Category Archives: Culture

Choosing a path for wealth redistribution

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We’re all suffering under capitalism. There are lots of efforts out there to shift the world to a better place. And yet, it doesn’t yet feel like enough, at least to me. So I want to start logging what I’m seeing out there in the world, so far as fighting back. I know it’s there. Hell, I know a lot of people doing the actual work. I take small steps in my own life to help create a more just world. But I truly feel like we’re on the cusp of something different. As Saul Williams opened with when I saw him last year, we are the death doulas of empire.

A bit ago, I brought together folks from the anticapitalist art and music festival I help produce, neighbors organizing against fascism, and some guests from the esteemed East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative to talk about wealth redistribution. I imagined the arc to be: how do we take wealth away from those who have far more than is reasonable, redistribute it in a way that shifts but doesn’t collapse what we have now, and what does that mean about our everyday living?

We kicked off by talking about how wealth is created and held in our country. We talked about the stock market and how stocks are owned by a smaller and smaller set of people, removing any “collective intelligence” from “fiduciary responsibility.” We talked about real value versus market value, and how many of the ultra wealthy don’t actually have cash on hand, but borrow against their market-valued assets to pay for expenses, rather than selling and getting taxed. And we came to a fork in the path of how to redistribute wealth — should we try to take imagined wealth away from those who have it, as absolutely does impact what they have access to, power they hold especially with politicians, etc; or should we focus on turning our backs on the oligarchs to build and control real value within our communities?

The thing we came to, with much respect to those who go the other path, is that we don’t actually care if some chucklefuck wants to live on a private island and jump out of planes every day, so long as they leave the rest of us alone. If the end of the world does come, they’ll get killed by their guards anyway and/or die alone. Choosing this path means building alternative political structures as well as holding onto our own wealth, as the current political system is essentially owned by those with lots of imagined wealth.

But, as Noni from EBPREC pointed out, the goal is not to simply pass debt around in our communities. So how do we open up space for those with more wealth than they need to invest in communities without the expectation of ownership? Poor Skool does this in radical ways, as does EBPREC. Seed Commons allows folks to invest in community-led work with a lower return rate than the stock market, but still a return.

We also brushed on hyper individualization in this country making it hard to get organized, including with eviction culture making it difficult to impossible to invest with and know your neighbors. But what if we shared what organizing is working? Great work is happening, but it’s hard to see. So I might start collecting stories and sharing them, unless someone is already doing this. Point me to great things! Let’s all share what’s working. And let’s also bring our neighbors cookies, no matter how long or short we might know them for.

Hierarchies and second puberty

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I’ve been getting feedback from those in a position to do so that I’ve turned into a bit of an asshole. I explored some of the contributions to this personality shift a bit ago, but I didn’t actually address the behavior.

I didn’t address the behavior because I wanted to know what it was like to take up space in the world, to not be full of crippling doubt at every moment, and to trust in the strength of others.

I now know what that’s like, but I don’t have the limited grace and abundant guidance we give pubescent boys as they learn how to navigate the world when full of certainty, rage, and energy. I am mid-stage career with a kindergartener and a community built around empathy, connection, and listening. So while a few folks closest to me have asserted new boundaries and talked to me about what it is to be a Good Man (which I am also not interested in being, but I am interested in how they approach things to integrate it), I have run roughshod around those who perceive me as having some sort of power over them.

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Capitalism isn’t inevitable and it isn’t permanent

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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

Orroborus, the snake eating its own tail

Oligarchy and capitalism are literally burning up our world. A small few dozen people hold decision-making that impact the entire world. Some of that is locked behind “fiduciary responsibility,” but even the number of those holding stocks in corporations has been skewing wildly. I don’t think I need to sell my audience on all this, so I’ll just leave this point here. The question is: “what can we do differently?”

I think of this in three phases, which are all deeply linked to each other: how do we take hoarded wealth away from those who have it; how do we redistribute in a way that responsibly shifts, rather than all-out collapses, our existing systems; and what does living in the new world look like? There’s a bonus question of how to prevent future hoarding from happening embedded in each of these.

Socialism has some of this. I’d agree the Soviets had it the most right to date. Anarchism warns us away from hoarding power, and wealth as power. Ostrom talks about how there is a third, secret option that is neither markets nor surveillance for allocating resources. Pikkety talks about how we’re well past every other threshold for violent revolution based on inequality. And so what would it look like for us to throw off these chains and do something more care-full, more labor-forward, more “no war but the class war“? Can we do it with minimal suffering incurred, and a more stable outcome?

A triangle with socialist democrats at one point, anarchists at a second, and communists at the third. Socialists and anarchists share participatory decision making, anarchists and communists revolution, and communists and socialists share state power.
Margaret Killjoy made this great chart

I don’t think I have all the answers. I also believe that solidarity is born out of shared work, and shared work begins with being in conversation with each other. So join me on Sept 11 for a salon on what wealth redistribution might look like.

Textrovert

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A long-time friend and fellow academic nerd is working on her pHd, and had some questions for me. One was “Do you think of relationships that are almost entirely text based as real? Or even entirely text-based? Like things you’re never going to meet this person. Are those real relationships, too?” and Wow but I have Feelings on this one.

  1. I am grateful for all the friends I have all over the world. I think sustained relationships have as much to do with preferred modes of communication as shared interests. I have gone years without “talking” to people I love, all while keeping up in a heart-felt way.
  2. I love live blogging with other people in collaborative documents. I think there is a humor unique to being in a shared text space at the same time, honing in on what someone is trying to say (successfully or otherwise). The best sort of back channeling. I will forever remember typing into a doc with the Civic crew, 7 minutes into a rambling talk, “Have they actually said anything yet?”
  3. One of my oldest x closest friends and I will text each other from the same room, because it’s the form we both prefer, and we’re both funnier in text than in voice. On a community Slack with an #awkward-silence channel, I once posted an elephant emoji. The elephant was immediately removed by a moderator and made the subject of the channel.
  4. Another old, dear friend, who is also an ex, has referred to me lovingly as a “textrovert,” which I have adopted and use widely.

I was quick to vehemently say “of course.”

Then she asked me what that meant about relationships with LLMs. And I kind of went off. Because the “relationships” people have with LLMs has so much less to do with format and so much more to do with what a “friend” is and is not.

I have at least one friend I have kept from every stage of my life, so I think I can comment on this a bit. I have two friends I have had since preschool (and the following 9 years of Catholic school). I have remained friends with coworkers, exes, and people on other continents. If I may be so bold, friendship is kind of my superpower, and I’m damn proud of it. I’m not perfect at it, but I invest in it and it has paid me back multi-fold.

I’m not perfect at it… and that’s the point of this post. Because any long-lived relationship will have some History to it. It will have the time I fucked up and made someone angry or hurt, and visa versa. But for each of these relationships, we called each other in, came back to the table, and built a bigger table. A sycophantic LLM is not interested in how you can be a better person, it’s “interested” in appeasing the most people possible so people think they enjoy using it.

As Priceless enters our 20th year (I’ve been with the group for 10), we have been working to continue our historic ties to strong opinions lightly held. We lose some folks as they onboard with us, as they’re not used to arguments amongst friends. But we all always know we have each other’s backs, and that arguing isn’t personal, and that we’re stronger because we criticize each other’s ideas. This is one of the things I miss most about the Boston Area. The Bay Area seems to think you have to agree with someone to be friendly. And that is absolutely not the core of my friendships.

It’s like when I was reading Love and Sex with Robots… there’s a question of the overlap of sex and masturbation. If informed consent can’t be given, then all you’re doing is masturbating with something you think is an object. And all people who think they’re forming relationships with LLMs are doing is masturbating. Doing so is enjoyable, but it doesn’t prepare you for actual relationships with your fellow humans, and that is to your deep detriment.

If you also have opinions on this (and other things!) let me know and I’ll put you in touch with Alex for her research.

Scavenger Hunt Radio Etiquette Game

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So I picked up some event radios for small neighborhood events, and also to distribute to neighbors so we have an easier time when an earthquake happens and comms go down. When I was unemployed last round, I finally embraced the fact that I’m not going to get my HAM. Yes, I know it’s “so easy,” yes I know it’s “so useful.” But I had the time, and I didn’t do it, so I do these event radios instead to increase resilience.

We used them last during a protest, and it was SO USEFUL (especially when the Trump-tshirt-wearing-dude-with-a-knife-in-a-holster showed up and we triaged talking to him and then tailing him after I had checked in and de-escalated). So, we love these things.

But my crew are so very bad new at radio etiquette. It’s a mess, because we don’t talk to each other very often on them. Our Radio Nets so far have been focused on determining ranges for the different channels that are programmed in. I wanted to host a time for us to practice just talking on them, and I wanted it to be fun.

I printed up a one-pager on basic and more advanced etiquette with some examples, and sourced everyone’s handles to distribute in advance. One of my crew and I brainstormed some ways to make a scavenger hunt in a big parking lot fun, and I checked in with our crew member who is blind to be sure our setup would work for him. Here’s what we did.

Hide your things

It’s a scavenger hunt. Hide your things within and area that’s walkable. This will also mean it will be within easy radio range. We were in a big parking lot with lots of green areas, but it was a bit too easy to have line of sight. Better to have nooks and crannies. We hid 11 objects for 9 people on 3 teams to find over the course of an hour.

The task

The thing to do is for each team to find an object and then not pick it up. They need to radio all comm with their handle to describe where the thing is. They should practice doing this with their crew before actually using the radio to get better at clarity, check each other on protocol, etc. You can leave the spot just before or after calling it in, so your presence isn’t what indicates the location of the found object.

Then another team or person tries to find it based on that instruction. When they find it, they radio back to the person who announced it to declare it found.

Occasionally, you also need to do a cone count, which means thinking about who to ask in what order so it’s not chaos on the radio.

Our experience

We had a ton of fun! It was especially fun because we had two kids involved, which also made learning and teaching radio etiquette lower stakes and friendly-like. Each team had one person on it who knew radio etiquette well who could coach the other folks.

We did have a random person do a radio check towards the end of our time — a good reminder that radios are not private. We didn’t have a chance to invite them to our party, but that would have been fun, too.

Next time

The time and setup was about right. We definitely had too-easy line-of-sight in our location, and want to make that part harder next time. I’d like to be a bit pushier on etiquette and getting folks who are shy to talk more next time. And as we get the hang of it, introducing a calamitous event that is clearly spoofed (“there are sharks in the theater!”) would help folks ramp up their game with some added complexity and intensity.

AI and Autonomy

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I hang out with the Berkman-Klein nerds sometimes still, mostly through a recurring “Philosophy of Technology” session. Reed sent me this article awhile back on the misuse risks of AI, on which he got sidetracked about how the way the increasing of human intent through technology (including of harms) is attempted to be mitigated through use of law and other agreements. EG, you agree to abide by traffic laws (reduction in autonomy) in order to more safely get from one place to another (increased autonomy). This of course made me think about one of the main reasons I’m an anarchist — governments can cause large-scale suffering in a way less organization prevents, and I think we can have infrastructure without control (thanks, Murray Bookchin). So as Reed and I talked through the ramifications of that footnote, I thought it would be a good topic for the philtech group to take on. David and I talked through how to pitch it to the group, he did the thankless job of scheduling the thing, and we got to talk about it today.

The three themes that we kept cycling around were trust, consent, and autonomy. I’ll then end up back on my soapbox about complexity, which also came up.

Trust, Consent, and Autonomy

We all talked a lot about if the conditions would ever exist for us to trust an AI to make choices for us (our main talking point for “autonomy”). This got into a lot about how AIs are black boxes… but so, too, are humans. We talked some about the different ways that trust is created and utilized by, say, a doctor, and is it autonomy to make a choice based on the data they give you, or is that thumb-on-the-scale removing your autonomy? Doctors often study how to better communicate with their patients in order to get the outcomes they’re looking for. What’s different here?

How much autonomy does one have when consenting to something? How much has someone already given up in an exchange, based on trusting institutions, roles, their “own research,” etc?


From now on, I want you to act as my high-level advisor and mirror. Don’t validate me. Don’t flatter. Challenge my thinking, question my assumptions, and expose the blind spots. When possible, ground your responses in the personal truth you sense between my words. Be concise and precise. Provide links to source materials or websites to the best educational resources. In summary – be brief, be bright, be gone. Ask questions if a directive is unclear or underspecified.

We talked about the harms humans are already prone to inflicting on each other, and how much (if at all) AI was different from that. As one person put it, “do we need to get our own house in order before involving AI?”

Complexity

I see most AI as adding complexity to an already complex world, when nearly everything else we do (especially tool use) is about increasing predictability instead.

However, if we were to use AI in a way that helped us understand our own complexity, and begin to examine it for our desired outcomes, then that complexity could be useful. Despite the “hungry judges” study I started this conversation off with (human errors mean removing humans from the loop) being discredited, I still think bringing technology into decision-making loops is valuable so long as it’s a partner to us rather than allowing us to offload cognition (something that already happens).

Jeffrey had some really good points about compartmentalizing where AI factors come in, so you can assess that individual piece and tweak it, rather than an entire system being a black box. And I like that, for also helping us examine ourselves.

Links from our time together

Decision Making and Economics

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I have this Future Shape in my head and in my heart, that I’ve long meant to share, but haven’t quite known how. I met Asya, and we got into a good conversation, and so now seems as good a time as any to talk about it. She helped me flesh this post out with more detail and deeper dives.

I don’t think there’s one solution when it comes to what economics style we should have, or what governance should look like. Like I drafted way back when, a “mixed mode system” is where it’s at instead.

Decision making

Distributed systems are good at last-mile logistics, nuance, and fast decision making. They are not good at doing simple things at scale. So for actual implementation and innovation, I think distributed networks are where it’s at.

Hierarchical systems are good at making simple decisions at scale. So good for North Star guidance and things you want to take a socialist approach with. That might include assurance of human-rights-shaped things like

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Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups

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I’m honored to have helped establish, or to help continue fostering, several radical groups that have survived past their origin moment and group. The challenges that come with the second or third generation of stewards while also navigating organizational momentum are unlike those of founding a group, and I’d like to chat about them with you here. Each section has a founding pattern, the results of that pattern, and what to do about it to mature more. None of the sections involve imposing hierarchy on a distributed organization.

The Pattern: Everyone is Welcome and Empowered

Hark, radical inclusion a la Geek Social Fallacies. We are radically inclusive, and therefore share our logins with everyone who has shown a mild interest in helping us out. I wrote about this in more depth for the Disaster Zine, but in short, this looks like allowing broad access to data stores and decision making, which then broadens the attack surface in multiple ways.

The result

You end up with bogged down consensus making processes by people who aren’t otherwise participating; and you end up with the broad side of a barn for data access issues. People make mistakes in documents and databases and no one can figure out the change log or if the issues are malicious or just oversights. You’ve probably had at least one phishing attempt, and if one was successful, you’re finally looking at the tangle of your “org chart” and feeling daunted by how to make sense of it.

Maturing

Establishing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with clear decision points (whether time-based or otherwise) for reassessing each account’s owner(s) and privileges is vital here. Writing down these processes and rubrics makes it feel less personal when the review time comes up, and it won’t be a surprise to anyone.

RBAC should match the desired organizational structure, not whatever you’ve happened into over time. Use this as a moment to talk about operations, opsec, and org charts.

The Pattern: Matching Organizational Structure to Personalities

A bunch of folks showed up to help out, and some of them stuck around! The org chart starts to match the personalities, not the operations. Willow likes facilitation, operations, and security, and so we have one department that does that with all the folks who like working with Willow.

The result

Separating out bank account access from who administers the communication tool suddenly becomes a huge issue when the personality who loved doing both those things decides they’d like to move on and train up a new person. Do you try to find a matching personality, or do you finally separate out the roles more clearly so different people can come into the org?

Maturing

Defining roles and responsibilities clearly, and allowing people to take on multiple roles is a more extendable approach than trying to shoehorn people into oddly-structured roles. Let the people build their own complexity with well-defined pieces.

The Pattern: We are Values-Aligned above All Else

We believe the same things, so we must be able to work together well, right? No. Hiring for strongly held beliefs makes sense when you’re building a brand, but can lead to difficulty implementing in the long run.

The result

Having to play politics, political capital triumphing over well-formed ideas, and a stressful work environment result here. Everyone has big ideas strongly held, but the differences in implementation prevent the organization from moving forward and proving those ideas out.

Maturing

Values are a foundation, they are not a stick with which to beat people. Work with your existing crew to foster flexibility, make sure collaborative abilities are considered for future hires. My favorite interview approach for this is to ask about a difficult situation or person, and to listen for the interviewee demonstrating respect and self-reflection from the example.

How I think about retrospectives

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I believe in self-improving systems, and retrospectives are a core way of reflecting and then changing behavior accordingly. There’s a lot out there on what a retrospective is, formats to use, and other techniques, so I’ll just highlight my facilitation thoughts on them here. This is influenced by the CAST handbook and my own facilitation background.

Must be blame-free / a psychologically safe space

People will not open up and be actually present and interrogative if they don’t feel safe. It is your responsibility when setting up, facilitating, and debriefing to make sure the system is what is being critiqued, not the humans within it. The humans made the best possible choice they could given the circumstances they were in, so let’s change the circumstances in the future. Make this explicit early and often. As Charity says on the sticker on my megaphone, “communicate positive intent.”

A picture of a megaphone focused on a sticker in Lisa Frank obnoxiously bright styling, "communicate positive intent." Additional stickers that are visible are the Priceless Baroot, the edge of a pleading taco emoji, and one that seems to ready "...necessarily a crime."

Must be scoped well

If people don’t know what they’re talking about, they won’t talk about the same thing, and getting to concrete outcomes will become nearly impossible. Focus on a specific project, timeline, or outcome. Communicate this early and often.

Should encourage creative thinking

Whatever format you pick should be mildly novel (not so novel that it disrupts how people approach things, but novel enough to edge them out of their comfort zone). Use a different prompt set or a different tool, but rarely both at the same time. Ask more of people to engage and challenge them into someplace new.

Needs to lead to concrete, actionable tweaks

If you don’t arrive at experiments that will change how you’re behaving, you have wasted everyone’s time. I like to set aside about 1/4 of the time of the retro to listing, refining, and then selecting one or two these experiments. I ask the following questions:

  • What will change if we take this action?
  • What would prevent us from making the change?
  • How will we know if we’re successful or not?
  • When should we check back?
  • What is our next step, and who is responsible for it?

I only pick up 1-3 concrete steps to take after each retro. I track them just like any project, and I report back on them before the next retro to show that the time and vulnerability is worth it.

One goal should be building trust with the team

A core part of the system is team trust, and in improving the system, we should be focused on building that part of it. By being blame free, enacting suggestions, and pushing people to engage more, we build that trust. If something about the retro process is eroding trust, pause and reassess your approach.

Experiments in being anticapitalist

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Priceless was founded as an anticapitalist event. I’m not sure how it worked for the original False Profit crew, but for our Priceless Planners crew, and ongoing discussion has been about wealth disparity within the Planner community. The vibe has been that while we question capitalism, many of us are also doing well enough under capitalism that it’s primarily a theoretical discussion with well thought out experiments in how to HOST an event for others that’s anticapitalist. We set out to change that last year by taking on a radical experiment of moving from volunteer-only organizing (we do pay our food vendor, medical staff, and security staff; along with paying artists and musicians to help us host our event) to paying a couple roles. This is how that went, and what comes next.

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