Categoria: Competitività/cooperazione

«It’s revolution or death»: Part 1 and Part 2 transcriptions

It’s revolution or death
Part 1: Short Term Investments
[video]

[Text overlaid on video]
subMedia and Peter Gelderloos present
It’s revolution or death
Part 1: Short Term Investments

Things aren’t like they used to be.

[Voiceover]
I mean, aside from a few wingnuts, people recognize that things are bad, climate change is real.
They’re doing something about it.
Yes.
Those in power are taking it seriously.
Every year, green investment and green energy production have been growing.
Thanks to proactive initiatives by politicians and policy makers around the world, and conscientious investment by major funds and companies like Blackrock, BP, and Tesla.
Every year the Conference of the Parties holds a summit to define the next steps needed to reach a carbon neutral economy and meet the goals set in the Paris Agreement of not exceeding 1.5C of global warming.
Global investment in clean energy grew to $1.7 trillion in 2023, the highest level yet.
From 2010 to 2021 renewable energy production in the US has doubled.
In 2022, the major economies of the world made renewed commitments to green energy.
The US government passed the Inflation Reduction Act, leading to $110 billion in private investments in clean energy manufacturing in one year alone, as well as a 52% increase in the sale of electric vehicles.
China added 160 Gigawatts of capacity to its renewable energy production, and the European Union added 50 Gigawatts to its capacity in wind and solar photovoltaic energy.
So things are getting better, right?
Right?
Continua a leggere «It’s revolution or death»: Part 1 and Part 2 transcriptions

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

— English version here —

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

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 necessary socialist International

[Last edited on Tuesday, 22 August 2025]

Like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists, i think we need 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 to save ourselves, our children and the future generations, because in addition to the usual exploitation and violence there’s the huge ecological problem, one of the most problematic elements of which is the average temperature of the world rising, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, mainly driven by energy production and consumption for which “renewables” are not a real alternative, and despite the many decades of peaceful pressures on governments and companies that we acted in every sauce from below, obtaining nothing at all; and climate change is only one of the six of nine planetary boundaries we are far beyond.

A “forced-by-nature-degrowth” would happen when it would be too late for our species and so many others to not extinguish and, at the same time, “degrowth-by-our-will” is impossible as well: it’s impossible that the people in the US, in Europe, in China, in Russia, in all these “developed” countries, and particularly the upper classes, who are by far the greatest GHG emitters, will “degrow” in numbers high enough and in times short enough to get our species out of the very sorrowful extinction by famine, thirst, warfare and pandemics that we are already living today in many territories. This is why i think there’s no alternative to taking the lands, to cultivate them without polluting, to take and close the industrial “meat factories”, to take the means of production and turn off all the polluting ones.

Agricolture today produces the second most important part of greenhouse gases, but it is possible to cultivate without resorting to fossil fuels burning, that today is mostly used to produce synthetic nitrogen, by practicing agroforestry and permaculture, that are more productive than industrial agricolture and don’t pollute, so it would be possible to start anew everywhere, more or less on the model of Kurdish democratic confederalism, as a world of small communities, that in the cities would be municipalities, and in smaller towns the town itself, where decisions would be taken and current rules would be abrogated or redefined and refined in assemblies that would be open to all, with the municipalities commercially relating one another by public assemblies as well – because it 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 produced some of the worst nefariousness in history, that social justice and good levels of social equality require to be backed by the constant possibility of open and public verbal confrontation about what to do with common goods and common spaces, and about which rules to give ourselves.

This kind of social organization has precedents in history, and today it would be easier to achive, with global free access for all to lay, egalitarian education and knowledge of horrors of the past, with the abolition of licenses and patents, and with the possibility for all to sublimate their “dark sides” in creativity and lash them out in harmless ways through arts, frugal sports and free, respectful love.

Yet time is crucial, and it’s running out not least with respect to the risk of extinction by ecological issues (climate change, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification and so on), but especially with respect to the increasing probability that this umpteenth crisis of capitalism will end up again in an unfolded third world war, that would be an acceleration towards the extinction of our species and so many others, through the spread of worse and worse nationalisms and the already ongoing wars, that are still mainly driven by nationalist conflicting wills to hoard raw materials that we should have stopped using yesterday, such as fossil fuels and so many others.

This crisis of capitalism that we are living today is not only the umpteenth of a series of crises that have been increasingly damaging, but it’s also unprecedented, with its enormous ecological implications that are now, already tragic, with the amount of death and pain they have already caused and are causing now in the world, that would just get more and 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 and that would certainly form a whole which, as if one or a few of its parts wasn’t enough, would be fatal for our species and so many others – unless we actually organize and do the socialist 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, just and happy world for all to live in. 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 most peacefully live our individual lives in it, the upper classes, the higher they are, still have to understand that it is the only “god”, and that they are those who have the most to learn from it.

The socialist 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 not only save and free ourselves and our people, but also directly and greatly alleviate the semi-slavery conditions, that in many cases are materially worse than those of actual slavery, of people in 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 rulers and masters, who are only interested in consolidating and extending their profits and power by obtaining at lower prices the raw materials to be used in the ecologically devastating production of tools that are so often overpowered, 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 and everywhere, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries, would be shed.

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 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.

Michael Pollan su Timothy Leary

Da Come cambiare la tua mente,
di Michael Pollan (Adelphi, 2019)

«A Harvard stavamo concependo pensieri storicamente estremi» scrisse in seguito Leary a proposito di quel periodo: convinti che «fosse arrivato il momento (dopo i superficiali e nostalgici anni Cinquanta) per visioni rivoluzionarie, sapevamo che l’America aveva esaurito la filosofia, e che era urgentemente necessaria una nuova meta-fisica empirica e tangibile». La bomba e la guerra fredda costituivano lo sfondo essenziale di quelle idee, conferendo al progetto un carattere d’urgenza.

Nel suo passaggio da scienziato a evangelizzatore Leary fu incoraggiato anche da alcuni degli artisti che aveva egli stesso iniziato agli psichedelici. In una memorabile seduta nella sua casa di Newton, nel dicembre del 1960, Leary diede la psilocibina al poeta beat Allen Ginsberg, un uomo che per vestire i panni del profeta visionario non aveva bisogno di alcuna induzione chimica. Verso la fine di un trip estatico, Ginsberg scese incespicando al piano di sotto, si tolse tutti i vestiti e annunciò la propria intenzione di marciare nudo per le strade di Newton predicando il nuovo vangelo.

«Insegneremo alla gente a smettere di odiare» disse, «inizieremo un movimento di pace e amore». Nelle sue parole si può quasi udire la nascita degli anni Sessanta, come un pulcino fluorescente ancora bagnato che rompe il guscio dell’uovo. Quando Leary riuscì a persuadere Allen a non uscire di casa (tra l’altro, era dicembre), il poeta andò al telefono e cominciò a chiamare vari leader mondiali, cercando di farsi passare Kennedy, Chruščëv e Mao Zedong, per cercare di appianare le loro divergenze. Alla fine riuscì a parlare solo con il suo amico Jack Kerouack, presentandosi come Dio («qui è D-I-O che parla») e dicendogli che doveva prendere quei funghi magici.

Al pari di chiunque altro.

Ginsberg era convinto che Leary, il professore di Harvard, fosse l’uomo perfetto per guidare la nuova crociata psichedelica. Per Ginsberg, il fatto che il nuovo profeta «emergesse dall’Università di Harvard», l’alma mater del neoeletto presidente, era un esempio di «commedia storica», giacché qui c’era «il solo e unico Dr. Leary, un essere umano rispettabile, un uomo navigato, messo di fronte al compito d’un Messia». Venendo dal grande poeta, quelle parole caddero come semi sul terreno fertile e ben innaffiato dell’ego di Timothy Leary. (Il fatto che le sostanze psichedeliche possano promuovere un’esperienza di dissoluzione dell’ego, la quale in alcuni individui porta poi rapidamente a una sua colossale espansione, è uno dei loro numerosi paradossi. Essendo stato ammesso a conoscere un grande segreto dell’universo, chi riceve tale conoscenza tende a sentirsi speciale, prescelto per grandi imprese).

[«Essendo stato ammesso a conoscere un grande segreto dell’universo», mah, boh, io al massimo poi così]

Darwinismo e anarchia

Da La concezione anarchica del vivente,
di Jean-Jacques Kupiec (elèuthera, 2021)

Capitolo sesto
Risposta ad alcune obiezioni

[…]

6.4 Il darwinismo non è anarchico

Associare il darwinismo e l’anarchia nello stesso quadro concettuale potrebbe essere fonte di malintesi che vanno evitati. Una prima precisazione si impone. Quando si fa riferimento al darwinismo per spiegare i meccanismi di embriogenesi non si tratta evidentemente di trasferire il meccanismo preciso della selezione naturale così come viene descritto da Darwin. Si tratta piuttosto di recuperare in primis l’ontologia e la specifica causalità introdotte da Darwin, le quali forniscono un nuovo quadro generale per pensare l’ontogenesi. D’altronde, il meccanismo della selezione naturale non era del tutto precisato in Darwin, dal momento che all’epoca non erano completamente note le modalità della variazione. I biologi di solito fanno riferimento al darwinismo in senso lato quando traspongono la selezione naturale al di fuori del suo originale ambito di applicazione. Che sia nella teoria clonale degli anticorpi o nel darwinismo neuronale citati in precedenza, o ancora nel modello anarchico della differenziazione cellulare, il riferimento al darwinismo indica uno schema generale comune e non un’analogia dei meccanismi in senso stretto, cosa che sarebbe assurda. In ognuno di questi casi quel che si intende esattamente con variabilità e selezione è differente. Del resto, fin dall’inizio l’utilizzo del concetto di «selezione» da parte di Darwin era metaforico.

Continua a leggere Darwinismo e anarchia

La competizione fra gli uomini (K. Lorenz)

Da Gli otto peccati capitali della nostra civiltà, di Konrad Lorenz

La vita organica si è posta, come una strana diga, nel mezzo della corrente dissipatrice dell’energia universale: essa “divora” entropia negativa e cresce attirando a sé energia; man mano che cresce essa acquista la possibilità di accaparrarsi sempre più energia con un ritmo la cui velocità è direttamente proporzionale alla quantità assorbita. Se tali fenomeni non hanno ancora condotto al soffocamento e alla catastrofe, ciò è dovuto anzitutto al fatto che le forze impietose del mondo inorganico, le leggi della probabilità, mantengono entro certi limiti l’incremento degli esseri viventi; ma in secondo luogo anche al formarsi, nell’ambito delle diverse specie, di circuiti regolatori.

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Nel primo capitolo ho spiegato come e perché, nei sistemi viventi, la funzione dei circuiti regolatori, anzi, di quelli a retroazione negativa, sia indispensabile ai fini del mantenimento di uno stato costante; e inoltre come e perché la retroazione positiva, in un circuito, comporti sempre il pericolo di un aumento “a valanga” di un singolo effetto. Un caso specifico di retroazione positiva si verifica quando individui della stessa specie entrano in una competizione che, attraverso la selezione, ne influenza l’evoluzione. Al contrario della selezione causata da fattori ambientali estranei alla specie, la selezione intraspecifica modifica il patrimonio genetico della specie considerata attraverso alterazioni che non solo non favoriscono le prospettive di sopravvivenza della specie, ma, nella maggior parte dei casi, le ostacolano.

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Il mio maestro Oskar Heinroth diceva, nel suo solito modo drastico: «Dopo lo sbatter d’ali del fagiano argo, il ritmo di lavoro dell’umanità moderna costituisce il più stupido prodotto della selezione intraspecifica». Al tempo in cui fu pronunciata, questa affermazione era decisamente profetica, ma oggi è una chiara esagerazione per difetto, un classico understatement. Per l’argo, come per molti altri animali con sviluppo analogo, le influenze ambientali impediscono che la specie proceda, per effetto della selezione intraspecifica, su strade evolutive mostruose e infine verso la catastrofe. Ma nessuna forza esercita un salutare effetto regolatore di questo tipo sullo sviluppo culturale dell’umanità; per sua sventura essa ha imparato a dominare tutte le potenze dell’ambiente estranee alla sua specie, e tuttavia sa così poco di sé stessa da trovarsi inerme in balìa delle conseguenze diaboliche della selezione intraspecifica.

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La competizione fra uomo e uomo agisce, come nessun fattore biologico ha mai agito, in senso direttamente opposto a quella «potenza eternamente attiva, beneficamente creatrice».