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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

I have to disagree with such a broad statement covering a period of, what, 600 years. Neither do I agree with the premise that leaving small communities alone, not having the populace or these communities a say in larger affairs, and limiting access to te community decisions to a select few people to be more democratic than our current system.

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> broad statement covering a period of, what, 600 years

not only was it long period but the Middle Ages are only ever brought up by people educated by a Western/ized idea of history.

My point stands because we would never hear of systems that "worked" in a decentralized way because required power structures would have never been in place for them to leave any impact that people will feel should be noted in the history books. James C Scott[1] does a great job tracing decentralized societies fleeing the Chinese empire over a period of several hundred years and settling in the hard to access hills of South East Asia.

A successful decentralized society wouldn't be in our history book because the measure of success is different in these systems. In fact things that are a failure in one system are a success in the other.

In the same way today, groups like the Jawara/Andaman or similar tribes will always remain a footnote in our books, at least until their successful assimilated into our own "superior" culture, and then we give them an honorary mention (= by then their way of living is destroyed ofc).

Another way to read this (and the way I personally do) is that a successful decentralized alternative is often the by-product of (an over-reaching) centralized system. Take a look for what the state labels as crooks, outlaws, degenerates, pirates, insurgents, terrorists, or anyone they are struggling to tax and prosecute, ... in modern times Roma/gypsies are the only ones left who come to mind. Everyone else we eradicate!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...

That works if people's only businesses are what is needed by the small community/tribe. We've reached a point where thanks to a millenia of technological advance, a fraction of the populace works in agriculture. Instead I work in a business that sells a niche enough product that we might have a customer ever other week from somewhere in Europe. In order for that to work, we can't only have customers in our town or its immediate neighbours.

So we can have more devolvement, an endless argument here in the UK, but centralised money structures, standards bodies, transport networks, etc are required for this to be feasible. Already we complain that the more niche ideas can be more successful in the US because there's a larger home market.

yes I agree. IMO it looks to us like the only "natural" way for humans is a centralized system/power structure because we simply are unable to envision a world which is not. It also would require an unrealistic "deprogramming" of society which makes the idea just another utopia (at least not achievable without huge sacrifice to what we hold dear today). The more likely scenario in which this is more realistic is after a total collapse of anything we associate today with society/humans. Even after collapse we'd have probably lost everyone except the most brutal selfish individuals and therefore we'd have to again first go through similar phases of central power structure ...

To paraphrase Zizek's quote on the end of capitalism: We are so far down that road, that it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than it is to imagine humanity living in a decentralized society.

This is a criminally underratef observation. Well said.

While I'm personally a big fan of zomia, it should be noted that it's received a lot of criticism and has been notoriously hard to operationalize. There are probably less controversial examples to use here.

(as you might be able to tell) this is of great interest to me so if you have any reading recommendations I'd appreciate them (thanks).

some of the people (other than Scott) who influenced my thinking on this would be:

Berger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_L._Berger (especially http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reali...)

Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci... (also Propaganda)

and Nassim Taleb (e.g. his view on Switzerland) ...

also I'm admittedly thin on anthropological reading (still have Agner Fog's book on my list since ages: https://www.agner.org/cultsel/warlike_peaceful.pdf)

Jinba Tenzin has been one of the more prominent critics of it. He makes the argument that it's more complicated than just "outsiders" and "china", but rather that there's a whole range of overlapping, marginalized identities and strategic use of power-relations to evolve things according to various positions. His objection is basically that zomia homogenizes marginalized identities and doesn't fully capture their relationships with each other or with the state. The convergence zone paper is probably the one to read for this.

Caroline Humphrey also gave a talk [1] that I've wanted to cite, but haven't found an excuse for. She's not against the idea, but she brings up a lot of issues with applying it to areas like like Tyva/Khövsgöl, as these were clearly state-spaces despite fitting all the other characteristics. She runs into basically the same criticism as Tenzin in that zomia doesn't encapsulate precisely what we intuitively understand as people about these marginal border spaces.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297392497_IS_ZOMIA_...

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