A very, very common question I’ve seen when discussing anarchism goes something like this:
“Once people are free of state violence and hierarchy, how can they just stop some bad actor from taking over?”
The assumption is that people who are free from coercive hierarchies are powerless to act in their own self defense, alone or in cooperation with each other.
(The question is usually accompanied by some invocation of the dreaded “war lord” whom the questioner assumes will inevitably overrun a nonstate or non-hierarchical community.)
So, I thought I would take a crack at answering this as comprehensively as I can!
In their book “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow provide multiple accounts by early European settler colonists of the indigenous societies they encountered in the woodlands of northeastern North America.
Over and over, these Europeans noted that these societies were well and truly stateless, lacking rulers, laws, courts, police, prisons, or anything like what they were used to in Europe.
They quote one Jesuit, writing in 1644 about the Wendat:
“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”
#Threads by #Meta forcing itself into the #Fediverse is bad and will harm the Fediverse as a whole if not straight up kill it.
I am baffled to see claims such as "we should give them a chance!" or "this could help the Fediverse grow!", as if we're not talking about one of the probably most immoral, unethical, and predatory businesses in this day and age.
Meta isn't coming to play fair. They're coming to use us for profit.
Main point: The Meta/FB [Thread app/site] "P92 app will be carefully crafted as a one way bridge that is permeable for content in direction of Meta, but not so much for P92 users in direction of the Fediverse."