#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…

[disease]

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

[unbossed]

"You use whatever social network you want to use and connect with people on whatever social network they want to use. And there are a few other perks. When I quit using Twitter a couple years ago (before it became X), I left all of my followers behind. That's not how it works with the Fediverse: You can switch from one service to another and take your followers with you. That's the kind of freedom you can't get from a centralized system."

[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

[thatonebirdwrites]

A thread I wrote on a different platform. I'm transferring it here.

‪Matt Browner Hamlin‬ ‪of @mattbh.com‬ (on AT Protocol) WRITES: @aoc.bsky.social e-mail going after TikTok & social platforms collaborating with Trump - with a shout out to @bsky.app

ALT TEXT: First of all, Donald Trump is not president right now. He's a private citizen. He does not have access to presidential powers. He does not have the ability to do any of that. Please understand that TikTok's decision to name Trump in the notification is a choice. They are signaling that they have agreed to privately collaborate with Donald Trump and the Trump administration. For all of those concerns that people were saying that TikTok is gonna be used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese, understand they're using it as a propaganda tool for the right. Now, I want you all to put all the pieces together because what this effectively means is that every mass social media platform in the United States has been taken over by the right wing, with the exception of Blue Sky (but Blue Sky is still very small, relatively). (The thread: https://bsky.app/profile/thebirdwrites.bsky.social/post/3lg5p5lhyqk2i )

MY RESPONSE (I'm speaking to those that may see the above post and fear all social media sites are falling to fascists):

Not every social media site is being taken over. People forget that the fediverse (a decentralized web) still exists. There are servers of people who are decentralized communities of Leftists - some use the Mastodon client, some use Sharkey or Misskey, Friendica, and others. Stop forgetting them.

This isn't to say that far-right fascists don't exist on the fediverse. They do, but many defederate/block them. (EDIT: This also isn't to say bigotry doesn't happen on fediverse, it most certainly does and needs to be better handled).

For example, threads (run by Meta) is fascist transphobic racist trash.

Disabled.social, the disabled server I help mod, defederated/blocked them. This keeps us safe from those trolls. ‪ A majority of centralized social media like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads), Tiktok, Twitter/X are all owned by corporations and funded by venture capitalists. THOSE are the ones that have already been taken over as Right-wing fascism already.

Bluesky isn't immune to this as it is also centralized. ‪

Bluesky has shown a willingness to allow bad faith actors that harass and harm trans people. I haven't really seen a resolution to that yet, just people stopped discussing it. That's testing the waters. Bluesky has also taken venture capitalist funding. It's protocol is a centralized silo. ‪

Will Blue Sky go the way of the others? Maybe. Based on Bluesky's own plans and documentation, they show a strong tendency toward profit and growth paradigms.

Will those community servers in the Fediverse fare the same? No, because they are based on community and safety paradigms NOT growth. ‪

Decentralized networks in the Fediverse include these open-source clients: Mastodon, Misskey, Sharkey, Pixelfed, Peertube, Diaspora,Writefreely, and many more. People like myself can host a server on any of these for people to join. That community decides on how to handle moderation, updates, etc. ‪

All of the fediverse uses the ActivityPub Protocol, which is NOT what bluesky uses. ActivityPub has more privacy built into it. (Edited to add: this is in comparison to AT protocol. It's not enough privacy - more should have been built in, but of the two, AT is worse in regards to privacy. Also, protocol and clients are not the same. Protocol is like infrastructure and clients is buildings atop it. The features in clients on ActivityPub hold far more privacy than the BlueSky client on AT).

Bluesky's AT Protocol has no privacy features (for one, I'm furious that it allows one to query block lists of people. ActivityPub doesn't allow queries like that, which is the difference I reference above.)

Open-source developers are making bridges between Blue sky and the rest of the larger fediverse, but the bridges aren't always stable as the two protocols don't talk well to each other.

So Blue Sky sits in a precarious spot, where their venture capitalists could push it toward an X demise. ‪

But the larger fediverse (those dozens of different clients) are not affected by profit-driven, growth-paradigms. Most servers like disabled.social are run by people like me. Folks who live at home, maintaining software, so people can chat. Costs for hosting are paid for by donations.

However, centralized networks do not want you to know about decentralized servers. They don't want you to leave their silos, so they try to make it look unappetizing, while making their centralized services as easy to join as possible. But this leaves us to the whims of capitalist propaganda.

It's easy for centralized social media to become a propaganda machine (like Tiktok, X, and Facebook are doing) because they trap their users in their silos. The captive audiences end up seeing whatever these silos allow in.

Fediverse, since it's decentralized, is too diffuse to capture. ‪

Focus of decentralized must become:

keeping the servers up and running (donations, combating attacks on Internet access).

Finding the safe servers where the community is good at blocking bigoted trolls and right-wing fascists and good at moderation.

Solidarity between marginalized groups to protect each other.

Working together to fight the growing fascist state.

Teaching and beefing up safety and security culture to help us survive the growing fascism

Teaching and showing how to engage in collective action, community building, and horizontal democracy (See book: Anarchic Agreements https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1286)

Our routes of communication is hindered, yes, by centralized networks falling under the control of far-right fascists, but my above thread is a reminder to all of you that not all social media has been taken over. Marginalized populations exist on the fediverse and are fighting back there too. ‪

Remember, Community is the only way we'll survive this. They want us isolated and easy to destroy. That's why they are doing huge spectacles right away to demoralize us.

As long as our community continues to exist, as long as we continue to write and create art, we are resisting and surviving. ‪

Do not let the huge spectacles and take over of centralized sites demoralize you.

Community can be built. We can work together to build that community. It won't be easy to build and maintain. We all will have roles to play for that. But it can be done. We can survive and defeat these fascists.

RESOURCES:

*Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble

*We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

*Audre Lorde

*White Rage by Carol Anderson

*The End of Policing by Alex Vitale

*Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

*Crip Kinship by Sins Invalid

*Care Work by Piepzna-Samarasinha

*David Harvey

*Paulo Freire

*Creative Interventions Toolkit: www.creative-interventions.org

*Beyond Survival edited by Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha

*Overcoming Burnout by Nicola Rose

*adrienne maree brown

*Andrewism's Library of Things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOYa3YzVtyk

*John P. Clark

*A Profession Without Reason by Bruce Levine

*The Future is Degrowth by Schmelzer, Vetter, Vanisintjan

*Surviving the Future edited by Branson, Hudsen, and Reed.

*Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

*Cedric Robinson

*Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong

*How We Show Up by Mia Birdsong

*bell hooks

(Any others feel free to add in notes...)

Addendum: I will add that although I discussed decentralized versus centralized -- I was focusing on the existence of alternatives, so that people didn't lose hope or think that all social media is now right-wing/fascist run.

So, having written that thread, I want to be clear that the fediverse desperately needs better moderation tools for the building up of the security and safety culture. Racism, ableism, and transphobia happens even in Leftist circles, so to keep the fediverse working for us, to build up solidarity and community, we need tools to combat that better.

We also need better documentation that's easier for newcomers to learn the ropes if they wish to get more involved in the developer side. I consider this part of security and safety culture -- building the tools for it and making it accessible.

[onlinemarketingcash4ublogspotcom]

Understanding ActivityPub

ActivityPub is an open, decentralized protocol designed to facilitate social networking across diverse platforms. Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and published as a recommendation in January 2018, it aims to empower users with more control over their data and online presence. ActivityPub serves as a bridge that connects different platforms into a cohesive ecosystem, often referred to as the Fediverse (short for "federated universe").

[estranhossonhos]

Currently venturing on Mastodon. Great alternative to 99.9% of all current social media platforms. 100% recommend if you are looking to decentralize social media + run away from every platform owned by those crazy greedy multimillionaires + that only wants to gather/sell data =» to properly manipulate you, the media and world politics.

Sidenote: I will not be hold accountable for consequences of my reactions if I witness another person trivializing the “refugee” by referring to themselves because of the whole tiktok ban and zuckerberg's latest statements. and by the way Wake-up people: amazon, google, meta, microsoft, the 1001 musk's capital “ventures”, trump and all right-wing meat bags like him, that hoarder richnesses beyond our wildest imagination, while billions of people are fighting to survive every-fucking-single-day, while those 1% are using us for their entertainment! All of their fake social-consciousness, “goodwill”, donations publicity stunts, … it's all bullshit. Their evil-doings are not recent either. They are just no longer afraid of showing their true colours because they are above the law. In fact, they are the law. And we are choosing to remain numb, while trying to fight against this machine, and crying about one less available social media to infinite scroll into oblivion.

Don't want to sound like a broken record nor cringy, but ...

[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…

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

[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