#Decentralized socialism

[theadaptableeducator]

Towards Sustainable Societies: Gandhi's Insights on Challenging Dominant Systems and Embracing Alternative Paths

Drawing on Gandhi’s philosophies, we can explore the interconnectedness and unsustainability of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism, and propose sustainable alternatives. Colonialism: Gandhi vehemently opposed colonialism, seeing it as the exploitation and domination of one group over another. Colonialism disrupts local economies, cultures, and governance systems, often for the…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

[jointhefediverse]

...This is why it's my belief that as designed today, social media is out of balance. It is far easier to escalate than it is to de-escalate, and this is a major problem that companies like Twitter and Facebook need to address...

[disease]

a relatively concise explanation for any of those confused about decentralized social platforms. [ie: Mastodon, diaspora*, Friendica, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy, Bluesky, etc.]

[essential-randomness]

Enter the FujoVerse™

Starting 2024's content creation journey with a bang, it's time to outline the principles behind the FujoVerse™: an ambitious (but realistic) plan to turn the web back into a place of fun, joy, and connection, where people build and nurture their own communities and software. (You can also read the article on my blog)

The Journey

As those who follow my journey with @bobaboard or read my quarterly newsletter (linked in the article) know, the used-to-be-called BobaVerse™ is a collection of projects I've been working on since 2020 while pondering an important question: how do we "fix" the modern social web?

Obviously the joyless landscape that is the web of today is not something a single person can fix. Still, I loved and owed the internet too much to see it wither.

After countless hours of work, I found 3 pillars to work on: community, software ownership and technical education.

Jump in after the cut to learn more about how it all comes together!

Community

Community is where I started from, with good reason! While social networks might trick us into thinking of them as communities, they lack the characteristics that researchers identify as the necessary base for "true community": group identity, shared norms, and mutual concern.

Today, I'm even more convinced community is a fundamental piece of reclaiming the web as a place of joy. It's alienating, disempowering, and incredibly lonely to be surrounded by countless people without feeling true connection with most of them (or worse, feeling real danger).

Software Ownership and Collaboration

As I worked with niche communities "software ownership" also became increasingly important to me: if we cannot expect mainstream tech companies to cater to communities at the margins, it follows that these communities must be able to build and shape their own software themselves.

Plenty of people have already discussed how this challenge goes beyond the tech. Among many, "collaboration" is another sticking point for me: effective collaboration requires trust and psychological safety, both of which are in short supply these days (community helps here too, but it's still hard).

Education (Technical and Beyond)

As I worked more and more with volunteers and other collaborators, however, another important piece of the puzzle showed itself: the dire state of educational material for non-professional web developers. How can people change the web if they cannot learn how to *build* the web?

(And yes, learning HTML and CSS is absolutely important and REAL web development. But to collaborate on modern software you need so much more. Even further, people *yearn* for more, and struggle to find it. They want that power, and we should give it to them.)

Once again, technical aspects aren't the only ones that matter. Any large-scale effort needs many skills that society doesn't equip us with. If we want to change how the web looks, we must teach, teach, TEACH! If you've seen me put so much effort into streaming, this is why :)

And obviously, while I don't go into them in this article, open source software and decentralized protocols are core to "this whole thing".

The Future

All of this said, while I've been working on this for a few years, I've struggled to find the support I need to continue this work. To this end, this year I'm doing something I'm not used to: producing content, gaining visibility, and putting my work in front of the eyes of people that want to fight for the future of the web.

This has been a hard choice: producing content is hard and takes energy and focus away from all I've been doing. Still, I'm committed to doing what it takes, and (luckily) content and teaching go hand in hand. But the more each single person helps, the less I need to push for wide reach.

If you want to help (and read the behind the scenes of all I've been working on before everyone else), you can subscribe to my Patreon or to my self-hosted attempt at an alternative.

I deeply believe that in the long term all that we're building will result in self-sustaining projects that will carry this mission forward. After all, I'm building them together with people who understand the needs of the web in a way that no mainstream company can replicate.

Until we get there, every little bit of help (be it monetary support, boosting posts, pitching us to your friends, or kind words of encouragement and support) truly matters.

In exchange, I look forward to sharing more of the knowledge and insights I've accrued with you all :)

And once again, to read or share this post from the original blog, you can find it here.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

they put the televangelist in the same school as at least two extremely radicalizable children

[nicksaperov]

Distributed social media - Mastodon & Fediverse Explained

That’s an awesome explanation of the Fediverse - a huge step towards social networks decentralization. This is for sure the future of social networking, the remaining question is timing only. Networks (any, not social only) are more resilient/robust while being decentralized. To say more strictly, it’s the only possible way for networks to evolve in the long run. 

Thanks to the author of the video @savjee, it’s totally amazing that it was published more than 5 years ago.

My personal step towards decentralizing is here .

[dailyanarchistposts]

Topics: decentralization, DIY, Dual Power, health care, medicine, science

One of the central claims of capitalism is that it is the best system to bring supply and demand together; when people need a good or service, the capitalist market will provide. However, the reality of the situation can be quite the opposite. An excellent example of this—from my perspective as a lay person whose experience with the pharmaceutical industry is one of a consumer for mental health purposes—is access to important medication such as EpiPens and HIV treatment in the United States. The former averages around $700 per pack of two auto-injectors and the latter, depending on its type and whether it is brand name or generic, can reach up to over $4,000 per 30-60 tablets or capsules; and more generally, according to Andrew W. Mulcahy, medications are 2.56 times more expensive in the United States than in 32 other countries. One could arguably trace the problem to the corporate business structure or the universalization of the profit motive, but more directly the problem is one of corporate-state scheming through stringent intellectual property laws. These laws keep genuine competition—supposedly a main selling point of capitalism—from taking place in the market by granting exclusive manufacturing rights to specific entities—usually massive corporations but sometimes individual scumbags like Martin Shkreli. These entities can then drive the prices of medication to truly ridicouous levels. And in the context of insulin in particular, this price manipulation is so extreme that Lucas Kunce asserts that “[t]he cost of insulin isn’t determined by supply and demand. It’s really just 3 companies setting a price based on how many deaths and amputations the market will bear until people start rioting.”

This is a problem that has the potential to affect all human beings, but, as with many socio-economic problems, it hits the working class—and particularly its queer and BIPOC members and those with disabilities—the hardest. This is obviously in part because of how expensive the medication is, but also because people of lower class backgrounds do not have access to high-standard housing, healthy food choices, low-pollution environments, etc. All of these can both create and accentuate health problems that require the aforementioned medications. And capitalists only care enough about workers to help them be skilled enough and stay alive long enough to produce and reproduce, giving thought to their health and medical needs only at a whim or by minimal, loophole-filled legal mandates. As Karl Marx writes, wages are simply “the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer” plus “the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones.” But even putting aside (true) rhetoric about class, capitalism, and such, the simple problem of the matter is that there are people who need medication and that medication exists, but for abstract reasons invented by people in power the individuals in need cannot gain access to that medication with ease.

The obvious solution is to simply eliminate the entire institution of IP, opening the way to, as Laurance Labadie writes, “free competition, that is, free and equal access to the means of production, to the raw materials, and to an unrestricted market, [so that] the price of all articles will always tend to be measured by the effort necessary for their production. In other words, labor as a factor in measuring value will become predominant.”And—having eliminated all state-sanctioned monopolies, IP and beyond—not only would medication be massively more affordable but, according to Kevin Carson…

licensing cartels would no longer be a source of increased costs or artificial scarcity rents. [Therefore, t]here would be far more freedom and flexibility in the range of professional services and training available. Some . . . neighborhood cooperative clinics might prefer to keep a fully trained physician on joint retainer with other clinics, with primary care provided by a mid-level clinician. Or imagine an American counterpart of the Chinese “barefoot doctor,” trained to set most fractures and deal with other common traumas, perform an array of basic tests, and treat most ordinary infectious diseases. He might be able [to] listen to your symptoms and listen to your lungs, do a sputum culture, and give you a run of Zithro for your pneumonia, without having to refer you any further. And his training would also include identifying situations clearly beyond his competence that required the expertise of a nurse practitioner or physician.

But barring this effective and far-reaching but rather (at least for the meantime) improbable solution, another extrasystemic tactic is available: the open access publishing of DIY ways to produce life-saving medication by way of the Internet—essentially liberating the information from the private-corporate sphere into the digital commons.

This is not an original concept as it originates in the work of Professor Michael Lauer and his group Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, whose goal is to generate open access means for anyone with access to a computer, basic chemistry technology, and a 3D printer to synthesize medicine. These include such things as instructions for building an “Apothecary Microlab” and DIY EpiPens as well as 3D printer blueprints for homemade chemical reactors. This essential idea has been taken up by the Open Insulin Foundation, who…

are creating an open source (freely available) model for insulin production that centers sustainable, small-scale manufacturing and open source alternatives to production. [They] are developing organisms and protocols to produce rapid acting (lispro) and long acting (glargine) insulin. Additionally, [they] are working on developing open hardware equivalents to proprietary production equipment, are researching sustainable regulation pathways to bring our insulin to the public, and are developing plans for local, small-scale manufacturing pilots.

In the context of this open access availability, Sebastian A. Stern writes, “Do-It-Yourself scientists working in hackerspaces are positioned to make significant contributions with low overhead and little formal training (becoming necessary and valuable apprenticeship sites as the current higher education system deteriorates). The state has yet to heavily clamp down, but, because such freedom threatens the status quo, we can expect intervention to intensify.”

This type of strategy completely rejects the use of the state and its organs to try to correct the problem from within the system. And this makes sense! The state capitalist system is the central cause of artificial barriers to medicine, and as such solutions sought through the state follow the logic touted by Robert LeFevre that “[g]overnment is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” And the process by which state-based solutions like price ceilings are being proposed, such as for insulin under Biden’s Build Back Better plan, have proved again and again to be both convoluted and seriously drawn-out; downsides quite serious for a problem where lives are on the line. Karena Yan also points out that Colorado’s “$100 cap for a 30-day of supply” has…

revealed a few loopholes. Some health plans fell into an exemption in the legislation, leaving the people on those health plans ineligible for the insulin price cap when purchasing their monthly insulin. Additionally, instead of offering a flat $100 maximum on monthly insulin prescriptions, the current legislation allows insurers to charge $100 per prescription per month, which translates to $200 for those who take both basal and mealtime insulin or two other insulins, such as short-acting and long-acting.

And while the FDA will come cracking down on open access DIY pharmacology eventually, eluding the state apparatus for as long as possible is ideal. Milton Friedman points out that “[t]he FDA has done enormous harm to the health of the American public by greatly increasing the costs of pharmaceutical research, thereby reducing the supply of new and effective drugs, and by delaying the approval of such drugs as survive the tortuous FDA process."[1] Ryan Calhoun even accounts of the 2014 seizure of “19,618 parcels of ‘unapproved’ prescription medication. More plainly, the FDA stole people’s medication and denied them any reasonable manner of attaining it again.” And David D’Amato makes a compelling argument that “[v]oluntary membership associations, ratings and review services, and noncompulsory, competing accreditors are more than capable of furnishing the information that consumers want and need to make safe, smart decisions.”

However, there are, rather obviously, serious practical problems to this praxis. While sharing information about DIY pharmacology is not illegal and, as Grants Birmingham writes for Time, the Open Insulin “project seems to be in a regulatory safe space, but that may change as it gets closer to making actual medicine.” And, of course, “if [Open Insulin] does reach a production phase, [it] would have to conform to Good Manufacturing Practice, the FDA rules for factories that make medicine, food, cosmetics and medical devices. And because the group plans to share its insulin-production framework online, crossing state lines, there may be other legal issues on the horizon.” Then there is the immediate danger of throwing together cocktails of homemade medication. For example, pseudoscience debunker Yvette d’Entremont is firm in her opinion that “there are so many things that could go wrong in constructing [the DIY EpiPen]. It seems like such a bad idea.” And, further, “[i]t’s all fun and games until your product gets contaminated and you get a giant abscess in your muscle.” I know I would be very hesitant to try something like this at this stage of development. Furthermore, any proposal regarding the liberation of medication in the U.S. must be considered within the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic—where people are spreading vaccine misinformation en masse and making ‘independently researched’ and completely stupid decisions to take horse dewormer as treatment—as well as the long-standing opioid crisis.[2] So while with the decay and eventual collapse of state capitalism, this may certainly become the manner in which essential medications are made available through the aforementioned neighborhood cooperative clinics and North American barefoot doctors at the price of their necessarily low cost of production, for now, I–someone who, it must be made clear, is neither a scientist nor medical professional–would have to agree with the CEO of DIY genetic engineering company The Odin Josiah Zayner, who calls the work done by Four Thieves Vinegar “proof of concept stuff . . . usually the first step in innovation.”

Due to these serious problems, one might be inclined to focus on more respectable but still decentralized solutions available in the form of healthcare insurance cooperatives, fraternal benefit societies (hopefully to be raised back up to their former glory), healthcare sharing ministries, free medical clinics (in the style of the Black Panther Party), pharmaceutical purchasing cooperatives (for lay people not just pharmacies), etc. Logan Glitterbomb writes that…

[c]reating, supporting, or volunteering at [the aforementioned] free clinics, cooperative clinics, and grassroots union-run facilities are great ways to increase access to medical care for low-income individuals. Having these facilities also promote and focus on preventative care, rather than treatment, can also cut down cost and increase public health in the long term. The Ithaca Health Alliance was created by the same minds behind the labor time-based alternative currency known as, [Ithaca] Hours. It is a wonderful example of a community-based healthcare cooperative that is right in line with anarchist values and tactics. Their network of over 150 local healthcare providers offer a 5-10% discount to all IHA members. The IHA also runs the Ithaca Free Clinic, a free community clinic staffed by volunteer physicians, herbalists, acupuncturists, and more. The Ithaca Health Fund, which offers emergency medical grants to low-income patients, also provides grants to other community-based health projects in the area, all funded through donations.

Projects such as these present the possibility of creating a dual power healthcare infrastructure. But setting aside the critiques of open access DIY pharmacology presented above, a main advantage of this strategy is that it doesn’t just give people the things they need to live comfortably or live at all, it also attacks the central cause of artificially high medication costs (IP) and—as would come by any placement of medication in the information commons—decentralizes medical knowledge. The contemporary medical system—as opposed to its non-patriarchal predecessors—is oriented towards a small group of professional, highly-educated elites.[3] Though it is important to have experts and specialists (as the ignorance of large swaths of the U.S. public during the present pandemic has made clear), there is no good reason for the level of totalizing hyper-specialization and stringent regulation—public and private—that only gives a small elite within highly specific institutional frameworks access to such important knowledge.

But if the future is to be decentralized, the liberation of medication goes deeper than 3D printers and DIY chemistry. It means shifting toward antiauthoritarian community practices of health. As Simon the Simpler writes,

A society of people who are responsible for their own health and able to gather or grow their own medicines is a hard society to rule. These days we are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care and medical specialization: the secret society of the doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the corporate decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless greed and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our hearts or even envision a world without such oppression.[4]

And so, through a combination of decentralized medical technology and a general motion toward these kind of health practices, perhaps the liberation of medication is on the horizon.

[1] I cannot find the original source of this quote.

[2] Not much can be said that has not already been said about how the opioid crisis is not the product of some non-existent free market but of corporatism; and a properly libertarian perspective on COVID-19 can be found in Carson’s “Pandemics: The State As Cure or Cause?” and Andrew Kemle’s “Libertarianism vs Psychopathic Dumbfuckery.”

[3] See Barbara Ehrenreich’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers.

[4] This is not even to delve into the biopolitics of modern medicine as theorized by Michel Focuault; a topic which could fill an entire other article.

[stimkydukc]

so twitter is a endlessly burning pit of hatred run by elon musk, facebook is the world's biggest data mining operation, tumblr is run by a pissbaby who's incensed trans people would dare talk back to him (or bring up the site's own pit of hatred in the basement), reddit is owned by a pedophile and has redditors on it, and it turns out cohost is run by awful people too!

(idk about bluesky but i don't like the twitter format either way)

fucking amazing how centralized social media has absorbed all the problems of the forums and chat servers of 90's and 00's, cut down on 90% of your options, and added capitalism's insatiable need for fucking everything to be a profitable venture on top of it.

at this point it feels like the only way to avoid having your social media run by pissbabies or pedophiles or soulless corporate husks who will monetize the hell out of your social life is to go decentralized (or even fucking self-hosted)

i should get a raspberry pi at some point and turn it into a tiny server for my friends, but i'm broke as fuck so idk what to do until then

[biedevoidofpasswords]

Post this here for archival

Transcribe:

I saw that tweet abt bskyVStwtr on which allows more 4i to access ur data 🥲

It's like bad vs less bad at this point

Im really rooting fot the resurface of decentralized SocMed eventhough i dont fully understands how the web3 communication protocols (ActivityPub, Nostr, AT,Matrix etc) works tbh

I kinda get tired of everytime i tried to enter the profile page of a creator i get blocked by a wall

And if i sign up every service with mail i eventually get traced with an established digital profile and then get pawned and bombarded with ads in mail AND THEY DIRECTLY PHONE ME

Ye maybe buy another number to sign for these services later but i dont want to abandon current numbr

Really think of everyone should just have a wordpress with comment system and communicating with ActivityPub (plugin is available) but Wordpress is having a commotion now

And yeah setting up such stuffs require a bit technical

[arainaizevran]

[theadaptableeducator]

The Interwoven Unsustainability of Colonialism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Capitalism: Bakunin's Critique and Pathways to Sustainable Alternatives

Mikhail Bakunin, a key figure in the development of anarchist thought, offers a critical perspective on the interconnectivity and unsustainability of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and capitalism. His views help elucidate how these systems interlink and perpetuate unsustainable social structures, as well as suggest sustainable alternatives. Interconnectivity and…

[toplesstopics]

Today's short video: "My POV as an oldbie #contentCreator on the impending US ban on Tiktok"

TROM/Peertube (the decentralized platform where I host my "patriarchy-unapproved" videos: https://videos.trom.tf/w/iEb3HJRm4DuYoqoZBYXpsW

#Youtube : https://youtu.be/UWRJeMgdwno

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4gH-SmJwhv/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Tiktok: (part one) https://www.tiktok.com/@toplesstopicstv/video/7346259506554228014 (part two) https://www.tiktok.com/@toplesstopicstv/video/7346261022711237930

Decided to pontificate on the impending ban of Tiktok in the US, while many, many other data-harvesting and spying apps, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and all the other mainstream platforms, continue to endanger and exploit everyone. Moral of the story: mainstream corporate owned platforms will ALWAYS betray you--stop giving them unilateral power over your online existence, and self-host your content on decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Peertube, amd/or your own web server, THEN link to your content on the mainstream apps. You'll rest so much easier if you're not constantly living on the knife edge of potentially getting obliterated by a couple of algorithmic ones and zeroes, designed by misogynistic, transphobic, racist, patriarchal, capitalist tech bros!!

You can see my decentralized links, as well as my other mainstream socials, at https://www.toplesstopics.org/contact

[jointhefediverse]

💫 Join the Fediverse! 💫

Greetings, fellow bloggers! We welcome you to join us in discovering, honoring, and promoting the potential future of social networking—commonly referred to as the "Fediverse."

The Fediverse, or Federation Universe, refers to a collective of online platforms that utilize the web protocol known as ActivityPub, which has set a standard of excellence in regards to both protecting and respecting users' online privacies.

There's a good chance in the past few years that you've caught wind of the fedi family's critically acclaimed Mastodon; however, there are many other unique platforms worth your consideration...

✨ Where To Begin?

Conveniently enough, from the minds of brilliant independent developers, there already likely exists a Fediverse equivalent to your favorite socials. Whether it's an opinion from the critics, or from the community alike—the following popular websites are commonly associated with one another:

Friendica 🐰 = Facebook Mastodon 🐘 = Twitter Pixelfed 🐼 = Instagram PeerTube 🐙 = YouTube Lemmy 🐭 = Reddit

It's worth mentioning, too, a few other sites and forks thereof that are worthy counterparts, which be: Pleroma 🦊 & Misskey 🐱, microblogs also similar to Twitter/Mastodon. Funkwhale 🐋 is a self-hosting audio streamer, which pays homage to the once-popular GrooveShark. For power users, Hubzilla 🐨 makes a great choice (alongside Friendica) when choosing macroblogging alternatives.

✨ To Be Clear...

To address the technicalities: aside from the "definitive" Fediverse clients, we will also be incorporating any platforms that utilize ActivityPub-adjacent protocols as well. These include, but are not limited to: diaspora*; AT Protocol (Bluesky 🦋); Nostr; OStatus; Matrix; Zot; etc. We will NOT be incorporating any decentralized sites that are either questionably or proven to be unethical. (AKA: Gab has been exiled.)

✨ Why Your Privacy Matters

You may ask yourself, as we once did, "Why does protecting my online privacy truly matter?" While it may seem innocent enough on the surface, would it change your mind that it's been officially shared by former corporate media employees that data is more valuable than money to these companies? Outside of the ethical concerns surrounding these concepts, there are many other reasons why protecting your data is critical, be it: security breaches which jeopardize your financial info and risk identity theft; continuing to feed algorithms which use psychological manipulation in attempts to sell you products; the risk of spyware hacking your webcams and microphones when you least expect it; amongst countless other possibilities that can and do happen to individuals on a constant basis. We wish it could all just be written off as a conspiracy... but, with a little research, you'll swiftly realize the validity of these claims are not to be ignored any longer. The solution? Taking the decentralized route.

✨ Our Mission For This Blog

Our mission for establishing this blog includes 3 core elements:

To serve as a hub which anybody can access in order to assist themselves in either: becoming a part of the Fediverse, gaining the resources/knowledge to convince others to do the very same, and providing updates on anything Fedi-related.

We are determined to do anything within our power to prevent what the future of the Internet could become if active social users continue tossing away their data, all while technologies are advancing at faster rates with each passing year. Basically we'd prefer not to live in a cyber-Dystopia at all costs.

Tumblr (Automattic) has expressed interest in switching their servers over to ActivityPub after Musk's acquisition of then-Twitter, and are officially in the transitional process of making this happen for all of us. We're hoping our collective efforts may at some point be recognized by @staff, which in turn will encourage their efforts and stand by their decision.

With that being stated, we hope you decide to follow us here, and decide to make the shift—as it is merely the beginning. We encourage you to send us any questions you may have, any personal suggestions, or corrections on any misinformation you may come across.

From the Tender Hearts of, ✨💞 @disease & @faggotfungus 💞✨

[disease]

a comprehensive list of fedi alternatives. be sure to explore menu tabs.

[jadwiga-abremovic]

" Lenin said: "The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of power, an organized force for suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and for readership of the great masses of the population, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, and also for the establishment of socialist ownership". (Lenin State and Revolution page 142, Russian edition, free translation). "But it should not be forgotten", says Lenin, quoting Marx. "That the proletariat needs only the state which is withering away". That is how Lenin refers to this matter. And what does the bourgeoisie need? The bourgeoisie, the exploiting class, needs the state as a permanent force for maintaining the exploited classes in subjection, meaning the majority of the people. The bourgeoisie does not contemplate the weakening of the state machinery, to say nothing of its withering away, for it considers its system, the system of exploitation, immortal and perfect. Accordingly, the difference between the bourgeois state, no matter how disguised it may be by a democratic screen, and our state, for instance, is that the bourgeois state, an apparatus of force in the hands of a minority, meaning the class exploiter, oppresses the majority of the people and has the tendency to increase in strength. Here, although the state has the job of restraining the minority of exploiters and enemies of new Yugoslavia, it is gradually dying away, for its functions, primarily in the economy, are gradually being transferred to the working people. According to Marxist science, the state is a product of "class conflicts", and it will wither away when classes disappear, when there is no longer anyone to suppress or any reason to suppress them. Where is the beginning of this withering away process in our country? I shall mention only the following examples. First, decentralization of the state administration, especially in economy. Secondly, turning over the factories and economic enterprises in general to the working collectives to manage themselves, etc. The decentralization of economy and political, cultural and other aspects of life is not only profoundly democratic but has inherent in it the seeds of withering away not only of centralism, but of the state in general, as a machine of force. This is a fact which anyone can check on here if they want to. How do things look in the Soviet Union thirty-one years after the October Revolution? The October Revolution made it possible for the state to take the means of production into its hands. But these means are still, after 31 years, in the hands of the state. Has the slogan "the factories for the workers" been put into practice? Of course not. The workers still do not have any say in the management of the factories. They are managed by directors who are appointed by the state, that is, by civil service employees. The workers only have the 'possibility and the right to work but this is not very different from the role of the workers in capitalist countries. The only difference for workers is that there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union, and that is all. Therefore, the leaders of the Soviet Union have not, so far, put through one of the most characteristic measures of a socialist state, that of turning over the factories and other economic enterprises to the workers so that they may manage them. Since the Soviet leaders consider state ownership as the highest form of social ownership, the fact that they have not turned over the means of production to the workers to manage probably issues from such a conception of state ownership. Besides, this is altogether in accordance with the strengthening of their state machine. That is also a fact that anyone can ascertain for themselves, if they want to learn the truth." Josip Broz Tito, 'Workers Shall Manage Factories in Yugoslavia', June 26, 1950.