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aiwendil wrote (edited )

So, the way I look at it is that communism is an economic system and anarchism is a system for organizing society and decision making. Communism is a a moneyless system, where resources are more directly moved around, based on the collective ownership of resources including the means of production. This means that you I and everybody, inherent to our citizenship of a communist country would be just as entitled to any resource as anybody else. There are many ways this can be implemented, so far it has never truly been implemented, but attempts at it have combined communism with an authoritarian political system, which would often dictate where you would work by use of aptitude testing and things of the sort. This has often led to highly efficient, but extremely coercive systems in which the people have no true agency or autonomy. On the contrary Anarcho-Communism adopts anarchistic, non-hierarchal decision making practices to take a more egalitarian approach to communism. I personally believe that in order for a society to be truly classless, as communism was initially envisioned to be, you would have to also have no ruling class, which also means no vanguard. I think the nature of anarchy with adjectives, is that everybody has a different sense of what this means and whether or not a vanguard could work in this paradigm, but that is my take. I think within Anarcho-Communism nationalizing resources is completely unnecessary, but socializing them is in fact ideal. In that sense the computer I am using would be our computer, not my computer, but as a society we could decide to have as many computers as are needed to meet our computing needs. This might even change the way we computed. We could have a much more "cloud," centric design, where the units we would access would just be terminals that connect to a supercomputer. Re-imagining computing this way might make you think about how we might re-imagine other things: Transportation(could be much more communal public transportation rather than the individual driven idea of car ownership), housing, farming, what have you). Hope this all makes sense.

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TOTaIleyAnTeWaxeCAmB wrote

while I agree with you on most of this, I think a public cloud and computers being treated as public resources creates a big threat to the individual

after all, anarchism/communism/socialism can remove the need for private property in many senses- but personal computing needs a huge update in order to embrace security AND privacy while allowing public contact on all physical nodes. Personally I don't feel any current security protocols, esp those easily understood and implemented by the avg individual, are a good fit for this.

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aiwendil wrote (edited )

I agree with this in a lot of ways based on my non-idealistic understanding of the current world we live in. I think Anarcho-Communism is idealistic, I am not sure it can ever be implemented as it kind of requires all of humanity or at least large groups of humans functioning as a sort of hive mind. I am not sure what is innately human and what has been conditioned by capitalism, but I like to think that in a truely communist society we would have less need for the secure computing channels that our current world requires. I think in the current society we live in we need to hyper decentralize, but in other worlds with different rules it might be more efficient and thus advantageous to hyper centralize certain resources to make them more accessible. However you could obviously take another tack and that would be that each individual could function as their own infrastructure. Like we would all connect via mesh networks whose infrastructure was directly owned as in personal not private property, by the operator themselves. I was just kind of laying out possibilities and I think it is easy to think of computing that way and then extrapolate that sort of functionality to transportation and farming and housing, etc. I tend to think the best we as humans can probably do is to create hyper decentralized mesh services, both digitally and in the real world. Like we could all farm a little bit on our roofs or in our yard and specialize in whatever and then share those resources with neighbors and the community for example. That is just a structure we can create to make more autonomy for ourselves within a capitalist paradigm, but those things tend to get criminalized in hyper capitalistic countries very quickly.

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aiwendil wrote

I want to clarify that I don't believe in the whole "nothing to hide," rhetoric. I just believe a lot of why we need to compute securely is because we have non-transparent government entities nefariously spying and criminalizing the people they spy on for simple things like sharing ideas or innovating to make their lives better or easier and also because we live in a coercive society that requires us to securely transfer funds, but in a society where money didn't exist and we freely shared resources, there may be no need of internet privacy as our private lives could go back to being lived out largely in person. To think of communism without trust as it would have to exist in out world is a huge undertaking.

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TOTaIleyAnTeWaxeCAmB wrote

I love you.

I completely agree and honestly think the key would be to have some sort of public and private profiles? Honestly a nig part of my thinking foes tro human activities of flirting- sharing nudes has become a big part of technology and society. There's nothing wrong with that- but there are networks out there that are (mostly) outside monetary models and depending more on rep. Most of it still has to do with capitalist breakdowns of star and celebrity- btu I can still see a decentralized community still having an underground n00dz community, much more easily perpetuated by current models of "access tot eh device, access to the data" standards.

The proliferation of easy to use, secure FOSS is certainly helping with this though.

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aiwendil wrote

The nudes thing is actually a really important thing I hadn't considered at all and I am sure it could apply to a lot of things, like even a love letter that you just want one person to read or the parlance of some embarrassing story or event that you vulnerably share to a confidant.

I certainly think if we all truly owned all resources collectively we would have less need of secure transport for things like scientific data, proprietary information, tax returns and the like, because some things just wouldn't need to exist like tax returns and social security numbers and particularly proprietary information, and scientific data would be collectively owned, so for profit repositories and journals need not be the gate keepers of such knowledge, but vulnerable sharing is certainly something that needs to be of paramount importance in designing systems. I appreciate that perspective a lot.

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TOTaIleyAnTeWaxeCAmB wrote (edited )

That's the thing. I feel a lot of the reasons we currently need so many security mechanisms comes down to capitalism- an IPS/IDS seems like overkill in a decentralized system removed from an "economy"

but I do feel human nature doesn't remove certain aspects- some ppl will use other's physical selves as leverage. Creating systems to prevent that- much less in a totally free system where physical devices are shared makes certain kinds of privacy, which are really nice (albeit not necessary), very challenging

edit: just responding because I love this subject and would love feedback on this subject

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