Anarchism can never even exist, let alone work, because it defines itself in a fundamentally nonsensical way.
It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.
What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.
What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.
It's a bit ironic to say anarchism works because people have been interested in it for centuries if not more and yet it has clearly never worked. And then people always bring up something or other "oh, these people were anarchists for 2 and a half months in Spain in 1926, see it works!"
Another glaring inconsistency with anarchism is that if you are unwilling to use coercion or organized force, then how do you defend yourself against another group who will and wants to take you over? You'll just get obliterated and then be forced into their version of non anarchism. And then the nit picking starts "you can defend yourself" yeah but if you haven't been actively cultivating an organized defense force you're going to lose and maintaining an organized defense force involves all sorts of coercion and hierarchies.
No point even writing this stuff, it's not the kind of thing you'll ever convince anyone of who doesn't want to here it but organized anarchism is just such a preposterous idea that it's hard not to.
There are anarchist experiments that lasted much longer, even in the United States. Modern Times in New York was a town that used "labor notes" instead of dollars (within their own community at least), and they had no jails. They existed for 13 years. Eventually some gossipy rumors spread that this eccentric town (which it was) was just a bunch of "free love" weirdos (they were not). The founding members and strongest personalities either moved or passed away, and the remaining people got tired of defending themselves to others, so they reorganized the town as Brentwood. The public library in Brentwood has a neat collection of writings and artifacts from Modern Times, and I once spent a fun day there looking through their collection.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_Community_of_Modern_...
Home, WA was more explicitly "anarchist." It lasted for about 18 years, and I think from the beginning they had a rough time from neighboring towns as it was founded right about the same time McKinley was assassinated. McKinley's assassin was a self-proclaimed anarchist, so overnight the word "anarchist" became notorious and dangerous in mainstream opinion. There was, again, much outside gossip about the town being a weird "free love" town (which was not such a baseless claim in this case). Internally, it seems people never really agreed on social norms about being nude in public spaces, either.
As to your point of defense, I once heard someone describe that as the major difference between anarchism and Marxism. Marxists generally believe that the State needs to be seized from capitalists, and then we must use the power of the State to oppress the oppressors. That is supposed to be a transitory period, and eventually the State will have squashed all capitalist opposition, at which point the State "withers away." The anarchists see all that and say we should try to jump straight to the good part :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state
Funny, I'd rather have you in solitary confinement for the rest of your life then running around robbing people with weapons but hey, psychopath is in the eyes of the beholder.
Just be aware, you can come seize my capital but you better have more guns then I have.
Many anarchists recognise scarcity and admit it's a difficult thing to deal with fairly. But instead of assume they have the one solution and enforce it on everyone else, they leave it to more local levels to agree on a reasonable way to ration scarce things.
You could also easy make the opposite criticism of capitalism: it doesn't recognise abundance and builds almost everything on (often artificial) scarcity.
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Free banking ("everyone making up their own money") was never the disaster currency monopolist would like you to think it was.
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You say locally made up rules that apply only locally don't scale. Does it really scale to have locally made up rules (because they always are) that are enforced globally?
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But yes, many anarchists do exactly what you propose: they experiment way different ways to collectively make decisions. They don't shun all rules.
Always good to see a zero-CSS website. The true zen-master style of web production ‒ many tacitly aspire to its purity, yet few are able to shake off worldly temptations to attain it.
Software is not all made up out of thin air -- you do not 'choose your own gravity'. The equivalent of phyical laws in software are computational/algorithmical, logical laws.
For example, sorting cannot be done faster than O(n log n) -- that is as hard and objective as anything physical. (In fact, one would think it is even harder in some sense, since it is so purely logical.). Software is built within algorithmic constraints.
This is, well, shallow propagandising guff. It promotes an agenda but diverts criticism with mythologising illusion.
Markets fail in various ways. Should we just let that happen? -- and just have 'faith' in the wonder of 'freedom' etc.? As Stiglitz says, a common reason why 'the invisible hand' is invisible is because it is not actually there.
Yes, markets should be allowed to fail. It is part of a very natural and successful process that has brought us to where we are. The same goes for governments. It's a trial and error process that goes back to the beginning of life. There is an anaology I really enjoy which relates the idea of saving economy and markets from the natural process of failing:
"In the 1970s the US developed a policy of forestry that espoused 100% prevention of forest fires; let’s call it “fire is not an option”. This policy resulted in the systemic suppression of small fires and eventually into very unbalanced forest ecosystems where fire is now not just an option, but a certainty of disaster. We now know that fire is a natural part of a forest’s life-cycle. Without fire, the forest floor gets overgrown, making it a source for bigger and hotter fires. When fires break out in a “managed” forest where fires have been suppressed for years, they burn so hot they turn the ground to glass. Fires that were survivable by trees are now so destructive that they denude hills and wipe out the entire ecosystem. Our financial system has become much like a poorly managed forest, harboring within it the increasing probability of a systemic and destructive conflagration."
Just as no single person knows how to create a pencil, no single person, or group of powerful individuals, have any idea of the complexities that exist when deciding how to guide an economy. It's naive to think otherwise.
I have more faith in freedom than faith in a group of humans with the same greedy intentions as any other human, but with regulatory power over everyone else in the market.
You were effective at using big words and quoting an economist, but not at providing any counterargument to the essay.
On one hand, a 'theory' is described as something completely internal and irreducible:
"the theory, is not, and cannot be, expressed" (quote from PATB)
But on the other hand, a 'theory' is applied to external objects:
"if viewed in relation to the theory of the program these ways [of changing it] may look very different, some of them perhaps conforming to that theory or extending it in a natural way, while others may be wholly inconsistent with that theory" (quote from PATB)
These cannot both be true. A 'theory' cannot be wholly internal if it is applied to things. If something external conforms to it to some degree, then that thing is to that degree an expression of the 'theory'. What else is an expression? And, a 'theory' cannot be irreducible if it applies to things that are reducible. If it matches something -- like software -- that is complex and determinate, it must itself be analysable into determinate properties or patterns or structure.
Since 'theory' is used to make actual software -- something that can fit or diverge from it -- 'theory' must have a substantial, and complex, objective part.
So instead of this confused term 'theory' we should think of something like a material: programming is the engineering-design of structures in a particular abstract 'material'.
That does not change the article's conclusions about programmers not being 'replaceable components of production'. But it gives a better viewpoint of the activity: not merely some obscure inaccessible idea of human thought, but some lead on the part of it that is objective and that we can get hold of and hopefully build some understanding of.
You seem to have confused expression with application. A person unable to speak but merely point is unable to express (that is, define precisely) what it is that causes them to point to, say: a red brick, a red door, a red pencil. However in their activity of pointing, that is, in their application of an unexpressed principle we can infer a "theory".
Naur's point is that a "theory" in his sense is a purely mental, immediate, intuitive ground for the understanding of a problem. It is the "red" in the above example, and as we cannot explicate red (only point to it) we cannot express the theory.
>If it matches something -- like software -- that is complex and determinate, it must itself be analysable into determinate properties or patterns or structure.
No. The mind is not a computer program. Mental models are not immediately accessible, completel and transparent to conscious thought, nor are their relations, nor are they "comprised" of anything simpler than more thoughts.
The theory doesnt "match" the computer program, the computer program is a symptom of the theory. The theory is how a problem is understood.
>Since 'theory' is used to make actual software -- something that can fit or diverge from it -- 'theory' must have a substantial, and complex, objective part.
I dont know what this means (nor much of your comment to be honest), but i suspect you're making the same error as above: that the (physical) products of mental activity reveal or constrain the nature and structure of that mental activity.
What is this 'theory' Naur talks of? It is not a nebulous feeling or sensation, it is something complex, articulate -- something 'built'. But how can something with logical structure be at the same time inexpressible? There is a contradiction lurking there.
Imagine you are 'building' one of these 'theories', to make some software. How do you know it is correct? The only way is by testing it against the world, and to do that it must be expressed. And any part that is not expressible cannot, for that reason, be a usable part of the 'theory'. (It is more basic really: a 'thing' in your mind, that cannot be expressed, is not really a 'thing' at all.)
The reason programmers are not simple replaceable resources is not because some kind of 'theory' thing is not expressible, but because making software requires certain significant practicalities of effort, knowledge, and skill.
That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make sense.
If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically. If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and it is a contradiction in terms.
Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' -- is really this: an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and share information.
Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.
Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc. -- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information around. Indeed, with enough power you could process more information than the money-market system.
And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from it.
The information is expressed through demand. People spend money according to their values. If people don't have money, then it's very difficult to determine their actual preferences. That is how I always understood the argument anyways. Likewise producers need to express their values for the materials they need, and those producers have values for the materials they need, etc.
That question has been answered: we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically -- more goods are more widely available.
While there is a lot of piracy, it's relatively small compared to the overall entertainment market. It's still been generally limited to the tech savvy crowd. Setting up bittorrent or usenet is just too hard for the average person. They could learn it, but they are unwilling to even try to.
An app like this? Which is just download and it works? That is a huge threat. My grandma could use this.
So while a small amount of piracy isn't harmful, everyone being able to pirate everything with total ease, is harmful.
The copyright industry has been 'crying wolf' for ages. No-one should listen.
We do not even know that very large amounts of piracy would be bad -- the market would probably reconfigure and adapt.
We should increase people's ease at getting and using informational goods (by reducing artificial restrictions) and see what happens -- yes, observe the actual evidence.
>we have had plenty of piracy for years now -- and do we still have plenty of film/TV/music/book production? Yes!
That just means despite losing "potential income" the industry is still managing to earn money via people who do not wish to circumvent Copyright Law. Or in other words, the number of people not interested in infringing copyright is greater than the number of pirates. That doesn't mean anything other than a majority of people respect copyright law.
>So piracy (at least, as we have known it) is not harmful, in fact it seems almost certainly beneficial economically
Please link to data that demonstrates piracy is economically beneficial to everyone. Since you're claiming 'almost certainly' - I assume you can find hundreds of studies.
Here is my simple thought experiment. Let us say it was impossible to pirate Windows or popular games or tv shows and people had to pay the $100 or w/e it is. Would every single pirate switch to Linux, free games, non-copyrighted entertainment OR Will some of them end up paying the $100?
If reducing Windows piracy means more Linux adoption, I wonder if the Linux cheerleaders would be onboard to reduce Windows piracy :)
As Landes and Posner say in 'The economic structure of intellectual property law' (Conclusion, p422, s3) (2003):
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Now, the main purpose of copyright is to get the best trade-off in production level and access to goods. So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
> losing 'potential income'
What does that even mean? Really, what? If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
>And that is echoed in various other economic comment in later years. So there is an uncomfortable lack of research.
Seriously? You use the words "almost certainly" and are now trying to weasel out when simply asked to back up your statement? The correct response when you don't have data is to say - I don't know at the moment.
>So given both that model and the lack of evidence, to say an increase in availability of goods, with a still strong level of production, is a good thing, seems very reasonable, does it not?
Lack of evidence is just proof of lack of evidence. You don't get to make any wild assertions because they sound reasonable in your head. And even if you do, you have to qualify them with the appropriate words - you don't get to say "almost certainly".
>What does that even mean? Really, what?
Perform my thought experiment.
> If people buy more coffee machines and make coffee at home, perhaps coffee-shop owners are going to say they are losing 'potential income'. Oh no! we had better ban the use of coffee-making machines!
Thats a rather childish way of twisting my argument. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand and does not deserve a response.
>The law is not there to ensure certain businesses make as much money as they think they should. (Well, sadly it currently is, but it ought not to be.)
If you don't like the law, get it changed. What have you done in that regard?
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There is a solution for your problem that doesn't involve breaking laws just because you don't like them.
1) Support artists who put out their work in non-copyrighted form. Perhaps they could have a new model like kickstarter for music/movies/games with people pledging money.
2) Help reduce piracy of copyrighted material and get people to support above artists.
3) The vastly increased sales of those artists will attract even more artists to that model creating a nice feedback loop.
4) Copyrighted forms of entertainment will diminish in their importance and the MPAA/RIAA could perhaps cease to exist.
Capital-I Industry, perhaps. But I argue that it's because it's a lot harder to sell garbage albums with just one or two hit songs when you can go to Bandcamp and find a better artist, preview a whole album, and buy it for $5.
Yes but you could also argue that there are many many many more artists making money in the music industry now, and that consumers have much more choice.
Sure they're not all making millions, but I'd rather see an industry with more players each making less money (i.e. more choices for me), than a smaller group of pre-selected artists (and the machinery behind them) that take home tons of money but put out less varied produced-by-committee content designed for mass consumption.
So I think it's arguable whether it's better or worse for the industry, but it's definitely better for the consumer.
That's like if the parent post said, "The invention of the web allowed many more people to communicate, and was an economic boon" and you replied, "Microsoft would disagree."
Just because the old toll collectors, middlemen, and gatekeepers are worse off doesn't mean that's true for society as a whole.
If plenty of music is being made, so what? If certain businesses cannot make so much money, tough luck on them -- they should get out of business. That is the market.
The purpose of copyright law is to ensure good amounts of production for the public overall. It is not there to help certain rent-seeking companies make money.
What did professional music look like before radio? Before audio recording? I'm not convinced that business models that emerged due to technological change should be protected from future technology.
And if you like that (spheres only), you might also like this (general triangles-based), in 444 lines of Scala (and OCaml, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, C++, and C):
This is quite pointless because it essentially cancels out. To get a cooperative structure you have to give away surplus -- that is, people with more have to give it to people with less.
Yes, redistribution! That seems a dirty idea in a substantial part of USA politics. So 'pay it forward' chains are a peculiar thing: they summon the feeling of cooperation, in an acceptable way, without actually being effectively cooperative.
It is far from pointless. First of all the next person in line feels good, because a stranger helped them with no underhanded motives. Then there is a high chance they will pass it on, getting a second dose of feeling good, because most people feel good about helping others.
That's a double dose of feeling good. I don't see what is being cancelled out here.
The chains are peculiar yes, but not that peculiar: It's strongly ingrained in us to return favours, to the point that giving someone something is a brutally effective way of exploiting them by later asking for a bigger favour back (e.g. consider Hare Krishna, that tended to use flowers for this purpose). The effect is so strong that we often try to prevent receiving favours because we don't want to become indebted.
In that light, these chains are easy to explain: People might like the idea, but people are also likely to want to prevent a feeling of being indebted - if you can't pay back the person who did you the favour, paying it forward to the person is the next best thing. There's also social pressure to show that you're as charitable as the guy in front of you, and against being seen as the person who is either "too greedy" or too poor.
There's also very low perceived cost: You were intending to pay for your meal anyway; that you're actually paying for someone elses meal makes little difference for you - it's more like friends that takes turn paying the bill when going out, where it is a social gesture rather than an attempt at charity.
The idea is that if I ask a favor of you (to loan me a book, in Ben's case) - you are more likely to become friendly to me in the future.
Its a curious extension of what you mentioned above, by asking you for a favor - which you then grant - you gain a sort of psychological 'credit' over me (I owe you). In fact, because you implicitly recognize that I'm voluntarily offering to place myself in your debt, you are happy to oblige since you recognize the subtle power relationship at work.
I learned about this from a lawyer friend who claims he uses it all the time. If there is someone professionally he want to get to know, he will call them and ask them for a small favor (ie. I can't make the social gala party tonight, could you please take my check with you and drop it off to pay for my yearly dues...etc).
I use this occasionally for social, not professional, purposes and it seems to work quite well.
It’s sometimes a bit tricky to think up a favor the right size for the state of your relationship, but still useful enough to be real. Fake favors don’t work (and are frankly just weird).
You were intending to pay for your meal anyway; that you're actually paying for someone elses meal makes little difference for you
These chains have been common at coffee shops drive-thrus in Canada for years, where the standard deviation of orders is very small: Almost everyone is just getting a coffee and maybe a donut. A couple of dollars, generally. I have to imagine that order size varies much more dramatically at a burger shack, and it has to suck if you and getting your cheeseburger and end up in a chain with a family of six behind you.
Others have focused on how "pay it forward" chains actually do produce surplus, of a particular kind. But what jumped out at me was the idea that you must have redistribution to get a cooperative structure:
> To get a cooperative structure you have to give away surplus -- that is, people with more have to give it to people with less. Yes, redistribution!
This is correct up right up until the hyphen. Cooperation involves giving away surplus, but everyone has surpluses on different axes. Someone good at software development might have no idea how to fix his car; he gives away his surplus software development talent to someone with more knowledge of auto mechanics. Obviously the trade isn't direct since the mechanic might not want his software--so the developer trades his software for money, then trades money for the repair. This is cooperation!
Ah, yes, you want a surplus, but a surplus of what exactly? No one cares about the burgers. It's a surplus of good-will and happiness that they want to create, and I think to that end it's very effective indeed.
If the person before me pays for my meal, I won't feel obliged to pay for the person after me.
How does it even work anyway? How do you know how much the person after you owes? It may work at drive ins but it's certainly impossible at a normal queue -- except if people leave a "standard amount" regardless of what the next order actually is.
And even at a drive-in where the amount of the next order is known, it's probably a big hassle for the cashier -- if not downright impossible: the point-of-sale system wants the exact amount if paid by card, and if using cash it's even more complex (the POS system tells the cashier how much to give back, and now this is false and has to be somewhat reconciled at the end of the day).
You're right that it's specific to drive-thrus. The implication is that the person behind you has already spoke their order into the box by the time you pay for yours, so the cost is completely known to all parties. It's pretty straightforward.
It's not a big hassle at all. The system is already managing payments as a queue, and once your meal is paid for (either because you paid it or because you were a beneficiary of someone else), the next one on the queue is the one immediately after you, which the cashier can then take your payment for and clear it out of the system.
This is quite pointless because it essentially cancels out
This is ultimately what makes this so bizarre -- in the end such a chain has a single "benefactor", and then a number of what could best be described as victims: People who become a part of this process because of social obligation. Given that the people were already in line and obviously ready to pay for their order, this is unwelcome generosity, and it takes advantage of the law of reciprocity in many cultures.
This sounds really cynical, and I suppose it is, but I see nothing heart warming about Western culture in these acts. If someone randomly paid for other people's food, that is one thing, but what we're reading about now are people obligating the people behind them to pay for the people behind them, essentially trying to become a part of something -- the initiator -- for little.
If I pull up to Tim Hortons and just want a coffee and a donut, having to understand and then orchestrate the chain is not something I was looking for, and in the end I've gained nothing.
I strongly disagree that it's worth nothing. In terms of money, sure, someone paid extra, and someone got free stuff, with the bunch intermediaries.
But isn't it true that we collectively spend our lives chasing the ghost of connection, goodwill, and meaning? Don't you think that lacking those is one of the major "bugs" in western society?
So now we have a chain of people who get to participate in an act that brings them together, makes them part of a small "community," and allows to them to exercise both generosity and gratitude.
I think that's extremely valuable, and that someone has figured out how to do that for such a small price is pretty smart.
If you want evidence that my position is closer to reality than yours, consider how strongly stories like this resonate with people, and ask yourself why that's the case.
Which part of society is obligating a person to continue paying it forward? Certainly not the previous customer, who has already driven off. And certainly not the following customer, who (if you don't pay it forward) has no way of knowing that you got your food for free.
In fact other than you, the only person who knows the situation is the cashier, and they certainly aren't expecting meals to continue to be paid forward - the articles on the topic always mention how surprised they are when it happens. And to be honest I don't understand your social compass if being judged by a random restaurant cashier is that big a burden on your conscience.
And to be honest I don't understand your social compass if being judged by a random restaurant cashier is that big a burden on your conscience.
My moral compass is not dictated by the presence of witnesses. If I'm at a park and no one is there to witness it, I still dispose of trash properly. I pick up after my dog without scurrilously looking around for other people.
One's "moral compass" should be internal, and might also be considered like karma. Most people do things because they believe it is right, not because they are being judged (though there are those people in this world, and they are the ones who dent and run and leave a big doggy steamer cooking in your yard). And in Western society one of the biggest burdens you can drop on someone is the sense of reciprocity.
Ok, that makes a lot of sense, but then I don't understand what you mean by "people obligating the people behind them to pay for the people behind them".
If your moral compass is based on what you believe internally, I don't see how you are being obliged to do something by someone else if that person has no knowledge of whether you did it or not.
it's a good point that if I'm in line and have a cheap order and feel under pressure to pay it forward I might end up paying a few times my order. It pays to be mindful if you're hard up, and be able to say no!
It distinguishes itself on the principle of 'non-coerciveness'. But coercion is written into the fact of physical scarcity: if someone wants that food, then someone else cannot have it. Any organisational notion that does not represent that scarcity as constraint on behaviour is useless. It simply fails to address the problem.
What anarchism then does is to confuse and obscure this, or just wish it away. The motif of 'decentralised organisation' is a contradiction in terms: there cannot be structure without some constraint. If every local grouping is always free to decide the rules, then there are no rules. If everyone is free at every transaction to invent their own money, then there is no money. Plus, everyone making up new rules will not scale. (And no, people will not just naturally, magically, happen to agree.) Organisation is essentially hierarchical in its basic one-to-many informational form: there must be some single pattern followed by multiple elements.
What anarchism could sensibly propose instead is more sophisticated democracy: ie, better forms of feedback from participants to rule generation. We cannot avoid rules/structure, but we could more responsively, iteratively, steer the the construction of them.