintesi. Predomina l’una o l’altra a seconda delle circostanze, degli ambiti di studio o degli autori. Nel caso dell’ontogenesi si è imposta l’ontologia della genetica con il suo corollario: un rigido determinismo. Ed è appunto questo il motivo per cui è importante capire questa storia: per dissociare il darwinismo dalla genetica e dissolvere così l’illusione di ordine che tale associazione fa perdurare.

1. Queste due espressioni non sono esattamente sinonimi. «Neodarwinismo» indica la reinterpretazione del lavoro di Darwin compiuta nel XIX secolo da alcuni precursori della genetica, soprattutto Weismann, mentre «teoria sintetica dell’evoluzione» indica la sintesi che ha fatto il suo esordio nella prima metà del XX secolo integrando dapprima darwinismo e genetica delle popolazioni e poi anche altre discipline fra cui la biologia molecolare. Oggi, però, le due espressioni sono spesso utilizzate come sinonimi in senso lato.

2. Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (MD), 1983; Jean Gayon, Darwinism’s Struggle For Survival, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), 2007.

3. Il termine «realista» deriva dalla disputa sugli universali. È quasi sinonimo del termine «essenzialista», inventato nel XX secolo.

Come fecero le forme di organizzazione verticistiche a vedere la luce?

Dall’ultimo capitolo di L’alba di tutto,
di David Graeber e David Wengrow

Se c’è un racconto particolare da narrare, una grande domanda da porre sulla storia dell’umanità (al posto del quesito sulle «origini della disuguaglianza sociale»), è proprio questa: come siamo rimasti bloccati in un’unica forma di realtà sociale, e come sono riuscite le relazioni basate sulla violenza e sulla dominazione a normalizzarsi al suo interno?

Continua a leggere Come fecero le forme di organizzazione verticistiche a vedere la luce?

The main reasons why i think Mastodon is probably the worst alternative to centralized, commercial socials [with Italian version]

English version
[Italian version below]

  1. Instead of implementing the APIs defined by ActivityPub, of which only a small portion has been implemented in Mastodon to date, the Mastodon development team implemented its own APIs on top of those of ActivityPub and, taking advantage of the fact that Mastodon, before supporting ActivityPub (now the only decentralized social protocol it claims to support: little, as noted above), was by far the most widely used FOSS alternative to the large, centralized, commercial socials, it forced the development teams of the other platforms to implement the Mastodon-specific APIs, so that their own platform instances could interact with Mastodon instances; thus the Mastodon API became de facto the most widely used and most implemented interoperability standard among the Fediverse platforms, to the detriment of implementations of ActivityPub, which as a core social protocol was and would in itself be able to guarantee interoperability of the various platforms that implemented it;
  2. the Mastodon development team did everything possible, including the above, to centralize the Fediverse to its own platform and especially to the most widely used Mastodon gGmbH-owned instance, mastodon.social, which is also by far the most populated instance of all the Fediverse’s platforms, and this is bad for decentralization in itself (a network of small-to-medium instances is more resilient to any attack, and does not carry the risk that the most widely used platforms and instances will dictate interoperability rules and customs), and because the larger and more generalist an instance is, the less effective its moderation will be; it pursued and achieved this centralization by doing what is described in the first point and, even more, by putting a nice big button “Join mastodon.social” on the homepage of the project’s official website, before the “Pick another server” button, which, for its part, sends to a Mastodon instances presentation page that shows first, again, mastodon.social, and, immediately after that, the other, already more populated instances, and doing something very similar with its official mobile apps, where new users are even more induced to join mastodon.social;
  3. the Mastodon’s development team introduced “trending posts,” “trending accounts,” “trending hashtags,” and “trending news,” which are active by default and can only be turned off by those who manage the instance, thus gamifying the experience of the vast majority of users and increasing their FOMO; in other words, it has implemented features which are detrimental to equal and non-competitive interaction, investing a lot of time, energy, and money coming even or especially from the European community, instead of solving the huge problems Mastodon has been carrying for so long (see the first point, and below), and instead of implementing things which would be useful in themselves (see below, again), especially those that would be useful for decentralization, such as a simple inter-istance discovery mechanism for accounts;
  4. on Mastodon, if you read a thread whose first post comes from an instance other than your own, the thread very often has a lot of missing branches, i.e., those that develop under a post written from an account that your instance doesn’t know yet, including that very post; this is a huge bug, which greatly reduces the basic functionality of a social, and has been known since 2016, and has not yet been fixed; on other platforms supporting ActivityPub this bug is not present;
  5. on Mastodon you can’t make a public post of yours appear only on the local timeline of your instance; on other platforms you can, and it is an important feature for community-building – also, possibly, from the perspective of economic sustainability;
  6. on Mastodon those who manage an instance do not have an easy way to set the number of characters per post available to those who use it (they have to apply an hackish patch with each update); on other platforms it is possible to do this much more simply, by modifying an instance setting, and this is important because Mastodon’s default 500 characters limit is often very inadequate: as we see in so many threads, it happens very often that one has to split their posts.

Versione in italiano

I motivi principali per cui penso che Mastodon sia probabilmente l’alternativa peggiore ai social centralizzati e commerciali

  1. Invece di implementare le API definite da ActivityPub, delle quali ad oggi, in Mastodon, è stata implementata solo una piccola parte, il team di sviluppo di Mastodon ha implementato proprie API sopra quelle di ActivityPub e, sfruttando il fatto che Mastodon, prima di supportare ActivityPub (ora l’unico protocollo social decentralizzato che sostiene di supportare: poco, come già detto), era di gran lunga la più diffusa piattaforma FOSS alternativa ai grandi social commerciali e centralizzati, ha costretto i team di sviluppo delle altre piattaforme a implementare le API specifiche di Mastodon perché le istanze delle proprie piattaforme potessero interagire con le istanze Mastodon; così le API di Mastodon sono diventate di fatto lo standard di interoperabilità più diffuso e più implementato tra le piattaforme del Fediverso, a detrimento delle implementazioni di ActivityPub, che in quanto protocollo social di base era e sarebbe in grado di per sé di garantire l’interoperabilità delle diverse piattaforme che lo implementassero;
  2. il team di sviluppo di Mastodon ha fatto tutto il possibile, compreso quanto sopra, per centralizzare il Fediverso verso la propria piattaforma e soprattutto verso l’istanza di proprietà di Mastodon gGmbH più usata, mastodon.social, che è anche l’istanza di gran lunga più popolata tra tutte le piattaforme del Fediverso, il che è male per la decentralizzazione in sé (una rete di istanze medio-piccole è più resistente a qualsiasi attacco, e non si porta il rischio che le piattaforme e le istanze più usate dettino le consuetudini e le regole di interoperabilità), e perché quanto più grande e generalista è un’istanza, tanto meno sarà efficace la sua moderazione; ha perseguito e ottenuto questa centralizzazione facendo quanto descritto al primo punto e, ancor più, mettendo un bel pulsantone “Join mastodon.social” sulla homepage del sito web ufficiale del progetto, prima del pulsante “Pick another server” che, dal canto suo, manda a una pagina di presentazione delle istanze Mastodon che mostra per prima, di nuovo, mastodon.social, e subito dopo le altre istanze già più popolate, e facendo qualcosa di molto simile con le sue app mobile ufficiali, dove i nuovi utenti sono ancora più indotti a iscriversi a mastodon.social;
  3. il team di sviluppo di Mastodon ha introdotto “trending posts”, “trending accounts”, “trending hashtags”, “trending news”, attivi per default e disattivabili solo da chi gestisce l’istanza, gamificando così l’esperienza della stragrande maggioranza dell’utenza e aumentandone la FOMO; in altre parole, ha implementato funzionalità dannose per l’interazione paritaria e non competitiva, investendoci un sacco di tempo, energie, e soldi che gli arrivano anche o soprattutto dalla comunità europea, invece di risolvere i problemi enormi che si porta appresso da tanto tempo (vedi il primo punto, e sotto), e invece di implementare cose utili in sé (vedi sotto, di nuovo), in particolare quelle che sarebbero utili per la decentralizzazione, come un meccanismo di semplice discovery interistanza degli account;
  4. su Mastodon, se leggi un thread il cui primo post viene da un’istanza diversa dalla tua, il thread ha spessissimo un sacco di rami mancanti, ovvero quelli che si sviluppano sotto un post scritto da un account ancora non noto alla tua istanza, compreso quello stesso post; questo è un bug enorme, che riduce moltissimo la funzionalità di base di un social, ed è noto dal 2016, e non è ancora stato risolto; su altre piattaforme che supportano ActivityPub questo bug non c’è;
  5. su Mastodon non è possibile fare in modo che un proprio post pubblico compaia solo sulla timeline locale della propria istanza; su altre piattaforme si, ed è una funzionalità importante per fare comunità – anche, eventualmente, dal punto di vista della sostenibilità economica;
  6. su Mastodon chi gestisce un’istanza non ha un modo semplice per settare il numero di caratteri per post disponibili a chi la usa (deve applicare una patch arrangiata a ogni aggiornamento); su altre piattaforme è possibile farlo molto più semplicemente, modificando un’impostazione della propria istanza, ed è importante perché i 500 caratteri di default di Mastodon sono spessissimo insufficienti: come si vede in tanti thread, capita spessissimo di dover suddividere i propri post.

The shadow walks behind you

by Doran, from the Doran album

[Spoken]
The shadow walks behind you
The shadow’s step is your step
But you step into the river
So that your shadow cannot cross

You want to walk alone
We want to leave them on the other side of the river
And dance without them dancing behind us
But the shadows gather there

[Sung]
Oh, they gather there
They gather there

[Spoken]
The shadows gather among the roots of the trees
They dance with each other, they build, they grow, they gather
They gather themselves into themselves
They gather in strength

Without them, without them
Without them we are only walking
We cannot really dance

[Sung]
Oh, shush, bye, bye, my only
Only, only, oh

[Spoken]
We must reach back across the river
We must step into the shallow water
Onto the bright stones
And extend our hands across

The necessary anarcho-communist International

[Last edited on Saturday, 27 January 2024]

TL;DR (AKA: an abstract)

It is necessary now more than ever before in history to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in the context of an anarcho-communist International, like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists advocated and fought to make happen, because today we not only need to finally end it with the domination of exploitation, violence and death that patriarcapitalism is in the whole world, and with any other domination of man on man and of man on the other species, but we also need to save ourselves, our children and the future generations of our species, and so many others, from the decimation or, more probably, the extinction that otherwise would happen in some decades, or even before, by spreading and growing wars and by ecosystemic catastrophes like the escalating reduction of biodiversity, the escalating frequency of pandemics, and global warming driven disasters like the droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, sea level rise, unlivable temperatures in the summer, and more and more cold winters, which are already happening and causing so much pain and death everywhere, but especially in areas of the planet that have less temperate climate conditions than ours, less financial and material resources to mitigate the effects of these disasters, and, in many cases, even more pollution than our countries.

Moreover: tomorrow it would be much easier than ever before to make a global, federated community of many little communities that would self-manage themselves with open-to-all, consensus driven assemblies (i.e. real, direct democracy, that is a necessary condition for achieving and maintaining good or very good levels of equality and social justice, along with periodic redistribution of wealth accumulation, to be culturally ritualized in the context of festivities), because when the huge advancements in technology that humanity has done since the ancient times when big self-managing communities existed before, particularly those in the many-to-many communications and in the increasingly immersive fiction production and fruition fields, would grant paritary confrontation and creative sublimation and cathartic release of our dark sides (competitiveness, aggressiveness, and so on) to all, when they actually were, hardware and software, in the hands of everybody.

Also: the anarcho-communist International could and would much better start from rich countries, where conscience of the huge inequalities of patriarcapitalism is more widespread and material and cultural conditions are still better than in those many countries where the vast majority of the people of the world lives: by putting an end to the domination of the masters and rulers in our countries we would directly and greatly alleviate the near-slavery conditions of  the populations of the poorest countries, where the local rulers and masters would then no longer receive the more or less overt or covert support and the weapons they receive today from our governments and masters, who are interested only in securing for themselves the possibility to obtain at very low prices the raw materials to be used in the production of tools which are so often overpowered, or even useless or damaging, and also designed, with planned obsolescence, to last much shorter than they could.

Finally: although it would still require being armed, if we managed to be many enough to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in our rich countries, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries, would be shed; but time is running fast and it’s very improbable that we will be that many soon enough, so, and in any case, we’d better start or continue with more conviction to organize ourselves secretly, in groups, on an operational level, while continuing to spread our knowledge and ideas publicly.

Like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists said, we have to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in order to finally end it with this domination of exploitation, violence and death that patriarcapitalism is, and with every other domination and exploitation and violence; and, nowadays, also to save ourselves, our children and the future generations: because in addition to the “usual” exploitation and violence, there’s the immense ecological problem of the average temperature of the world rising, that no one “from above” has even put a curb on (globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, instead of decreasing), despite more than two decades of peaceful pressures which we acted in every sauce from below; and there is covid with its variants, this never-ending tragic affair which is predominantly and by far yet another consequence of the material and cultural misery that patriarcapitalism produces, also in its state version (see [1], [2], and [3], or just mind that if it was not because of these miseries, in that Chinese market people would not have sold animals at the risk of causing that virus to jump to humans), and to date has already painfully killed almost 7 million persons worldwide, and would otherwise continue; because yes, the anti-covid vaccines which are currently disposable in the richest countries do work: they are statistically very effective in preserving from getting ill those who accept to get vaccinated, although they provide a rather brief cover; but, despite the fact their development was financed to a great extent by rich states with money from tax payers, these same states buy them at a price per dose that is up to 24 times its cost of production, while the states where the large majority of the people of the world lives can’t afford to buy them and the bosses of pharmaceutical multinationals producing them don’t remise, not even temporarily, to the related patents, and don’t publish the know-how that’s necessary to build the machines to produce them, nor are they disposable to help in building these machines and to train the people who could use them within less rich and poor countries; thus, covid and its variants would otherwise continue spreading, and new viruses would otherwise born and spread – see [1], [2], and [3] again – even in rich countries: viruses, in fact, know no borders, as covid and its variants proved.

These are some of the reasons why we need to take the industrial infrastructures and turn off those that produce the bulk of the global warming that threatens to drive us to extinction, and why we need to take and close the industrial “meat factories”, and why we need to take the cultivated lands, whose cultivation today produces the second most important part of the greenhouse effect, to cultivate them without resorting to fossil fuels burning,  which today is mostly used to produce synthetic nitrogen, letting instead work the good old little mushrooms that have taken billions of years to learn how to make nitrogen for good and without polluting, in synergy with the roots of the plants, and thus also letting the lands rest by turning the cultivated plants from year to year, etc., and soon build lots of wind, photovoltaic and photothermal, hydroelectric infrastructures, and produce the necessary batteries without polluting and exploiting people, and start anew everywhere as a world of small federated communities, more or less on the model of Kurdish democratic confederalism, which in the cities could be neighborhoods, and in smaller towns the town itself, where decisions and rules will be defined and refined in assemblies that will be open to all, and which will commercially relate one another by public assemblies as well, through the internet, basing their commercial relations on the answer to the question “which is the closest among other communities that can exchange that resource or that product or that service?”, that will be publicly available information, and socializing through the internet the knowledge they will develop so that, for example, with respect to viral pandemics – that would be then much more seldom anyway –, they would be globally stopped for real and also in a much shorter time; and because we should be clear, by now, also due to the historical experiences of “real communisms,” with their marxist nonsense of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which by the way has never been real and produced some of the worst nefariousness in history, that social justice and good levels of social equality require to be backed, along with periodic redistribution of wealth accumulation, that would be culturally ritualized and much more real than today in the context of festivities, by the constant possibility of openly and publicly, verbally confronting in open-to-all assemblies, in every community, about what to do with common goods and common spaces, and about which rules to give ourselves, as this happened already in history, and would happen much better tomorrow due to global free access for all to lay, egalitarian education and knowledge of horrors of the past, that would be widespread everywhere in the world also thanks to the technologies we have developed in the meantime, which should be common heritage of everybody, and due to the abolition of licenses, patents and trade or industrial secrets, and to the possibility that then everyone in the world would have to sublimate their “dark sides” in creativity and lash them out in almost or totally harmless ways, to an extent and with an immersivity that we, as a whole, never had before: the possibility for all to build fictional worlds, with or without fictional stories, using open hardware and software produced by the communities, and to virtually live some time there, and to play and fight and love and build there too, with or without other avatars of others’ selves. This is what arts have always been about, and tomorrow it would be just freely accessible for all, and it would be a great contribution to sublimation and catharsis of our “dark sides”, along with frugal sports and more usual arts and free, respectful love.

And we need to do the anarcho-communist International because it’s our interest not only to save ourselves and the future generations, but also to make the world a much better place for us and our children and everyone else.

There’s no alternative, and time is crucial at this historical stage, and it’s running out not least with respect to the risk of extinction by climate change, that otherwise would happen in this very century, but especially with respect to the increasingly less remote possibility that this umpteenth crisis “of capitalism” will end up again, through the spread of worse and worse nationalisms and wars in which access to those fossil fuels we should have stopped burning yesterday is still one of the main justifications, in an unfolded third world war with a decimation of the global population that would be much heavier than in the previous two (or perhaps, even in this case, with the total extinction of the human species, and so many others): because, in short, this crisis “of capitalism” that we are living today is not only the umpteenth of a series of crises which, on average, have been increasingly damaging, but it’s also totally unprecedented, with its enormous ecological implications which are now, already tragic, with the amount of death and pain they have already caused and are causing now in the world, and which will get much more tragic with the worsening of the already and since long ongoing crisis in the ability of the living to reproduce, even in order to feed us, and with the worsening of water scarcity and drought that is already ongoing, and with so many other problems that patriarcapitalism has caused and is causing, which will certainly worsen and will form a whole that, as if one or a few of its “pieces” wasn’t enough, will be totally fatal for our species and so many others, unless we actually organize and do the anarcho-communist International we need to do, quickly, to transform what otherwise would certainly be a bitter and very painful end for most or all of us, into the foundation and the beginning of a new and much more peaceful, and much more just, and much more happy world for all to live in, and, quite soon, also out of, when anyone who will so desire will have the ability to peacefully live with anyone else, members of terrestrial and non terrestrial species as well, on other planets too, to bring life to those planets were life is not already present and to protect it on those where it is. Because that which is holy and sacred is not much our individual lives, but life itself, that just can’t be stopped, and in order to be a living and healthy part of it, and to peacefully live our individual lives in it, we still have to understand that it is the only “god”, and we have so much more to learn from and about it.

The anarcho-communist International could and would much better start from rich countries, where conscience of the huge inequalities of patriarcapitalism is more widespread and material and cultural conditions are still better than in those many countries where the vast majority of the people of the world lives: by putting an end to the domination of the masters and rulers in our countries we would directly and greatly alleviate the near-slavery conditions of  the populations of the poorest countries, where the local rulers and masters would then no longer receive the more or less overt or covert support and the weapons they receive today from our governments and masters, who are interested only in securing for themselves the possibility to obtain at very low prices the raw materials to be used in the production of tools which are so often overpowered, or even useless or damaging, and also designed, with planned obsolescence, to last much shorter than they could.

Finally: although it would still require being armed, if we managed to be many enough to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in our rich countries, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries, would be shed; but time is running fast and it’s very improbable that we will be that many soon enough, so, and in any case, we’d better start or continue with more conviction to organize ourselves secretly, in groups, on an operational level, while continuing to spread our knowledge and ideas publicly.

The problem with libertarian and egalitarian education at the present time

The problem with libertarian and egalitarian education, at the present time, is that the more we adopt an education in which rules are established with children, as they begin to understand the language, and always remain open to being improved and modified, which is necessary and foundational for a wider education to sharing, the more likely it is that children, once they become adults, will have difficulty adjusting to this ultra-hierarchical present, in which social justice is only a verbal expression with such a small correspondence to reality, and that is currently decimating and would possibly extinguish our species and so many others.

But i think it would be worth it all the same, if we made children aware early enough that, at the present time, the adult world is mostly like that; and, above all, if we organized ourselves, for this and so many other reasons, for the necessary anarcho-communist International.

The Christ: Jesus’ twin

I think it’s probable that “the Christ” was the unknown twin brother of Jesus, and that he was kept imprisoned in Mary’s and Joseph’s poor home basement since not long after he and his brother Jesus were born, as per this previously stipulated contract between “the Magi”, which were actually some guys working for the early and then unknown Catholic Church, and Mary and Joseph themselves, until they pulled him out all of a sudden to let the romans put him on the cross and kill him instead of Jesus, to stage Jesus’ death, and then his resurrection.

Before that, Jesus, who was educated mostly by “the Magi”, and agreed to their contract and their plan very early in his life, also because Mary and Joseph made that contract before he and his brother were assigned to them by “the Magi” themselves, was mainly reciting “in sunlight”, with the oppressed, a plot and precepts which was written by “the Magi”, who based them on many more, selected madmen’s and “saints’” beliefs and, to some extent, even on his brother’s obviously growing madness, although it was probably mostly driven, in its development, and particularly in “the Christ’s” increasingly sincere conviction of being the son of “God”, by “the Magi” themselves, who were visiting him periodically in the basement.

After his brother died as one more poor christ on the cross in his stead, Jesus acted for the oppressed that last touching “bye, see you at the end of the world” scene that “the Magi” had written for him, and then he, Mary and Joseph got the big money that “the Magi” promised to them, and a permanent vacation far away from those territories, in exchange for their good services to the early Catholic Church, that was already planning to gain complete hegemony over the whole world.

The only christ i like is the one my father, who died in 2009, imagined and sang in 1979 and still tells in his Il sogno and Il cristè songs, which are as one song. You can read its lyrics in the video description, both in the italian original and in the translation i’ve done.

“The dawn of everything”, the “always turn the other cheek” Christian commandment, the Anarchic International and immersive fiction

In their The dawn of everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow prove with archaeological evidence that, in a relatively distant past, there were big cities where people already knew and practiced agriculture, and where, in some cases for more than one millennium, decisions and rules about the commons were taken in open assemblies; thus, they also had good levels of equality in distribution of wealth and resources.

At some point in the book they ask themselves, and obviously their readers too, why, at least now, there is no archaeological evidence of later examples of such big societies which worked that way, and they make an hypothesis: that when three issues or “traits” of centralized accumulation of power and wealth and resources, which i won’t summarize here (read the book! 🙂), intertwine in a given society (like our present societies, since very long time), it’s very difficult to get back, or forward, to equality in distribution of power, work, wealth and resources.

They also emphasize that it is an hypothesis, and that more studies should be done to prove it more, or modify it, or extend it.

Anyway, i have an hypothesis about something that has probably worsened the situation: the Christian commandment to “always turn the other cheek” when anyone treats you bad: although i guess nobody can sincerely tell to really always behave like that, i think it’s a commandment which worked and still works a lot as a moral condemnation of some of the most effective actions any oppressed people can implement against their oppressors, and as a self-justification of fear of implementing it or, sometimes, even of thinking about it.

This bugs me a lot, also because i think that today it would be much easier to build equal societies, after an Anarchic International like this, i.e. after taking the lands to cultivate them without polluting, and the industrial facilities to shut down the polluting ones and build the sustainable alternatives while consuming less and better, which would also save our species and many others from the already ongoing decimation and the otherwise very probable future extinction caused by the current ecological catastrophe and-or the equally severe risks of the ongoing and future wars that the ecological catastrophe itself is very intertwined with: after an Anarchic International like this, in the liberated context it could foster (i.e. a global context of many federated little-to-medium sized communities where decisions and rules about the commons would be defined and refined in open assemblies, and thus we would have very good levels of equality in distribution of work, wealth and resources too, and where two or more communities would settle about exchanges of resources and products with inter-communal assemblies which could be made through the internet), tomorrow we would also have a hugely wider possibility to access and share all knowledge, and to build fictional worlds, with or without fictional stories, using open hardware and software produced by the communities, and to virtually live some time there, and to play and fight and love and build there, with or without other avatars of others’ selves, thus sublimating our dark sides in creativity and lashing them out in almost or totally harmless ways to an extent and with an immersivity that we, as a whole, never had before.

This is what arts have always been about, and tomorrow it would be just freely accessible for all.

Reasons why Meta joining the Fediverse is very bad, how to mitigate the damage, and an idea to save the Fediverse as a new and safer web space

[Last edited on Tuesday, 16 January 2024]

Although i’m sure it won’t avoid most of the damage, i strongly support the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact, and urge Fediverse admins to block Meta’s Threads (currently, the threads.net domain) at their Fediverse instances’ level, because Meta, the producer of Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Threads, is known to do such things as:

  1. profiling users for targeting advertisements [e.g.: 1, 2];
  2. controlling their users emotions;
  3. spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about November 2020 presidential election in USA;
  4. censoring political organizations – mostly, and by far, of the global left [1, 2], while not censoring political organizations of the most far right (e.g.: italian neofascist organizations like Casapound, Forza Nuova, Lealtà e Azione all have many pages and profiles on Facebook);
  5. facilitating a genocide;
  6. super-exploiting moderators;
  7. censoring wildfires news stories from Canada to Canadian users;
  8. systemically censoring Palestine contents on Instagram and Facebook;
  9. and so much more;

But most Fediverse platforms’ instances, especially most or all of the most populated, are not blocking and won’t block threads.net; thus, using those instances, will be less and less different than using Meta’s products, in terms of data scraping by Meta and users’ privacy, because those instances expose their users to the risk of giving complete access to their “private” messages (messages addressed to “Mentioned people only”, on Mastodon) just by unknowingly or thoughtlessly mentioning Threads accounts in such messages, and to complete access by Meta to their “less public” posts (posts addressed to “Followers only”, on Mastodon), when Threads users will get the possibility to follow other Fediverse platforms accounts, that is soon going to be implemented by Threads developers. Meta has scraped even “less public” posts and “private” messages on its platforms in the past, and it is most probably still doing it, in spite of some court cases that accounted it guilty of doing it and “punished” it, much later than when each one of those abuses was made, with financial penalties that were ludicrous to Meta, because of its huge financial wealth.

To mitigate these risks, users of Fediverse platforms instances that have not blocked the threads.net domain at instance level can still block it by themselves and for themselves only (on Mastodon’s official web frontend, this can be done by clicking on the three dots icon in the lower right corner of any post and choosing Block domain from the popup menu); or they can set their accounts to prompt for their confirmation whenever another account tries to follow theirs (on Mastodon’s official web frontend, this can be done by going to Preferences > Public profile > Privacy and reach tab, and unchecking the Automatically accept new followers checkbox), and then paying attention to not mention any Threads account in their non-public posts (“Followers only” and “Mentioned people only” posts, on Mastodon).

Still, to ensure that the Fediverse won’t become a big barrel from which Meta, and probably other big and medium commercial players in the future, will scrape not only data from public posts, but also from “less public” and “private” posts, the most safe way would be to write a new social networking protocol specification, that could be named FreeSocialProtocol, and to put it under a license or a patent that (1) would prohibit any use of the protocol itself in products that are not open source, and (2) would prohibit its use in products that also use other protocols that are under no licenses, or that are under licenses not prohibiting their use in non-open source products (point 2 would make it a viral license/patent, like the GPL, but only on the open source condition; and necessarily so, because otherwise, this license/patent very purpose would be defeated).

I have no illusion that a new protocol with such a license or patent would be used by many from the start, and maybe it would take long for it to gain traction, or maybe it would never exit the “niche” status, but it would be good all the same even in these cases, and i think there is the possibility that it would gain a lot of traction, soon or later. But, again, i think it would be just and good if it existed even if it was never to exit the “niche” status.

Note 1: i’m trying to verify whether it is possible to create such a license, or such a patent, and to apply it to the specification of a social networking protocol: on Friday, 22 December 2023, i wrote an e-mail to the FSF (using the licensing@fsf.org e-mail address) asking just this; and on Saturday, 6 January 2024, i’ve written to the European section of the FSF too, at its licence-questions@fsfe.org e-mail address, without receiving any answer from both as of today, Tuesday, 16 January 2024.

Note 2: on this topic, you may want to read these ongoing discussions i’m having: the first one with a Fediverse protocols and platform (Streams) developer, the second one with an Akkoma developer (Akkoma is another Fediverse platform, a fork of Pleroma). I think they’re both at least very useful, clarifying and instructive.