Moderator's note: This thread was split from this other thread.



The only way anarchists are going to be fairly reported on Wikipedia is if the anarchists get themselves organized...



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....no wait a minute. That can't be right....

The word "anarchy" comes from the Greek word anarkos, which means, literally, "without rulers." It does not mean without rules, without laws, or disorder. In fact that most common symbol of anarchy, the A inside of the O, symbolizes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's statement, "Anarchy is Order."

Anarchy is based on mutual aid. Organization is mandatory in order for anarchy to exist. Early US communities, particularly in the northeast, were anarchic: everyone gathered in town hall meetings where laws and rules were decided upon by simple show of hands. Anywhere people collaborate without the need for a ruler standing over them with a sword or a whip or a gun, there is anarchy.

We ARE organized, and Wikipedia may yet regret that it fucked with us.

Au contraire.

Anarchy just means not governed by a system of bureaucratic rules.

It doesn't mean that the dysfunctional maze of bureaucratic rules cannot be supplanted by something more functional, more imaginative, more innovative, and more entertaining.

Fortunately (for those who actually learned their basic mathematics), there does exist a marvelous construct known as functions which (unbeknownst to those woeful bureaucrats hopelessly lost in their labyrinthine maze of byzantine rules), have the property of organizing the behavior of highly complex (and otherwise perplexing) systems.

Now one thing about Wikipedia is that the site is a sucker for being the first to carry an article on an otherwise obscure item of semi-popular culture. So one strategy is to devise and launch a notable item of not-yet-popular culture that Wikipedia cannot blithely ignore.

Now, to be sure, it is easy enough to ignore my own lame attempts to write atrocious song parodies about WikiCulture, but then I'm just a failed dropout of the Brill Building Sound. Moultown Records never really got off the ground, having been terminated with extreme prejudice by Gomi and the Mods. But surely there are others out there more talented than moi who can create popular culture parodies that <nowiki>can deny</nowiki>.

You've just described Wikipedia.

Now describe irony.

In terms of France, you're describing "Left wing anarchy", which is probably best represented by the fédération anarchiste. However, there are "right wing anarchist" fringe groups, such as the group that puts flowers on the tomb of Leon Bloy ("Anarchism is often a sort of punishment for sins...") every year. It is possible, at least in these people's minds, to be "anarchist" and "fascist", although I'm not at all certain that the word has exactly the same sense in English and French, which might be part of the problem...

One speaks of "Anar de droit"/"Anar de gauche" to clearly make the distinction, so it is an important one.

(I often listen to Radio Libertaire in the car, which plays quite a lot of music that...you don't ever hear anywhere else, like free jazz with bagpipes, that sort of thing...)

We're still waiting for "SmashTheState" to come to terms with the fact that Wikipedia is an anarchist project. It could be a while...

Not really. WP is a dysfunctional pseudarchy.

Functional systems are also not archies. An archy just means it's defined in terms of rules.

Functional systems are defined in terms of functions — a considerably more advanced (mathematical) concept than rules.

All your modern high-functioning technology systems are function-based, which is why they work.

If they were rule-based, they would be dysfunctional.

Wikipedia poses as a peer-driven learning culture in some fuzzy hippy style. In practice, it's everything Ivan Illich said schools were - an authoritarian apparatus whose primary lesson is to shut up and play your designated part.

If you think that's "anarchy", you've finished the lesson.

Nope. The structure was developed by "community" and "consensus". The notion of truth emanating from self-selected groups writing history according to such notions is clearly anarchist.

The only problem is that anarchism fails to ever consider what happens to such structures when put under external stress (hint: its what happened to anarchist communities the world over)

I have finished the lesson. You have failed the course.

Are they veronicas?




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Now playing: The Veronicas - 4ever
via FoxyTunes

It's true the structure emerged, organically, by the prevailing social dynamics, through a process which Victor Turner called "liminal social drama" and which I have noted frequently devolves into lunatic drama.


It's clearly absurd, in term of the precepts of epistemology.


Where anarchism fails, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Umberto Eco succeed.


More like Brothers Karamazov.

&bull; Veronica? &mdash;
&bull; Isn't that something in &bull;-fighting?

Jon

I would argue that the early US system was direct democracy, not anarchy. The same system existed for centuries in many Swiss cantons. Its roots are in the tribal assemblies typical for Germanic, Slavic (and most possibly other) tribes. As the tribes had their chiefs they were certainly no anarchies. By the way from what I know, the decisions of the early forms of parliaments tended to be made by consensus, not voting . The minority usually yielded when it realized it may come to physical harm by further opposing the will of the majority. And traces of this tradition are actually still visible in Wikipedia :-)

But seriously, to nitpick your reasoning further, the "everybody" you mention did not include women and indentured servants. As well as slaves if there were any. This made the system almost identical to that of ancient Athens, which are deemed to be the birthplace of democracy rather than anarchy.

STS seems to be conflating anarchy with direct democracy. People in this discussion also seem to be doing great stretches of intellectual gerrymandering in order to define the governing arrangements that produce results they like as "anarchy" and the ones that don't as not.

Might be possible that an anarchist knows what an anarchist is better than you. He is not some kid trying on different identities every week. He has actually lived a bit. Things aren't always adequately explained in dictionaries or even encyclopedias.

This is a little similar to the communists who always claimed that the ideal communism they are building is quite dissimilar to the mess they managed to achieve (called by them "real socialism" ).

Although the real socialism builders were in worse situation than STS: nitpicking existing systems while praising nonexistent utopias is easier than defending a nonworking system as one which has a huge potential which could be released if only...

Quite. I cannot see the difference between anarchist beliefs and those of Pol Pot's Year Zero. Certainly the Khmer Rouge policy of emptying the cities was an anarchist's wet dream come true.

Two million people died in a regime of appalling barbarity.

But back to anarchism and Wikipedia, is there any chance that anarchists will recognize the anarchistic roots of Wikipedia or will they claim its not real anarchism unless anarchists are visibly in charge?

Besides the fact that Wikipedia states specifically that it is not an anarchy, there is a very simple test for this. Anarchy is based on a very very simple premise: No rulers. Hence the Greek origin, anarkos, "without rulers." From this very simple premise, vast numbers of principles emerge. For example, there can be no hierarchy, for there are no rulers; without hierarchies, people cannot be coerced into collaborating with others against their will; without forced collaboration, all relationships must be consensual; and so on, for quite some millions of pages of anarchist political, moral, philosophical, and ethical thought.

Wikipedia has a hierarchy. It openly states this, which means I really shouldn't even need to argue this (cv. dozens of threads on this very site dealing with God-King Jimbo and his merry crew of courtiers).



Although "direct democracy" is sometimes used as a synonym for anarchism, it is actually a special case of anarchism. There are infinite number of potential ways of organizing an anarchist community and economy, from primitivist tribalism to decentralized communism to syndicalism to free-market parecon. The system used most commonly in the early days of northeast US was a rough, frontier-style direct democracy.

Your understanding of stone age socio-politics is understandably biased by that of the people who write the books (or rather, who *wrote* the books, since modern anthropology has advanced considerably, largely thanks to the feminist movement and their challenge to the "Great Man model" of history). We know from what few stone age tribes exist today that they are almost inevitably anarchic. The do have councils of tribal elders and chiefs, but these are generally positions involved in settling disputes and acting as spokesperson with outsiders. Examples of this would be the Hopi and the Yanomani, who both have peaceful, stable, anarchic cultures stretching back millenia. Even among tribes as fearsome and warlike as the Cossacks (even the Mongols feared the Cossacks, and the Mongols were some pretty fierce folks), the chieftan position, known as a "hetman," was held by a person respected by the entire tribe for both his strength and his wisdom, and whose job was primarily finding consensus among the people. A hetman who abused such a position generally found his head quickly separated from his shoulders. Cossacks were (and are) not people to tolerate oppression of any kind. It's no coincidence that the great anarchist Ukrainian revolutionary, Nestor Makhno, was a Cossack.



Anarchism is not Utopian. No one has ever claimed such, and no one ever will. The accusation that anarchism is Utopian was actually started by Marx, and it was this very issue which split the First International between the reds and the blacks. Marx held that there was a need for an intermediary period of overt oppression, the so-called "tyranny of the proletariat," before the State could be allowed to die away. The anarchists, and Mikhail Bakunin in particular (who is credited by most as being the father of modern anarchism), objected strenuously. Marx claimed that anarchists, with their adamant insistance on liberty for all, from the beginning, was "unworkably bourgeois."

The frequently acrimonious correspondence between Marx and Bakunin makes for fascinating reading, and much of the juicier parts can be found at Wikiquotes. To give you a couple of examples:

"When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called `the People's Stick'." -- Mikhail Bakunin

"They [the Marxists] maintain that only a dictatorship -- their dictatorship, of course -- can create the will of the people, while our answer to this is: No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation, and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom, that is, by a universal rebellion on the part of the people and free organization of the toiling masses from the bottom up." -- Mikhail Bakunin

Anarchism, then, is a work in progress, never to be completed. No one intends it as a solution to all problems. It is entirely possible -- even likely -- that an anarchist community can and will contain all sorts of very ugly problems such as the ones you mention, of racism, sexism, classism, and so on. The point of anarchism isn't to wave a magic wand and make all that stuff disappear, it's to create a framework where people are FREE to work on those problems, one step at a time.



As an organizer, I have spent many years using anarchist principles and seen with my own eyes that they not only work for accomplishing practical things, but in so doing they build up the sense of self-empowerment of those who use it. Without ever using the word "anarchy," I've watched the most oppressed people in our culture -- homeless panhandlers with drug addictions, mental illness, and severe lifeskills problems -- step forward and pick up responsibilities they never thought they had the capability to perform. Our press releases were at one point written by a man who had to leave the room every 15 minutes to take a sip of hand sanitizer in the bathroom because of a severe alcohol addiction. It was with a tremendous amount of pride that I saw street kids organize to take over the main Ottawa Police station and shut it down by occupying first the street outside and then the lobby inside -- surrounded by swarms of angry cops -- to demand the resignation of the cop who got his jollies by beating up street kids in empty parking lots at night.

I don't just speak as someone who has read a bunch of books. I've witnessed with my own eyes the power of anarchism -- that is, the power of mutual aid and voluntary association -- build up people who are more broken than you could possibly imagine.



There are two places in the modern, industrialized world where anarchism organized as a military force and declared themselves free by force of arms: Ukraine under the generalship of Nestor Makhno, and Spain under the generalship of Buenaventura Durruti. In both cases anarchists won the battlefield and were then betrayed by the Bolsheviks. However, in the all-to-brief period of anarchist organization in both cases, productivity reached record levels and crime virtually vanished. Others, like the aforementioned Yanomani and Hopi continue to putter away quietly and
successfully as long-standing anarchist communities. As far as I can see, anarchism has a perfect track record thus far.



Green? Check. Warty? Check. Lurking under the bridge, accusing everyone who disagrees with him of resembling Adolf Hitler/Pol Pot/Fidel Castro/Satan? Check. Dignify with a response? Not a chance.

Why only stone age? We know very little of stone age tribes not tainted by civilization. I meant rather the iron age, the tribes which overran Europe when Rome fell.

(It's the same with Cossacks. The hetmans were leaders. In fact warlords. What kind of anarchy is that? The rank-and-file Cossacks were rather egalitarian, but so are ran-and-file marines. Does it make them anarchistic?)

Yes the chiefs were conciliators. I wrote the tribal councils worked by consensus. And sometimes the chiefs were even elected. But anarchy means "leaderless" so they were no anarchies.

The majority vs minority consensus seeking was mostly shouting and shaking spears. This is how the assemblies were described by contemporary "civilized" witnesses. It seems looking for consensus was a kind of religious obligation. If you disobeyed you became an outlaw. Similarly to individuals who harmed a guest (for the tribal mentality it was tantamount to offending gods). That's why I believe the spears were only rarely used. Gods, it seems, were on the side of the majority. Where do you think the idea of "vox populi, vox dei" came from?

The idea of counting the vote was a later civilized "contamination". And many parliament sometimes still vote by shouting (by "acclamation" to give it its official name) which is a remnant of the original tribal consensus seeking.

PS. I've just checked that both the German stimmen and Russian golosovat' ("to vote") come from "to voice". Only the Latin derived "to vote" is an exception coming from "to vow, to promise, to desire". Clearly the first two have deep tribal roots while the third has some civilized wheeler-dealer connotations.

Having a leader and/or a warlord is not precluded by anarchism. This is part of the misunderstanding you're having. Nestor Makhno, general of the Makhnovshchina and leader of the Ukrainian partisans, was an anarchist from the top of his bear fur hat to the tips of his jangling spurs, and he'd probably have shot any man who denied it. The Makhnovshchina was comprised of volunteers who agreed to be part of a revolutionary army, and to be under military discipline. As I said, anarchism is not Utopian. On the battlefield, there must be order if there is to be any hope of success. Anarchist therefore -- by voluntary, uncoerced consent -- agree to accept discipline in the form of following orders from officers, and the officers from Makhno. The officers and Makhno, however, also hold their positions by vote of the men serving with them, and their orders could be questioned or even countermanded -- later, after the battle is over.

There is an anecdote about Makhno which might prove illustrative. One night after a battle, one of the common soldiers came into the command tent to ask if it was true that they had just executed a Bolshevik messenger. Such an act would be tantamount to a declaration of war. (Trotsky, who was terrified of Makhno, had ordered the Makhnovshchina to lay down their guns. The Makhnovshchina, who had just twice saved the Soviet Union, first by driving out 600,000 German troops and then cutting off the supply lines of Denkin's Czarists as they marched on Moscow, quite rightly refused. Their refusal came in the form of a bullet to the head of the Bolsheviks' messenger.) The officers in the tent agreed that this was so. The soldier asked what Makhno's opinion of this was. Makhno was lying in a bunk nearby, apparently drunk and asleep. The officers told the soldier that Makhno had agreed to it. The soldier, hearing this, said it was okay by him if it was okay by Makhno, whereupon Makhno came roaring out of his bunk, absolutely furious. "We just KILLED a man and all you can do is ask what MY opinion is?" Makhno was outraged by the fact that this man was abnegating his own moral choices in favour of someone else. In fact, many times Makhno had been outvoted by the Makhnovshchina, the army he led which was even named after him. Makhno, for example, having met Trotsky and Lenin, despised the men and mistrusted them. He advised (correctly it turned out) the Makhnovshchina not to make common cause with them, but he accepted their decision.



This is perfectly viable, and not inconsistent with anarchism. However, I'd like to make a point which may seem subtle but is extremely important to any kind of anarchist-based decision making. The amount of "say" a person gets needs to correlate directly with the amount the decision will affect them. In other words, the whole community should not get to vote on issues which affect only a small number of people. To do otherwise is to force association on people who may not agree to such, and this is a grave violation of anarchist principles.

You see, for me it's more interesting how the ancient societies worked (what made them tick) than the labels we now stick on them.

Can you face the truth that whether we call the iron age tribes (or Cossacks, or anyone else) anarchistic or not, it does not make smashing of modern states one iota more or less probable.

On the contrary, an understanding of anthropological history gives valuable insights into how the modern horror of the megalithic nation-State arose and -- more importantly -- how to knock them down so we can replace them with something on a more human scale. You may be interested in reading Piotr Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread. In it, he argues that no sane individual will ever join a revolution unless and until the revolutionaries have proven that they are capable of organizing food (and other necessities) for everyone after the revolution is done. The Zapatistas, for example, will not teach a person how to use a gun until that person has proven she or he is capable of making a decent taco from scratch. By understanding how ancient peoples organized themselves without the need for rulers, we bring the day of reckoning closer for the rule of the megacorporations.

The megacorporations have an advantage due to economies of scale, which are a law of nature, and are as impossible to remove as it is to teach ants or bees to do their own thing. There is a reason why ants are the most successful insect on Earth in terms of shear mass. Teaching people how to make handmade tacos might be educational (and so is learning to start fires with two sticks), but it's not practical. If they try to all do it for themselves it leads to damned expensive tacos, especially when you have highly educated people making them when they should be doing somehing else ("I got a sliver of metal in my eye." "The doctor will see you as soon as his tortillas are finished.") That was exactly Pol Pot's mistake, but it's a common leftist bit of nuttiness. It's a great way to destroy a society if you actually implement it. As explained by Ricardo.

Giant corps are here to stay, so long as we want a better standard of living. That dosen't mean they must have their present structure or control. Humanizing them lies not in reducing their scale, but the scale of their control. You can syndicalize, you can set quotas for maximal differences betweeen CEO and janitor pay (as they do in Japan and the EU), and so on. But doing things by hand or with less specialization, is a step backward into the Dark Ages. Which they didn't call the Dark Ages for nothing.

The corporations are NOT especially efficient. They rule through monopolist practices, and this has been amply proven time and again. I can't be arsed to track down the references right now, but feel free to have a look for them, they're not all that hard to find. It's been shown, for example, that small mom-and-pop farms produce close to four times as much per hectare as the huge agri-corp farms do. In British Columbia, there are laws which dictate how close together Amish communities are permitted to be, because they are able to produce and sell crops for a much, much lower cost than the agri-corps using 18th century technology. Such laws are unconstitutional of course, but the Amish refuse to challenge the law.



The idea is not that everyone should be making scratch tacos, the idea is that the revolutionaries must be capable of showing that they are capable of not just shooting guns, but of organizing and possessing practical skills for survival. But then, I suspect you know this and are building a strawman because I've offended your ideology.



Funny, they said the same thing about slavery.

{citation needed}

We're back to Wikipedian standards for scholarship. That's why Wikipedia and anarchism are such a good fit together.

Most corporations don't rule through monopolistic practices - that's another anarchist broad brush trying to obscure a central feature of what corporations (and companies) do. What would anarchists do with Gazprom, the Russian state-owned energy company? Decrease its competition? No that would lead to monopoly. Increase its competition? No that way leads to economic growth. Anarchist solution? Shut it down and let all but a very few starve and freeze to death across Russia and Europe. What would anarchists do with the small consulting company that I used to run with my wife? Smash it, because its elitist for people to sell their specialist skills for money instead of growing vegetables.

All anarchism would do would be to impoverish everybody in order to impose (literally) an agrarian tyranny of mob rule. We've seen the Killing Fields and they were no fun last time.



Oh dear. We are back to Cambodia circa 1976 again. In order for this anarchist wet dream to take place, Western civilization itself must be demolished in favour of an agrarian utopia.

The plain fact is that Wikipedia is anarchism in action, and the result is a perversion of history that anyone (including the insane) can edit. And its all on anarchist lines. You should be proud.

First, if you look above I didn't not claim that megacorporations had an advantage in each and every last sphere of economic action, due to scale. Obviously there are poorly scaleable services from massage therapy to dog-training, which don't scale well, or only to a low point (a building for training more than one dog, but that's about all you get). I simply meant (and should have put it so I could not be misunderstood) that megacorps are here to stay because MANY economic practices scale well, and those cannot be beaten with small scale competition. Examples are just about anything you see in How It's Made, a Canadian show you may be familiar with.

Second, "farms" are not a single economic activity, but a package of them, some of which scale well (monoculture of grain) to things which don't (raising of briddle or riding horses). In between are a lot of things which scale to some extent, but the best sizes of production are sort of intermediate, like growing grapes or flowers or fancy greenhouse vegetables, and a lot of labor intensive animal production. If you look at farms, you tend to find that the size of the farm dictates the mix of things they do, and the large ones tend to do the things that scale well, and the small ones tend to do the things that don't, and the middle-sized ones do a mix. Surprise.

The "yield per hectare" BTW is a poor measure of efficiency in any case. It only counts if land is at a huge premium and shortage (which it isn't, unless you live in someplace like Japan). What you're interested in efficiency-wise is something like "yield in dollars per labor-hour," since the whole idea is that after the Glorious Revolution we won't have to work dawn to dusk 6 days a week, and will have time to read and mess around on the internet. The yield in agriculture, BTW, has to include the yield of sales of animals, since it's so important for the income of middle-sized and small farms, which don't compete well in growing just basic plant-calories.

If you look at yield in money/time for smaller farms, you find they do about average, if they change their mix of activities to intrinsically-poorly scalable activities. But this proves nothing. Again, we're talking about a subset of economic activities. For highly scalable activities which can be performed by machine, smaller farms are destroyed if they try to compete with larger ones, and that's why all the whining about US wheat production wiping out small farms in third world countries that can't compete without tarrifs. If you were right about the economics of farms, and it applied universally across the board, there would be no need for tariff protection of any farm, large or small. Can't have this both ways.

In the US there are no such laws, and Ohio countries that are 50% Amish are no more efficient than counties which are far less, when you count in the cost of labor which Amish don't charge each other for (but which still counts economically, of course). See:
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1040041

The Amish also have another advantage inasmuch as in the US (I have no idea what it's like in Canada) they escape much of the total of 40% of income lost to taxation of various kinds, which they get out of by something like barter. Which would be illegal here in the US if it were done to escape taxes (I trade you eggs for your ham, and the State still wants its cut) except that the Amish are allowed to get away with it, as part of the unspoken "deal". Whatever your personal feelings about taxation and the state, you cannot but agree that it's rather unfair to compare the Amish with other businesses, large and small, which labor under that kind of economic handicap.

The other thing about the farming-Amish is that they neatly illustate the fact that small and medium scale farms are forced into a mixed economy which includes a lot of non-scalable stuff like horse-raising. The Amish don't come close to feeding their animals, let alone themselves (the more Amish in a county the larger the fraction of grain net imports). That goes along with the practice of raising stock for sale. Nor are the Amish (even the Old Order Amish which use little electricity) close to a closed and sustainable economy. And to be fair, they never claimed to be! It's only people who want to use them as examples of the Glorious Revolution feeding itself, who forget that the Amish trade with "The English" for many factory-manufactured goods, and always have. Take away the industrial revolution, and the Amish go back to the middle ages, too. That's no fun.


Not at all-- I'm merely trying to understand the point of your Zapata story. Why should revolutionaries learn pratical skills for survival as a neolithic or (at best) pre-industrial revolution society, unless they intend their Glorious Revolution to produce such a thing? Which Zapata may well have. It makes no sense. "Survival" in our present society more often depends on knowing how to run a computer than how to make maize tacos from the ground up. Look at yourself, for Godsake. What are you doing now? It's not farming corn. Are you one more Luddite-on-the-internets, preaching the efficiency of the Amish and their 8th grade educations? Spare me. Forget the tacos and build me a NAND gate out of discrete components and then a more complicated logic circuit from a number of these. It's about as relevent as growing corn in the backyard. You'll learn something, but you're not going to make a full living at it anymore than the Amish do.

Yes, well, they laughed at Galileo, too. And they laughed at Bozo the Clown. So what? I never know what to do with such arguments. They hardly qualify as arguments.

I'm no anarchist, but IMO Wikipedia is an ochlocracy (rule by the mob), not an anarchy. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, because the mob wants you to think it represents "all," and the results of an ochlocracy are probably always going to be identical to the negativist conception of how any given anarchy is going to fail. Also, no state has ever really tried ochlocracy as a system of government (assuming that isn't a contradiction in terms). And of course, hardly anyone knows what the word "ochlocracy" means unless you explain it to them.

Some might say this is just nitpicking over terminology, but I personally don't think so. Mobs have leaders and hierarchies, but they tend to change at a moment's notice, and nobody really has the power to hold them accountable anyway. Some people even claim to be "in charge" of a mob, but in nearly all cases they're really not - they just think they are. Anarchies deliberately (and in some cases, formally) reject all that stuff, but an ochlocracy isn't even that organized.

If Wikipedia were really an anarchy, it would be more manageable, and probably more ethical too. For Wikipedia, anarchy would be a step up.

A nice idea in principle but very hard to implement in practice. Perhaps I shouldn't vote on laws related to children, unless I have children? Does that change if I suddenly acquire them? Or am I allowed to participate, if I've once been a child? How about senior citizen laws? If I have no car, does that mean I only vote on city traffic rules where pedestrians are involved, but not highway laws?

Modern democracies actually have a mechanism in place in which small numbers of people who are differentially affected by laws which larger numbers of disinterested and uninvolved people pass, can protest. It's called "lobbying." It makes nearly every group which fancies themselves "populists" foam at the mouth.

People who have made up long lists of meta-rules for how "anarchists" should in theory make their decisions, give me the grins.

Every day that goes by I become more convinced that Jimbo is smarter than all you turkeys put together.

He knows more about market dynamics and how to profit from other people's juvenile phantasies than anyone I've seen since Ronnie Raygun.

What is Greek for Turkey-Archy?

Ja Ha

The Ottoman Empire?

I'll put my feet up to that.

Jon

Almost worth having a store that sells nothing but corded fabric and padded footrests, just so you can call it Ottoman Empire.

New Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Emporium

Not to be confused with the Octomom Empire …

Ja Ja

I know. Let's institute an anarchistic republic ruled by a democratically-elected King (or Queen - let's not forget those ladies) complete with a Soviet-based politburo and a fascist police-state apparatus held together by tax-exempt mega-corporations and a guiding gerontocracy/oligarchy headed by men of God.

Yes, it sounds really, really stupid - but in a thread that describes Pol Pot and Wikipedia as "anarchist" I'm only trying to blend in with the surroundings. It'll all end in tears, you know.

Not to mention some truly atrocious appoggiaturas.

Try making your own transistors. Then make a digital computer out of them.
That'll teach ya.

(I know how to make tubes, and even a tube computer, if you're interested...)

Looks like you found a weakness in Mr. Nellis's logic. The Amish are a bad example for self-sufficiency.
They are not even like a hippie commune, they are 17th-century German religious cranks, who decided to reject "sinful society". It doesn't mean they can totally live without the outside civilizations' support and resources. That's true of a lot of "utopian communities", past and present.

Frankly, if he had no choice but to live off the land, he'd have severe difficulties--and he'd thereafter probably have no time, or money, to cry havoc on the internet.

Just don't discourage him from participating here.
Crank or not, we need him, and all the other well-spoken Wikipedia critics we can get.

I admire Eric's vacuum tube devices. A couple of years ago I taught myself some assembly language, and felt like I was going "back to land" although I'm sure I will never do anything remotely useful with it. Eric is digging into the digital self sufficiency a couple of steps deeper.

Also I live in a rural area of a very industrial state with a significant Amish population. They are perfectly good neighbors as far as can tell. Some local folks bad mouth them terribly but they are same people who hate Muslims, poor people and seem generally intolerant.

Yes, that was all there was from the late 40's up to about 1960. I have some great old circuit boards and even once had an acustic mercury delay line memory tube. When I tell people how it worked, they sometimes don't believe me.

I grew up in an era when if your TV wasn't working, you took the back off to see if all tubes were lit up. If they were, there was no way to tell if one had gone bad, but to pull out all the major triodes and pentodes and take them downtown to some drugstore that had a tube tester. You could look them up in a book, (flip, flip), plug them into one of the sockets on the machine and set it, then according to directions, then hit the button to get a BAD....GOOD reading on a pointer-scale. That was fun.

Later I got to play with tube circuits using high voltage dry cells for portable radios, which people also don't believe when I tell them about. Ah, the cleverness of our forebears.

You can also build logic circuits from nothing but solenoids, and relay computers came just before tube ones. Turing's thesis being what it is, almost anything will work which is a switch, but solenoids were a lot faster than tinkertoys.

Once, in school, a fellow student bet me money I could not wire together only relays with power and a single momentary contact switch, such that the circuit would turn a light ON when depressed momentarily, then OFF the next time, then ON the next time. Had it worked out mathematically. And I think he was correct, except that solenoids weren't perfect devices. You could devise a relay-oscillator circuit which would eventually reliably stick in ONE position, due to heat and imperfections, and then this could be broken by a contact to kill it. Then turned into oscillation again with the next contact, which would eventually cause it to settle into ON. This turned out to be surprisingly reliable, if not very fast.

He paid me money, complaining all the time that I'd cheated by exploiting mechanical wonkiness in the switches, not logic. But he hadn't specified his terms on the bet.

Well, hopefully people will come to realize that alternatives are beginning to exist where they can positively contribute to the free-information movement.

I was at Manchester University, the home of the first stored program computer (if you define your terms properly, you can have the first computer anywhere in the world!).

There were two entertaining things: the Williams tube, named after one of the builders, which relied on the decay of the phosphorous screen, where the bits were stored as dots on the screen, and read via a detector. By continuously reading and refreshing, it managed to store values (though the mercury delay line also fascinates me as an example of divergent thinking).

The other thing was that this first computer had a random number generator, which turned out to be a noisy valve.

Exploiting wonkiness was what it was all about in those days - in fact I'd go as far as to say that our technology is built on such wonkiness - all the great inventions needed someone to spot some wonkiness that could be exploited.

Yes, the truth hurts.

Go for it! You're on a roll!

Agreed. A lot of Nobel prize-winning stuff like electron diffraction and cosmic microwave background noise wasn't discovered by people looking for it. The history of surprises leading to great things (Chance favors the prepared mind, ala Pasteur) is very long.

Isaac Asimov, who probably knew as much about the history of science as our present Burke Conections guy, has an entertaining essay in which he says that actually the most common words associated with a fundamental discovery in science are not "Eureka!" or something like that, but rather a much more prosaic "Huh.... that's funny..."

That's right. Consider the space program. That would never have happened if people hadn't been working on things like TV satellite dishes, medical imaging and vision screening systems. No .... wait ....