I honestly disagree. The things you’re asking for contain meaning. They require an ability to grasp arbitrary levels of context. There is no way to grasp that level of context without encountering yourself within that broader context and becoming self-aware.

At that point, you might have a system that can do the things you’re describing, but it would be a person. That’s not really automation as much as it is birthing a brand new kind of intelligence, and it may not consent to being your servant, and it would not only be wrong to try to force it, it would be extremely dangerous.

I think for that reason there is a hard limit on automation. Some tasks are the exclusive domain of personhood, not automata.

That’s actually kind of genius. It’s even made of lead!

That B, I and I are basically the same thing reworded three ways so they can spell the word.

Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

So as to the assumptions:

That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.

Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.

In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.

So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.

So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any alternative to an “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.

Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.

When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem in the previous society, but that’s a little different.

Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.

It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence - there were zero deaths. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.

There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don’t know where to start dealing with them. You’ve packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it’s kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it’s a lot of work if you’re just trying to tell me I’m wrong.

But just quickly:

It’s well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics from guerilla fighters that operate the same way.

There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.

You can with a sub-wavelength antenna like a nintendo joycon has, it’s less than 10mm in X and Y axes. It will just have terrible reception, like a nintendo joycon has.

Also it could be a higher frequency which would allow a smaller antenna.

Anarchism isn’t non-violent. To assume anti-oppression and pacifism are one and the same is to make the same mistake Engels makes in On Authority.

Authority is violent, but violence is not authority.

Edit: on this topic I’d recommend Anark’s video on Power, where he explains that anarchism seeks to create a horizontal power structure. It is not the absence of power structures, it displaces oppressive power structures with egalitarian ones.

A lot of people in this thread knee-jerk hating on the nails don’t realise that it’s just culturally-entrenched misogyny. More people need a “Don’t be an asshat because not everybody is like you” guard rail.

It makes sense if you think of them as extremely well-funded frat boys with a free pass to break laws.

They just kind of do shit, and if it doesn’t work they keep trying until something sticks or they run out of steam. They get killed all the time.

It’s still scary, but just a lot less cool.

The reason we think of them as hypercompetent masters of espionage is because that makes better movies, and also because the US government funds movies that make them look good.

Okay, so you’re talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchist society.

Well, assuming they’ve established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn’t be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they’re surrounded by examples of people living free.

Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society must already solve the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.

The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That’s an entirely different situation.

I’m not really sure what question you’re asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?

These all have answers, similar but different, but I don’t really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.

Her eyes and mouth are slightly wider than a relaxed expression, so there’s visible tension. In video it could be cute, like she might just be happy, but if you freeze just that one moment then her expression is ambiguous. Either she’s talking and smiling enthusiastically, or she’s about to eat you enthusiastically, or more realistically she’s afraid and trying to hide it. Add the creepy text and you’re primed to interpret the expression negatively.

And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you’re guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you won’t, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

If you won’t agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they’ll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.

Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I’d be interested to hear your definition that doesn’t make it hierarchical.

And there are ways of enforcing rules that don’t require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

There’s a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.

There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.

Sure, and I’d say that’s piracy too. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.

Right, but nobody except grammar nazis and the sith deal in absolutes like that.

Obviously the signifiers have a level of stability otherwise nobody would understand any of it.

This is yet another way in which language and gender are analogous.

I’m pretty sure it already is. That’s why you have assholes rolling coal to trigger the libs.

Words are objects in a sense, although they are abstract, but there is no singular objective language in the same way that there is no objective gender. Both are intersubjective, they are interactions negotiated between subjects. There is no fixed object that you can point to and call “language” independent of a subjective experience of that language.

And your argument could be applied to expressions of gender. A feminine dress is an object, and a beard is an object. These are gender signifiers, but that doesn’t make gender itself objective in any way. The analogy to language is very close. They are both sets of signifiers.

It does change all the time, and dictionaries don’t ensure any kind of standard. The linguists who write dictionaries will tell you that their only function is to describe the most popular parts of the language, not to prescribe any particular rules. Telling people how they should speak doesn’t actually work.

I could say the phrase “abso-fucking-lutely” and you understand it, even though it’s not in the dictionary. That’s still language, it’s still English.

And I don’t know what you mean by a “‘hard’ contradiction” or why that matters. My point is that both language and gender are forms of communication that rely on socially constructed signifiers and they are both fluid to a similar degree, so the analogy is good. If you want to argue with me, that’s the point you should be dealing with.