#anti utopia

[talefoundryshow]

This week, on Nebula:

[cybersophianism]

nEon by Todor Kondev

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Dystopia in real life - If John Carpenter directed the COVID-19 pandemic in the Balkans - it would literally look like this.

In two small villages in Croatia (population 500), the local priest - Don Mijo, lined up all the villagers and told them to kneel in the streets and wait for his arrival. Then, his assistant drove him through the village streets in a shiny black car while he blessed people with the altar sacrament.

[hollow-parables-poet]

Alright fine, Unfettered democracy doesn't "create capitalism", however, large democracies almost always rely on market systems to coordinate scale. That's not good, bad or indifferent

at some point

Every hospital

Every law firm

Every community group

Every church

Every school

Every homeless shelter

resources are limited, time is limited, labor is limited, and demand is not

And when that happens, you need a coordination system. That's where we land at capitalism.

Not because people lack humanity.

But because humanity alone doesn't solve allocation at scale. We've always traded.

Not because greed is the core of human nature, but because exchange is one of the simplest ways humans solve mismatched needs

you have what I need, I have what you need, and neither of us has to take it, we can agree.

That logic predates capitalism by thousands of years

Capitalism is NOT the invention of trade.

It's the systemization of trade under conditions of:

* private ownership of productive resources

* voluntary exchange

* prices that reflect scarcity and demand

* and profit incentives that signal where resources move efficiently

And whether people like it or not, that system has historically been extremely good at scaling production, distribution, and innovation in complex societies. That doesn't make it morally pure, no

It doesn't make it fair even

But the shit DOES make it functional in specific ways that communism does not.

Hospitals don't run on goodwill alone. They run on funding structures that combine government reimbursement, private insurance systems, supply chains, and labor markets.

Schools don't run on shared values alone. They run on fucking tax allocation, labor contracts, and administrative economies.

Even nonprofits and shelters rely on donations that come from surplus created in market economies!

Goddamn it..

Anyway, the idea that capitalism is "outside" of human cooperation misses some important things

capitalism is just one of the coordination tools built on top of human cooperation, it's not a replacement for it

And then at the same time markets don't naturally produce equality, guarantee fairness, or distribute resources based on moral need. That sucks. They distribute based on purchasing power, scarcity, and demand. So then the issue is democracy? No. The issue is distribution ethics, value disagreements, and political negotiation

That's not a bug or a conspiracy

Its why every functioning modern democracy actually uses a hybrid system of

* markets that are for production and efficiency

* governments for regulation, safety nets, and public goods

* nonprofits and communities for gaps in stuff that nobody can fully cover

The tension people actually argue about isn't "capitalism vs humanity”

It's:

what should be allocated by markets, what should be allocated by collective decision, and what should not be left to price at all?

And since human beings in general don't agree on what "enough" means..

Since For some people enough is never enough For others everything is always enough

And no economic system removes that disagreement.. it only decides how it gets processed..

We’re left figuring it out ourselves

But when people say "capitalism is evil," they're really just reacting to inequality, exploitation, or concentration of power that can emerge inside it..

I get it

But exchange is ancient, capitalism is a structure built on it, and democracy is like an arena where we all argue about boundaries and who gets more or less... it doesn't get less gross because we switch the systems

We still have to talk about the fucking elephant in the room. That We are human beings, on collective scales, conscious of mortality, with limited resources, and we have to pick and choose who gets the most care.

And that argument isn't going away.. because it isn't even about systems anymore

It's about what people think a life is actually made for

People seem to be upset that they can't live the very life outside the system, that CONSERVATIVES are actively striving toward

*Do it yourself

*Grow it yourself

*Teach them yourself

*Build it yourself

*Sell it yourself

*Buy it yourself

*Create it yourself

The American Dream is long been framed as; to work hard enough, to have enough.

The issue is democracy allows for individuals to decide when enough is enough for them

Like I said..

for some people it's nothing

Some people it's everything

But that’s free will

That’s democracy

That’s human nature

That’s exchange

That’s distribution ethics

NOT capitalism

Stop making people defend capitalism

[anti-utopian]

post-civ essay response 1

Take What You Need And Compost The Rest: an introduction to post-civilized theory

Margaret Killjoy Take What You Need And Compost The Rest: an introduction to post-civilized theory 2010 This article first appeared in Dodge

an prim (anarcho primitivism) has always struck me as stupid on its premise, because of this i decided to read more an prim essays. this writer does not consider herself an prim, but would fall into the post-civ camp, i guess, perhaps more tenable. There are some glaring issues to get out of the way as well before i engage with the work as a whole. First, slash and burn is not a horrific practice. it only seems horrific at a first glance because of all the anti-forest fire rhetoric in the US (writer lives in appalachia). I don't like this dismissal of slash and burn as this terrible thing without any level of nuance. After all, local tribes have been using slash and burn sustainably for literally thousands of years. It is specific to areas where soil nutrient quality is not very high. The context of course is monoculture, and i agree, since monoculture is known to reduce soil nutrient quality, it is true that doing it enough times might create the conditions that necessitate slash and burn but i think this framing is also inadequate. The problem is creating the conditions that necessitate this practice, not the practice itself. Considering how many areas of the world exist where soil is naturally chronically limited in nutrients, notably, rainforests, this phrasing strikes me as ignorant. But i get it, no single person can envision something as complex as the future alone. on to some of the other points. There is further discussion on colonialist context behind the word "civilization" the binary opposites designated civilization and barbarism is completely untenable, same as natural vs unnatural, a basic post-structuralist lens could arrive to this rejection. Hence I can understand wanting to move beyond civilization into a post-civ future. The thesis of the essay, take what you need and compost the rest, makes up the title but it is easy to engage with this as breaking down the skeleton of civilization and repurposing its parts, everything else can be repurposed by the microbes. In that regard I am a lot more receptive to this idea than I at first realized, the author is recognizing (outright stating actually) that the issue of anarcho primitivism is often of a baby and a bathwater thing. This works as an alternative, even if I may end up with several critiques of certain assumptions the writer might have made in the examples she gave. If anything the immediate problem is how we balance the necessity for moving past the structures that confine us with the need for care and precision in selecting which parts to keep and which to compost. I also just love the idea of ideological composting as a whole, and will probably be using it from now on. Anyway that's about it for now, sorry if my ramblings seem too disorderly. There will be several other topics addressed later on. if anyone has more to say, or would like to suggest additional readings feel free to lemme know however you wish.

[litruin-blog]