The collapse of existing sociopolitical arrangements is not interpreted as an accidental historical disruption but as the inevitable consequence of the progressive incompatibility between institutions organised around accumulation and a conception of work understood as the free expression of collective existence, because every social order reproduces itself through the assumptions embedded withinâŚ
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Well maybe they shouldn't be so fucking boring. I think its hilarious that people are mad at you because they are literally so fucking boring it makes no sense what so ever lmao. I Feel people trying to affect you a lot right now. Some people could know that your not with your family for the holidays and instead of this person enjoying their family they are spending time focused on you and what you have going on. It doesn't matter what people have that you don't, understand that most of those people don't appreciate what they have. Its simply because they don't have happiness within them. A lot of these people don't like you because you have such a creative mind. But who GIVES A FUCKKK!!
LMAO! These people are KRUSTY.
Collective you should just continue giving your energy to your goals and your ambitions! You should not allow people and their words to bother you because they want you to fit into the stereotype that they come from or that they've been taught "people like you" are. You go against a lot of the social norms and you are being your most true self. Everyone wants you to be what they can understand so they don't feel intimidated by you lol.
Fill up that cart with everything you want. If someone wants to spoil you, let them lmao. Get exactly what you want. Tell them exactly what you need. Do not allow yourself to hold back because that's what your use to doing. "Kiki do you love me?" LMAO someone is trying to be chill but they know damn well that the chill has turned hot and they just have to have you lmao. I honestly love this energy!!! Its like you minding your business then a bunch of positive things coming in for you! Change your hair color! You've been thinking about it and you should do it! Maybe you wanna get a completely new wardrobe with your own hard earned, do it. Don't ask anyone for a gift this year, tell everyone you want to actually not do gifts. Spoil yourself! Its time for you to enjoy you! Do not spread yourself thin! Allow yourself to enjoy yourself lol. The norm for holidays is changing and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!
The Beauty of Anarchy: Murmurations as a Collective Response to Uncertainty
Katya Krylova, Anarchist Studies Volume 33 Number 2 (2025), pp. 50â81
This article is written within what can loosely be called the anarchist cybernetic paradigm, i.e. the idea of anarchy as a self-organising system. The author, Katya Krylova, has also written a loosely animal-liberationist (but state-regulationist) piece on companion animals and about half-a-dozen other pieces mainly on representations of animals. Their work evidently comes from a place of compassion for animals, although it seems more rooted in ethical ideology than anarchy.
This article examines starling murmurations as a metaphor for how collective systems respond to uncertainty without centralized control. What appears to be chaotic movement is actually the result of simple, local interactions, each bird adjusting its behaviour in response to nearby neighbors. From these decentralized rules emerges coherence, adaptability, and collective intelligence.
A starling murmuration, from Yorkshire WIldlife Trust.
Krylova uses this natural phenomenon to challenge traditional ideas that order requires hierarchy, authority, or rigid structure. Instead, she presents anarchy not as disorder, but as a form of self-organization rooted in responsiveness, trust, and constant feedback. Murmurations demonstrate how groups can remain resilient by staying fluid and relational rather than fixed and controlled.
This article is written within what can loosely be called the anarchist cybernetic paradigm, i.e. the idea of anarchy as a self-organising system. Katya Krylova examines starling murmurations as a metaphor for how collective systems respond to uncertainty without centralized control. What appears to be chaotic movement is actually the result of simple, local interactions, each bird adjusting its behaviour in response to nearby neighbors. From these decentralized rules emerges coherence, adaptability, and collective intelligence.
Krylova uses this natural phenomenon to challenge traditional ideas that order requires hierarchy, authority, or rigid structure. Instead, she presents anarchy not as disorder, but as a form of self-organization rooted in responsiveness, trust, and constant feedback. Murmurations demonstrate how groups can remain resilient by staying fluid and relational rather than fixed and controlled.
The essay ultimately suggests that in moments of instabilityâsocial, political, or environmentalâdistributed coordination may offer a more effective and humane way forward. Beauty arises not from control, but from shared awareness and collective adaptability in the face of uncertainty.
What it means for radicals: This is a reformulation of ideas of swarm intelligence and self-organising systems which have been around for awhile, given a novel twist by the focus on beauty and resilience. We need to be cautious with cybernetic metaphors because of their deindividuating potential and because they are adjacent to todayâs dominant social models. This said, swarm intelligence clearly happens in crowd situations and some kinds of social movements.
Analogies with animals are interesting in breaking out of the humanist deadlock resulting from linguistic, cultural, normative, political, and economic models. Starling murmurations are beautiful to see, and itâs also beautiful to see how such birds ignore human-imposed restrictions like lockdowns and national borders. Animals are natural anarchists â but at the same time, we need to remember they are natural egoists, even in the social species. They do what feels right or brings pleasure in the moment, in accordance with their feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Since different species and even different individuals have different instincts, sensuous perceptions, etc., itâs tricky to draw analogies from one species to another. And while the animal world includes egoist communists like ants and bees, it also includes solitary, predatory, and highly conflictual species.
In my view, Darwinism is limited in its usefulness for anarchism, because animals seek pleasure, not simply survival. Iâm drawn to Graeberâs idea of play in nature and Hakim Beyâs use of Erasmus Darwinâs and Fourierâs ideas of âsurvival of the happiestâ. The authoritarian imperative âwe need to work together to surviveâ is all too easily tagged onto Kropotkinâs mutual-aid revision of Darwin, but itâs often also the case that animals survive and flourish by doing their own thing. And, at least with humans, it seems to me that collective intelligence is often inferior to individual intelligence â at least, it is very easily nudged and manipulated, and reduced to the lowest common denominator. Herds fall for authoritarianism easier than individuals.
Still, it's interesting and inspiring to think of ourselves in analogy to starlings, and it's very noticeable that nature often does things better - and more beautifully - than humans.
History is written by the winners, which is why Luddite is a slur meaning âtechnophobeâ and not a badge of honor meaning, âPerson who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it for and who it does it to.â
If youâd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, hereâs a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Luddites werenât anti-machine activists, they were pro-worker advocates, who believed that the spoils of automation shouldnât automatically be allocated to the bosses who skimmed the profits from their labor and spent them on machines that put them out of a job. There is no empirical right answer about who should benefit from automation, only social contestation, which includes all the things that desperate people whose access to food, shelter and comfort are threatened might do, such as smashing looms and torching factories.
The question of who should benefit from automation is always urgent, and itâs also always up for grabs. Automation can deepen and reinforce unfair arrangements, or it can upend them. No one came off a mountain with two stone tablets reading âThy machines shall condemn labor to the scrapheap of the history while capital amasses more wealth and power.â We get to choose.
Capitalâs greatest weapon in this battle is inevitabilism, sometimes called âcapitalist realism,â summed up with Frederic Jamesonâs famous quote âItâs easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalismâ (often misattributed to Ĺ˝iĹžek). A simpler formulation can be found in the doctrine of Margaret Thatcher: âThere Is No Alternative,â or even Danteâs âAbandon hope all ye who enter here.â
Hopeâââalternativesâââlies in reviving our structural imagination, thinking through other ways of managing our collective future. Last May, Wired published a brilliant article that did just that, by Divya Siddarth, Danielle Allen and E. Glen Weyl:
That article, âThe Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question,â set forth a taxonomy of decentralization, exploring ways that power could be distributed, checked, and shared. It went beyond blockchains and hyperspeculative, Ponzi-prone âmechanism design,â prompting me to subtitle my analysis âNot all who decentralize are brosâ:
That article was just one installment in a long, ongoing project by the authors. Now, Siddarth has teamed up with Saffron Huang to launch the Collective Intelligence project, âan incubator for new governance models for transformative technology.â
https://cip.org/whitepaper
The Collective Intelligence Projectâs research focus is âcollective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a groupâs capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.â That is, asking more than how automation works, but who it should work for.
Collective Intelligence institutions include âmarketsâŚnation-state democracyâŚglobal governance institutions and transnational corporations, standards-setting organizations and judicial courts, the decision structures of universities, startups, and nonprofits.â All of these institutions let two or more people collaborate, which is to say, it lets us do superhuman thingsâââthings that transcend the limitations of the lone individual.
Our institutions are failing us. Confidence in democracy is in decline, and democratic states have failed to coordinate to solve urgent crises, like the climate emergency. Markets are also failing us, âflatten[ing] complex values in favor of over-optimizing for cost, profit, or share price.â
Neither traditional voting systems nor speculative markets are up to the task of steering our emerging, transformative technologiesâââneither machine learning, nor bioengineering, nor labor automation. Hence the mission of CIP: âHumans created our current CI systems to help achieve collective goals. We can remake them.â
The plan to do this is in two phases:
Value elicitation: âways to develop scalable processes for surfacing and combining group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences.â Think of tools like Pol.is, which Taiwan uses to identify ideas that have the broadest consensus, not just the most active engagement.
Remake technology institutions: âtechnology development beyond the existing options of non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project.â Practically, thatâs developing tools and models for âdecentralized governance and metagovernance, internet standards-setting,â and consortia.
The founders pose this as a solution to âThe Transformative Technology Trilemmaââââthat is, the supposed need to trade off between participation, progress and safety.
This trilemma usually yields one of three unsatisfactory outcomes:
Capitalist Acceleration: âSacrificing safety for progress while maintaining basic participation.â Think of private-sector geoengineering, CRISPR experimentation, or deployment of machine learning tools. AKA âbro shit.â
Authoritarian Technocracy: âSacrificing participation for progress while maintaining basic safety.â Think of the vulnerable world hypothesis weirdos who advocate for universal, total surveillance to prevent ârunaway AI,â or, of course, the Chinese technocratic system.
Shared Stagnation: âSacrificing progress for participation while maintaining basic safety.â A drive for local control above transnational coordination, unwarranted skepticism of useful technologies (AKA âWhat the Luddites are unfairly accused ofâ).
The Instituteâs goal is to chart a fourth path, which seeks out the best parts of all three outcomes, while leaving behind their flaws. This includes deliberative democracy tools like sortition and assemblies, backed by transparent machine learning tools that help surface broadly held views from within a community, not just the views held by the loudest participants.
This dovetails into creating new tech development institutions to replace the default, venture-backed startup for âsocietally-consequential, infrastructural projects,â including public benefit companies, focused research organizations, perpetual purpose trusts, co-ops, etc.
Itâs a view I find compelling, personally, enough so that I have joined the organization as a volunteer advisor.
This vision resembles the watershed groups in Ruthanna Emrysâs spectacular âHalf-Built Garden,â which was one of the most inspiring novels I read last year (a far better source of stfnal inspo than the technocratic fantasies of the âGolden Ageâ):
And it revives the long-dormant, utterly necessary spirit of the Luddites, which you can learn a lot more about in Brian Merchantâs forthcoming, magesterial âBlood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Techâ:
This week (Feb 8â17), Iâll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. Weâll be in Brisbane tomorrow (Feb 8), and then weâre doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next are Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!
[Image ID: An old Ace Double paperback. The cover illustration has been replaced with an 18th century illustration depicting a giant Ned Ludd leading an army of Luddites who have just torched a factory. The cover text reads: 'The Luddites. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.']
There is one context in which I think recursive self-improvement is a meaningful concept, and itâs when we consider the capabilities of human civilization as a whole. Note that this is different from individual intelligence. Thereâs no reason to believe that humans born ten thousand years ago were any less intelligent than humans born today; they had exactly the same ability to learn as we do. But, nowadays, we have ten thousand years of technological advances at our disposal, and those technologies arenât just physicalâtheyâre also cognitive.
Letâs consider Arabic numerals as compared with Roman numerals. With a positional notation system, such as the one created by Arabic numerals, itâs easier to perform multiplication and division; if youâre competing in a multiplication contest, Arabic numerals provide you with an advantage. But I wouldnât say that someone using Arabic numerals is smarter than someone using Roman numerals. By analogy, if youâre trying to tighten a bolt and use a wrench, youâll do better than someone who has a pair of pliers, but it wouldnât be fair to say youâre stronger. You have a tool that offers you greater mechanical advantage; itâs only when we give your competitor the same tool that we can fairly judge who is stronger. Cognitive tools such as Arabic numerals offer a similar advantage; if we want to compare individualsâ intelligence, they have to be equipped with the same tools.
Simple tools make it possible to create complex ones; this is just as true for cognitive tools as it is for physical ones. Humanity has developed thousands of such tools throughout history, ranging from double-entry bookkeeping to the Cartesian coĂśrdinate system. So, even though we arenât more intelligent than we used to be, we have at our disposal a wider range of cognitive tools, which, in turn, enable us to invent even more powerful tools.
This is how recursive self-improvement takes placeânot at the level of individuals but at the level of human civilization as a whole. I wouldnât say that Isaac Newton made himself more intelligent when he invented calculus; he must have been mighty intelligent in order to invent it in the first place. Calculus enabled him to solve certain problems that he couldnât solve before, but he was not the biggest beneficiary of his inventionâthe rest of humanity was. Those who came after Newton benefitted from calculus in two ways: in the short term, they could solve problems that they couldnât solve before; in the long term, they could build on Newtonâs work and devise other, even more powerful mathematical techniques.
Why Computers Wonât Make Themselves Smarter - Ted Chiang | The New Yorker
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Watching the video of Henry Jenkins and reading âCollective Intelligence and Online Communitiesâ, I was reminded of the online community I was active in in middle school and how it helped me learn, experiment, and form friendships. As a kid, I was really into reading âchic-litâ, books intended for young girls such as Gossip Girl, The Clique, A-List, etc. I got so into it, I started going on online forums dedicated to these book series. There I found other young people who were interested in practicing their writing skills. Together we created our own websites, where we collectively wrote fan fiction-type work about girls in boarding schools. This practice of writing together, is also known as Role Playing or RP. We would each write a paragraph as a character and this would move the story along. Vanesa GaĚmiz might refer to this activity as, âpractice-based learningâ. We were dedicated to becoming better writers. We learned from each other, were inspired by each other, were held accountable to each other and because we had so much fun doing it, we did it voluntarily. Every day after school I ran home to the computer, dialed up AOL, and in spite of the slow internet connection, I wrote for hours with my online friends.
The skills I developed there were invaluable. Collaboration, experimentation, plot and character development, website building among others. I credit these forums to becoming a better writer. This online community also served as an entryway into other online communities I got involved with later in life. In my early twenties I became involved with the âalt-litâ scene on Twitter, a group that consisted of experimental social media poets. I went from following cool writers on twitter, to befriending them, to hosting readings with them to traveling to poetry festivals with them. This community has published my work, curated me into museum shows, workshopped my in-progress poems as well as given me lifelong friendships.
Itâs bittersweet to admit that these two online communities have influenced me just as much if not more than any of my K-12 education. Why was so much of my learning happening outside of the so-called place of learning, school? Why is this often the case? It begs the question, are schools set up to deny students the real tools needed for learning (agency, creativity, experimentation, collaboration, collective intelligence, self-driven inquiry)? If so- how can we change that? I believe the tools and projects of media literacy are an essential part of the solution. In order to start engaging students, it makes sense to start with what they already engage with and itâs up to us as teachers to figure out what that is.
Humans are social animals who like to communicate and copy each other. But key to this collective intelligence is flexibility and a little non-conformity.
When it comes to making decisions, most of us are influenced to some degree by other people, whether thatâs choosing a restaurant or a political candidate. We want to know what others think before we make that choice. Humans are social animals. So social that we can rarely be independent of others because of our propensity for copying behaviour and communication â also known as social learning. Humans copy each other every day. You might buy the latest trainers because theyâre really popular, even though you have no idea how good quality they are. And then you might share that information, perhaps posting a review on social media. This can induce âsmarterâ purchasing decisions because usually, if a product is popular, it seems less likely it would be of be poor quality. So sometimes social learning can improve our decision making.
