I’ve seen a lot of garden size machines you can build essentially out of rc and 3d printer parts, hook up to a Pi and run open source software to automate things like watering and even weed plucking if you’ve got pattern recognition and cameras on the machines.
I often wonder how feasible it would be to simply scale it up to a large field. Im absolutely sure it’s done now commercially, but I’m thinking more like “it’s 5-10 years post collapse and you’re scavenging stuff to make it happen in a large field to feed 50 people”
There’s already machines for weeding. Some use lasers, quite cool. That being said, I don’t get how it would be possible in an anarchist system. How do you make the plastics, the metal parts that need high precision, or the chips and rpi?
I don’t really get anarchism. Is it about having a small utopia while still using global trade (with less international laws) and ignoring the city states growing around you with no human right or environmental regulations? How do you deal with the community upstream that poisons your river because of lazy mining?
I think there’s going to have to be a long drawn out transitional period both technologically and socially.
We’d probably need a socialist safety net, and to replace corporations, and eventually other forms of private enterprise, with employee owned and ran co-ops.
You’re right to say something as complex a chip fabrication would go out the window if we tried to do this overnight, but I’d like to think localized manufacturing will get us at some point in the mid-to-distant future.
Ya, that’s basically it. I like the idea but it’s not possible at our current technological level. Tbh, I dont think it ever will be because of the defense issue. Once we reach a level where comfortable self sufficient societies are possible, how do you defend against China or Russia and it’s daily output of drones?
Another commenter mentioned having collectives organised in bigger bodies which would then join other bodies. I feel like the whole system is about small communities having ultimate governance on themselves. So I don’t think such a body could tax or force a small community in Spain for instance to donate resources for a war in Ukraine.
Any political system is possible these days if you give yourself leeway to buy some stuff globally and people are patient enough about it, but most including anarchism would really leave any individual community or collective to the whims of what ever is bigger around them. Whole organised countries with standing armies get bullied constantly. I’d rather something like communism with a flavor of anarchism for smaller communities but 100% independent (which is how I understand it but I might be wrong) is just not feasible imo.
I think if manufacturing gets hyper-localized enough nations go out the window as a concept after a while.
National Governments have a lot less leverage when your town can make all the shit it needs by itself.
Like I said though, realistically Democratic socialism will be large, potentially multiple-century stepping stone to that, assuming we get there and that we haven’t figured out something better.
Industry and anarchism are not mutually exclusive. There obviously would be very little industry left in a post-industrial, post-collapse world so I don’t think that particular example is too relevant.
Anarchism takes no stances on the scale or level of industrialization of a society. Anarchist Spain had factories. The whole anarchist federation there stemmed from workers unions. Anarchism also does not mean a lack of organization or a lack of rules the way that “anarchy” is often portrayed by the status quo. It’s just that the organization happens horizontally and without coercion.
If some place is fucking up the environment, then you organize on the regional level (delegate councils or however the system is structured) to lessen cooperation with the problematic community until they stop doing that.
Edit: If some neigbours continue to be dicks, then you can just go to war. Inb4 “Checkmate anarchists, killing fascts in the spanish civil war sounds a bit coercive!”
I mean, pretty much you get a group of people together to buils/maintain/run the infrastructure because it needs done. As for the community upstream, have a nice chat and if that doesn’t work, do violence. The most important part is setting the conditions so that a self-sustaining state or similar such group capable of enacting large-scale coercion or hierarchy is difficult/impossible
Most of what I’m going to say here is stuff I learned/thought about a decade ago. I went to the Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest) in college, the largest libertarian get together in the US (it took over a mid-size campsite for a week). What I learned was hardcore libertarians tend to be anarchists. A lot of what I heard from others was centered around individuals being engaged in their own governance.
In one case that was a blockchain voting system where a person essentially owned their voting registration instead of getting registered with the state. The more interesting one was a presentation that put forth that the best organized groups are in sizes of eight. Therefore the best government system would be a council system in which individuals sort themselves into groups of eight, then choose one of them to be part of a group of eight groups, and so on until a country has built up a national council that directly traces each member to every individual they represent.
Based on those I think what most anarchists take issue with in our current world (of the US) is that the government comes out every four years to say “hey, here are some people to vote for, take your pick.” It’s a lot more top down than it might look on the surface, and anarchists demand a bottom up approach.
If you want an interesting portrayal of hard libertarian/anarchist ideals, I recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, which is about a libertarian revolution on the moon.
The (big L) Libertarian Party - especially those Free State Project weirdos - all but completely tainted everything to do with that scene over the past 20-ish years.
FWIW, I think you’re right. All those people who were attracted to it because it was the closest publicly acceptable thing to real anarchism, or did not even think to describe themselves as anarchists, are now largely ideologically stranded. DSA and PSL are acceptably close in ideology, but lacking in diversity and breadth of thought.
Unfortunately, that level of tolerance and openness may have been the Achilles heel allowing all those weirdos to take the reins. It honestly reeks of psyops, but could go either way. Nowadays, I avoid even the small “L” term entirely for fear of being associated with fash freaks, even when I’d be technically correct to use it.
I don’t want garden sized what fields I want huge community ones tended by machines made out of ganked parts running open source MCU firmware.
I’ve really had enough of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was hoping we could abandon it after the revolution.
I’ve seen a lot of garden size machines you can build essentially out of rc and 3d printer parts, hook up to a Pi and run open source software to automate things like watering and even weed plucking if you’ve got pattern recognition and cameras on the machines.
I often wonder how feasible it would be to simply scale it up to a large field. Im absolutely sure it’s done now commercially, but I’m thinking more like “it’s 5-10 years post collapse and you’re scavenging stuff to make it happen in a large field to feed 50 people”
There’s already machines for weeding. Some use lasers, quite cool. That being said, I don’t get how it would be possible in an anarchist system. How do you make the plastics, the metal parts that need high precision, or the chips and rpi?
I don’t really get anarchism. Is it about having a small utopia while still using global trade (with less international laws) and ignoring the city states growing around you with no human right or environmental regulations? How do you deal with the community upstream that poisons your river because of lazy mining?
I think there’s going to have to be a long drawn out transitional period both technologically and socially.
We’d probably need a socialist safety net, and to replace corporations, and eventually other forms of private enterprise, with employee owned and ran co-ops.
You’re right to say something as complex a chip fabrication would go out the window if we tried to do this overnight, but I’d like to think localized manufacturing will get us at some point in the mid-to-distant future.
Ya, that’s basically it. I like the idea but it’s not possible at our current technological level. Tbh, I dont think it ever will be because of the defense issue. Once we reach a level where comfortable self sufficient societies are possible, how do you defend against China or Russia and it’s daily output of drones?
Another commenter mentioned having collectives organised in bigger bodies which would then join other bodies. I feel like the whole system is about small communities having ultimate governance on themselves. So I don’t think such a body could tax or force a small community in Spain for instance to donate resources for a war in Ukraine.
Any political system is possible these days if you give yourself leeway to buy some stuff globally and people are patient enough about it, but most including anarchism would really leave any individual community or collective to the whims of what ever is bigger around them. Whole organised countries with standing armies get bullied constantly. I’d rather something like communism with a flavor of anarchism for smaller communities but 100% independent (which is how I understand it but I might be wrong) is just not feasible imo.
I think if manufacturing gets hyper-localized enough nations go out the window as a concept after a while.
National Governments have a lot less leverage when your town can make all the shit it needs by itself.
Like I said though, realistically Democratic socialism will be large, potentially multiple-century stepping stone to that, assuming we get there and that we haven’t figured out something better.
Industry and anarchism are not mutually exclusive. There obviously would be very little industry left in a post-industrial, post-collapse world so I don’t think that particular example is too relevant.
Anarchism takes no stances on the scale or level of industrialization of a society. Anarchist Spain had factories. The whole anarchist federation there stemmed from workers unions. Anarchism also does not mean a lack of organization or a lack of rules the way that “anarchy” is often portrayed by the status quo. It’s just that the organization happens horizontally and without coercion.
If some place is fucking up the environment, then you organize on the regional level (delegate councils or however the system is structured) to lessen cooperation with the problematic community until they stop doing that.
Edit: If some neigbours continue to be dicks, then you can just go to war. Inb4 “Checkmate anarchists, killing fascts in the spanish civil war sounds a bit coercive!”
I mean, pretty much you get a group of people together to buils/maintain/run the infrastructure because it needs done. As for the community upstream, have a nice chat and if that doesn’t work, do violence. The most important part is setting the conditions so that a self-sustaining state or similar such group capable of enacting large-scale coercion or hierarchy is difficult/impossible
Most of what I’m going to say here is stuff I learned/thought about a decade ago. I went to the Porcupine Freedom Festival (Porcfest) in college, the largest libertarian get together in the US (it took over a mid-size campsite for a week). What I learned was hardcore libertarians tend to be anarchists. A lot of what I heard from others was centered around individuals being engaged in their own governance.
In one case that was a blockchain voting system where a person essentially owned their voting registration instead of getting registered with the state. The more interesting one was a presentation that put forth that the best organized groups are in sizes of eight. Therefore the best government system would be a council system in which individuals sort themselves into groups of eight, then choose one of them to be part of a group of eight groups, and so on until a country has built up a national council that directly traces each member to every individual they represent.
Based on those I think what most anarchists take issue with in our current world (of the US) is that the government comes out every four years to say “hey, here are some people to vote for, take your pick.” It’s a lot more top down than it might look on the surface, and anarchists demand a bottom up approach.
If you want an interesting portrayal of hard libertarian/anarchist ideals, I recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, which is about a libertarian revolution on the moon.
The (big L) Libertarian Party - especially those Free State Project weirdos - all but completely tainted everything to do with that scene over the past 20-ish years.
FWIW, I think you’re right. All those people who were attracted to it because it was the closest publicly acceptable thing to real anarchism, or did not even think to describe themselves as anarchists, are now largely ideologically stranded. DSA and PSL are acceptably close in ideology, but lacking in diversity and breadth of thought.
Unfortunately, that level of tolerance and openness may have been the Achilles heel allowing all those weirdos to take the reins. It honestly reeks of psyops, but could go either way. Nowadays, I avoid even the small “L” term entirely for fear of being associated with fash freaks, even when I’d be technically correct to use it.