Hacker News Reader

Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives

Yup, there are still some anarcho-primitivists who think technology was a bad deal for us humans overall, and that living in a tribal setting of hunters-gatherers is best. The infamous "unabomber manifesto" was broadly advocating for this worldview, albeit with a very negative, nihilistic twist to it as one might expect. Kinda ironic to point that out when you look at OP's nearly-utopian attitude to tech, of course.

View on HN

UB started with the right observations, but arrived at the wrong means prescriptions. He wandered off alone into the weeds, in both senses.

A wiser realization is that it's those in established power and the rich who are actively or willfully ignorantly sabotaging the planet and condemning billions of people to relatively more poverty, misery, disease, and death.

A million people nonviolently showing up to the seats of power, arresting crooked politicians and their enablers, and fine-tuning what cannot be fixed (by any POTUS, SCOTUS, or COTUS) from within (separation between church and wealth and state, public campaign financing, clean elections observed with exit polls and international observers, de-emphasized celebrity political promotion perhaps by lottery [as the ancient Greeks] rather than mainstream media popularity contest) are the necessary first steps before fixing anything else.

"Nonviolently showing up"? I might or might not agree but let's face it, most of us won't even bother to show up at a voting place on election day. People just don't care. Maybe they'll kvetch to their acquaintances about how bad the other side is, but overall there's a lot of complacency. Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents. That kind of thing. But of course that's not going to happen either.

I think the problem in the current US political system is that a tiny majority of votes wins you everything. If this won you the 49% you deserve, then things would be different.

This is why you should simply strike. 10% of the US population striking would exert immense power and make the ruling class crumble.

10% of the US population is currently unintendedly striking. I don’t see the ruling class crumble yet.

They are unemployed, not striking. Being unemployed means they are not needed by a corporation, thus them not working does not damage the profit of any corporation by disrupting its function. But when you are employed in a corporation and run its functions, then you can strike and exert pressure by disrupting its flow.

If we consider this striking, it would appear that a large portion of the population (I don't know the actual percentage), composed of all walks of life, has decided it's of the utmost important to union bust and push people back to work without really making any attempts at resolving anything, and even with the knowledge that forcing people back to work will result in additional loss of life. "Sure, the mine is collapsing on people and giving you all black lung, but if you don't get back in there the town will shut down".

Doesn't really bode well for any future mass action.

I don't think you can categorize layoffs as unintentional striking. Businesses are capable of laying off a lot of their workforce without crumbling, they just wind up running leaner and pruning some of the growth they had in the last few quarters. Striking means you organize enough of the employees that once they're gone the business cannot operate, no work gets done and there's an active effort by the strikers to advertise that the business is not operating in order to put further pressure on them.

The difference is purpose, and intent. The people not at work right now have been judged non-important, and have no purpose.

If the 10% was distributed differently, in the intent of maximum damage instead of minimum damage, and if they had a clear goal of overthrow, the ruling class would be fucked and the stock market would be at 0.

Of course, having a "strike" where everyone is willing to go back to work and only non-essential people are striking will not do much of anything as far as power relations. That much is obvious to anyone.

A two party system is literally a failure mode of democracy.

People don't show up because they don't think it will work.

> Similarly, you don't need to arrest corrupt politicians, you just need to not vote for them. Support a primary challenger if they're incumbents.

Most of the time, the alternatives aren't any better. That's why some people are apathetic.

That's one excuse.

Voter turnout was over 50% in 2016 and 2018, even after the effects of voter supppression.

And you don't need 100% turnout for an election to work; you only need a nearly unbiased sample.

Arresting carries with it an implicit threat of violence, if the arrestee does not want to comply.

The simplest way to accomplish your goals would be through unions integrating and syndicating ultimately culminating into a general strike and overthrowing existing power structures.

In practice however, the national guard will start shooting beforethen (see: Haymarket square massacre, Battle of Blair Mountain), so you better stock up on weapons just in case.

How do you arrest someone without using violence?

How do you compel anyone to do anything with violence?

Many ways.

Well, there are the billions who are now alive thanks to modern agriculture and medicine. We are perhaps comparing the best of the past with the worst of the present, which may not be a fair comparison. Best is to collect the best of past and present to create the best future.

Well said.

If we value the ability to experience consciousness ourselves, then surely the fact that 7 billion people exist is valuable in and of itself?

But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence since we obviously can't change the past.

> the vast majority live in extreme poverty

For that matter, the whole point of the primitivist argument is that humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation for most of their history. It's only when the social milieu is totally FUBAR that "poverty" as we know it becomes a cause of deep unhappiness and dysfunction. Also as the OP shows, people can also be quite unhappy with their life despite living in a highly developed country and enjoying quite a bit of material wealth.

> humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation

Citation desperately needed.

One can have the viewpoint that on average humans were likely happier 30,000 years ago, and that technology was a bad deal for us overall, without advocating that the solution is bombing society back in time.

It’d be a very drastic, but arguably fairly effective solution.

Then what exactly is one suggesting?

"We all know what is best for us, but I'm not going to actually say what I think we should do."

I don't think technology is the problem. I think the institutions that install or preserve the structures that cause a lot of people misery is the problem.

The institutions are all humans, I think it’s an “us” problem :)

There's a reason for those institutions, though. Within any social group larger than a primitive tribe, you can't coordinate pro-social behavior or resolve disputes without some formal institutions and structures of sorts. We've got to give the anarcho-primitivists credit where credit is due: at least they understand what it would take to get actual anarchism to work!

Perhaps this will change your mind to some extent

https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10933-what_the_world_can_learn_f...

Specifically talks about how Hong Kong protestors have almost no formal hierarchical structures (to avoid the Chinese state arresting the leaders), yet remain highly functional and effective.

To have a group of protestors who volunteer for a commonly accepted goal among them be organized, functioning and effective without hierarchical structures is vastly different from having a whole society functional and effective without hierarchical structures. What every system first and foremost must face is how conflicts are resolved, because conflicts of every level of severity will arise without fail. A group without conflicts, that exists exactly because it is made of people who truly think exactly alike, like HK protesters, is not a good example. ANY group of people who truly think exactly alike is perfectly functional, no matter what it is they collectively value.

You should watch the talk. She specifically talks about how disagreements and conflicts are resolved.

It sounds like the problem then is getting everyone to share fundamental values. If everyone has common ground to start from then it's easier to build towards a resolution of conflict.

I agree that any group of people will eventually have some form of conflict but I don't agree that a hierarchical structure is the only way to resolve said conflict. You could just as easily apply any of the methods of governance that humanity has devised to resolve a conflict so I don't think the method of governance is crucial to the resolution of conflict. I think that getting both parties to agree to a satisfactory resolution is what is critical. That can be done with force as in a hierarchy where an external party enforces a resolution on both conflicting parties or it could be done without outside intervention, this obviously happens all the time in a variety of situations.

Ideally, every conflict should be able to be resolved directly by the people involved without additional harm being caused. Maybe there is a way through education or other tools that we can build that would allow people to resolve any conflict in such a manner? Maybe prevention is the best remedy and there exists a way to defuse conflict before it reaches a level that cannot be easily resolved. My point is that resorting to authority or force is not the only solution.

"We have met the enemy, and they is us!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com