cacheson

kglitch, 5 months ago

As I build my fediverse software, I'm blogging weird ActivityPub corner-cases at https://join.piefed.social/blog/.

If you understand the fundamentals already, it'll make sense. I'm not an expert or anything, I'm making it up as I find things out.

FireTower, 8 months ago

America made a lot of contract guns for the White Russians. Ian has a video on them: https://youtu.be/L-OfevJb03M?si=mwMqTMQegX_4qbS-

cacheson, 8 months ago

TL;DR- This turned out way longer than I expected. Skepticism of Bitcoin among solarpunks is understandable, but things aren't as bad as they seem.

I'm neutral on the defederation issue here. I am overall mildly hostile to Monero, and also mildly against defederation without a strong reason (such as being EH, grad, or HB). However, I would like to address the idea that Bitcoin (specifically) and proof-of-work are antithetical to the interests of solarpunks.

To lay all my cards on the table:

• I don't really consider myself a solarpunk, so this is a bit of an outsider perspective. I think solarpunk is kind of cool, but it's also new to me.
• I'm here to lurk (and maybe participate) in the anarchism community. I've been an anarchist for a long time (almost 20 years), mostly centered on mutualism. I've also been interested in alternative currencies (digital and otherwise) since before Bitcoin existed.
• I do have a financial stake in Bitcoin, but not any other cryptocurrencies. I sincerely do not believe my commentary in general has any effect on the price of bitcoin, and especially not when addressing such a small audience. I am not looking to convince anyone here to buy anything.
• I have been heavily interested in Bitcoin almost since it's creation, and as a result have a pretty deep level of knowledge about it. I want people to understand Bitcoin both because I enjoy sharing my obsessive interests with others, and because knowledge is power and power should be widely distributed. The latter part goes double for anarchists, because I want anarchists to be well-informed in order to help the anarchist project succeed.

For the purposes of my argument, everything bad that is said about altcoins (non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies) is true. Some of them can maybe be generously described as "honest experiments that are likely to fail". The rest are varying degrees of scammy, up to and including "intentionally planned as a scam from the start". Monero is probably one of the lesser offenders in this regard.

Also, I'm presuming that at least some people here see some value in the existence of decentralized digital currency. If you think money is inherently bad and that humanity should abolish it completely, then obviously through that ideological lens Bitcoin is all downside with no benefit. The only thing that I can do to change your mind is to convince you to change your lens, and that's outside of the scope of this discussion.

Continued in reply

BartsBigBugBag, 9 months ago

I’ve managed to radicalize multiple of my blue collar, truck loving, baby Jesus spouting, coworkers. It’s a process, but so was my on radicalization, just a different one due to our different material conditions.

Obviously, you can’t change everyone’s minds, but in my experience, there’s not much mind changing that has to be done in a lot of cases, just education on the root causes of the things they already know and notice.

When one party is telling you that this is the best time in our history, while your wages have gone down for 30 years straight, and the other party is the only one addressing their issues, but is doing so through inflammatory rhetoric and outright lies, it’s easy to see why someone would lean towards one over the other, and why they’d come to believe one sides lies over the other side. The trick is that most rural atomized people recognize most of the same problems in our society, the same way the rest of us do, they’ve just had people telling them lies about why those things are happening.

If you want a mass movement, you have to meet the people where they are. If you want to feel superior, then dunking on rednecks is the way to go. That doesn’t mean accepting bigotry, but recognizing that everyone is at a different stage in their political development, and that it takes a custom catered approach towards each individual in order to best effect said development.

A big problem i see liberals having when trying to change the minds of both leftists and conservatives, is an inability to even consider any aspect of another’s perspective, and a belief in one’s own perceptions as objective reality. In doing so, they will argue against their perception of others beliefs, rather than actually discussing and finding what those beliefs are, or where those beliefs come from.

It’s almost like no one remembers that redneck meant socialist union organizer before it was corrupted to truck loving suburban hillbilly wannabe. The working class is ripe for radicalization, but you have to treat them like full people first, not caricatures.

NightOwl, 9 months ago

Yeah, one of the statements “If you’re not paying with cash, you’re paying with attention, time, and/or privacy” I found to no longer be relevant.

Doesn’t matter if you spend thousands whether it be a video card or even a tesla. Telemetry to collect data has become a standard with the normalization of everyone being the product regardless of price tier for lot of services and products.

And for YouTube type services seems even more so with the service requiring being logged into an account so along with payment information it leading to much more account specific data collection. The YouTube workarounds actually do more to try to disassociate usage data than the official paid products do.

Also, for those who feel like reading the video transcript than sitting through 10+ minutes

youtubetranscript.com/?v=jneVrkgbG4o