anarchist courierism

Rich people own patents, meaning that they literally have the government destroy their competition.

This allows them to price gouge, plan obsolescence, or otherwise profit from their government enforced monopoly.

But they believe poor people should be ashamed of themselves for needing any kind of government assistance.

The patent (and IP in general) system is also just super fucked. It costs thousands of dollars to get a patent. You generally need a specialized lawyer to write the application for you. (I'm not sure how true this really is. Given the cost of the application though, I think most people don't want to fuck around and gamble on their ability to follow arcane bureaucratic rules.) Once you get a patent you have to actively search for people violating it and sue them. If you don't, it becomes invalid. (You could also license it to them. I'm not sure if that's an alternative to suing someone who already infringed your patent.) So, a patent only defends you from people who are less wealthy than you. If a wealthy company infringes your patent, you're basically out of luck because they can just stall the lawsuit until you're broke. So, it's kind of worse than you made it sound; the government will only help you if you're rich.

Also, because IP can be bought and sold, the owners usually have absolutely fuck-all to do with the invention of the thing. They usually don't give a shit about progressing technology, making new things, or helping people. It's just another kind of investment. It takes something that's intrinsically not scarce (an idea) and legislates it into being artificially scarce just for the sake of expanding the domain of capitalism.

Also also, the fuckery goes deeper with "patent trolls". These are companies that just buy patents (usually from failed startups) entirely for the right to sue people. They don't make the thing the patent describes or even develop it further. They just wait for someone to reinvent it and sue them, in the hopes they can profit from a settlement/damages. They explicitly hold back technological development.

As an engineer (ya know, someone who actually creates new technologies), I fucking hate this system so much. Not only are my creations held back from their full potential, but I don't get any sort of benefit when I make really good stuff. Like, why should my employer be the only one who's allowed to make this? Why should it be lost to humanity when their company inevitably falls apart? I would much rather see my inventions benefit as many people as possible.

— The Coming Insurrection

This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:

You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else

I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free

You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them

There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it

But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all

public middle school teachers should be paid 3x what they’re earning because I could never do that

soldiers fight a couple tours of duty and call it a heroic art. middle school teachers enter an active war zone 5 days a week for 36 weeks a year their entire career

Remember how it started as 14 days?

FUN FACT!

I was working as a contact tracer during the pandemic. I was in a supervisor position, so I'd be on calls with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), who would relay to us what the CDC's current guidance was. And when the 5 Day Isolation thing came out, all of us asked "but is it safe? Is there any guidance that suggests people are less likely to infect others?" Their answer was "no, but businesses need workers, and this is about people getting back to work faster."

I know a lot of people think that the 5 Day Isolation must have come about because of some new scientific discovery that 10 days was too long, or new strains don't last as long, and blatantly no. THIS DECISION WAS NEVER MADE TO KEEP YOU SAFE. THIS DECISION HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT MONEY.

the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired

man this is like the worst year for tech and websites

discord is forcing a username change that no one wants, twitch nearly banned sponsored streams, imgur is banning NSFW and removing old pics, reddit is restricting their API usage and killing off all mobile apps, apple introducing some shitty overpriced AR headset, the amount of fuckups twitter is doing i cant even count on my own two hands its all becoming too much i hate technology i hate you silicon valley

The great enshittification:

“This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.“

People love to talk about the immortality of the machine, but I'm a mechanical engineer, so I know they delude themselves. Most machines are far more mortal than flesh.

How long does a machine last? A car is a very solid machine, expensive, precision designed, and you're lucky if you get more than three decades out of them.

Your enemy is not the flesh. It's entropy. It's the death knell of the energy imbalance. If you want to live as a complex machine you will, by necessity, generate a great deal of entropy until your machine breaks irrevocably.

You want to be immortal? Then don't worship the machine, worship the stone, the forest. Seek that which is either simple enough to never know death or diffused enough to accept every death.

hedonism is good actually rich people just suck at it

i think not only do we have a moral obligation to preserve human life but also a moral obligation to maximize the pleasure of others and ourselves (provided it doesn’t hurt anyone)

people don’t just deserve to eat food, they deserve to eat good food that tastes good without worrying about nutritional content

people don’t just deserve clothes, they deserve nice clothes that are well made and fit their personal style

people don’t just deserve the bare minimum, they don’t just deserve to be alive, they deserve to live and have nice things for no other reason than making that particular person happy

you’re right but let’s circle back to the original post, the part about rich people being bad at it? you’re so fucking right. I hate rich people so much I hate their stupid half-billion-dollar megayachts that all look identical and have the same amenities and the only difference is how Big they are. I hate their stupid mansions that have absolutely no style and all also look the same. I hate their private jets that are all the fucking same too, just “luxury” aka you spent $450 for the bottle of wine chilling in this private cabin that looks like every private room in the world in a jet that sounds like nothing and flies like a fuckin 737 anyway.

you have more money than most small nations and you’re doing THAT with it?? At least buy like a MiG or smth, be interesting if you’re gonna waste your money

there has to be a word for like, the type of response people have wrt to anti-civ or civ critical theory. like, speaking generally, if you want to engage critically with a position, you have to entertain it to a degree. like that f scott fitzgerald quote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” you have to let it in.

this is the case with criticism of civilization as a whole. people see these and, for this or that reason, completely shut down to the point where you almost have to remind them of how the world works. and it’s pretty easy to dunk on people like this but the problem is that they’re so shut up that the dunk wont’ even affect them lol.

“waaaa our ideology only requires the deaths of 98% of the population and the wholesale slaughter of trans and disabled people but other people are definitely just rejecting it for no reason”

Most of the anti-civ people you’re trying to dunk on are trans and disabled and I persoanlly put that into my theory, I am anti-civ partially because I’m trans and disabled.

how the fuck are you going to get hormones post-civ? 

There are lots of trans people who are making their own hormones at home. We don’t need to rely on centralized systems like industrialism that rely on specialization of necesary skills in order to control people.

h o w is the question, how the fuck are you going to do that if innovation is a “white colonialist” concept. what specific way will you get hormones that doesn’t require innovation of any kind

Well it isn’t. Indigenous people in Uganda did successful c sections centuries before Europeans, they did this without industry. You’re erasing thousands of years of indigenous knowledge with your European centric ideas of innovation.

okay so you have no actual answer to how you’d get hormones post-civ, got it

god this is so perfect. thank you, squid avatar white girl, for being living demonstration of this post. and this behavior is even more egregious because @cynical-fag​ is being so patient and amicable (hats off to you, btw). like, squidiot here is asking questions and getting perfectly reasonable responses yet acting absurdly hostile for no reason.

like, these questions are not questions, they’re attacks. what was cynical-fag supposed to respond with? the strawman of “you think innovation is colonialist” is answered by “well, it’s not, here’s an example,” is then met with “oh, so no hormones?” and then being blocked presumably lol.

it would be very very easy to call her an idiot, and i mean honestly she is, but the reality is that this is a specific tactic meant to safeguard an ideology, the one being “progress” (seeing as how she loves to dehumanize indigenous people). she’s not trying to debate, she’s trying to fight. and in a fight, the other person isn’t interested in your opinion, they’re trying to beat you into the ground.

[Toot by @bethsawin@spore.social: “Beware the shiny escape hatches promoted as climate solutions but require no adjustment to worldviews, power relsationships, vision, or values. A system that pushed a whole planet deeply out of balance in 500 years doesn’t just need some cosmetic upgrades friends.” Feb 3, 2023.]

YES! We’re currently seeing a decline in climate change denial because it’s becoming impossible to ignore, and a predictable increase in unrealistic easy fixes.

All of these fake solutions are ineffective, most are immediately harmful to indigenous and impoverished communities located mostly in the global south, some are incredibly dangerous in the long term. And probably most importantly: all of them are used as excuses to not make the actual massive changes that we need to stop climate change.

Low-Tech Magazine

No-Tech Magazine

Inhabit

Stop Cop City

Wet'suwet'en Land Defense

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Anarchy Works

Jesus

The Joshua tree is on its way to extinction because so-called green energy companies want to keep the death machine of civilization going by installing large swaths of solar panels over the desert floor, a big metal blanket that will kill everything it covers: the desert tortoise, the sage grouse, the hawks and snakes and beautiful flowers that have flourished for thousands of years. Gone. Gone.

All so that we can keep the dead heart in the rotting corpse of industrial civilization beating into the next decade. These are the "good guys" btw, these are the "renewable" "carbon neutral" options: covering the desert in miles of metal and microchips until every living being without a bank account is dead.

Out of all the cowardly, anthropocentric responses on this post (the people advocating for nuclear energy on a post where I was crying about trees dying are beyond hope) somehow this one just misses the point so completely

Firstly, the article I posted before this is the source:

Secondly, you don't even have to look that hard to find how threatened the Joshua Tree is

Thirdly: everything on this planet is on a fast tract to extinction. Do you not remember last summer when the Pacific ocean got so hot it boiled a bunch of fish alive? What do you think is going on when you see that birds are falling out of the sky because they're starving to death midflight? Are you really going to "um actually" about a climate change because the Joshua Tree may not be "actually extinct" for another 50 years? 50 years is less than a lifetime. Should we wait around until there's 1 tree remaining to actually do something?

You think the Bureau of Land Management gives a fuck about any of this? The BLM is in he business of scrapping the environment for parts. Did the BLM give a shit when they signed off on a lithium mine in Arizona last year?

I just find this response to argue that "it's not that bad" baffling. How does it not reduce you to tears to hear these stories? Stories about another species gone, another ecosystem turned into ash, another ocean turned into acid, another mighty mountain mined into a endless black void?

It does not matter to me if the Joshua Tree is cut down by loggers, cleared by real estate developers, or strangled by solar panels. Destroying ecosystems in order to maintaining techno-industrial civilization should be resisted in all its forms. It is an even crueler tragedy that possibly the last hands to rip apart the remaining intact ecosystems will be doing so with the blessing of so many "environmentalists."

Utopians b like

for people who want anarchists to have a step by step set of instructions which the anarchists will personally enact, with every single possible detail and contigency considered and planned for, leninists sure like to do a lot of hand waving when it comes to the ‘withering of the state’

astounding that the “it’s companies destroying the environment, not individuals!” crowd are made up of individuals who screech at the idea of facilitating industrial collapse of any kind citing they “need” it or it’s their “right” to have it

individuals make up the consumers of said companies and don’t want to accept any fault in not only their lack of resistance but their absolute complacence in the systems they enjoy or believe benefits them

tell environmentally concerned people we should stop mass scale farming of animals and crops, or should stop extracting wood and minerals, or how we should dismantle nuclear plants. and see how quickly they turn their attention from executives and against you instead

Total fucking madness that we let fast food joints sell us this little-ass hash brown patties for three fucking bucks. They're making like ten, maybe twelve dollars per fucking individual potato. Jack in the box wants $3.29, nutritional info pegs their hash brown at 64g. Just with a Google search, a potato will weigh anywhere between 140-285g. They're making $7.19-$14.64 per fucking potato. And I figure they're using the largest they can get, and potatoes are fucking cheap dude. And let's say they're paying the same price we do for potatoes, like 4 bucks for 5 pounds. Same serving size. They're making that into $116 fucking dollars. They're making fucking fried potatoes --delicious, broke slop-- into an expensive treat, a luxury. What goddamn horseshit. When is it enough? When are you going to just let loose? Can you really keep living like this?