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1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 10:39:41 EDT Strypey

   https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/
   *sigh* Fred Turner's revisionist history of 1960s/70s counterculture, like that of Adam Curtis (see his 'All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace' series), completely fails to distinguish between the projects of genuine idealists, and the cynics who who use trendy language to justify and recruit people to whatever they would have done anyway. The #MerryPranksters, #WELL, #FSF, and #EFF are the former, #CharlesManson, #Scientology, and #SiliconValley are the latter

   1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 10:44:21 EDT Strypey

      in reply to

      "So the New Communalists failed, in a big way. By 1973, virtually all of the communes had disappeared or dissolved." #YeahRight

      All of the children of the hippies became bank managers, bla bla bla. It's bullshit. The original Back to the Land movement continued forming new communes worldwide, well into the 1980s, and new generation started joining in the 1990s, continuing to this day. There were many failed experiments, yes, but many still exist, feed themselves, and run sustainable businesses.

      1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 10:48:48 EDT Strypey

         in reply to

         It's very important to authoritarians (whether marxist, capitalist, or fascist) to lump anarchistic experiments in with the egotist and corporatist attempts to co-opt them, so that they can recruit dissenters to their symbolic rituals of protest and electoral politics, and keep them from building community-run replacements that might actually distribute the power they want to seize and wield "for the greater good" (in their opinion).

         1. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 11:39:32 EDT Strypey

            in reply to

            According to #DavidGraeber, this is part of a larger strategy of control that coalesced after the worldwide student-worker uprisings of the late 1960s. It's based on the a PR inspired theory that if you repeat the lie that 'all horizontal organizing fails' enough times, people will believe it, and not try. It's a strategy perhaps best summed up in Thatcher's slogan "There Is No Alternative" (or #TINA), or the title of Guy Debord's book 'The Society of the Spectacle'.
            https://thebaffler.com/salvos/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse

      2. Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 11:45:48 EDT Strypey

         in reply to

         "The folks associated with the commune movement—particularly Stewart Brand and the people formerly associated with the Whole Earth Catalog—begin to reimagine computers as the tools of countercultural change that they couldn't make work in the 1960s."

         Everything about this is true except for a) the lie that the counterculture failed offline, and b) the idea that corporatist sociopaths like Thiel or Zuck or Bezos were their ideological children in any genuine way