I’m quite familiar, just overestimated how clearly defined the middle class as a societal phenomenon. Cannibal capitalism by Nancy Fraser is a great book, highly recommend.

Ok, I stand corrected on that one. But I still think that it’s a phenomenon worth investigating. I would like to hear your thoughts on the rest of that earlier comment of mine.

The economy couldn’t have grown like it used to in the last century without the middle class fuelling that growth with consumerism. Guess who owns that economy? The middle class has definitely benefited the bourgeoisie in this regard a great deal. And while it’s a breeding ground for organized opposition as you say, the majority of them are still quite comfortably sedated with bread and circuses. The material comforts are also used as justification for the righteousness of the system. It remains to be seen how long that lasts for, however.

The middle class can definitely be theoretically grounded, though not by its relation to the means of production because it’s just a subset of the working class in that regard. Notice how all the economists on the news always cry for increased consumption when the economy isn’t growing like it should? You need consumers for there to be consumption. For that you need a subset of the working class to have enough money to buy shit. It’s an incentive like any other the capitalist follow, and one that ceases to exist when the real economy stops growing and the growth transitions from the production of commodities and services into coming primarily from financialization and rent extraction (from you guess who). No need for caricature villains behind the curtains.

Apologies, I was thinking of the feudal peasant, as that seems the most relevant as we slide towards technofeudalism (this is not limited to the US).

Agreed. This is pretty much what I said in my other comment to this post.

A peasant by definition does not own the land he works. He pays taxes to the feudal landlord for the permission to work the land, so in effect rents the means of production.

The bourgeoisie were only a middle class in relation to the aristocracy above them. While there’s still some aristocrats around, they’re not relevant as a societal class. The modern middle class is a subset of the proletariat afforded enough wealth to be good little consumers fuelling the growth of the economy.

I disagree somewhat. Yes it was appeasement to a significant extent, but I think the middle class was primarily created to grow the consumer base to fuel the growth of the economy by giving a subset of the working class enough wealth to make them better consumers. At the same time they get bombarded with marketing to keep them using their limited wealth for this purpose. The rich can’t get richer if the economy (that they own) doesn’t grow in size and it can’t grow if workers can’t afford to be consumers for the products and services they produce. Financialization is the key thing that is currently (since like, Reagan and Thatcher) shaking things up. The real economy isn’t growing like it used to, with economic growth now coming primarily from asset inflation. Rent extraction and high interest debts gain even more prevalence and guess who’s paying…

I think it’s worth noting that the report exposing ziq as running a honeypot is dubious at best. The website only has that one report and an article about that report. Ziq accused the report of being ai slop, which I think may well be the case as this site just happened to pop up. Ziq also wrote a lengthy list of (alleged, I haven’t gone through them) errors in the report in the comments of the post linked in the OP here. I have no clue about the personalities of the people involved, but in my opinion the essay by Ziq in the anarchist library talking about how prisons have no place in anarchism has nothing wrong with it in and of itself.

Coercion != institutional coercion. Spontaneous self defense is an obvious example of coercion that isn’t institutional, as in an established practice. If someone punches you in the face, you don’t stop to think about what the established customs and practices dictate should be done, no, you punch back. A community kicking someone out because they can’t behave, while it would probably end up becoming established practice in time, is not established in that sense before it has become a habit for the community. Humans form institutions all the time, that is unavoidable because problems will pop up that require solutions, and then applying those solutions will become habitual because that’s more efficient than thinking every problem over from first principles. That’s why anarchism is a never ending struggle with no end and the anarchists within that society would have to start raging against the exile-machine when it starts to exile people who shouldn’t be exiled (like maybe people who disapprove of that institution). But setting out to build organized institutions of coercion even before a problem arises that would require a coercive solution that would afterwards become established practice, is backwards. The people who build this hypothetical society should cross that bridge when they get there and hopefully enough of them will realize to constantly keep a sceptical eye on any of those practices so that they don’t become too established so as to cause unnecessary harm by sheer inertia.

literally what he describes earlier in that video…

And then he says “they should lock people up”.

wait, you’re not anarchist?

I am not partial to the crime or wrongdoing in question. If I am, then I will have an opinion. My point is that prescribing solutions from the outside of a situation is authoritarian. Drawing up a constitution and a model for totally-not-prisons (institutions that will perpetuate themselves at the cost of solving the problems they were built to solve) is authoritarian.

Literally imprisonment.

If you think that shaming, ostracism, exclusion and exile are forms of imprisonment (which is different from prison as an institution, but we’ll get to that) , I don’t know what to tell you. Sure, shaming and similar rites probably involve detainment like stocks and stuff, but the timescales involved are way shorter and the purpose is shame, not detainment. Also why did you bold ADR?

The institution is the guardians, the physical cages, the perpetrators, and the victims.

so like a third party doing this, instead of the folks affected by the wrong doing?

You don’t know what institutions are? That makes sense. An institution is an established custom, practice, relationship, organization, or behavioral pattern of importance in the life of a community or society. Marriage is an institution. Prison is an institution. They are frameworks that exist independently of the people flowing through them or the physical infrastructure facilitating them. They grow in complexity in response to new problems (like more paperwork for a marriage and organizations establishing new departments, see the organizational charts of any government from a hundred years ago vs. today), they perpetuate themselves and calcify. They are the machines that anarchists rage against. The first sentence of the wikipedia page on anarchism:

Anarchism is a mostly far-left political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy…

A prison (no matter how rehabilitative or how well managed with democratic oversight) is still an institution that perpetuates authority (of the guards over the inmates for example), and quite obviously coercion. Do you see the contradiction of trying to formulate an institution that enacts coercion in a supposedly anarchistic system?

Ostracism and exile for example are much more compatible with anarchism as forms of discouraging bad behavior, because they only limit the positive freedoms of the person. No coercion needed when the community just refuses to engage with the person until they right their wrongs.

He does… we both outlined some examples…. I am asking you what corrective course do you think might work better.

The solution he proposes involves locking “sequestered citizens” up in “monitored democratic rehabilitation communities with required rehabilitative measures” in the case of the worst crimes. That’s a prison. I’m not going to prescribe a solution to a situation that I have no part in. I think the community in question should decide to handle wrongdoers how they see fit on a case by case basis.

ahistorical assertion.

I didn’t say all of them, I said plenty of…. A couple of examples from Australia and Nigeria.

By these definitions, bedrooms and closets constitute as prisons, when timing out/disciplining children

Do you think a bedroom or a closet is an institution? It’s only the institution surrounding it that differentiates a jail cell from (an often boringly decorated) bedroom.

The distinction anark argues is that there are outliers that wish injustice that do not desire to reparate & rehabilitate, what would be the corrective action to take? Compost, servitute, banishment?

And does he propose something that doesn’t involve locking people up? I’ll note that plenty of indigenous peoples managed just fine without prisons before colonialism showed up.

By the definition of “prison” you’re using, even rehabilitative facilities like nordic prisons wouldn’t be called prisons. It’s a bad definition. I prefer this one:

a place of confinement especially for lawbreakers

specifically : an institution (such as one under state jurisdiction) for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes

Anyways, the semantics are irrelevant if we focus on those outliers you mention, since reparation and rehabilitation would be out of the picture.

Yeah a prison with a focus on rehabilitation is still a prison. Nordic prisons sure are nicer than american ones for example, but they’re still prisons and to not call them that is just silly. In the video the only difference to a nordic prison is that it’s managed by a smaller scale community.

If the essay by zig which apparently started this feud is wrong on such a fundamental level and Anark is in fact against prisons (I don’t know his takes), wouldn’t the best course of action be to focus on that instead of accusing him of running a honeypot (while himself using twitter and youtube)?

The dogwhistle seems pretty far fetched tbh. They also have this nice picture on the projects community page:

ziq called that “evidence” AI generated copjacketing slop, and given that the site has just that one report, it doesn’t seem too credible. The list of factual errors in that report written out by ziq in the comments linked in the OP here is also quite lengthy.

After reading the comment thread linked in the source, damn. Harassing someone with alts and a fake ai-slop osint report just because they disapprove of the concept of prisons is… wild.

The morbid curiosity might get the better of me and I might go look what other wild takes this so-called “anark” has. Too bad that Shitter sucks to browse without an account.

I get why one would call the companies that, though.

Every car on the road today goes 400% over the speed limit.

Ok? And do you think the people making the cars don’t share responsibility for when people do stupid shit with the tools they’re given?

Guns have only one goal: kill people. AI has multiple benign applications. That’s why 99% of the world regulates guns, but not knifes.

Guns are also used for hunting, defence, sports, a variety of things other than shooting up schools. Every tool is a weapon and every weapon is a tool. The difference between the two is irrelevant. Architecture is politics, and politics is control. The way you build a system determines how it will be used. If you build a system optimized for mass surveillance, you will get a panopticon. If you build a system optimized for centralized control, you will get a dictatorship. If you build a system optimized for extraction, you will get a parasite. Modern centralized subscription service LLMs (so in effect AI as it exists in the current world, the self-hosted stuff is less than a rounding error in comparison), are a panopticon, a dictatorship and a parasite all in one.

Our whole system is run by moneyhungry sociopaths. When people are building AI, who do they think will be using it? What do they think it will be used for? But sure the protein folding research is nice.

A tool that excells at outsourcing thinking is going to be used in stupid ways.

If you build a car that goes 400% over the speed limit, don’t be surprised when someone goes over the limit with it.

“Guns don’t kill people, people do” is an age old mantra and it sounds quite similar as well. Blaming the user is a very convenient way to shift attention away from the structural issues and those causing them (the AI companies and the gun lobby).