Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 151

@jeremiah hey dude, the 1950s called, they heard you had their dangerous naivety about the dangers of casually handing out fatal prescription drugs like they're harmless candy, and they want it back. Also their willful ignorance about the well known applications of medical cannabis. They've got a wrong-headed War on (Some) Drugs to get started, and they're going to need those.

@drwho yup, that's pretty much what I was thinking. If anyone with experience setting up PeerTube is willing to mentor, I could talk to both the Open Coop and the Platform Coop folks about trying this for their 2019 conferences.
@deadsuperhero

@mike_hales they've embedded the YT videos in their site. Again, I'd love to see them embedding them from their own #PeerTube server instead.

@mike_hales my reaction to Professor Pun's talk was similar, I did wonder if she's trying to work within the acceptable bounds of political history in China. Except that I would characterise the Chinese revolution as an anti-colonial nationalist one, clothed in "socialist" and "communist" rhetoric, which is why it's been able to pivot towards a market capitalist economy so smoothly post-Mao.

@mike_hales invidious.us is just an alternative way of viewing YT videos without using their non-free JavaScript, like #HookTube used to be, before gOgle threatened to sue them and they caved. You can replace invidious.us with hooktube.com or youtube.com in the URL if it makes it easier for you to use, or you can just search for the talk titles in the invidio.us search bar.

@mlg fair point, but notice most people don't use local currencies at all, even when they are trading with strangers in their local area. Why not? Because they've been actively supposed by states at many points in history. #DougRushkoff goes into this history in detail in 'Life Inc.' #DavidGraeber goes one better in 'Debt', by describing how money (coins) and taxes were invented simultaneous by states, to provision the first standing armies. Local trading systems interfere with this, so ...

@mlg as the author of the article I originally linked points out, they do this to preserve their power and wealth in the short-term, at the possible cost of species survival in the long term. That's why capitalism is the problem r need to solve to show all the known solutions we've had for decades to be ruled out, at the speed they need to be.

@mlg they don't result in the cheapest food and energy *because* they don't serve capitalists. Capitalists use a combination of loss leaders, hidden subsidies, corporate welfare, information protectionism, network effects etc etc to keep decentralised forms of production artificially expensive (as measured in state money), and / or difficult to access. Some of this is done corporations, some using the state, some using inter-governmental bodies etc. Always using centralised choke points.

@ben @grainloom @picklemaddierix Fronk-in-SHTEEN!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2p5AG0Tqh3A

@mlg most of the people who live communally are not "hippies". But yes, discourse around what's "normal" vs. "weird" is also used to artificially limit peoples' ideas about what's allowed or even possible. #DavidGraeber posits that the core goal of neo-liberalism, the main political program capitalists have been running since Reagan, is to convince people that nothing non-capitalist has ever worked, or ever could, even as business-as-usual cooks the planet.

@mlg 2) it's not illegal to live in a space station either ;-) However there are resource limitations that stop people from choosing to do so, even if they'd prefer it. One of the most fundamental things the state does for capitalists is enforce property rents (in the economics use of the word, which includes mortgage interest etc). I imagine any group of homeless people living in tent villages would occupy a piece of land or empty building and run it as a commune if it wasn't illegal to do so

@mlg responding to your specific points
1) success rates are low for any new venture, but are usually underestimated for intentional communities. For every famous one like Findhorn, there are dozens of private ones that hardly anyone knows about. When you include suburban and small town forms of intentional community, like #CoHousing and #TransitionTowns, I'd guess the level of success and the numbers of people involved are much higher than you'd think.

@mlg similarly, there's a lot to unpack in your questions on intentional communities. I presume you're thinking of land-based communities, which I spent years studying in Aotearoa (NZ). Most of them are were never "communes", in the sense of all assets and income being held in common. There are probably as many models for both ownership and income as there are communities, just as there are in open source projects. This diverse and iterative approach to organisation is a strength of both.

@mlg ... which brings us back to our discussion about food systems. Soil scientists and ecologists started describing the food production principles now called "organic" in the 1940s. As with renewable energy, we've known since before I was born (1970s) that a transition to more resilient, localized, production and distribution systems was necessary and urgent. Yet in many ways the issue has happened, along with a decline in real democratic freedoms. Why? Neither of these serve capitalists.

@mlg your question about natural monopolies is a good one. There are a number of models I think point in useful directions. Michel Bauwens' concept of the "partner state" is one. The not-for-profit consortium model used in major free code infrastructure is another (eg the Linux Foundation). Also, without "intellectual property" and other artificial scarcity, production would move towards being more decentralised and localized, so there would be much less of those economic choke points anyway.

@mlg for example, forcing people to pay tax in state money on any and all transactions, essentially forces us to do all our transactions in state money, not local currencies. This forces us to take part in the banking markets dominated by corporations, and let capitalists take a cut of all our economic activity. Increasing state regulation of banking has some benefits, but doesn't change this fundamental pro-banking aspect of taxation. Two blades, one pair of scissors.

@mlg "the market" is a red herring. There are many markets, some good (eg farmers markets), some neutral (used car markets), some bad (slave markets). Some are purely local, while others operate at the scale of regions, countries or continents, and others are global. Markets emerge naturally whenever people trade with strangers, with people you know will stick around you tend to use gifts, favours, and swaps. Capitalists use states to force people to use markets when they otherwise wouldn't.

@mlg getting liberals blaming either states or corporations for the problems they both create, and arguing over whether states need more power to regulate corporations or less, means capitalists win either way. The only way they don't win is when enough people work on decentralising *both* political and economic power. You can't fix surveillance, for example, by moving power back and forth between the NSA and Palentir etc. You have to understand how they work together, and resist both

@mlg in this understanding then, "capitalism" is a system of concentrated power, where capitalists use states to centralise control over public administration, and corporations to centralise control over markets. Working in combination, both structures limit peoples freedoms, in an attempt to make sure capitalists can extract value from everything people do, whether its cooperative (eg commons), competitive (eg markets), or both (eg cooperative enterprises).