incremental_anarchist

joined 1 month ago

I'm really into youth liberation and the various ideas surrounding rethinking education. I'm a parent and am sending my kid to a Montessori, but I'd really love a whole system where child raising and education are seen less as responsibilities for the nuclear family unit to have full control over and a communal responsibility that everyone participated in. Letting kids guide their own education (under the general advice that anything important to learn will be intrinsically motivating, and anything that isn't can be encouraged through instilling values rather than forcing curriculums), making things mastery focused rather than using grades and limiting ones future prospects based on their performance on tests (which, more than anything else, simply correlate with things like food security and access to tutors and stuff), generally getting rid of the concept of kids being rankable in intelligence, and above all defining a box of what's "neurotypical" and what's not (in favor of the neurodiversity framework).

With that in mind, I liked that this article made some good points about how this process should be decentralized and involve communities determining what they think will work best for them, and being okay with some not achieving the goals they set out with.

But I have to say, it was pretty hard to read. In particular, the negative parallelisms every 2nd sentence just interrupted the flow with constant thoughts of "this is likely written with the help of ChatGPT".

Also, man it can be hard to find local community members to try any of this stuff with. A lot of the resources in unschooling are also tied to religious and/or conservative families wanting to homeschool so the parents can better enforce specific ideas on their kids, rather than seeking child liberation.

Yeah, I certainly want people who want to see new people, topics, and points of view to be able to do so. Fortunately, I think networks of trust are pretty good at getting you to far away ideas pretty quickly though. Veritasium actually did a video on this quite recently but basically even a small number of connections outside the "bubbles" create bridges that connect networks really well.

I think a system that put this into practice would need precise controls over who gets added to your network (e.g. friend this person but don't add their friends to the network of trust, or block this person and prevent any of their friends from being added to the network of trust, or friend this person but privately so others can't use that connection in their own networks of trust, etc.). That would help with balancing seeing a lot of posts while still "exploring" the network at your own pace and comfort level.

And today discoverability is still pretty weird and closed off. You either get algorithmic feeds that just show you shit they think you'd like, and you're likely to see posts from influencers a bunch, causing para social relationships, or nobodies who you've never seen before and never will again, making it hard to form a connection. Or, you have closed off groups like discord servers that aren't very "permeable". You can't, say, use the server you like and use it to "explore" similar communities.

So alongside the network of trust I think being able to "traverse" the network would help discoverability. I picture this as like a digital neighborhood, where being friends with someone is like them being your neighbor, and you can "walk down the street" so to speak, and the further out you walk the further the people may be from your "bubble". I don't know exactly what that would look like in practice, but one idea I've played around with is myspace style pages. So instead of a global feed, you go to someones page, see their friends and some posts that spark your interest, so you go to the friends page, and so on.

But IDK, this is all theoretical and IDK exactly what such an app would look like. But I think the discoverability problem is solvable in a network of trust based platform

[–] incremental_anarchist@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well part of the network of trust would be enabling a protocol or platform where individuals can control their identity and data, and thus use clients that don't use AI.

I'm also not sure I agree with the idea of echo chambers being bad or even a thing to avoid. You're already in various echo chambers of varying sizes, based on your interests, spoken languages, and so on. It would certainly be cool for people to just learn all languages and learn all about every culture and every point of view, etc., but that's simply not feasible. So who, then, decides which cultures and points of views to prioritize? Well I don't want the answer to be the some company or some nation, so it really has to be the individual.

Besides, a lot of the reasons an individual might have for not engaging with certain points of view can be quite reasonable. I don't want to force trans people to regularly expose themselves to posts by transphobes, for example. Society can handle that particular interaction not occurring. And once again it just comes down to who gets to decide which interactions are worth having and which aren't, and it's really going to come down to individuals and what they're individually comfortable with. Sure, a transphobe interacting with trans people might change their ways, but I think we can find better ways of fixing transphobes existing than building a platform where trans people become obligated to do exposure therapy for transphobes.

I think a lot of the "we have to avoid echo chambers" sentiments stems from an unfounded trust in liberal democracy and the free market of ideas. Time and time again, it's been shown that that just leads to allowing extremists to portray their ideas as having some level of legitimacy. It's what leads to fascism and hate (even though ironically you'll see people argue echo chambers do that instead).

[–] incremental_anarchist@slrpnk.net 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Yeah I think this comes down to centralized moderation in general. The fediverse helps, but you're still ultimately picking a server to have control over your identity and data and to police your behavior.

I don't like twitter-likes, but blueskys version of moderation seems a bit better, although the bluesky corporation still has more influence than I'd like (even if it is technically avoidable).

Honestly, I think what would be best is a sort of "network of trust", where you just see posts from friends of friends, and you explore the network by adding friends. It would eliminate bot spam immediately, and limit virality (which lowkey I think hurts people generally unless they're making money off it being an influencer, which I also don't like enabling) but makes discoverability harder. You'd need to find a way for ideas to spread easily while limiting any specific posts' reach

The whole using directions for different ideas/concepts is so tiring. If you ask someone what the difference is between wanting horizontal change vs sideways change I don't think anyone would be able to give a reasonable answer.

In this case, they're also just describing the horizontal change anyways??? Anarchism already has decentralization as a core tenet, it's already about allowing pluralities. There is no one "anarchism" in the same way this article is trying to argue there is no one "degrowth".

[–] incremental_anarchist@slrpnk.net 23 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I agree with this take and have been making similar arguments, especially to those who didn't go because they didn't see it as useful for a leftist cause. Like, as if sitting at home waiting for the revolution to happen on its own is somehow a better use of your time.

2% is huge. Mobilizing that many Americans is a massive accomplishment, and if even a tiny fraction of that go on to join the local orgs they likely just discovered or otherwise help to build up their local community, unlearn individualism, or do what they can to ease their community's dependence on the global capitalist system, that's still a hell of a lot more than anything else that would have happened this weekend.

Like, there's this idea that some vanguard party is going to just take over the US and press the communism button and I really don't buy it. We're a very large country with a lot of people who've been propagandized since birth with neoliberal and individualist brain worms, and I think right now we really do need to be working to change that wherever we are currently living. That'll create the material conditions necessary for a national change.