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ziq wrote (edited )

How can industry proceed without "centralized forms of production"? Industry as it stands depends on resources from every corner of the globe being extracted and transported for refinement and processing at various other locations and then transported again for manufacturing and then again to reach warehouses and then again to reach end-consumers and then again for disposal or recycling once the consumers trash the product.

That's without mentioning all the processes to obtain and refine the fuel for every stage of transportation and the processes to manufacture the transportation vehicles and the labor and resources to build the warehouses, factories, distribution centers, roads, server farms, retail outlets and so on, or the packaging for each stage of processing and shipping.

The true cost for such arduous and unsustainable processes would be completely unfathomable without capitalism. Without exploiting and enslaving and polluting and killing and hiding reality every step of the way. There's no way humans would mass produce anything if the true cost; true destruction (up to and including the complete collapse of our entire ecosystem) weren't being hidden by capitalism.

Making industry anarchist (non-exploitative, decentralized, voluntary, sustainable) would require that all those resources be extracted, refined, processed, manufactured and disseminated in the same general location... Using only renewable resources. Using only voluntary labor.

So I don't see how anarchist industry can be possible for any technologies more advanced than axes and ceramics. Even glass requires sand, which is incredibly destructive to exploit and a rapidly diminishing resource. People are being crushed with bulldozers all over the world now so the sand can be stripped from their ancestral land by industrialist robber barons. Why would anyone that lives anarchy; that is free, voluntarily stand by as their own land is bulldozed and polluted and forever destroyed so that they can have a few glass windows and jars in exchange?

Every technology has a net cost that is absolutely immense when measured by real metrics, unskewed by capitalism's destructive manipulations. Anarchy would expose those costs so that they would effect every single person that uses those technologies directly.

This is what happens when you close yourself off from your natural environment. You don't see the true cost of the civilization you were "raised" under.

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[deleted] wrote (edited )

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ziq wrote (edited )

What about the inherent alienation that technology produces, the isolation from each other and our environment it allows? Is an alienated, isolated, emotionally closed-off populace even capable of practicing anarchy?

How do you stop "anarchist technology" from growing and creating more technology that becomes increasingly destructive and authority-forming? How do you stop technology from creating hierarchies between those that have it and those that lack it? How do you get a detached, apathetic populace that are conditioned to receiving the instant dopamine release technology produces to give a shit about anything that doesn't give them an immediate reward? How can they care about what's happening in the world outside their sterile little bubbles when they're plugged into their digital ecosystems that allow them to ignore everything outside of them until it's too late?

What does "decentralize" even mean in the context of industry? Do you mean "cottage industry" - families producing a simple local product for the local market? Can that even really be called industry? Or do you mean actual mass-industry where electronics are created from materials acquired from diverse ecosystems as I assumed? Can the tech-industry exist without mass production since technologies are made up of so many disparate components? CNC machines look like they require globalized mass industry to be manufactured. It's hard to imagine a cottage industry family workshop creating them using locally sourced materials and without exploiting others.

no one's going to bulldoze their forest to send the resources overseas

That's my point though. Tech is habit-forming. Once a population decides they "need" it, they'll oppress whoever gets in their way to acquire it. If they have to bulldoze an entire country and enslave the inhabitants to mine the minerals to make their cellphones or VR goggles, and their culture revolves around that technology, they'll do it. They won't care if they or their victims have declared themselves anarchists. Anarchism doesn't mean anything, like any word, it can be misappropriated to justify any horrible thing if framed as being for the "greater good".

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