• 0 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 30th, 2023
  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoSolarpunk@slrpnk.net•You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism
    0·
    23 days ago

    Here is another excerpt which is more relevant to more extreme acts of political violence, which is referencing this essay:

    text

    Events in recent years have amply demonstrated the correctness of its main points: 1) That means determine ends—the use of horrifying means guarantees horrifying ends; 2) That urban guerrillaism almost always leads to repression and little else—which makes it very difficult to engage in constructive political work such as organizing and education; 3) That “successful” urban guerrillaism leads to authoritarian outcomes; 4) That these results are determined by the nature of guerrillaism. Guerrillaism relies upon the capitalist media for much of its impact, presenting political acts as spectacles divorced from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people (reducing them to passive spectators), while providing the corporate media with a perfect opportunity to frighten the public into the “protective” arms of the state. To put it another way, guerrillas presume to act for the people—attempting to substitute individual acts for mass actions—thus perpetuating the division between leaders and followers (in this case, vanguardists and spectators). While the authors of You Can’t Blow Up a Social Relationship reject terrorism, it should be emphasized that they are not arguing for political passivity. They are not arguing against the many forms of direct action which form an essential part of any mass movement for fundamental social change. (Examples of such direct action include wildcat strikes, factory occupations, and civil disobedience.) Neither do they discount the quieter but equally essential efforts of those doing educational work. Finally, it should be noted that the authors are not pacifists; they believe that situations may arise in which armed self-defense becomes necessary.

    So there’s a lot of reasons, only one of which is “uninvolved people clutch their pearls” ie. fear is generated and authoritarians get fed political capital to make things worse. There’s also direct relevance to the point being made in the OP article: its actual impact focuses on media spectacle, in which most participants are reduced to unconnected spectators. This leads to the narrative

    writing itself into a corner:

    By the time the drama has become tragedy and the guerrillas lie dead about the stage, the audience of masses finds itself surrounded by barbed wire, and, while it might now feel impelled to take the stage itself, it finds a line of tanks blocking it and weakly files out to remain passive again. Those individuals who continue to object and call on the audience to storm the stage are dragged out, struggling, to the concentration camps. Guerrillaism is in the tradition of vanguardist strategies for revolution. While in general it merely leads to repression, should the strategy succeed it can only produce an authoritarian leftist regime. This is because the people have not moved into the building of a democratic movement themselves.

    After all, that CEO was replaced immediately, they’re still doing the same things, just now a lot of people are having fun posting memes about it, which is cathartic and enjoyable without being difficult or risky or meaningfully improving the situation. It doesn’t put them in a position where they have habits and social relationships that would enable them to actually do anything to help each other or exercise direct political involvement. From the OP article:

    But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoSolarpunk@slrpnk.net•You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism
    0·
    23 days ago

    Just remember that violence is so often counterproductive to the point where governments intentionally bait or false flag it as a core part of their strategy to take down activist groups. This article focuses on ways people can organize to help each other, rather than assassinations:

    Here in New York City, in the week since the inauguration, I’ve seen large groups mobilize to defend migrants from anticipated ICE raids and provide warm food and winter clothes for the unhoused after the city closed shelters and abandoned people in sub-freezing temperatures. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago, where ICE reportedly arrested more than 100 people, and in other cities where ICE has planned or attempted raids, with volunteers assigned to keep watch over key locations where migrants are most vulnerable.

    A few weeks earlier, residents created ad-hoc mutual aid distros in Los Angeles to provide food and essentials for those displaced by the wildfires. The coordinated efforts gave Angelenos a lifeline during the crisis, cutting through the false claims spreading on social media about looting and out-of-state fire trucks being stopped for “emissions testing.”

    I’ve been reading a (confusingly named) book, The Anarchist Cookbook, which I think has some strong arguments about this stuff, here is an excerpt:

    Solnit’s essay on the Oakland assault on Whole Foods is pertinent here: “This account is by a protestor who also noted in downtown Oakland that day a couple of men with military-style haircuts and brand new clothes put bandanas over their faces and began to smash stuff.” She thinks that infiltrators might have instigated the property destruction, and Copwatch’s posted video seems to document police infiltrators at Occupy Oakland. One way to make the work of provocateurs much more difficult is to be clearly committed to tactics that the state can’t co-opt: nonviolent tactics. If an infiltrator wants to nonviolently blockade or march or take out the garbage, well, that’s useful to us. If an infiltrator sabotages us by recruiting others to commit mayhem, that’s a comment on what such tactics are good for. Solnit quotes Oakland Occupier Sunaura Taylor: “A few people making decisions that affect everyone else is not what revolution looks like; it’s what capitalism looks like.” Peter Marshall’s book on the history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, points out that “The word violence comes from the Latin violare and etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act violently means to treat others without respect … A violent revolution is therefore unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human relations. Given the anarchists’ respect for the sovereignty of the individual, in the long run it is nonviolence and not violence which is implied by anarchist values.”

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoCybersecurity@sh.itjust.works•Hackers steal $1.5bn from crypto exchange in ‘biggest digital heist ever’English
    2·
    1 month ago

    It’s Ethereum, so close relevance to anything web3.

    it seems reasonable to me.

    It won’t seem reasonable to the people developing the software or running the staking nodes whose consensus would be needed, see https://nakamoto.com/credible-neutrality/ for an idea of why. Basically the idea is that the more a network acts to impartially execute algorithms than as a subjective governance body, the more it can be relied on without worrying about the potential bias of that governance, and that impartiality is at the core of its actual value. The whole “code is law” thing might not be literal reality, there is a line, but that line is located at an existential threat to the network itself (ie. the DAO hack hardfork which was the only time this was really done, or the plans for a hard fork to recover after a hypothetical quantum computing attack breaks encryption on all wallets).

    If there was an office somewhere practically able to wield a ctrl-z button for Ethereum accepting support tickets for its use, that would be a very different sort of cryptocurrency and imo not one that would be likely to work out.

    Anyway this kind of hack does suck, but I think ultimately the lesson just has to be for people to either self custody or avoid crypto entirely. Centralized crypto exchanges rarely deserve the trust placed in them.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoCybersecurity@sh.itjust.works•Hackers steal $1.5bn from crypto exchange in ‘biggest digital heist ever’English
    21·
    1 month ago

    I worked for an NFT company for awhile, and we talked about how people stealing like this would just have the funds reversed because the blockchain can fork to solve it

    This is a pretty naive perspective when it goes directly against the whole ethos of the network. You can’t have credible neutrality and also have hardfork bailouts every time a centralized exchange with poor security practices gets hacked or “hacked”, these are mutually incompatible things. For a financial infrastructure that does reversals and central authority judgment calls, there is always fiat and banks.