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 ?

  • 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.