• 39 Posts
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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2019

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  • Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.

    How are you defining mass parties? Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as “parties designed for a mass society”, where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.

    When did they stop working, and why?

    There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.

    The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you’re working with don’t change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.






  • It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

    In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

    For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.




  • ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.






  • No, it’s global. There are two timeslots to better accommodate the broadest possible crowd. TWC is mostly active in the USA and Europe atm, because the Indian chapter basically merged with the local IT union and stopped operating as TWC.

    The event is organized by the TWC Global chapter, which is the “digital” chapter that supports the local chapters throughout the world.




  • You cannot escape social norms. The act of rejecting them doesn’t free you from them. You will be judged for rejecting them and others will adapt to it, either by rejecting them too and creating a new social norm, or shunning you and attaching a certain rejection to a specific social signal. There’s nothing artificial on it. The logic you describe is very oblivious to how social norms and social actors work.

    Also here we are talking about webcams not really as technological artifacts, but as social tools. Obviously it’s not a technical requirement to be presentable, but a social requirement, that’s implicit in the discussion.