An infrequent contributor to the site has decided to open his very own blog. Lets give him some exposure.
Orgthingy, the infrequent contributor to the Division by Zer0 has decided to take the jump and open his own blog, self-hosted (it seems) and everything. His new site, called Red Side, is still fresh from the paint but there’s a few articles already there. So go and check it out and lets welcome the new member of the Blogosphere.
Adding the capability for readers to quickly provide feedback on blogposts without having to comment has always been a wish for me. The Emo-Vote WP plugin now allows me to achieve this.
Damn, I’ve been trying to find this plugin for a while now, ever since I’d discovered clickcomments ((And stopped using it due to its slowness. That service has now shutdown due to hosting costs. No wonder as the whole thing was extremely centralized)) I’ve been trying to get a similar solution running on the Division by Zer0 but there was nothing of the sort, at least as far as I knew.
So as a workaround I used another similar plugin called WP-Likes which did almost the same thing but unfortunately was limited to only one option and hard-coded to “Like”. It was a compromise while hoping that it’s developer might include the multiple-choice functionality in the future.
Fortunately I didn’t have to wait that long. Through a chance encounter with the Sikkdays blog, I noticed exactly what I wished to have: Three little icons at the end of the pos, allowing people to rate/judge a post according to emotion. A quick question to the admin, led me to the plugin responsible for this, called Emo-Vote.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to stay with Emo-based titles as there is a customization possibility and I quickly switched to Slashdot-based ratings, which are far more descriptive of how people might find the topics I write about.
So you’ll notice further below that you can now vote for each article on how you found it. Options are based on how I think opinionated blogposts can be judged as, such as interesting, boring, funny etc. I’d like to have a couple of options more, such as “disagree” etc, but I think for now the current capability is enough.
But why do I think that this kind of functionality is something beneficial to have on one’s blog? A few reasons.
First, it allows people who had a reaction to the article from some perspective (say, finding it informative) to state so without having to write a short comment about it (which is far more time-consuming than a simple click of the mouse.) In a sense, allowing the author to see how his articles are being received from a part of the audience he couldn’t see before. The silent majority. And as I consider comments and feedback in general as the main measure of success of blogposts, a way to increase that cannot be anything but good.
Second, it provides some interesting statistics, such as being able to see which are my top funniest topics, which are the most boring etc, according to audience interaction. This in turn one can publish on sidebars or a particular page so that new visitors can quickly find the most interesting content in the blog according to their tastes. It also provides the author with valuable information on what kind of topic he should concentrate on, based on previous success.
Lastly, it has potential. What Postreach attempted to do but failed due to its centralized nature, perhaps can be achieved by blogs federating amongst themselves. So for example, perhaps there will be a way to export such ratings to an aggregator which would allow anyone visiting it to quickly find new insightful, interesting etc posts from different blogs. Of course that would require than many use the same rating names or some other working system. Who knows, perhaps the Automattic will be willing to host such a service for the benefit of their userbase. But yeah, potential.
So anyway, I really hope I’ll see you all clicking away below, and you should even see this as an option on your RSS reader. 😉 Normal comments are of course welcome as always and do let me know if you think that a category should be swapped to something better.
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The Nethernet is turning off its lightposts, powering down its portals and slowly going dark. Lets hope they enter the liberating portal of Free Software.
The Nethernet, a browser-based game formerly known as PMOG was an innovative attempt to make the whole internet a virtual playground where people could interact passively during their normal use. As a concept I found it brilliant and I blogged about it when I first started using it as I thought it had a lot of potential to spread ideas around while being fun.
However I soon stopped using it as the experience was very buggy on a GNU/Linux system and it was having very infrequent updates, not enough features to make it more addictive and it just couldn’t keep my interest (although that’s nothing new, WoW couldn’t keep my interest either.) Nevertheless, I had subscribed to their official blog to keep abreast of their progress and hopefully jump in at some point when it would be more fully fledged. And in fact I did, just a few days ago, shortly after the Nethernet toolbar finally hit version 1.0.0.
Well to my surprise, today my RSS reader brought up the post announcing the end of the Nethernet, ironically called “The Nethernet Moving Forward”. In short, The Nethernet is being shut down because of the very high costs associated with hosting and developing it. While the shutting down news came as a bit of a surprise, seeing as there was no warning at all and everything seemed to be like business as usual until the weekend, the ongoing troubles they were having with bandwidth were noted while their sudden and heavy handed attempt to introduce micro-payments were an obvious display of their monetary troubles.
Personally I smell the investor’s hand in this. Gamelayers and the Nethernet was quite a bit backed by venture capitalists and their board of directors is practically run by them. As such, it was a matter of time before a resource-heavy game that failed to find a business plan to monetize all their traffic would start to raise questions about its viability by the investors. My impression is that the developers were given an ultimatum on this by their investors: “Either find a way to make money out of this within the next month or we stop funding you.” Or something to that extent. As such we saw the wholly misguided attempt to introduce “bacon” (ie micropayments) to the game which had the effect of driving a very considerable number of the community away (Just look at the comments on their post about it).
And now, almost exactly one month later, once it became obvious that their community abandoned them (or once a deadline was crossed?) the plug is pulled. The question is, what now? I mean, it’s obvious that the hosting won’t continue for much longer by Gamelayers (possibly until their server leasing expires?) so at some point the Nethernet will go 503.
But what happens to the assets? Personally I think it would be a shame to simply lose all this effort in code and artwork and I think the very best idea would be to simply open source the source of the servers and the firefox extension (if it isn’t already) and allow people to possibly find a way to continue with it. It obvious from the developers’ point of view that they’re not going to be working on the game any time soon so why let it go to waste.
What I did find interesting as well was the number of people who suggested the exact same thing in the fora, before I even came around to add my own voice. There were at least 5-6 different people suggesting an open sourcing of the game which just goes to show how mainstream the idea of free software has already become. But I digress…
But if the costs were too high for gamelayers, why would a free software adaptation of it be possible? Well because the code might be modified so that the resource use becomes distributed. I think the biggest mistake of Gamelayers was their protective and secretive nature on all things related to The Nethernet, even up to and including the announcement of the shutdown that came as a surprise even to some of the most valued members of their community. If they had allowed far more crowdsourcing of various aspects of the game, (eg: badge creation), perhaps this unfortunate fate might have been avoided.
But where Gamelayers failed, perhaps the community driven creativity, from players, for players, might make the Nethernet what it could have been. I can only imagine solutions such as federated servers, each of them possible to be hosted by any person’s desktop, sharing resources to allow the game to run smoothly. A team of free software programmers simply coding in the tools that people really want to have, that will make the game far more immersive and exciting, instead of the semi-boring event it is now. And by the nature of Free Software, you might see other versions of the Nethernet spring up, based on different universes rather than the same Victorian Steampunk one PMOG was always based on, again connected via distributed computing.
The possibilities are always there, but it is the curse of closed source initiatives to be always be based on the limited perspective of the developers, rather than opening up to the creativity of people “scratching their own itch”. Lets all hope that in the end, they will at least do the right thing and release the code under the AGPL as Nethernet’s last hurrah.
Pathfinder Db0, signing out…
The Black Sun Journal takes a misguided swipe at Anarchism triggered from a spat with a Mutualist. I attempt to point out how absolutely confused he is.
My RSS reader recently lit up with a new post on the Black Sun Journal attacking (or defending against?) Francois Tremblay’s calling him out over a Facebook discussion. Now this should have normally been another instance of internet drama (of the kind I keep getting into myself unfortunately) and I wouldn’t have gotten involved (especially since I’ve gotten in my own private flamewars with Francois in the past), if it wasn’t for Sean bringing up the whole topic of Anarchism and not only misrepresenting it horribly in order to denounce it but also making some common arguments for statism, which stem out of ignorance. Ignorance which I’ve pointed out to him in the past and he simply (obviously) ignored.
From the get-go, it’s obvious that Sean conflates Anarchism with the (far-smaller) individualistic wing, even bordering on merging it with the right-“libertarianism” of Rothbard and other wannabe Anarchists. This by itself is a blunder as he only seems to perceive the individualist aspects of Anarchism while ignoring the very solid theory that exists on the points of society organization, community management economics and-so-on. In short, he assumes that Anarchism is simply Anti-statism and wishful thinking which is a wholly intellectually dishonest representation he’s been called on many times before and should know better than.
So lets look at Sean’s specific arguments against Anarchism and dismantle them one-by-one.
Here Sean is countering the classic straw-man of social-democrats, the “Noble Savage” which is the idea that people were more peaceful in the past. Anarchist do not claim that humans are inherently peaceful and abstain from violence. That may be a pacifist’s myth but not an Anarchist’s (although a minority of Anarchists are pacifists). As such, this poses no argument against Anarchism?
Yes, humans can be violent but they can also be peaceful if their society and the ethic values they are raised with promote such a behaviour. The rise of civilized behaviour thus, is not the cause of the state but of the changing values of humans which eventually the state acknowledged in the form of laws, laws which always follow the acts of man rather than the other way around.
Furthermore, while tribal societies may have been more violent, there were also far more egalitarian. This is the aspect that Anarchists point at as a fact that our proposed social-structures are not against human nature. Sure, the Celts may have been killing one another, but such deaths were usually cross-tribal and when they were within the same tribe, very often you’ll find that they were against usurpers of power, such as power-grabbing warchiefs and the like. Looking at other tribal structures such as the Iroquois, we notice similar patterns.
And what about the recent reduction of violence? Was that caused by the emergence of republics and the capitalist mode of production? Here Sean has far less of a base to stand on other than simple correlation. What we in fact notice is that the drop of violence does not correlate with republics which for many years promoted inhuman acts such as human Slavery and still promote many forms of human-over-human domination. Rather the drop of violence correlates far better with the rise of rationalism, a process which started only a few hundred years ago.
What in fact has happened under Capitalism (and its supporting state apparati) is the continuation of human suffering, not in the form of active violence, but rather in the form of passive coercion or economic destitution. To put it more simply, instead of humans killing humans, they simply let them die (from starvation or easily preventable diseases). And the rate of which this death occurs, as can be seen from the scale of misery which occurs in most nations outside the rich “developed” ones, vastly outnumbers the suffering from active violence that occurred in pre-civilization periods.
While humans can manipulate each other for such reasons, this is far from being the natural state of mind of human behaviour. It is this precice point which Anarchists call attention to when they say that it’s the environment that shapes the behaviour of humans inside it.
Sean once again appeals to human nature as he perceives it and brings as backup genetics (ie the Selfish Gene). But what he misses is that Genes do not care how they reproduce and perpetuate but only that they do, and what this means is that the way by which they go about doing this does not have to be competitive.
This fact escapes Sean who is so keen to tie evolutionary science with his pro-capitalist bias (ie he wishes to have an empirical foundation) that he jumps to conclusion on how this works in human societies.
The actual empirical facts however beg to differ and in fact utterly demolish Sean’s argument that the human drive is a materialistic self-interest. Kropotkin’s evolutionary studies on Mutual Aid have not only shown that species (even different species) can find it far more helpful to cooperate rather than compete for natural resources but he has extensively documented how the human civilization naturally moves towards such a cooperative society (ie egalitarianism) when state-domination is reduced.
Not only that, but Engel’s analysis on the rise of the state and the pre-civilization familiar structures further reinforce that humans, lacking factors which promote inequality (such as private property) naturally form co-operative societies and in fact strong co-operative bonds were evolutionary required before Homo Sapiens became a viable evolutionary path.
So no. Humans will not naturally manipulate for power and profit, but when you put them into an environment which naturally selects for those which will manipulate for power and profit, then those will be selected. This is in fact what is happening in a propertarian economy and which Sean takes for granted and then draws his conclusions and states them as a fact of nature.
Here we can clearly see Sean’s confusion on what Anarchism is and his merging it with Right-“Libertarian” rhetoric. His argument is simply that people live in societies and as such need to provide for those more unfortunate around them. But Anarchists do not claim that they should not! If anything anarchists stress the requirements of acts such as Mutual Aid and (social anarchists) generally promote socialistic measures such as “according to need”. And while individualist anarchists and mutualists embrace a more market-based economy, they also oppose “sticky” property (ie private property) and believe that such a society would be better because the truly free market (ie free from inequality and the state) would be able to care for the less unfortunate without people needing to give the power to do so to a higher authority.
So Sean is proposing a false dilemma when he assumes that there’s only two choices, Tax-funded governmental social nets and dog-eat-dog rugged individualism. Anarchism is in fact all about pointing out that it is, in fact very difficult to opt-out of society (although not impossible as Sean suggests) but that this society does not have to be condensed around a nanny state who will care for us. It is about pointing out that a nanny state is far worse at providing such functions than what freely cooperating individuals are.
In fact, very often the delegation of the safety net to the state is a detriment to those who need it as the state is a tool of the ruling elite and as such this safety net will be dismantled when it goes against their interests. The experience of the last 35 years in the developed world should have been enough of a waking call to the flaws of this perspective. One only has to look at how the Reaganites gutted social spending once they got into power and such a trend continued through both Social Democrat and Liberal rule even when obviously against the will of the “democracy”. One also only needs to look at the phenomenal success of community driven mutual aid projects such as building societies, clothing clubs and the like to provide social safety despite the failure of both government and markets to achieve this.
Examples such as these should have been enough to make most people reconsider their opinion on what humans do “naturally”…
It is funny that Sean brings up the “Tragedy of the Commons” argument against Anarchism. A theory so debunk by studies in communal societies and co-operative management that it’s laughable to see it brought up as a counter to anything but free-for-all capitalism. Something that not even the right-“libertarians” do not suggest (They prefer to privatize everything).
Once again, that Sean brings this up as an argument against what he thinks is “Anarchism” is once more a case in point that he has not even bothered to understand what Anarchism is, even after the numerous times I explained that he has not understood it yet.
In closing, I will quote the last paragraphs of Sean which is in fact what has itched me enough to write this post to counter his rampart confusion:
There are many other sound reasons (beyond the scope of this article) why anarcho-anything does not work and can never work. Humans are a social, hierarchical species, and we need organizers.
No Sean. You have not yet proven that we are hierarchical species or that we need organizers. You simply allow your preconceptions to blind you and stubbornly refuse to understand why what you say is wrong. You seem content to simply repeat it.
Still anarchists continue with their irrational claims that people will all just somehow naturally work together for the common good, absent external incentives
*Sigh* No Sean. We do not claim that. In fact what we claim is that it is the external incentives that will shape how humans will work together and thus we propose a society structure (ie an external incentive) that naturally selects for co-operation and altruism rather than greed and domination over others.
What irrational claim, in fact, continues in this case, is your ideas of what Anarchists claim without having bothered to understand the theory behind them, the extensive evidence backing them up and the already existing criticism of your arguments that me and others have repeatedly pointed out to you.
And this is the last time I bother to correct your misrepresentations of Anarchism. If you continue with your misguided arguments as if they have not been addressed already, you will forever have exposed yourself as someone who does not care about the truth but only about stubbornly sticking to your ideological castle and basking in your own assumed intellectual superiority.
Disgusting right-wingers making disgusting quotes.
“Consider the sexual harassment which continually occurs between a secretary and a boss . . . while objectionable to many women, [it] is not a coercive action. It is rather part of a package deal in which the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job, and especially when she agrees to keep the job. The office is, after all, private property. The secretary does not have to remain if the ‘coercion’ is objectionable.”
Lame as always.
On a brighter side, here’s why you should check up on Voltairine De Cleyre. Feminist, Syndicalist, Anarchist without adjectives.
Katpoop10 tried to frame me up on reddit as using sockpuppets, as he was caught doing himself. The result? An Epic Fail.
You remember that little incident I just posted about earlier today about the guy in reddit using sockpuppets?
Well he came back for vengeance. A few hours ago, a new account called Trollhunters posted a reply to the comment where I uncovered Katpoop’s sockpuppets, falsely accusing me of the exact same thing I discovered katpoop doing. It was obvious from the start that the new account couldn’t be anyone else but the revengeful KatPoop as he had already proved he didn’t really have enough imagination to think about a different accusation.
Anyway, I started making fun of his little ruse as he really couldn’t prove that I ever really used those accounts (The account page was simply not there as it was never created) and he couldn’t create them now as the creation date of the account would obviously give him away. I expected him to try and fake it somehow as it seems that his previous fail had got him angry enough to try every trick in the book in order to hurt me.
So, the next comment he posted, after I challenged him to provide evidence, was exactly that. Screenshots of two of those accounts in action [1] [2], apparently posting comments innocently and actually looking pretty believable. I mean, he must have been preparing this trap for a while as one had a comment posted almost one day ago, while the other had a comment from 7 months ago (Obviously a shop. I can tell from pixels and from looking up the actual comment 😉 ).
The problem? Both of those screenshots had him at the moment logged in with those accounts in question. If those were really my sockpuppets, his screenshots should be displaying his own name on the top right. Apparently our little troll must have been in such a haste and so upset, that he didn’t really pay close attention to his forging of the evidence, giving away his game immediately.
But the funniest part, was how he tried, along with those screenshots, to weave a little story of how this is not KatPoop (no really!) and how he’s always seen those who accuse others of sockpuppetry of doing the same themselves and so on. The whole fairy-tale, I present for your amusement below.
EPIC FAIL!
It really seems that this keep must have a problem with lying. I mean, I’ve called him in the past about him downvoting all my comments and his reply that it wasn’t him was immediate. Is he a compulsive liar? I really cannot say. All that is certain, is that he needs some professional help. I don’t know who KatPoop10 is in real life and unlike E&R I don’t have a good skill at dox dropping, but if anyone knows who he is, they should really let his mother know of his online issues.
Anyway, 2 minutes after my reply uncovering his trap was posted, the new account was deleted, but unfortunately for him, reddit does not forget. All his comments remained visible for all to see and his failshots will stay forever testament to his idiocy.
I’ve also opened a bestof post, linking to his epic failure for all to laugh at in reddit. Vote it up if you can please as it might serve as a disincentive for other kids trying to do the same tricks online (or at least in reddit).At the least, they may figure out how not to try and frame people on the internetubes, especially if they are going to do it as a revenge for being caught red handed.
Ah, fun.
Update: Katpoop has come clean with his actions through a half-arsed apology. Unfortunately, he fails even there, as he takes more space to insult me rather than apologize for his actions. He hasn’t learned at all…
What do you do when you are dedicated to anti-authoritarianism and direct action and someone decides to abuse the system for their own purposes? Here’s how simple peer-pressure solved one problem.
It should be obvious to readers of the Division by Zer0 that I am a frequent user of Reddit for my source of news and online interaction. You may have also noticed that I am also generally hanging out a lot in the Anarchism subreddit as I find the community there quite vibrant and interesting to discuss with. Recently I’ve also been promoted to a moderator as this particular subreddit has a different policy on this issue to get around the potential abuse. This is a complex issue so I won’t go into it at this point as I simply wanted to mention that I ended up getting mod powers.
Now, there’s also a frequent topic of discussion on the subject of “Anarcho”-Capitalists who often come over from other parts of reddit, complain about the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Anarchism subreddit and usually proceed to downvote all pro-socialist articles and submit pro-capitalist articles which are quickly downvoted. Nobody has ever been banned or moderated in any other way for doing this as we prefer to let the moderation happen naturally through the reddit system by the community.
We always had the possibility of moderation in case obvious problems occurred, such as spam accounts. Fortunately, the automated moderation of reddit never made this an issue, so most that the mods ever did was to unban people and posts mistakenly caught by the spam-filter. However just yesterday, this exact dilemma presented itself to me, as I caught one of the latest “Anarcho”-Capitalists to join had been obviously gaming the reddit system for his own purposes.
Now I had three options. The easy one would be to simply start banning his accounts from /r/Anarchism using my moderator powers. Another one would be to report the user to the Reddit moderators themselves for them to take action. However none of them felt right. Using either, would mean that I would have to use authoritarian means to solve the problem and this is something I wanted to avoid. So what is left for an Anarchist to do? Name & Shame.
Why use this method? Simply because I believe that someone who is so interested in making his position look right to an unsuspecting audience will be particularly susceptible to public humiliation once his underhanded tactics were brought to the fore. Not only that, but it would also provide the evidence to use against him pointing to his “public approval” in the form of upvotes as an argument as he was known to do.
And it didn’t take long. Just today I noticed all his accounts have been deleted along with his main one. True, I cannot know for sure that it was indeed him and not the Reddit moderators that finally caught up with him, but as he stopped writing soon after I called him out on the sockpuppetry and he also received scolding PMs from his fellow AnCaps I believe it must have been his own decision.
For me, this was a great example of how moderation of a community can happen even without authoritarian means such as moderation or banning.It shows that even in an online forum with anonymous aliases, where very little outside IRL crimes can get back to bite you in the arse, peer-pressure can be enough to force someone who misbehaved to voluntary “exile”. It shows that simply by public condemnation or activities we wish to discourage, the community can moderate itself and avoid “benevolent dictators” or a bureaucracy.
The sad part in all of this, is all the people who, when reported, jumped in to his defence. Accusations of me bring an “Alarmist”, “Propagandist” and whatnot started flying, even in the face of undeniable evidence of wrongdoing and no actual “force” from my end. It is sad that the simple act of trying to direct peer pressure to a good cause (ie, stopping abuse of the system) must be labeled as “Propaganda” or other such nonsense. This is like the fear of public opinion I was talking about before which in my mind is an excuse for wanting to act like a jerk or of preferring to use authoritarian means.
For me, this experiment in libertarian action has been a success and gives me faith that if this can work even in an environment where peer-pressure is weak by design, it can surely work wonders in real life.
Can a game community repair its internal social relation through self-moderation or is it doomed to fucktardery by the few. I believe the concept of Direct Action can help.
I’ve recently entered the beta for an upcoming DotA (almost-)clone called Heroes of Newerth (HoN) when I discovered through reddit giving away 100 of ’em for the most absurd names (I submitted the Flying Spaghetti Monster of course). I always wanted to play the DotA experience but I didn’t have Warcraft3 available and Demigod is quite different from it (and a bit disappointing as well). Plus, having a native GNU/Linux client was an offer I couldn’t resist. 😉
But what does this have to do with the title above? Well one of the main issues that DotA has is the sheer number of elitist assholes who heave tons of abuse at people trying to learn the ropes or even just don’t play perfectly. I am talking total nerd-rage here. Unfortunately, this mentality seems to have migrated to the HoN community, most likely because it’s been marketed as the intellectual sequel to DotA (Items and Heroes are almost the same).
While this general level of fucktardery is not such a big issue in a free mod such as DotA, for a commercial game with developers to pay and with big plans for the future, it might make or break their life-expectancy. The less people that are interested in nurturing and increasing their “newbie scene”, the less people will stick around until they won’t be at a level where they suffer abuse simply for not having climbed the (very steep) learning curve.
As I was reading similar sentiments from other people in the fora, I got to thinking on how those who would like to help new players might overcome this obstacle and alleviate, if not reduce the rampart dickwadery. While technical solutions might be proposed and coded, such as improving the match-making system, I think the solution lies in direct action and cooperation from the community.
Of course the community cannot take very good action without the game presenting at least some tools to combat the problem, which is incidentally why the DotA community is what it is. Fortunately, even at this beta stage, the game has some controls that could be used for such purposes. Permaban and Ignore. If I understand the first one correctly, one can mark a specific account as always banned from games one hosts. Ignore just…well, ignores chat messages from a particular player.
So how can these two be used for self-moderation? My idea was through a blacklist. Lets say that a known newbie-friendly player (lets call him/her a ‘Mentor’) while playing in a newb-only game, discovers that one of his team members is constantly ranting and cursing at the others for being worthless, n00bs, sucky and whatnot. The Mentor then, grabs a few screencaps or a replay as evidence of this and adds the dickwad’s alias to a blacklist he maintains. This can be as simply as a blog with each new post being about a particular dickwad and a full list in a prominent location.
Now all the other people who have a likewise mentality, ie they like to promote a healthier community are subscribed to this blacklist. Each time a new person is added to it, people judge the evidence and if solid ((Although of course, if the Mentor or the maintainers of the blacklist are trusted, many will not even need to look at the evidence)), they add this account to their permaban and ignore lists. If just a 10% of the HoN people are subscribed to this blacklist, then the abusive players are going to quickly start running into problems joining games or talking to people.
The effects of this tactic would be akin to peer pressure in a normal social situation. Suddenly the dickwads are going to find out that being a jerk online has some drawbacks. Hopefully some might reconsider as generally, not being a dickwad is not so difficult. They should be then given a chance to take themselves out of the blacklist (probation time?) and who knows, maybe they’ll join the other side for a change.
So why is this better than simply using system based changes? Well first of all because no programmed system is perfect, especially at catching such vague concepts as dickwadery. Matchmaking may not work well enough and options to mark others as abusive (say via a game function like permaban) may in turn be abused themselves for griefing purposes. On the other hand, a self-moderated solution avoids these issues.
Let’s say for example that someone was added to the dickwads blacklist but some think this was wrong. Perhaps his frustration was warranted, or there is not enough evidence and whatnot. What would probably happen is that not all subscribers to the blacklist would add him as they wouldn’t feel he deserves it. As such his “pain” would be much less. Dialogue will be also had and perhaps more evidence requested.
Lets have another example where the Mentor goes on a power trip and starts adding people he doesn’t like to the blacklist without evidence just because he expects to be trusted. Seeing as this is not anything official, nothing would prevent people from calling him out on this, a new blacklist forked from the old under the supervision of another Mentor or even a collaboration of them and the old Mentor might quickly find himself in a prominent position in the new blacklist.
All of these then are ideas that might work to allow a game community to self-moderate itself to a healthy environment which is conductive to new people joining, without requiring any authoritarian measures on the part of the developers or the moderators. Rather it would be based on direct action by the members themselves and as such far less prone to corruption, who would then get the community they deserve.
Who knows, If I stick around with HoN once it comes out (curse my short attention span) I might actually start this for the heck of it. Just to see if a purely community driven initiative can make a difference. It would be an interest test to put some of my principles under. 😉
A reader contacts me about his dichotomy between communism and anarchism. I think his PoV deserves some more publicity as it points, I believe, to a common question most outside the scene have.
Recently someone sent me an email letting me know that he likes the content of the Division by Zer0 (Thanks!). Along with his email, he sent some of his own musings which I found interesting enough to deserve some extra publicity. So I got his permission to post them on the blog. Enjoy.
By Scott
I have been, for the last few years of my life, moving radically leftward, from my rather innocuous beginnings as a “Trotskyist” to simply a “Marxist” to being labeled a “Left-Communist” to where I am now, which is on the fence between “communist” and “anarchist”. Both sides have their influences; the “communist” side has given me a strong respect for Marx’s historical analyses, as well as his critiques of the Capitalist system, among other things, while the “anarchist” side has given me the example to live by, for many anarchists are “lifestyle” anarchists, living their lives as withdrawn from the capitalist system as possible. Their world-wide actions (notably the recent “unrest” in Greece, along with the French riots a few years ago) have made world powers shake with fear, governments almost collapse, and the entire world watched as cars burned and the streets were controlled by police no more.
So what am I to do?
I believe that the best solution is simply to ignore these labels and be reminded of what is important: ending capitalism’s reign of terror. All who oppose the horrors of capitalism must work together under that banner, not as “communists”, not as “anarchists”, but as people who believe in the survival of humanity, and who believe that humanity cannot survive under the conditions of imperialism, oppression and slavery. What you want to add to that (from environmentalism to animal rights to “power to the people” to whatever else) is up to you. But we who oppose capitalism must not be divided by these ideological differences. Even the most dogmatic of communists from the same party cannot agree on everything, so why should we try? Instead, we should act. An action carries only the message that is put behind it, and a Leninist and an anarchist can both protest against imperialism in the 3rd world. They can both protest against the treatment of workers in many workplaces. They can both agree that community activism is a good thing. So why can’t they work together? We’ll sort out our differences (in a comradely fashion) when capitalism is no longer our enemy. Until that time, though, we must focus on our common struggles.
Truth is that I’ve had similar thought myself but the more I read and interact with Marxist-Leninists, the more stark the differences become between us. While theoretically what Scott says seems reasonable, the problem appear very soon once one tries to actually cooperate as it’s all a matter of how each movement tries to go about bringing down Capitalism.
The biggest difference imho is how one side (M-L) wants a vanguard party to lead the struggle while the other wants the revolution to occur through spontaneous and decentralized actions of the workers. There can be no agreement on this point. Anarchists cannot commit to promoting a vanguard party and M-L very often refuse to support and occasionally oppose struggle which is not led by them.
It is exactly because the methods by which we try to achieve the future society will make or break the revolution that there can be no cooperation when there’s a fundamental difference in tactics. It is exactly because the difference in tactics between Anarchists is not fundamental that they generally cooperate while on the other hand distance themselves from Marxist-Leninists and Rothbardians.
So as nice it would be for all of us to cooperate to bring about a better world, there’s also a reason why this doesn’t generally happen. The best we can do instead is patiently explain and convince people that our tactics are the ones that can work.
Will taking away laws defined by the state turn society into a totalitarian nightmare as Orwell had thought. I point out why this is scaremongering and highly unlikely.
The Barefoot Bum posts a passage from George Orwell criticizing Anarchism for its apparent tendency for transparent totalitarianism. For Orwell and TBB, people acting as per the social norms is the worst kind of dictatorship, while having actual dictators who tell you what you cannot do is “obviously” far superior, because among the things you can do, you have more freedom.
First, lets take a step back and see how our current society works. Is it true that people in the current society only live according to what they cannot do? Do they abide by the few restrictions and then go wildly in all directions on everything else? Even a casual observation of society shows the falsity of such a view.
Truth is, people do currently abide by social norms and public opinion to a large degree. Do you see people running naked around? Do you see people making physical contact with strangers (at least in western society)? There’s a lot of things people do not do, even though the freedom is there. Is this totalitarianism? Of course some people still do “eccentric” acts even when it goes against the public opinion, but it is a baseless assertion to claim that the same would not happen in Anarchism. Why not?
In fact, there is nothing that would stop this. A social rules and laws are not black and white. It’s not that we have some definite laws and then freedom. It’s that we have a gradual scale of rules which move in the intensity of social disapproval. We start from simple etiquette, progress through unwritten rules and eventually reach the definite “laws” that one is not allowed to break. All the rules in this scale are decided via public opinion. Yes. including Laws. Laws do not spring up from nothingness, nor are they inherent rules of the universe that some “bright minds” have discovered.
The distinguishing thing is that the power to decide the unbreakable rules in an authoritarian system (such as any statist system, from Representative Democracy to a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship) is granted only to a privileged few. The original and basic laws that will be passed (such as respect for human life etc) will be based on pre-existing social rules of the same type and thus will seem natural, but many of the rest of the laws will be decided arbitrarily by the ruling elite and may even come in opposition to the public opinion. The rest of the social norms, such as etiquette or unwritten rules will remain in the enforcement of the public, as has always been the case.
Now the fallacy that Orwell is commiting is to assert that if the ruling elite is taken away, if the power to decide the laws is taken away from the few, then all social rules will become laws. That is, people will start treating rules of etiquette with the same contempt and opposition as murder. This is the only way that one can be forced out of eccentricity and conform with every rule the public opinion decides.
But this is absurd. There is nothing to make us believe that if the power to decide and enforce the strictest rules (laws) in a society is decentralized, there will be no gradual scale and no freedom anymore. This is a mental jump that just makes no sense to take.
In Anarchism then, the only difference from an authoritarian system is who hold the power to decide and enforce the laws. The statist will tell you that it’s better for the enlightened few to make those decisions but I don’t think I need to point out the utopianism of the “enlightened few” concept. The Anarchist will tell you that since laws are in any case taken from what the public opinion already does, it makes no sense to take this power away from the people.
To do so is to simply invite abuse and stagnation into our society. Abuse from those who would pass arbitrary laws only to benefit themselves and stagnation from making it difficult to modify the laws when public opinion does not agree with them in the same intensity anymore (for example a law becoming an unwritten rule, such as in the case of nudity.)
To allow the public to decide its rules is not to have absolute conformity with the public opinion as this is impossible for the non-major things. For public opinion includes every one of us and all of us. The less important the act, the more diverse and therefore weak this “public opinion” becomes.
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