Information is Not a Commodity

[oakwizard-grimoire]

An Introduction

This blog is where I save posts regarding topics I intend to review for study purposes. You can expect:

Anarchism & social ecology

Queer stuff

Philosophy

My writing/inspirations to it

Whatever else I find interesting

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Equating markets with capitalism is a semantic sleight of hand that capitalists want you to make. Markets long predate capitalism, and I expect will outlast it as well. The issue we have isn't with trade or money, it's with monopolization and the weaponization of debt. These serve as far more immediate effects of how private ownership and state intervention coerce working classes into servitude.

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Equating markets with capitalism is a semantic sleight of hand that capitalists want you to make. Markets long predate capitalism, and I expect will outlast it as well. The issue we have isn't with trade or money, it's with monopolization and the weaponization of debt. These serve as far more immediate effects of how private ownership and state intervention coerce working classes into servitude.

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Society is an Ecosystem, Not a Machine

The conventional way of thinking about meaningful change in America follows a familiar pattern. A pendulum swings between two points. A party is elected, a few tweaks are made, some policies presented. But the structure they serve persists for the next election, the next swing of the pendulum. It is a clean, mechanical image. It is also, almost without exception, a fantasy.

I'd like to suggest a different approach entirely: succession. What if we treated social change not as a pattern but as a process? The name itself is borrowed from the way ecosystems recover after a fire, a flood, or any other mass disturbance: pioneer species first, then understory, then canopy, each layer cultivating the conditions for the next. Nothing appears fully formed. Everything grows in relationship to what came before.

The framework sits at the intersection of three forgotten intellectual traditions.

The first is the theory of mutual aid, a critique of Social Darwinism which holds that cooperation—not competition—is the foundation of social life. Long before there were states or markets, people survived by sharing resources, caring for the vulnerable, and solving problems collectively. That impulse did not vanish with modernity. It was buried, and it can be excavated.

The second is the mutualist school of economics, which insists on a distinction that has been largely erased from contemporary debate: commerce is not the same thing as profit. Commerce is ancient and, in all likelihood, impossible to eliminate. What mutualism rejects is the legalized theft of value from workers by owners or bosses who did not do the work. Workers, in this view, should own the full product of their labor, either in cooperatives or as individual producers. Markets can exist—thrive, even—without masters.

The third is the political theory of libertarian municipalism, which argues that genuine democracy cannot be outsourced to representatives in distant capitals. It must be practiced directly, face-to-face, in neighborhood assemblies where the people affected by a decision are the same people making it. These assemblies can confederate regionally to handle matters of scale, but power flows upward from communities, not downward from a state.

What makes succession more than an academic synthesis is its practical architecture. The strategy builds in layers.

The first layer is mutual aid. Community fridges, tool libraries, childcare collectives, disaster response networks. They meet immediate needs while building the trust that makes further cooperation possible. People who have shared a generator after a storm or watched each other's children during a shift are not just neighbors anymore. They are collaborators. That bond is the foundation of everything that follows.

From that soil, a second layer can grow, if directed with intent. Worker cooperatives, credit unions, and forms of self-employment that give people direct experience managing their own economic lives without bosses or landlords. Someone who has spent a year making collective decisions in a worker-owned business has a far easier time imagining collective decisions about land use or public safety. Economic democracy and political democracy feed each other.

The third layer is the assembly itself. Mutual aid and cooperative economics create favorable conditions for self-governance, but they do not guarantee it. Assemblies must be built deliberately. These are spaces where neighbors who've learned to cooperate economically can begin to coordinate politically, making binding decisions about resources and collective life through direct, face-to-face democracy. No representatives. No professional political class. Just people in a room, figuring things out.

As assemblies mature, they can federate. A single neighborhood cannot manage a regional watershed or a railway alone. Confederations of assemblies can, and they can do so without reproducing the hierarchies of a centralized state. The goal is not to seize the state in one dramatic siege. It is to gradually displace, confront, or outlast hierarchical power with a networked society of free communities, each governing itself and all associating freely.

This is not a promise of completion. An ecosystem is never finished. It is always growing, always adjusting to new conditions, always in the process of becoming something it was not before. Succession makes the same peace with incompleteness. It does not offer a blueprint for utopia. It offers a direction of travel, a set of practices, and a grounded hope that what grows in the fissures of the old order can one day become the canopy that shelters us all.

[queeranarchism]

[the cover of A consensus handbook by Seeds for Change, featuring the title in Orange lettering followed by an color drawing of 11 people working on the maintenance of a house]

I'm going to share this as a separate post for those that missed the ask: A consensus handbook by Seeds for Change https://seedsforchange.org.uk/handbook is a free and very handy guide to how to take decisions as a group without leaders or hierarchies. I'm going to drop the chapters here to show off just how much useful stuff it has. If you work with consensus, there's almost certainly a problem in here that you recognize and wish you had some answers to!

1: Making decisions by consensus What’s wrong with the democracy we’ve got? - Why use consensus? How does consensus work? - The consensus process - Key skills and values for consensus 2: Facilitating consensus The role of meetings in group work - What is facilitation? - Facilitating a meeting – Making meetings accessible - Taking minutes 3: Facilitating consensus in large groups Meeting the conditions for consensus in large groups - Processes for large groups 4: Facilitating consensus in virtual meetings Why have virtual meetings? - The tools for the job - Challenges of facilitating virtual meetings - A consensus process for virtual meetings 5: Quick consensus decision making Preparing for quick consensus - How it works 6: Facilitation techniques and activities Starting the meeting - Regulating the flow of the meeting - Encouraging involvement - Techniques for problem solving and tackling difficult issues - Prioritisation techniques - Activities for re-energising - Evaluating meetings 7: Troubleshooting in your meetings Our meetings take a long time - Time pressure - Our meetings lack focus - Our group is large and we don’t enjoy meetings - We’re stuck and can’t reach a decision - Too many ideas - ‘Steamroller’ proposals - How can we deal with disruptive behaviour? - What to do when someone blocks - Our group is biased towards the status quo 8: Bridging the gap between theory and practice Conflict and consensus - The life cycle of a conflict - Ways of dealing with conflict - Techniques for inviting collaboration Power dynamics - Step one: What are our feelings about power dynamics? - Step two: Diagnosis – what is actually going on - in your group? - Step three: Where do your power imbalances come from? - Step four: Work out some ways to change your power dynamics Other common issues - External pressures - Open groups with changing membership - What if you’re the only person who wants the group to change? 9: Consensus in wider society So how might it work? - Challenges, questions and tensions - How do we get there? - A final thought

[brainrotdotorg]

i really do think we should substitute gacha games instead for like. the random wikipedia article button. gives you the same "yay i got something new and exciting!" feeling without spending any money and you get to learn something new on wikipedia. the problem is that its missing a cute little storage menu where you can see all the links to different articles youve "collected"

[brainrotdotorg]

so many people could be weaned off of gambling if we just gamified that website a *little* bit

[brainrotdotorg]

okay so ummmmm. its real

[paper-mario-wiki]

hey here's a website for downloading any video or image from any website.

works w/ youtube, soundcloud, twitch, twitter (gifs and videos), tumblr (video and audio), and most other websites you're probably lookin to download stuff off of.

[paper-mario-wiki]

for anyone wondering about privacy and whatnot, i'm happy to say that the developers are pretty committed to have 0 trackers and 0 data retention. you can read more in their "about" section, but here's the basic important stuff:

[ms-demeanor]

Hey this let me download the videos of my band from a skate shop's instagram that I've been trying to get for like six years.

[joy-haver]

Dorothy Day - The Catholic Worker (an anarchist catholic magazine) 1953

“In 1932, Peter Maurin, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was working at hard manual labor at Mount Tremper, New York, at a boys’ camp where he mended roads, cut ice, and did other chores winter and summer and received his living, not a very munificent one, in return. As a French peasant he lived on soup and bread. His account at the grocer did not come to more than a few dollars a week. He slept in the barn which was as close to the Stable as he could get. He spent seven years in the vicinity of Kingston, New York, studied, worked and prepared what he liked to call the Green Revolution. Before this he had travelled through the States and Canada as an unskilled laborer. Before that he had worked in France, where he was born, at the one thing he was skilled at, teaching with the Christian Brothers. But he believed too, that the scholar had to become a worker not only that he might understand the conditions and problems of the worker, but that the worker too might become a scholar, because Peter believed in THE PEOPLE changing their own conditions. He did not speak in terms of THE MASSES, being swayed by some dictator demagogue.

Peter Maurin studied the prophets of Israel and the Fathers of the Church; he studied Proudhon, Karl Marx, Kropotkin and familiarized himself with utopian socialist thought as well as Marxist thinking. He knew to whom to turn among Catholic thinkers, and he introduced us to Romano Guardini, Karl Adam, Luigi Sturzo, Vincent McNabb, among the priests, and to E. I. Watkin, Christopher Dawson, G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc as well as E. J. Penty and Peter Kropotkin, who was in a way his favorite among the laywriters. When he waved the encyclicals at us, it was not only the social encyclicals of the Popes, but also that on St. Francis of Assisi. He preferred St. Francis’ way to the industrial council way. He always aimed at the best, and to him voluntary poverty, manual labor was the beginning of all true reform, which was to begin with one’s self. First of all he was a personalist and a Communitarian. “People are always saying, ‘they don’t do this, and they don’t do that,’” he would cry out in ringing accents, “WE is a community, THEY is a crowd.” And a lonely crowd, David Reisman would say, himself crying out against “the damned wantlessness of the poor.” Peter would have liked Reisman’s book as he would have liked Martin Buber’s book, PATHS IN UTOPIA. He wanted people to be taught to want the best, and the best for him was the immediate program of the works of mercy, practiced in the cities and farming communes set up in the countryside where workers and scholars could get together to try to rebuild society within the shell of the old by founding better institutions to take the place of soulless corporations. (He spoke and wrote in phrases so packed with thought, that to expand them would mean the writing of a book.) He saw the need for the works of mercy as a practice of love for our brother which was the great commandment and the only way we can show our love for Christ, and he saw too that such a practice would mean conflict with the State. “Personal responsibility, not state responsibility,” he always said.

Peter’s teaching meant the immediate establishment of houses of hospitality because it was a time of depression and not only the worker, but young Catholic college graduates were unemployed. Peter shocked people by calling for an “abolition of the wage system” and self employment. Young people gave their services and unemployed workers gave their skills, and readers of THE CATHOLIC WORKER sent in material goods and money, so that for the last twenty years we have kept going on this basis of voluntary poverty and “abolition of the wage system,” for those preferred to give their services rather than go out and earn a wage for them.

This self employment was an immediate remedy for unemployment but the long term program meant substituting a new social order to take the place of both capitalism and communism. Peter did not believe in the use of force to bring about this new society, so from the first we have opposed class war, race war, civil war, imperialist war, and have been surrounded by them all. There is even the war between the worker and the scholar, and Peter faced the reality of that. He spoke of the treason of the intellectuals and also of the fault of the worker who permitted his work to be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold.

The impact Peter made on us all, from one end of the country to the other, so that houses of hospitality and farms were undertaken from coast to coast, was because he personally lived a life of poverty and work. He knew the skid rows of the country. He never asked anything for himself. His speech was “yea, yea,” and “nay, nay.” He was a great indoctrinator, a great agitator. He believed in “a theory of revolution” and advocated much study. “The evil is so deep seated,” he said, “that of course much of the time will be given up to an immediate practice of the works of mercy.” But he believed too, in constantly trying to create order out of chaos. “To be a social missionary,” he said in one of his essays, “requires social mindedness, historical mindedness and practical idealism.”

Because Peter loved most of all what he called the green revolution, we are beginning our twenty-first year with emphasis on the land.”

[anarchopuppy]

Another world is closer than you think

Above is a portion of the Foundation for Intentional Communities’ map of communes, eco-villages, cohousing, etc. around the world. These are communities who are building a life outside of capitalism, based on cooperation, equity, and justice, rather than competition and endless growth. There may be one or more in the city you live in

If you find yourself unable to swallow the idea of going back to “normal,” here’s somewhere to turn. Many of these communities are looking for new members or trying to expand. You can join them

There is another way to live. There is hope

See the map here

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Marx screwed us all out of what could have been if Proudhon had more influence

[oakwizard-grimoire]

In truth, not just Proudhon but the mutualists his theories inspired. Tucker's monopoly analysis, in particular, provides a much more precise diagnosis of how capital has accumulated the influence and force that it has. Marxist class analysis, to its credit, overlaps significantly with monopoly analysis, so much that the venn diagram is functionally a circle. But I believe history has vindicated Proudhon and his intellectual descendants for their wariness of the state, on multiple occasions by now

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Marx screwed us all out of what could have been if Proudhon had more influence

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Mutual aid is a pioneer species

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Allow me to specify-

Mutual aid can be an effective tool for laying the foundations of more sustainable long-term economic and political structures, but it has to come first. Just voting for your preferred candidate in isolation isn't the ticket, you need to organize with your community and meet your neighbors where they're at (inasmuch as it is safe to if you are a minority, to be clear).

I've taken to viewing praxis as native human habitat restoration, the ecological process of succession translated to human social behavior. The climax community doesn't sprout up fully formed, it is the end result of a process that starts small and scales up at its own pace. The work, essentially, is protecting this organic process from the influence of the myriad hierarchies we are all subject to.

[oakwizard-grimoire]

Mutual aid is a pioneer species

[what-even-is-thiss]

I just had an argument with someone who was like “why would we settle for food stamps when we could have universal basic income?”

And it’s just like. People need food right now you know.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.

[what-even-is-thiss]

People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.

And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.

And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?

Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.

[thunderstormsandcats]

Yeah this is also why it annoys me when people are talking about raising the minimum wage to $25 and other people are like “um actually the minimum wage should be $66/hr 🤓☝️” … like let’s worry about getting it above $7.25 first.

[shamebats]

This also reminds me of a video I watched on tiktok of a black woman (in the US, I assume) talking about how when her ex was stalking her, she went to ask several different local abolitionist orgs what she could do and they were all like there's nothing we can do to help you, go to the cops. She had to choose between continuing to live in fear of possibly getting assaulted by her stalker VS talking to the cops and getting a restraining order against him, so she did what she had to protect herself.

As long as there aren't any alternative systems in place to choose over the existing ones, you can't just sit around and wait for some ideal solution to appear out of nowhere. People will get their resources wherever they can access them.

[callmebliss]

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

[macleod]

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

[hesitationss]

anyone can make a zine, regardless of skill level or access to materials or design programs. all you need is paper, scissors and drawing utensils (although many people enjoy collaging!) web search "8 page 1 sheet zine how to".

everyone SHOULD make a zine too, you will feel so good about it 🫶🏼 it's about putting the power of production into the hands of the people! also you don't have to sell it or anything, you can just make one for yourself or trade/give some to friends!

i really love julia grofrer's guide to analogue self publishing aka making zines on 8.5x11 paper

and jaydragon/jdragsky's thread on staple's self serve print centres (if you're area does not have a local print shop, they probably have a staples or fedex print centre)

if you can't draw, here is twitter thread for public domain art and also a mini summary of when thing enter creative commons (generally 70 years after artist death in the US and CAD)

i also have a DIY zine page on my art blog that i am dedicated to updating as i find more resources! (not accessible through tumblr mobile app, mobile friendly, just open the link in a browser)

go make some zines!!!

[art-and-anarchism-deactivated20]

Practical Organising

“Only the Organised Survive”: A Rebel Worker Handbook

Direct Action in Industry by the Direct Action Movement

Weakening the Dam by the Twin Cities branch of the IWW

How to Hold a Good Meeting and Rusty’s Rules of Order by the Industrial Workers of the World

Community Control of the Poor community

A Practical Guide to Anarchist Organisation – Compiled by Andrew Flood

How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action

The Bosses Need Us… We Don’t Need Them: Common Sense Reasons for Worker Self-Management

Organising in the Workplace

Organising Communities by Tom Knoche

Anarchist Agitation & Community Building by Ronald A. Young

A Rebel Worker’s Organising Handbook

[isuggestrevolution]

this is my suggestion