Author: Neil Mather

Very wiki / garden / agora adjacent.

“Memory/​narrative. Given the importance of strategy and grand strategy in anarchist cybernetics, functionality in an alternative digital platform to support long-​term planning, for example through facilitating a narrative-​ or memory-​focused layer to communication and organising, would be essential. This would entail a shift away from the short-​term stream-​centred approach of mainstream social media, where users experience content as isolated posts with little relation to what has come before them or what will follow them.”

— Anarchist Cybernetics

“In comparing social with cerebral organisations one important feature of the brain should be kept in mind; we find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big Brother. Within our heads our very lives depend on equality of opportunity, on specialisation with versatility, on free communication and just restraint, a freedom without interference. Here too local minorities can and do control their own means of production and expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbours. If we must identify biological and political systems our own brains would seem to illustrate the capacity and limitations of an anarcho-syndicalist community.”

— Grey Walter

I very much enjoyed Alison Powell’s book Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities.

"It is relatively straightforward to optimize transportation or the collection of recycling but more difficult to optimize volunteering, knowing neighbors, or creating local capacity to take care of people in a crisis."

Living in rotation.

"Many formerly squatted-in buildings emerged into collective ownership and some, like K9, where one of Freifunk’s founders lived, embraced radical principles of common governance."

[…]

"These buildings could have dozens of apartments, and at K9, apartments were inhabited in rotation so that all building residents would have an equal chance to live in the larger or more beautiful spaces."

— Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities

Reading Chapter 2 of Anarchist Cybernetics I am stoked. It (briefly) mentions slime mould and bird flocks as examples of self-organisation in nature. I studied this kind of thing in Evolutionary and adaptive systems. And it mentions the potential for decentralised Political organisation afforded by the many-to-many communication of e.g. social media. Like Free, Fair and Alive this book is tying together a lot of my interests in one place.