u/Introscopia

First of all, let me say that she remains pretty much the most coherent, honest and lucid political voice of my generation. Uncontested.

Now, I wanna open a discussion about what I identify as one of the main points of divergence within the left (internet-tribal divisions aside): Whether or not a better world is possible. Or the extent to which it can be better.

I think she's never been so clear about where she stands on this, which, turns out, is pretty pessimistic: At the end of the day you're still "working at a factory", which sucks no matter what ideology your boss subscribes to.

Now, while being in full agreement about needing to make an impact in the real world, here and now, I'm also a big believer in cultivating an ideological horizon. A Utopia. A lot of smarter people than I have pointed out how the left's inability to articulate a compelling alternative since the fall of the Berlin wall is one of the major reasons it has struggled to compete electorally across the world.

A liberal might say, we are gonna make the world better, we're gonna put worker protections in place, tax the rich, publich healthcare, yaddayadda. But ultimately these are all compromises.

I have all these worker protections, but the people you're protecting me against are still there, holding all the cards, thinking up novels ways to skirt regulations and exploit me. You're taxing the rich, but they're still rich, and we're still meat at their buffet. You're giving us a nice welfare state... until you lose an election and the right wingers take it away.

Indeed, we are living in the aftermath of the liberal utopia. Post-great depression, liberals had it all, they built the things, there was prosperity... aaand it was still not enough for the rich. They slowly eroded away the welfare state, concentrated power, and paved the way for a return to feudalism essentially. This guy recently did a fantastic breakdown of the history of this decades-long project of the right, with a focus on media consolidation, the Overton window, etc. Well worth the watch.)

(little brag here, but I've been describing the ideology of the elites as "techno-feudalism" or "neo-feudalism" for years now, and only in the last year, with Thiel, Musk, etc. going more mask-off, have I seen these terms finally cropping up in articles.... pretty chuffed with myself)

So the question is: What would be different the second time around? Why must we be locked into class warfare forever...

Well, like I said, I'm a believer, I don't think we must and I don't think we will be. Neither do I think we will run for a different set of chains, as in some imagined authoritarian communist dystopia. And this is the core of the matter here. How to convince someone of a possibility? Of a crazy possibility like a non-authoritarian socialist utopia?

>Skeptic: Can you name me a single viable example of a society which has existed without a government? >Graeber: Sure. There have been thousands. I could name a dozen just off the top of my head: the Bororo, the Baining, the Onondaga, the Wintu, the Ema, the Tallensi, the Vezo...

>Skeptic: But those are all a bunch of primitives! I’m talking about anarchism in a modern, technological society.

>Graeber: Okay, then. There have been all sorts of successful experiments: experiments with worker’s self-management, like Mondragon; economic projects based on the idea of the gift economy, like Linux; all sorts of political organizations based on consensus and direct democracy...

>Skeptic: Sure, sure, but these are small, isolated examples. I’m talking about whole societies.

>Graeber: Well, it’s not like people haven’t tried. Look at the Paris Commune, the revolution in Republican Spain... Skeptic: Yeah, and look what happened to those guys! They all got killed!

>The dice are loaded. You can’t win...

-From Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber.

So yeah, I don't know exactly how I came to believe a better world is possible. And convincing others is even harder. Learning about all these "partial" achievements, like the ones Graeber lists there, certainly reinforce my beliefs, but I think I must have had some preexisting "seed" belief.

I could talk about speculative fiction that helps us imagine different worlds, like Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. (Le Guin was in the tangent shortlist by the way, so let's definitely make that happen for next time, people!!) By I don't know if fiction can ever be convincing, because they can always claim that the author has in some sense twisted their reality to prove their point. Even in a strikingly grounded and beautifully human text like The Dispossessed.

So yeah.. I don't know! Somebody please drop the answer to "how do we shine the light of a beautiful utopian future into other peoples' souls" in the comments below, please.

If you haven't seen the (excellent) noclip vid about it, here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAv0LYLQi5c

Here's what occurred to me: At one point in the vid, they say they don't want to leave it up to chance, after all, people are "paying for the box", they "bought the fantasy" of being a Jedi. BUT. This statement fails to consider a mid-to-long time horizon. Everyone can agree that Jedi should be special, and in practical terms this implies that we need to limit the total population of Jedi at any given time. And we can do that using randomness!

• At character selection you have a few "basic options" that you can choose and have a nice tryhard playthrough grinding and building your character.
• OR you can choose to roll. If you roll, you get a random class and some bonuses, but the kicker is: the random pool includes all the "shiny" classes, including force users.
• The availability of shiny classes is directly related to the current active population of these classes in the server, and this is public information. The empire has bounties out on all the Jedi. You know how many there are, and what they look like. Want to be a Jedi? Go kill one and open up a slot!
• Obviously we employ a pity-queue type system to ensure given enough playtime, everyone gets more or less the same number of Jedis. Maybe throw in some in-game obtainable things to help your odds to roll rarer classes, like looting a light saber off a dead Jedi!

And so yes, we need to talk about this spicy mechanic, which they did mention in the video; Permadeath. I just said Jedi could be "killed", implying permadeath. But like they discuss in the video, it's a really harsh mechanic, especially in an MMO, right... ("my cat stepped on the power button"...) So here's what I imagined:

• Dying has big consequences! Which at first... are good! You first few scars make you stronger, tougher, smarter.
• But then they start to get worse. They start to cap you abilities. And eventually they become straight-up debufs. These "elderly" characters could still have lots of advantages in the game, think of an admiral, or an old master of some profession. But would be slow and weak in the more action-oriented parts of the game.
• For Jedi this curve is much shorter than for the base classes. I'm thinking 3 to 5 deaths at most.
• Getting to a point where most players would just choose to retire the character, and to earn bonuses based on how far they got on the playthrough.

Yea! That's what I came up with. I have no intention of ever working on an MMO lol, but I am interested in discussing this here!