Beyond Primitivism: Toward 21st Century Anarchist Theory and Praxis for Science | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Primitivism: Toward 21st Century Anarchist Theory and Praxis for Science

theanarchistlibrary.org

6 pointswahnfrieden7 comments

A general point: maybe I've failed to read closely enough, but skimming I didn't find any actual program for "Liberatory Science".

A specific point: how would we self-organise the equivalent of, say, https://home.web.cern.ch ? (thanks to which, we're communicating over HN)

In the current system, lawyers by training are a per-mille part of the population; the number of trained physicists is per-mille compared to them, so we're literally talking about few-in-a-million skill sets. Even the logistics of rotations would be difficult: say we do weekly rotations between the ages of 12 and 72; with only 3000 rotations per "career" most people would have no physics rotations, and a few would have 1 week; hardly a sufficient training period!

where do you see the weekly rotations suggested here?

I didn't see anything concrete suggested here. Rotations were an idea from one of your previous threads (and not inconsistent with what I understand of Le Guin's Dispossessed). Is there a better way to handle skilled roles?

i think the rotations concept applies more to positions of power/control and this article covers social participation in science beyond that kind of scheme. the article talks about critical "free individuals" and sub-groups of society still afforded long-term focus on their scientific practice, but it's difficult to understand concretely. i'll look for better sources on this topic.

This reads like an academic paper. Can anarchism start with writing in a style that's actually meant to be read rather then satisfying arbitrary institutional demands?

this was produced from within academia. there are academic anarchists who write popular texts outside of their academic work, but it's extracurricular and challenged by funding

Tolstoy funded his anarchist writing with family money ... but that's understandably not the most accessible of examples.

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