Anyone studying anarchist cybernetics ? Or like some form of anarchist economics/planning ?

I general how would market be abolished in anarchist society, and what steps can be taken now to go towards that goal ?

  • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    16 days ago

    I don’t understand why async communication is so hard for a lot of people. I know not everyone can devolve discrete math problems in their head but it frustrates me to the point where I’m like have y’all ever been at a sandwich counter? Every fast casual counter service restaurant that separates ordering, constructing, and paying is a prime example of async communication that involves the customer in the process transparently.

    The good thing about anarchist systems is that unlike computer systems the boundary between “internal and external” doesn’t exist in the same way. For a computer system there is often a usage boundary where that system needs to abstract itself into a different form, e.g. distributed async to seemingly centralized sync (from a users perspective). Anarchism doesn’t have that boundary.

    • DinosaurThussy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      16 days ago

      I agree that the informational boundaries (I’d probably identify them as bottlenecks) for computer systems are not nearly as well defined as they are in computer systems and that is a good differentiator as most of my experience is with computer systems. I’d also point out that most sandwich counters use queues, which is a common tool to throw at distributed systems in computer systems as well.

      As far as async communications being hard, that’s very subjective. I’m a firm believer in Rich Hickey’s differentiation between Easy/Hard and Simple/Complex. They’re orthogonal concepts. I think what makes that complexity hard for some people when designing asynchronous systems is that they want to recreate synchronous systems with the same invariants rather than using a toolkit more suited to asynchrony. So ease is largely about familiarity imo, even if the systems do tend to be more complex.

      I’d say a similar dynamic exists for designing anarchist systems as well where people will attempt to recreate hierarchical dynamics within horizontal organizations and get frustrated when things don’t directly translate.

      • piggy [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        Yeah I also subscribe to Easy/Hard - Simple/Complex.

        Async is simply multiplying by 2 for Complexity

        If myResult = doMyThingWithMy(args) is a 1 then

        const myPromise = askToDoMyThing(args);
const getMyResult = await myPromise;

        Is a 2.

        If you’re adding in error and flow control complexity, we’re simply arguing about how everyone cargo cults bullshit syntax and practices instead of using sensible things like a Maybe/Result monad where you have Result<success, value> and exceptions always crash.

        Which is just multiplying complexity in these cases by 3. If Complexity is a logarithmic scale it’s just the next order. rather than the next next order.