"Kolektiva is an anti-colonial anarchist collective that offers federated social media to anarchist collectives and individuals in the fediverse. For the social movements and liberation!"
> kolektiva.social was launched by "the anarchist video colletives subMedia and Antimidia".
Which may be a front for the FBI. There is probably a really good chance that any social site that is catering to the groups outside of the mainstream has the FBI behind it.
The Proud Boys were heavily infiltrated up to and including Enrique Tarrio. Atomwaffen was entirely astroturfed. The libertarians entrapped in the Gretchen Whitmer case. The "right" has a long history of FBI infiltration--klan meetings being comprised entirely of feds trying to bust each other has been a running joke for decades.
The "left" is similar, but it's not usually the the FBI these days AFAICT.
They were legitimately a group of mentally ill losers sharing edgy memes. The FBI got involved (see Josh Sutter) and began producing those well-crafted propaganda materials, including videos featuring actors wearing identical clothes to actual members. A lot of them got spooked and jumped ship. Those who stayed were literally drugged as part of "occult initiation" rituals, and, yes, some were finally convinced to carry out murders.
I've always felt like the fact that they seem to constantly be thoroughly invested in the right wing groups and let them persist, while they barely infiltrate the left and done everything they can to destroy them asap, really suggests theyre not so much infiltrating the right wingers as much as taking control because they actually support the underlying ideology....
But maybe that's just something I see and is just a perception issue.
I am no expert but my understanding is that anarchy is against rulers, not rules. And, insisting on carefully keeping in check the power of those who are given temporary power over others.
Is the intention of your reply to promote the stereotype that anarchy equals lawlessness and chaos?
From Wikipedia:
Anarchist organizations come in a variety of forms, largely based upon common anarchist principles of voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, and direct action. They are also largely informed by anarchist social theory and philosophy, tending towards participation and decentralization.
How do you make efficient decisions and coordinate actions against an enemy who has decided that hierarchy allows them to wage war more efficiently and effectively.
Anarchy hand waives away so many critical problems. It seems like a different flavor of libertarianism.
I have a casual belief that anarchy is an ideology pushed by foreign interests (Russia in particular) namely to cause chaos and prevent institutional investment from otherwise liberal people. Institutions build power and power can be used for good or bad. Societies operations depends on good people getting into positions of power out of a sense of responsibility, rather than bad people getting into power out of a sense of ambition.
Politics is largely an idea of how the game prisoners dilemma should be played. Libertarians and anarchists alike believe in an "always cooperate" strategy because "defection" is not a wildly different concept than domination. To defect against someone who cooperates is to dominate them. These ideologies take the stance that no one should be able to dominate, but fail to properly account for those who will choose to try to dominate anyway. These ideologies fail because no matter how much anyone wishes otherwise, might is the ultimate arbiter of disputes and participating in a hierarchy makes you, in the aggregate sense, stronger.
This means it is a somewhat a fools errand to fight oppression because it assumes a position of less power. One must be able to oppress and then choose not to. Then you run into the greater problem of if there are no consequences for you because you are able to oppress, why should you be bound by an ideology that inhibits you?
The biggest problem any anarchist faces is that they think they need to fight the police rather than become the police. An ideologically consistent anarchist should be on the police force exercising their individual power against those who try to dominate others and changing the culture of societies enforcers from within rather than thinking they can fight it from outside.
I find it interesting that people think rules can only be enforced by a position of power above the offender, rather than a consensus of their peers and equals.
Historical anarchists enforced their rules through a state apparatus that organized mob lynchings and targeted killings. The CNT-FAI and Ukrainian Free State both had secret police organizations, and the former was no stranger to political terror.
Indeed, all successful (even temporarily) anarchist groups grow a state apparatus.
Which is inherently fine, states are a tool of class warfare. The capitalist ruling class uses state power for its own ends, a successful worker ruling class needs to do the same.
No anarchism (not anarchy) is not ideology pushed by foreign interests. Lack of institutional investment in US isn't caused by few people believing in anarchism.
1. Deciding what the rules should be. How rules are generated to start with. (Meta rules).
2. Decide when the rules are broken. Human affairs are messy. So there should be an arbitration process to say “yes rule 1, 4 and 5” were broken by members x, and y.
3. How rules are enforced. To punish someone you may need some real power over them. Throw them out of a meeting. Impose a fine. Jail them in the basement?
Speaking as a computer nerd would a distributed consensus like Multipaxos or Raft but for anarchists work?
They can send messages between each other with increasing epoch numbers and everything.
The problem are the Byzantine failures. Members colluding with each others to take over and not replying truthfully. Also how to accept new members who are not FBI informants.
What do you do if everyone decides Joana has to go sit in the basement as punishment and reflect on her behavior, but she doesn’t want to. Need an new ballot to decide who the group of enforcers will be. Start a new Raft proposal round…
The main primitive a government deals with is disputes. The main unit of corruption is loyalty.
Conservative spectrum ideologies are about systems of loyalty and therefore concern a dominance hierarchy.
Liberal spectrum ideologies are about choosing a set of values that are more important than loyalty including loyalty to oneself. Liberal spectrum ideologies require dominance of values, which requires making responsible (another word for self-sacrificial) choices and "cancelling" those who violate core values.
Most people who believe in human rights don't know they are dirty globalists. To believe in human rights is to believe human rights should be protected, which implies an entity capable of protecting those rights or solving disputes about those rights. Most people who are anti-"being the world police", haven't fully contemplated what it means if we leave a vacuum and China decides they are the world police.
War, more than anything else, is about choosing which legal framework governs a given territory. The Ukraine war is about whether Russian law or Ukrainian law binds the territory of Ukraine. War determines who's police have authority. War determines who's system of justice provides it.
People that want freedom need to stop thinking about fighting power, and think about becoming power. Power is amoral, it is neither good nor bad, it is a tool to be used for good or for bad. Anarchists should focus on tools of power, which are institutions. Unions are this institution, becoming a police officer and providing a counter balance to "those who burn crosses who join forces" does more to further anarchy's goals than anything else.
One has a very simple choice. Wield power or be subject to it.
People will continue to keep forming groups and multiplying their efforts and that creates power imbalances, and people will continue to keep seeking to try to wield that power.
So what needs to happen is that the government, corporations, unions, and organized religion need to be set against each other and kept in balance. That only happens through the people being educated though and being involved and able to restrict what they can do. Although corporations themselves are formed like dictatorships and that needs to fundamentally change so that they're at least more like representative democracy.
There's still going to be power hierarchies, though, but the point is to minimize them.
Of all the different philosophies, though, anarchism is at least solidly in the right direction, even if the end goals are impossible. But I think its a lot like the "paradox" of intolerance, where the naively perfect world isn't a stable optimum, but that doesn't invalidate getting closer to that being better.
This is the sad norm. Leftist websites have been mostly seized by permanently online rules lawyers, who try to proactively block any slight against the moderation. Usually relating to mainstream identity politics, and to the point of suffocating discussion for those outside of their in-group.
It was not always like this, and I hope one day these narcissistic weirdos leave, and people can once again discuss freely.
Don’t they also have moderators? People to enforce the rules? Plus an administrator who owns the server and can even remove moderators? That’s a hierarchy.
It's just a server, not governance over their collective. Ideally they had backups or people owned their own data on a DHT or Blockchain. Otherwise the administrator has custody over the data...similar to a bank having custody over funds. My understanding is if someone breaks the trust, the victims would have a way to settle grievances...probably through a fine or some other financial means.
You realize that heirarchy is exactly how you enforce rules, correct? You can't enforce rules without heirarchy. Seems to me it's you who has no idea what anarchy is. "no slaves, no masters" doesn't mean people who can arbitrarily enforce "rules."
> You realize that heirarchy is exactly how you enforce rules, correct? You can't enforce rules without heirarchy.
That's not necessarily true, is it? All participants of an instance or group could practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy to form and enforce a set of rules without hierarchies. Not saying that's what happened here though...
Sure, but I don't think just only having direct democracy is sufficient, especially in an anarchist society.
The only nation state currently that somewhat has a form of direct democracy (Major emphasis on somewhat)- Switzerland- still has absurd hierarchies, some even more so than other countries, where entire cantons can decide who can or cannot move somewhere.
no you don't understand their hierarchy is totally temporary and they can just change it at any time unlike 'unjustified' hierarchies, also everything will just operate on a gift economy and somehow no one will exploit this
I hear the analogy of nations having an anarchist relationship with each other. There is no hierarchy of soverign nations but there certainly are power dynamics. If one nation breaks a treaty, for example, the other nation delivers some form of punishment as a deterrence.
What does it matter what I realize? I was explaining what anarchists believe, and why "you have rules!!!" is not some sort of clever gotcha. As an adult human, I'm fully capable of understanding beliefs without sharing them.
Not all anarchists are ultra-leftists bent on controlling thoughts through the control of speech. Some even say anarchism is about individual freedom above everything else, including above "minority" groups.
1. a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems: the country has been plunged into a state of anarchy.
2. the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government;
I can't tell if you understand or not, but your "first definition" is a grammatically correct pejorative. The second is a reference to a political philosophy.
What's happening in this comment thread is that people are "confusing" a mastodon instance dedicated to the political philosophy with a group dedicated to being in a state of disorder. It's neither productive to the discussion nor witty.
It’s only come to be a pejorative in recent times. Originally it was the only definition. This goes back at least as far as Aristotle’s political theory in which he categorized systems by the number of rulers (one, few, or many) and whether or not the rulers were “correct” (working toward the greater good) or “deviant” (working toward selfish aims). Aristotle did not recognize rule by “none” or “all” within his schema.
As for the modern pejorative connotation, it’s grounded in a critique: how do anarchist societies cope with motivated and determined rule-breakers without devolving into chaos?
So you understand the difference between the two definitions and you are falsely equating them in your first comment on purpose? In order to derail the conversation? That's disappointing.
No, I’m not equating them. I’m relating them. They are related. Anarchists have yet to demonstrate that they can build a robust society grounded in their theories (second definition) that doesn’t descend into anarchy (first definition), or result in some individual/group seizing power and putting down the opposition, betraying anarchist principles.
What anarchists propose is not in principle impossible, but it’s never been demonstrated to be practical. A near-universal critique of utopias is that they are not robust in the face of sustained opposition: that is, they assume everyone is ideologically aligned.
Nations absolutely have strong hierarchical relationships with one another. The US, for example, tends to use a lot of strong-arm tactics in its foreign policy in order to force smaller nations to toe the line.
If that's the sort of society anarchists envision for individuals, I have to say they're not being very ambitious!
Nations do not have a hierarchical relationship...only power dynamics, which is the strong-arm tactics that you mention. People are not hierarchical either. If nations or people become less dependent on a hierarchy for their survival, then they are freed from the constraints of & the burden of maintaining that hierarchy or pyramid scheme. This is a reason why totalitarian governments do not want people thinking for themselves or doing things that bring independence outside of that system. A pyramid scheme needs the people to do things to claim that the pyramid scheme itself did those things. In reality, the pyramid scheme did not build the roads, people built the roads.
> If that's the sort of society anarchists envision for individuals, I have to say they're not being very ambitious!
That's a reductionist take but ok...I'm not an anarchist & take a more pragmatic view to my own circumstances but I do appreciate the contributions that the various anarchist Philosophies to contribute.
For me, it's less about envisioning a new society but more about realizing the reality of what actually is...beneath the veneer that we call society is a regime enforced with violence & the imposition of a pyramid scheme on people whether or not they want to take part in it. The government does not make anything but only transfers resources at a loss. If some people gain resources at the expense of many others, then the people gaining the resources are happy while the others who are supporting the system are downtrodden. If the downtrodden stop participating in their own exploitation, violence is committed against them to accept their servitude. Effectively, you cannot have a pyramid scheme without some sort of colonialism or slavery. When the colonized realize they can remove the imposed yoke & organize in other ways, they do. What happens then?
I'm curious to know what you would say are the necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of affairs to qualify as a social hierarchical relationship, if lopsided power dynamics do not.
This is a reason why totalitarian governments do not want people thinking for themselves or doing things that bring independence outside of that system
I think you're mistaking authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes (such as Russia or China) seek to create an environment of depoliticization and disengagement, allowing them to go about their domestic business without any opposition. Totalitarian regimes do the opposite: extreme political mobilization of the population toward a particular aim. The difference is readily apparent when these two regime types institute a draft: disengaged people flee, mobilized people sign up to fight.
For me, it's less about envisioning a new society but more about realizing the reality of what actually is...beneath the veneer that we call society is a regime enforced with violence & the imposition of a pyramid scheme on people whether or not they want to take part in it.
Who has the monopoly on organized violence is the primary question answered by any political philosophy. My main criticism of anarchism is that it doesn't offer a solution to this problem, it merely punts. Power naturally accrues to those most willing to use it, so a diffusion of power is a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum.
> I'm curious to know what you would say are the necessary and sufficient conditions for any state of affairs to qualify as a social hierarchical relationship, if lopsided power dynamics do not.
An explicit organizational structure with a chain of command, often involving taxes & a locus of governing power with titles.
> I think you're mistaking authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes (such as Russia or China) seek to create an environment of depoliticization and disengagement, allowing them to go about their domestic business without any opposition. Totalitarian regimes do the opposite: extreme political mobilization of the population toward a particular aim. The difference is readily apparent when these two regime types institute a draft: disengaged people flee, mobilized people sign up to fight.
I tend to delineate a given prescriptive title from the descriptive attributes of action. With that in mind, the West & Democratic processes can be Totalitarian. A 51% of the vote to institute totaltiarianism is a Totalitarian government in my opinion. A bureaucratic rule by experts, prevalent in the west, often avoids Democratic processes anyways, leading to a fascist structure of public/private partnerships where corporations, franchised by the state, wield enormous political control over the lives of the people. The scientific process itself becomes corrupted to work within the framework of funding potential instead of inquiry for knowledge. With that said, personal autonomy, freedom, & liberty are key principles to uphold to avoid Totalitarianism. This includes the freedom not to be imposed on by others. The application of these principles change over time as there are no absolutes.
Pyramid structures are inherently unstable as the importance of necessary work is deincentivized in favor of power grabbing. An example of the consequences is how planned obselecence & profit seeking has diminished the combat capacity of the West. Russia is very successful in the Ukraine war against NATO despite having a fraction of the military budget of NATO. Another example is the dissonance between elites & the working class.
> Who has the monopoly on organized violence is the primary question answered by any political philosophy. My main criticism of anarchism is that it doesn't offer a solution to this problem, it merely punts. Power naturally accrues to those most willing to use it, so a diffusion of power is a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum.
My take is that Anarchism is a reaction to the political & social climate. The attractor is distribution of power & force rather than a monopoly. The problem with monopolies is that the locus of power attracts the Psychopaths & Sociopaths who will eventually take over the seats of power & leverage the concentrations of power. If the structures of power were more distributed, then Psychopaths & Sociopaths have less leverage & are more incentivized to do work that benefits their communities. Human nature does not change & people work within a framework of incentives. Centralized power incentivizes grabbing power due to the benefits of being at the top of the Pyramid scheme without having to do work that benefits the community...If the pyramid schemes were less powerful & overarching, there would be less incentive & impact to climb to the top of the pyramid & more incentive to provide value to the community.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but with distributed power, there would be no vacuum. Violence is used to consolidate power & is a net loss, so measures to disincentivize violence can be created within the community...including non-cooperation, ostricization, & even ganging up on an actor harming others. Ganging up on people happens today in the political realm, where some people are deemed "enemies of the State" & "domestic terrorists" despite not being violent. In that case, the principles have been corrupted to suit political ambition, rallying the apparatus of the state to commit violence against people with a different worldview & opinion.
> Russia is very successful in the Ukraine war against NATO despite having a fraction of the military budget of NATO. Another example is the dissonance between elites & the working class.
You mean the war where Russia is getting so desperate that they are using tanks as VBIEDs, which is the same war that NATO has yet to participate in?.
You may want to read The Tyranny of Structurelessness [1] by feminist Jo Freeman. She explains in detail what happens when you abolish formal hierarchies. Spoiler: informal hierarchies replace them (which you do not recognize as hierarchies, but which nevertheless exist).
Psychopaths and sociopaths will always exist (barring some totalitarian mass genetic engineering project). They will always be looking to pry open the cracks in society and find an advantage. The benefit of formal power structures is not that they prevent tyranny (they don’t) but that they make it legible. A legible tyranny at least stands a chance of being held to account.
Nations are highly-organized grouping of people. So what you're saying is, very large and cohesive groups of people can relate to one another without overt rules, therefore, so can individuals. That's a non sequitur.
I recall him saying something in his works about not caring if his writings led to complete disorder and destruction, because it is irrelevant to him so long as he pleases his ego by writing.
Edit, here's the quote from The Ego and Its Own:
"Do I write out of love to men? No, I write because I want to procure for my thoughts an existence in the world; and, even if I foresaw that these thoughts would deprive you of your rest and your peace, even if I saw the bloodiest wars and the fall of many generations springing up from this seed of thought – I would nevertheless scatter it. Do with it what you will and can, that is your affair and does not trouble me. You will perhaps have only trouble, combat, and death from it, very few will draw joy from it."
Yeah I guess that's one interpretation of that but I would interpret that rather as pessimism and staunch authenticity while he actually did want a better world (which is what all anarchism is really about.)
Fascinating. I thought anarchy was supposed to be all about unfettered freedom of association and trade with no governmental oversight. They seem to be defining it as opposition to the existing societal structure rather than a description of the desired structure.
In fairness, I assume their rules are for residents of that server, not accounts which are federated in.
A lot of it seems like typical internet forum common sense, no spam, no extreme content (gore/porn), that sort of stuff. But the rest just reads off as "don't post stuff we don't like such as pepe frogs, alt right symbols, star wars spoilers, flat earthers, holocaust deniers" without directly naming it.
Oh, I scrolled down and they do specifically mention nazi germany and covid19.
They fund out that in order to move, the rubber has to hit the road. Idealism and vigorous wishing, does not make things happen in this world, they found out.
Privacy fail 101. Never, ever host on US servers. Too often, protestors just let the fascist dick authorities lock them away for decades because they have absolute zero security hygiene and invite investigators to collect mountains of potential evidence to sift for which laws were technically broken to get a conviction.
0. Never use Signal (tied to a phone number), iMessage, email, or text messaging. Use Sessions, the fork of Signal without a phone number for anonymous group chats.
1. Never give out personal phone numbers. They are real-time traceable with ease.
2. Email if you must self-hosted on a VPS in Iceland or Sweden paid in BTC/LTC crypto.
3. Never use real names. Have a nom de guerre.
4. Leave your cellphone in a signal blocking bag in airplane mode.
5. Buy a gopro (in cash) and a chesty or head mount.
6. Never upload media directly to any site. Remove metadata and lower the resolution. Wipe source material and store it on encrypted media such as in a VeraCrypt volume.
7. Anyone who refuses to follow privacy procedures is either a naïve liability or a cop.
8. Anyone agitating for violence against specific or unspecified actual people is either a crazy fool, a dumb fool, or a dumb cop.
9. Hygiene is important, so do your part with an anti facial recognition surgical mask. Down with COVID!
10. That random person you met may actually be on a terror watch list. Being connected to them in any way, including being seen together on social media (now deep fakeable) is enough to put you on the radar of the security apparatus. This isn't speculative paranoia but what occurs routinely from on or before 2009. Friend of mine received a call from his boss who allegedly received a call from an intelligence service advising that a group picture on Facebook from an afterparty included someone "who's known as a Bad Dude(tm) from a foreign intelligence service." There's still a long game cold war just beneath the surface being played by ~10k people as rare as encountering a real Navy SEAL but you probably don't want extra airline checkpoint screenings and questions for the rest of your life.
https://ips-dc.org/three-felonies-day/ <-- People commit felonies unwittingly without intent and lack the resources to defend themselves. This makes them easy targets for DAs and investigators to pad their stats.
"In the world’s most incarcerated country, some high-profile sex offenders walk free [because they're rich]."
- John Kiriakou (June 10, 2015)
Even if not directly relevant to the case, it's a good list o opsec measures for someone whose relationships with powerful enough groups (not only a government) are strained.
I know about the Red Scare. After reading about Venona project, the fact that most spies in 40s-50s were almost all communists I understand how the red scare came to be and support it.
The government comes after people left and right all the time who don’t do any of those things.
I’m conflicted here. I’m familiar enough with online “leftist” (especially of the supposed anti-colonial stripe) spaces to know how many bad, often highly illegal things are coordinated there. But I’m familiar enough with the FBI to know that their actual activities often consist of terrorizing political dissidents for no other reason than to neutralize their opinions. Without more information, it’s sensible to to default to innocent until proven guilty and push the FBI to justify themselves.
A decade ago the FBI heavily shifted its focus to CVE, countering violent extremism. At that time, the focus was on Muslims and groups that could be perceived as proxies for their interests (Anti-War protesters, pro-Palestinian groups). CVE relies on debunked theories about radicalization, and its definition of violent extremism includes peaceful, constitutionally-protected, political speech.
More recently, focus narrowed from violent extremism to RMVE, racially-motivated violent extremism, focusing on white supremacist groups--the definition of "white supremacist" being interpreted so broadly as to include explicitly anti-racist libertarian groups.
Given that the FBI officially considers "violent extremism" something to be extirpated, and defines it so broadly that the majority of the activity falling under that umbrella is legal political activity, I don't really see how you can possibly make the case that the FBI isn't trying to quash dissent. FBI raids have a chilling effect on political activity, they know this, and they use it.
If the NSA’s going after you they can probably hack your instance more easily than a professional one. Spambots might just do it anyway because one guy doesn’t have a full security infrastructure.
Why do crypto and Fediverse people keep recommending people do the work of entire corporations for security? Those companies don’t employ hundreds of cybersecurity professionals for no reason
In this case the admins of this instance voluntarily disclosed the breach. What are the odds that in some future breach, on some other instance, the users will not benefit from the same treatment? And how should Mastodon users behave online as a result?
The Fediverse is by and large an unencrypted platform, and users should be under no illusion that toots and private messages are accessible to anyone with access to the server.
This is an acceptable tradeoff for most people, and you can use Briar if it isn't an acceptable tradeoff for your social circle.
Please _never_ _ever_ put a production database on a system which is not permanently in office, preferably never on any desktop system at all.
Not just unencrypted databases any production database no matter the state of encryption.
There is quite a large variety of reasons for this some security related, some liability (and similar legal reasons) related.
I know it's not very convenient, annoying and sucks. But as system administrators we have responsibilities to uphold (which is partially why I normally not work as a sysadmin, eh, also maybe just ignore me).
I should have been more clear: Desktop systems at home, independent of weather they are owned by the company or a private person.
EDIT: Or server system at home, or systems in a office which are not secured enough from physical access etc. etc. etc.
The cloud can for most companies/use-cases generally be assumed to be a physically secure location where it's extremely unlikely that a warrant for something else also accidentally include the systems.
Basically any location where the system is not either legally treated as company property and which is secur
In case anyone else was wondering.
Accoridng to <https://breadtube.fandom.com/wiki/Kolektiva>, kolektiva.social was launched by "the anarchist video colletives subMedia and Antimidia".