Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

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Very neat project. Since you are one of the contributors, I'd like to ask a philosophical question:

The wiki has this quote (emphasis mine)

>Tribler is a Bittorrent-compatible alternative to Youtube. It is designed to protect your privacy, build a web-of-trust, be attack-resilient, and reward content creators directly. We are building a micro-economy without banks, without advertisers, and without any government

I see this sentiment in almost all blockchain/crypto circles, including a lot of government funded research groups.

1.) How does that get unified in the mind of contributors? How does working to abolish the very thing that enables you to do your research without having to make bank doing it 2.) It seem to me that in general people want government. See Thomas Hobbes et.al. for studies in academia, or whichever region descended into anarchy most recently. Whenever things are "improving" you see government emerging. Why is so much rhetoric directed against government, when really what everyone is talking about is abusive government?( Which is a much messier problem to even define, but seem to me to be ultimately the correct problem people are trying to solve. That might be be done through building decentralized government -I think so -, but there are cases where centralization makes sense.)

What a side trail this could be!

I'd like to dispel the "anarchy == chaos" sentiment. Anarchy as a political philosophy has a long history of deep thought behind it. I personally see it more as a direction than an end goal. Anarchism is a desire to abolish all unnecessary and/or involuntary hierarchies. As Noam Chomsky puts it in [this interview][1], "it’s not at all the general image that you described — people running around the streets, you know, breaking store windows — but anarchism is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none."

In fact, a functioning anarchist polity exists in the world right now: the [Democratic Federation of Northern Syria][2]. Other such political arrangements have existed for brief periods in the past (one other example is [Revolutionary Catalonia][3]). Why have none of them lasted? It seems more to do with traditional hierarchical nation-states attacking and re-subverting them than any internal failing.

I don't know of the Thomas Hobbes studies that you reference when you say that _people want government_, but I would question it. I find it self-evident that "shared resources require _governance_", but I see no reason that such governance needs to look like a traditional nation-state. People don't want _chaos_, people don't want _mob rule_. But again, the problems of chaos and mob rule can be solved without traditional nation-states. I'm sure societies that trend toward anarchism could also find (voluntary, non-coercive) ways to fund basic research.

So yes, I say. Let's find ways to build economies without governments. Let's find ways to offload some of the centralized work of governments to decentralized technologies. Money, for example. Keeping official ledgers, for example. Let's think about how we can restructure society so that power is more diffuse, rather than being so concentrated. Governments already exist, and will continue to be a useful (if fraught) tool for governing many things, but maybe they don't need to micromanage all of it anymore.

  [1]: https://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Federation_of_Northern_Syria
  [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

I am familiar with Rojava (which in my opinion is not a good showcase if you want people to reevaluate anarchy, since it is still an active warzone with a common uniting foe, teters dangerously close towards cult of personality and has yet to prove that it would retain it's anarchic qualities after the survival struggle) and anarchic political theory. I'm mainly interested in understanding perspectives. So already thank you for sharing yours.

>Why have none of them lasted? It seems more to do with traditional hierarchical nation-states attacking and re-subverting them than any internal failing.

Different perspective(slightly provocative): people in a competing anarchic polity who had chosen to centralise more to be more efficient wiped out a competitor. It just looks like a nation state to you, because you frame it that way. Really it's people acting in what they perceive to be their best interest.

>But again, the problems of chaos and mob rule can be solved without traditional nation-states.

Sure, I mainly agree. But I think the next step is scaling the swiss model upwards, or making organizations like the EU more democratic. Anarchy is basically the equivalent "rewriting the whole codebase from scratch" in software: simpler in execution, but throws out the baby with the bathwater(and then not thinking through things properly and relying on "charity" and other notions).

>So yes, I say. Let's find ways to build economies without governments. Let's find ways to offload some of the centralized work of governments to decentralized technologies. Money, for example. Keeping official ledgers, for example. Let's think about how we can restructure society so that power is more diffuse, rather than being so concentrated. Governments already exist, and will continue to be a useful (if fraught) tool for governing many things, but maybe they don't need to micromanage all of it anymore.

Agreed. How do we deal with taxation? This is the elephant in the room: lots of people don't like taxes (even though they payed for starting almost everything good in this world, including the transistor and the internet), so how do we replace that system for funding common goods in our decentralized world?

> Since you are one of the contributors

Good to hear we are still nicely under the radar:-) We are the oldest and largest ledger research lab of Europe. (117 contributors for all repos, https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/graphs/contributors)

> 1.) How does that get unified in the mind of contributors?

Fascinating question. Universities have all sorts of measures to shield the actual researchers from providers of funds. Academic independence is deeply culturally and procedural embedded. For instance, as a tenured professor, I can't realistically be fired for creating "illegal innovations".

> 2.) It seem to me that in general people want government.

In my opinion, an economy is too important to leave to governments to run and tune. Sadly we don't have an alternative to government-led economies. Self-governance and self-regulation indeed leads to abusive behavior. e.g. Google "moral hazard banking".

>In my opinion, an economy is too important to leave to governments to run and tune.

But isn't that decision itself a governing decision, just one where we decide to tune for competition (for example)? It seems to me you can't avoid governance, as soon as there is power, there is either governance by the strong (robber barons) or by a system which tries to balance and - as you called it - tune things (e.g., an elected government enforcing anti-monopoly laws to improve competition)

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