they/them

  • 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • what you are describing is the tyranny of structurelessness

    and you are correct. structure is impossible to escape. but general hierarchy is not. I’m defining that as a structure in which one party has general powers to control another party, like police.

    the opposite would be specific hierarchy - a structure in which a party has power over other parties only in prescribed circumstances, like a bouncer deciding when a person must leave a bar. within the structure of our society, that bouncer can’t leave the bar and start forcing people into or out of other locations. a cop more or less can do that.

    therefore, it’s not a given that a “nonhierarchical” society is one of implicit structure. the most successful “nonhierarchical” society would be explicitly structured and would have robust checks and balances through specific hierarchies.

    for example, a subject matter expert should probably have preferential influence on decisions within their subject over non-experts. certain amounts of violence may always be necessary, so perhaps certain resources need guards. those guards would not be deciding policy, but they would be administering a pre-designed system of resource access, with the power to enforce that system if someone is trying to hoard that resource. (I’m not certain force will always be necessary, but it’s perfectly believable.)

    the best structures would discourage power accumulation with distributed responsibilities and self-improving systems (“laws” that prescribe their own revisions, theoretically with certain provisions that prevent regression toward allowing power accumulating behavior). these structures are not impossible, they’re just difficult to design and they are typically hated by power-seeking parties.













  • I’ve had a hard time finishing the game because of #2. DE is such a weird blend of “the devs thought of everything” and “all conversations are railroaded into insanity”. What at first felt like a game allowing the player to explore and develop political views in an alternate universe is actually more of a hamfisted, cynical parody of all possible idealogies. I think the moment I got South Park vibes (not from the writing, but from the " everyone is stupid " vibe) is when I was doomed to never finish it. That said, I actually love so much about the game, I want to enjoy and finish it. I just find it so tiring.





  • in many ways AH is one of the highest quality and most valuable subreddits on the site. it’s such an important organization that really should live on outside of reddit, but obviously it only got so big because it was part of that ecosystem. I think I might mourn AH more than my smaller niche subs even though I don’t go there often if it does end uo disappearing. I really hope they can migrate successfully somewhere else.