I grow more convinced all the time that there's a joint effort between tech corporations and governments to kill the open internet.
Repealing section 230 will kill social media in the US.
And AI search "assistants" will make it so that most people won't bother actually going to sites, which will destroy their ad revenue, which will put them out of business But conveniently enough, AI data centers will still have all of their content, which they can and will then put behind paywalls.
How exactly do you picture this becoming the dominant idea of society then?
The logic behind it is so solid that it cannot be rationally denied. All attempts to counter it are therefore, given sufficient intellectual integrity, doomed to fail. So oti simply a matter of humanity surviving long enough to mature enough philosophically, intellectually and psychologically that understanding of the idea becomes the rule rather than the exception.
If one presumes true equality among humans, then the notion that anyone can rightfully be made subject to anyone else's preferences becomes incoherent, since any argument one might make in support of ones own claimed right to impose ones will on others is an argument that they might just as soundly make to inpose their own wills on oneself, which can only lead to stalemate.
The way in which that stalemate is inevitably avoided, whether consciously or not, is by presuming some sort of hierarchy by which one is fundamentally dostinct from others, so ones own preferences are so meaningful that others are rightfully made subject to them while the preferences of others are so irrelevant that they areni even allowed to apply them to their own lives much less subject anyone else to them.
aI reject any and all such hierarchies out of hand.
So I find the entire concept of institutionalized authority to be logically unsupportable and reject it as well.
And that's the extent of my views on the matter. Everything beyond that is just whatever comes of the application of that understanding.
For instance - people get all twisted up about "capitalism." I don't.
To a considerable degree, the failures of and harm done by capitalism exist because the system establishes a number of hierarchies that could not exist if the bulk of humanity took my view regarding authority and hierarchy. So there's no need to oppose capitalism specifically since just refusing to grant any credence to the underlying hierarchies that make it possible is sufficient. And beyond that, there are aspects of "capitalism" that are entirely within the rights of individuals so to attempt to eliminate them is to go too far in the opposite direction - to become the one claiming unjustifiable authority.
For instance - my neighbor has built, entirely by his own labor a loom, and he offers to pay me a wage to operate it for him. I believe he has the right to make that offer and I have the right to accept it, but there are some, even among self-professed anarchists, who would disagree - who, though they likely don't consider it in these specific terms, believe that we should somehow be prohibited from entering into such an agreement. I think they're rather obviously wrong - they're veffectively claiming unjustifiable authority over our decisions.
So in that last graph, there are two more or less concrete positions I take. But it's not so much that I take those positions as that I apply my understanding of the fundamental failure of claimed authority to the situation and those are two of the positions that result. So it's not as if I would or even could beat my chest and proclaim "wage labor is a right" because there are too many possible variables and too many nuances to make such a proclamation,
I'm simply confident that my understanding of the inherent failure of claims to authority is sufficient, and that when humanity evolves to the point that that inderstanding is as common as, say, the current understanding that nobody can justifiably claim the right to kill and eat someone else, whatever norms might come of it can't help but becthe best possible since nobody could becnominally rightfully forced to settle for anything less.
I mean it's not always the case that the hierarchy that people attempt to establish based on expertise i
s based on their own expertise.
Awkwardly, far and away the most common example is communists citing Marx. There's a presumed hierarchy by which, if two communists advocate two different courses of action, the one who can cite Marx in support can and generally does presume that that alone means that others are necessarily subject to their preference and they have no responsibility to even consider any opposing view.
As an immediate, situational tactic - trying to stop, even forcibly, someone who's beating someone else for instance - I absolutely do.
But if we're talking about, for instance, funding one side in a war so that its soldiers can kill the other side's soldiers in greater numbers and thereby make it more likely that one set of power-humgry paychopaths in expensive suits will be able to usurp the another set of power-hungry psychopaths in expensive suits, no - I'm not the least bit interested in such a "defense."
And there's a broad range of scenarios between the two, each of which I'd have to decide on it's own.
Possibly - even probably - I was being unfair. By the point of that response, my patience, especially with him, had worn down to a thin film.
However,
you're arguing that if we change everyone's minds society will magically bend into this new reality, ie by fiat.
is a grossly uncharitable misrepresentation of what I actually said, and in my experience, someone who's capable of such a misrepresentation isn't worth engaging with.
But yes - I probably should've just walked away without the parting shot, particularly since it was uncharitable on my own part.
Sorry - no. There are far too many variables, and thus far too many "gotcha" opportunities, and with no specific offense intended, I have zero hope of getting anything like intellectual charity on this thread.
I agree, but nonetheless, expertise is probably second only to class as a basis for the establishment of a hierarchy by which those so inclined seek to avoid the stalemate that arises if they simply posit that humans possess a right to impose their wills on each other.
And note that it's not always personal expertise. Many try to take the position, "You must do/say/think/believe as I say because [this expert] said so." Sort of hierarchy-by-proxy.
I, perhaps mistakenly, took the other poster's conception of "changing people's minds" as an active one - essentially browbeating them into submission.
I very much believe in providing ideas for people to consider, in the hope that they'll see the logic in them and choose to change their own minds accordingly.
Which simply replaces a system under which some are forced to submit to the wills of others with a system under which some are forced to submit to the wills of others.
Not that I oppose the effort to, for instance, force the submission of CEOs or the politicians they buy. But I'm not going to pretend that that has anything to do with anarchism, particularly when history has shown essentially without exception that each new set of people who successfully exercise the nominal right to force the submission of others simply lay the foundation for the next set of tyrants who in turn need to be overthrown.
History will record that the collapse of the US began in earnest when the Trump presidency reaulted in the rise to power of insane morons.