Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocschwar | Hacker News Reader

David Graeber had a wonderful talent for finding innovative and fascinating ways to be wrong about something.

That will always make his writings worth reading and rereading. But before thinking he's right, remember he's guy behind the Occupy movement's rules of order, which is why the meetings took so torturously long. I remain a little irked by it, because a whole cohort of 18 year old activists sat at Occupy meetings before being introduced to Robert's Rules of Order, and some of them are ruined for life by it.

Good guy. Fascinating explorations into ideas. And so, so, wrong.

View on HN

Robert's Rules of Order is not the pinnacle of human achievement. It's just a tool.

New forms of collective decision making require new tools.

I wouldn't ever run an endorsement meeting using joint application design (JAD). Just like I wouldn't use RRO for eliciting user requirements.

Source: 8 years on exec board for local party, former UI designer.

PS- In fact, we're always tweaking our bylaws. To be more fair, more efficient, more representative, etc. For instance, we now use approval voting to stack rank motions to endorse, for maximal fairness. Doing so completely short circuits gaming RRO and mostly eliminated drama around the process.

PS2- OMG, experiencing traumatic flashbacks. Using RRO to craft platforms, amend bylaws, etc is literally hell on earth. Transmuting trivial activities using any other conceivable methodology into soul sucking unending torture. Last time we amended our bylaws, we had rapid response team from suicide prevention hotline physically present to monitor our members and preemptively intervene as necessary.

Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you.

You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?

My point: Occupy had two goals that I kept hearing when I went: 1. the bailout and recovery from the crash of 2008 should help the victims of the crash, and not the perpetrators. And 2. "it's not about the policy, it's about the process." That is to say, the people camping out at Occupy were trying to evangelize the GA model for decision making to the world at large.

Both failed miserably. And I blame the process.

Now, if you want to set up an anarchist space for yourself and some friends and live in it or just have it as a clubhouse for some endeavors, yeah, go for it. I really do look forward to see the first dead mall in my area that's taken over by anarchist squatters.

But the GA process 1. took too damned long. 2. was dominated by people who loved the sound of their own voice, 3. resolved conflicting interest by sheer attrition, by which faction would be last to drop out of the meeting, and worst of all, 4. encouraged people to reinforce their cognitive bubbles before social media came around to do the same thing. The worst of those bubbles was the one that wrapped around each and every Occupy camp and made them unable to understand how they were seen by people 30' away.

All this is on the process. And on Graeber.

As for 1., I would blame the lack of democracy in USA more than the norms of discussion within certain short-lived public meetings.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Part of the lack of democracy in the USA is the "Bowling Alone" problem: too much of the citizenry has no experience interacting with a democratic process. And part of THAT is the experience of losing a committee vote and moving on.

A democratic process would have to exist in order for us to "interact with" it (what would that even mean? if democracy is somehow separate from the people it isn't democracy). Citizens lose every vote. Rich assholes win every vote. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly choose to fight multiple pointless wars of aggression on the other side of the planet. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly imprison more fellow citizens, both in absolute and percentage terms, than any other nation on the planet, in history. A majority of citizens would never freely and informedly pay a Chinese lab to invent a global pandemic, and then enrich whichever pharma firms can best pretend to develop "vaccines" (which in actuality are more like pre-therapeutics, in that while they make infection less deadly they don't actually slow the spread of the virus) for that pandemic. All of these follies are the broken-window fallacy writ large, with the glaziers plowing most of their ill-gotten rents back into the political process to break more windows.

I'm glad I can't understand why so many prefer to blame we the people rather than the system of control to which we are subject. Perhaps they are also subject...

School boards and city councils are part of the democratic process, and they are open to you in your jurisdiction. You just have to face the prospect of your wishes being overruled for lack of support. That is part and parcel of living in a democratic society.

I don't live in a jurisdiction that has a city council. Is there something the local school board can do about the issues mentioned above? I had previously been pretty happy with their performance, but if they've been getting us in all these stupid wars then I have some complaints!

You seem determined to dismiss global concerns with quite specific imaginings of my apparently dysfunctional political participation. I don't actually care that much about democracy, per se. The concept is usually a red herring, cf. your contributions ITT. I just want to stop participating in a system that kills millions of innocents.

Alright, I'll bite.

What's the single best source for an outsider to become familiar with the problems Occupy's GA consensus process created? The more first-hand accounts the better, video or text.

Just look around. Do you see it adopted anywhere?

I've seen it written that a noteworthy number of people were ruined for life by adopting it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com