naevaTheRat

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 3d ago

Do you have thoughts on the article? I think this and his article on vulgar displays of power are interesting critques.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 3d ago

This person is a known troll btw

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 3d ago

So we're going to have to split this into a few parts, and to be clear I am not proposing that anarchism immediately leads to utopia.

anti-gay laws. Ok so what is a law? In our societies a law usually ultimately means that a piece of paper has some words on it, and if your actions are contrary to these words then men armed with guns and torture implements will hunt you down and hurt you until your actions comply with the words on the paper.

This is entirely incompatible with anarchism. Fundamental to anarchism is that coercive force will only be used when there is a pressing and immediate need to do so. If someone can hurt you for not complying with their rules you don't have anarchism.

Ok though, you live somewhere were for some reason people are mean to you, don't invite you to events, and otherwise bully you because you are gay. You have choices, you can stay and try to change their minds or you can leave. Leaving is easier, as you have no rents or mortgages, no passports, nothing that can be withheld from you to force you to stay in pain. Is this ideal? No, but I challenge you to come up with a system of living that will be ideal in all circumstances. At least under an anarchic system of organisation leaving is always a choice.

On someone always disagreeing: why do you think this will be the case? Is this your experience when you make decisions with more than one person? When you go out to eat is someone always adamant the choice is wrong? When you assign roles in a project is someone always unhappily complying only under threat of violence? It is not my experience that consensus is difficult to achieve except on the thorniest of issues. Under our current systems consensus is almost never achieved, any increase would be a meaningful improvement.

naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

As I’m sure you’re aware lots of folks in our field cannot write shell script to save their lives.

Basic scripting was a requirement for being a sysadmin. If you can't script you can't sysadmin, you can maybe be the IT person but idk it's a skill that takes a year to learn well. Shell is a very restricted language. This was 15 years ago, maybe things have changed. I know some people run around with microsoft certs and cisco certs pretending they are qualified to do more than resell (for free lol) products but companies shouldn't hire those people.

At least when I worked in the field a basically competant linux sysadmin got paid around 40k usd a year. It was not highly paid work, almost every dork and any programmer who was willing to sit and read "the art and practice of system administration" could do it. You need one whizz on your team and a few technicians to carry out their vision.

I was not a programmer or engineer, just a sysadmin.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

Idk thousands? we were a hosting provider lol. Don't want to dox myself. Not sure how regions come into it, I mean if you can write shell and some orchistration language you're golden for anything.

We had some PCI stuff, I relapsed smoking because of getting through it haha. We were also halfway through getting the Australian government PII/gov contract thing when I left.

Most people suck at passing audit compliance because they try to box tick rather than explain how their tailored systems meet and exceed the requirements.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

There are many ways you can structure governance. It's just how you decide to do stuff collectively. In certain contexts (such as in crisis) you might choose to follow orders from one person, for example the lead firefighter. Generally for decisions which are not time-critical simple majority is pretty poor and often leads to polarised and ineffective decisions.

Anarchists tend to favour consensus, with voting as a backup if consensus fails

Anarchic societies exist/have existed? In recent times I mean, not back when we were hunter-gatherers or something.

All societies have some anarchism in them, they can't function without it. Think community programs like buy nothing, classes, repair sheds, disaster relief efforts etc. Some societies have been more anarchic than others, David Graeber and David Wengrow cover some of how authority and power have been handled in their book The Dawn of Everything, mostly in the Americas where large and less heirarchical nations existed before colonisation (and some super hierarchical ones too). It would be a good jumping off point for finding more research via the citations.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

If your governing system requires consensus it does. Besides without coercive violence even if people dislike you being gay personally they can't e.g. imprison you for it.

It's not like heirachies have worked out well for queer people. The USSR persecuted queer people, almost all "liberal democracies" have (the state made me get steralised to not have my ID all say "please bully me and do violence to me thanks!"), Cuba only recently became more accepting.

Meanwhile there are more anarchic societies that have or have had social roles for queer people, or tolerated it just fine.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

We used to use KVM and qemu. There was no serious overhead maintaining them.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

Suppose this is true, what stops groups of 150 people sending say 5 people to a a council of other group's 5 people?

Anarchists aren't opposed to organisation, and it's completely compatible with anarchism to form councils and representative bodies. Provided that they are accountable and their recommendations are followed on a voluntary basis.

As much as you might not trust someone on the other side of town on a personal basis, I think you both have a collective interest in making sure there's potable water. Why would you not agree to organise some sort of working group or council to manage that?

naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

In his influential 1980’s paper “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner argues that this view of “neutral technology” does not hold up. That the politics of specific artifacts do not just come from who uses the technology and for what purpose but that technologies have built-in politics that stem from the political views and goals of the people building the technology as well as their internal structure.
He shows this by pointing at how certain bridges were built racist: When the civil rights movement in the US got black kids the right to go to the often better schools that used to only accept white kids, politicians did for example plan roads and bridges in a way that the buses that were supposed to take the black kids to the white schools could not pass the bridges and roads. This was not oversight but design intent. The racism is built into the structure of the artifact itself.
Winner also argues that certain technologies imply certain political or social structures in order to exist: The nuclear bomb implies not just scientists who can build it and a state thinking that that form of destruction is a valid form of acting in the world but also a security state capable of controlling and defending it. You simply cannot build a nuclear bomb without those structures, they are implied if not required, enforced by the artifact itself.
Winner’s work does not argue that the embedded politics of an artifact are always absolute: We do know of many potentially oppressive technologies that have been taken by artists and activists to turn them against their original use. But that is always an uphill battle: Surveillance will always lean towards a more forceful, rigid, less free understanding of government for example. You can use (counter-)surveillance of course but you always have to be aware of not reproducing the logic you are trying to criticize or attack.

Nobody is claiming all technology is fascist, but all embodies some politics and some of that politics is fascist.

naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

Well on your whole "it's just what's more common" this sort of entrenching of the "norm" as what is true is specifically one of the criticisms raised, so it seems strange to raise it as a defense, further much of the training data for all models is in english and reflects global north values and perspectives, particularly european and american because this is what has been digitised.

He also writes about the issues with centralisation and control, disinformation, lack of consent, undermining of government accountability/devaluing of institutions and transparency. It seems weird to dismiss this all as "just use a distillation of chatgpt run by a chinese company".

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

There are FOSS hypervisors that are more than adequate for almost everyone's useage. I would not advise anyone to make any single company a critical part of their infrastructure unless you are tightly integrated in a mutually beneficial arrangement.

If you have your own sysadmin then you don't tend to get as fucked, alternatively migrating hypervisor software is a fuckload easier than migrating from a cloud service provider.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 4d ago

Read the whole article, don't just react to a single bit I highlighted.

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naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 5d ago

I was working as a sadmin (like a sysadmin but more alcoholism) when the _cloud butt became all the rage.

Suddenly nobody wanted to host services on the hypervisor down the road, administered by someone you could _throttle call in a crisis. Nobody wanted to hire a monkey to keep their local tubes clean and run the basic stuff they needed.

Everyone could tell you that once they had your overbuilt shit locked in to their very specific apis and services they had you by the short and curlies and by god were they gonna squeeze for all you were worth.

Alas, nobody cared because initial offerings were cheap and your stupid magento storefront had to be webscale.

Now 6 companies control the internet and everything else is going that way too.

naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 6d ago

We all say things we don't really mean in convos, the internet just freezes remarks in time that would normally be moved past.

I think that it's worth trying to avoid certain kinds of mistakes in the semipublic spaces of online convos though, as fence sitters are often convinced by people that stay calm (I suck at this personally).

naevaTheRat @lemmy.dbzer0.com 7d ago

where are these rapewolves coming from? 🤣