ToTW: Escaping Silos

When I use youtube.com, I use different browser containers, based on what I'm looking for. One container is for news, and serious content, and I do my best (given that I'm ambivalent about news anyway) to find a variety of sources, including mainstream, international, etc. I actively stay away from progressive sources, since those tend to be the assumptions I already make. I mostly don't use the suggested viewing options provided by Their algorithms, but of course that is a lost cause, most likely.

As we live through the burgeoning effects of niche markets (given interesting background in Century of the Self series by Adam Curtis), which come to mediate and influence our perspectives more and more, what do you do to avoid your own media bubble, echo chamber, etc? Or is the best we can do to move between echo chambers, to be the floating irritants migrating from one self-satisfied system to another, resting when we find one that seems to fit ok, and then moving on from boredom or irritation or for fun?

And along that line, what is the difference between a home and a silo?

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"What is the difference between a home, and a silo?"

They can definitely feel very similar, specially if you don't get out much, specially during quarantine. Though I would make the distinction between personal biases, media bubbles/echo chambers, and the mere fact of living in a place. This makes me think of the word "parochial" and "insular" as insults vs "cosmopolitan" and "well-traveled" as compliments. This is not to suggest banal tourism turns into wisdom, as neither does being an eclectic spectator, watching all sorts of media from different sources.

Home as a housing unit can be synonymous with a certain alienation particular to civ, but so does being uprooted and living the jet-set life. Simply being in a place or moving through (be it your home, highways, airways, tourist destination) it is a commodity in one way or another, same with cyberspace, where you inhabit the product and you are also the product (the services you offer and the profile of your qualities that feeds into data mining and optimizes search engines and media feed algorithms).

"Or is the best we can do to move between echo chambers, to be the floating irritants migrating from one self-satisfied system to another, resting when we find one that seems to fit ok, and then moving on from boredom or irritation or for fun?"

There is no way to avoid moving through the world and being an irritant. One can enjoy irritating others as well as become sad at the adverse reaction of being irritating to others, certainly as a species we can be caustic and toxic to the environment to which we are inextricable, hence it irritates us as well. Inflammation response and entropy or whatever etc. What is our immune system to pathogens, or our allergic reactions? What is our critical thinking to media, content, fake news or not, and what "triggers" us? Not to force the metaphor too much.

"As we live through the burgeoning effects of niche markets (given interesting background in Century of the Self series by Adam Curtis), which come to mediate and influence our perspectives more and more, what do you do to avoid your own media bubble, echo chamber, etc?"

Excellent series, our reality seems clearer to understand once we reduce our scope and get into the details, once we try to broaden the scope to include what we think is everything, it becomes a mess. Overarching and seemingly all-encompassing concepts like "the spectacle" and "civilization" while muddying the details, it points to the greater whole that is eluded by addressing any particular thing as a problem that can be solved or avoided. You cannot avoid the ideological megaphone , enema, fish bowl, or silo, of urban planning, agriculture. Grain silos are ideological silos too, they are also media feed, you get your foodstuff and your discourse from it. Civilization is a silo, states are silos with their borders, citadels with their walls.

Are only the free-range grazing nomads, the migratory birds and fishes, the spores, the only un-siloed beings that can call Earth their home and place? What are the Earth's algorithms or media feed? How do we connect to its feed/feed from it? What is the Earth's livestream/life stream? What do wind currents, sea currents, the rivers bring to us (flocks, echoes, spirits, smoke signals messages in a bottle)

What is it to be in-touch or out-of-touch? As the digitized world becomes a flattened image, we lose tact, contact. What are our grounded bearings? After all, is being grounded and emplaced and attuned to context the opposite of being delusional, or having a misguided view of the world?

i think the difference between a home and a silo is the amount of threat that comes from leaving it. if it's scary to leave, then it's a silo.
that bypasses agoraphobia, but let's limit our variables!

The world is our only home and it's often a scary place, wherever you go you. Once you accept the presence and transience of feelings, your body and what it feels, including fear, becomes your home and not something to escape. A lot of people seek escapism of their body's sensations by dulling these sensations or distracting from one with others. That can be achieved through food, drugs, sex, adrenaline, self-harm, s&m, and also media streams and media bubbles. Some people are hooked on reassuring media streams and validating "likes" that serve as escapism from inconvenient truths and scary realizations (like their own irrationality, fallibility, harmful roles, mortality, etc.). You can never leave your body/Earth/all, never escape your home, not even in death. A silo is holding on to mental state, or a mental state that has a hold of you, a feedback loop, a source of pain and reward. Since everything is transient, you will eventually change from that state one way or another. But people hold on to their beliefs, their ideas, their identities, their dear life, transitions can be smooth or painful, gradual or sudden, whether in terms of biases, worldviews, life, aging, what we know as death is a gradual decomposition and re-composition. What isn't metabolism? The sun burns fuel, and will engulf the Earth. The silo will be destroyed, but what are the edges of the universe?

The way people from different silos mock each other with memes gives us insight into how silos mold affects.
In-groups and out-groups, sub-cultures, milieus, cliques, cults, differences of gradations.
Friendly teasing, cruel mocking, petty insults, humor as the pleasant reward of being an irritant, for example:

LBC vs The World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-6-xvzesRk

When a dynamic between silos form when they irritate each other, it reinforces the silos because of the humor reward, and also makes them more toxic because of the irritation.

Used to be funny when "ganggang" were still a thing, before the Inhabit stupidity came in with their divisive authoritarian bullshit and bragging.

your naming the primordial wound of separation
with a superficial fixation
in this way opposition to outgroup
takes the form of a fetish
focusing on each small detail
arouses and stokes desire
as seen in antifascists’ weekly taxonomies and biographical portraits of fascists and far-right groups
painting their resemblance,
caressing their contours
over and over
stroking their ego
looking in the mirror
narcissism of small differences

a) make your home silo into the best silo it can be
b) merge your silo with other similar silos into one big silo.
c) spend time in dissimilar silos to better understand them (even at the expense of your home silo).
d) destroy all silos!
e) silos aren't real.
f) society!

life is short and devoid of meaning.
float on, fellow irritants!

For me, it took growing up, like literally aging. It also might have had something to do with falling-outs and new friends groups and fallings-out again. I cut down many people until it was my turn to be cut down.

The best thing that prepared me for this, was the words of a few older anarchists who still found time to connect with the younger crowd. They tried to warn me and I heard them but didn't listen. They would say things that seemed odd at the time, things like, "the world doesn't only work the way you think it does" and "there needs to be something in your anarchist principles that accounts for when things inevitably stay-the-same and their world doesn't crumble from a few big black blocs and distribution projects"

Being forced from the "silo" made me reconnect with people on other levels (not anarchy) and now I realize that I'm okay with that. I don't have to be "on" all the time. It's actually way more relaxing this way, which is great for my depression and anxiety. I still have my projects and have slowly built bridges back into my local anarchist space, but I hold other anarchists at arms length. I don't trust them the same way I once did. I'll be a body in protests they organize and support projects I see that I can get into. I'll add my two sense when I think it'll be helpful, but I'm not interested in "center stage" or debating things endlessly.

I have anarchist projects myself and they sometimes overlap with the broader anarchist community, but oftentimes they don't. I don't shy away from my ideas, either. I just don't ONLY speak them into a feedback loop of my peers anymore. I've had more conversations about anarchism this summer than I've had in the last decade with people in my apartment complex/neighborhood because I've always been an unapologetic anarchist and a good neighbor, so when the riots were happening both around my town and the bigger cities nearby, I was able to provide them a context that they thanked me for. I didn't convert them into anarchists, but that's not my goal anymore.

Cabal/Argot is a pamphlet that was written by an old friend (maybe enemy, not sure how the decade has changed that) and I used to champion that in-group/out-group dynamic, as if it was the only one that really mattered. Illegibility and opacity were important. Infighting was the way to suss out the non-believers (I would have argued the opposite back then). I'm glad I made it out, even if at the time, the exclusion hurt.

But anarchists aren't tribes in the wilderness (even if our flowery terminology says otherwise) and exclusion/banishment doesn't kill/break you. You just kind of go on. And for people who have gone on, please try to reconnect with your local anarchist scene IRL (at arms length) and just see how it goes, try not to stir shit up with your old enemies and just be a chill person, show them how you've changed but try not to care what they think (you have your own life now, if it goes bad it's not the worst).

Thank you for writing this, anon. I hope you’re having a good day.

anarchism as leftism and activism is always a traumatizing disappointment.
there are ways of acknowledging that without becoming an ex-anarchist.
your sentiments reflect the experience of many, some are in denial and would not express it.
i would say nothing is lost if you never approach "the broader anarchist community IRL" which is code for leftists that are finding out (or not finding out) what not to do the hard way and then burning out and having a bad time in general.
avoiding churches is not a bad idea either. one of the effects of the online anarchist silos is that since the focus of discussion and critique is often anarchists, these might seem like disproportionately flawed and ugly, because we care more about their defects or take it personal as if it reflects on us, in comparison to "normies". there are many toxic communities, relationships and value systems.
seeing anarchism as a way to understand all this is better than seeing anarchism as a group of people.
people are alike all over.

Like... exactly the same issues as ANY insular group, just boldened instead. Pretend to be against "SOCIETY" while just reproducing it harder and harsher, prolly coz Hollywood superficial view of "radicals" as edgy n tuff baddies).

yeah, why single out anarchist alienation in the middle of the human interaction ice age?

“Human interaction ice age.”

That’s a good way to put it. God I’m so fucking lonely and alienated rn I could explode. Fuck this shit.

tough times, yeah. if you like, we can stretch arms towards each other across an infinite cybernetic abyss? is this helping?

Lol, ty Lumpy.

I prefer not to think of echo chambers or media silos so much as to call them (after RAW) reality tunnels. Once you can see the various reality tunnels in play in the world, or once you can merely acknowledge the fact of tunnels or chambers or silos, then you can start to map and experiment and play with being in each one, or acting as if you were. It is easy to get lost, though. So, I would say home is what you come back to after you've been out exploring a bit, the place or the stance or the reality tunnel that suits you best, from which you can evaluate the other stances or silos or tunnels. Every so often it can be worth it to re-evaluate home for structural integrity, though maybe don't do this completely alone. Believe nothing, entertain possibilities, as it were.

As for media, sometimes I do follow the suggested algorithms (Al Gore rhythms) (because he invented the internet) just to see where I end up. But, as we all know, the bias is built in, or capitalized in, so that only has so much (humor) value.

As a palate cleanser I find much benefit in looking at the non-electronic, non-manufactured world even if that is only the plum tree in the median strip. In all this, try not to ignore the evidence of one's senses, at base that's all any of us really has anyway.

wow, did you come up with that pun? pretty had not seen or heard it before, very clever.

Just watch Democracy Now! every day. You can trust Amy to bring you the news. Get the torrent file and contribute to an important media project, plus it's HD. Read the first chapter of Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark. Prelude: The Tale of the Omega Team. When AI takes over there won't be an announcement and you might not even notice it. All media sources should be suspect.

There should be a reinforced door at the base of the silo, or a hatch with a sliding door leading to a conveyor belt or sliding chute. Some have an internal ladder bolted to the interior wall. Otherwise, if you have tools like chisels, drills, hammers or explosives you could make a hole through the wall.

does anyone like vampire squid boy? he's just a lib or at best, a socdem but I enjoyed this analysis of the massive influence of the market on the "siloing". A sort of, race to the bottom of outrage clickbait instead of oldschool journalism.

To be clear, several anons here make good points about how this isn't just a recent social media phenomena but Taibbi helps explain how the media has supercharged the siloing in recent decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG1qJeDI9Ok

I came up through the crust-punk scene, which has it's own codes of conduct, language, look, "politics", etc. This, even though you had to look the part and go to the shows, was the freest silo I have been in. It's open to new comers, PC (but not overly so, so as not to exclude members of the scene who might not know any better), flexible (you can be friends with apolitical street punks, oi! skins (who aren't racist but not exactly anti-capital & anti-state), hyper PC anarcho-feminists, liberal ska 'rude-boys', etc.) and way more fun (adventures, sleep overs, drunken rampages with shopping carts, shows, etc.)

I found anarchism through there and felt like I should leave behind the patches and liberty spikes and when I moved to the United States (from a small island country) so I threw myself into the traveling activist anarchist circuit. I hitchhiked around, had a nalgene water bottle with all the right stickers. AK Press had loads of really amazing books and parties in the Bay Area. Clandestine Rebel Insurgent Clown Army were doing their weird thing. Riot Folk Collective and Defiance, Ohio were fun to listen to and honestly you can only listen to so much D-Beat. I controlled my problematic language and threw myself into "the revolution". New silo attained!

I was hungry once and I told my friends, "I'm starving" and they told me, "there are actually people starving" and I apologized and thanked them for it. No one was mad at me, they were just trying to help and prove they're comrades by checking my privilege. But because they said it to me, I was a little more sensitive to that critique, so when a more popular anarchist than me said, "I'm famished" the next day and no one called him out on it, I began to realize something was off. I had begun reading some anti-civ stuff because Earth First! and I considered myself a Deep Ecologist back then. Then Endgame by DJ (ol' magician eyes, I think someone called him) came out and I was in. New Silo attained!

I started tabling anti-civ lit at bookfairs and started meeting new people. Green @s, I@s, post-left, Tiqqun. Blackbird Raum, Kenny Arkana, Justice were what I listened to now. These were my people. Finally. A critique of silos within a silo, what could be better and what could possibly go wrong?

and it's been perfect and cozy ever since . . .

Tho I dunno through what strange subcultural conducts did Justice ended up in "anarchist" circles, as that was a band of French Christian rich kids from Versailles who hyped on the violence of French suburban youths.

Master of echo chambers

I try to get a variety of echo chambers, but not overtly so. I'll try to read some mainstream news, watch some breadtube (I know, yikes), I'll browse 4chan to see what the nazi trolls are up to, but mostly I try to focus on self-identified anarchists even ones I disagree with (excluding capitalist bootlickers of course.)

With this in mind, I'll try to get a huge variety of perspectives from around different anarchist scenes. From lifestyle anarchists, to social anarchists, to syndicalists, to primitivists, to nihilists, to communists, to egoists, to mutualists, to transhumanist circles. All of these different ideologies have their own (so-called) echo chambers, but they also are interacting with the world around them and each other to a degree. They'll overlap with mainstream news at times, with each other at times, and with other non-mainstream echo chambers at different times. I find that anarchist circles are often best at breaking down echo chambers, as we don't really want to ever find ourselves as "good little anarchists"

good TOTW! Shame there's not enough here for us to fight about.

I'll bite! We can fight about how best to deal with trolls and toxic people and dynamics within silos. What's the difference between an intense annoyance and a targeted harassment? A mentally disturbed person who needs care and not be pushed away despite their imprudent behavior and people who need to be kept as far away as possible or even be eliminated! I'm sure it's pretty clear-cut most of the time. When one is(voluntarily or not) trapped within a silo it becomes harder or impossible for people to avoid each other. During covid quarantine and lockdown people are locked in with abusing parents, couples, family members or roomates, or maybe someone really annoying that still drives the other person crazy. I'm sure everyone knows the best ways to deal with this, online and offline, so lets fight over that!

but like ... everything you just said is all reasonable and stuff? I mean, I've been in dozens or hundreds of those situations before but the details were everything and wow, would people ever fight about them!

but yeah, maybe say something more awful? like, definitely always push mentally disturbed people in to extreme isolation when their behavior makes anyone the slightest bit uncomfortable because fuck them and also, they're obviously all antifa pedophiles!

What kind of silo do you have on your mind, anon? An irl social scene? An online space? Perhaps providing a more particular context could make for a more interesting discussion.

We've always lived in silos. Long before social media. The Trots against the Lennists. The Bookchinists against the post-leftists. The individualists against the anarcho-communists. The primitivists against the social anarchists. The People's Front of Judea against The Judean Popular Front.

Was there ever a golden age of open plurality?

saying they've always existed doesn't say anything about how (or, i guess, whether) to escape them. is your point that they're inevitable so just accept it? or do you have something to say about how people used to escape them back in pre-hjistory?

Yes I'm saying silos have always existed, at least since civilization.. The beliefs are more extreme now, but social factions have always divided mass societies.

Is the solution that we should all believe the same thing? A planet with one mind? That was the hippy mantra in the 1960s.

and what about missile silos @news?! nuclear apocalypse is old news, not even worth a mention

People should be more concerned with the invisible silo, the Muhrican Dream Silo, the hidden nightmare and squalor 'neath the glittering trophy.

the fact it's everywhere makes people think it's invisible, but it's still definitely a silo

Love the only escape! But how to make it happen in the anti-love world?

Silos aren't necessarily a bad thing. Totalitarian regimes flourish on single-narrative information control and emotional manipulation: society as macro-silo one might say. Often the dominant media pushes (say) a counterinsurgency narrative all at once, and avoiding taking such things for granted is easier if exposure is reduced (examples: anti-"riot" and "terror" hysteria; dominant narrative on covid; persecution of activists). The best immunisation against this is to learn to spot COIN frames and filter them (tip: if you compare the Russian/Chinese coverage to the US coverage of protests in Russia/China, the differences are mostly down to COIN). The mainstream is often something like a massive silo in which there are a range of perspectives but within an Overton window and with a parochial focus. Among the things usually excluded: most social movements, the suffering of the oppressed, and most events in the global South. How many of you heard about the massive insurrection after lockdown was reimposed in Lebanon, with government buildings torches and politicians' homes attacked? How about the armed Mapuche activists blockading roads? Mass revolt in Tunisia? Literal witch-hunts against the rich in Malawi? If you're suffering psychologically from lockdown and/or wider totalitarianism, do you understand the dynamic involved, and do you have any idea how widespread it is? You know about covid deaths, what about TB? We just aren't told most of what's going on, and that stilts things just as much as actual bias. Consider also how "civilisation" feels the need to keep itself in a silo from nature, "disorderly" zones, "black holes", etc (to contain state collapse in Somalia, suppress unwanted internet content, keep out "terrorists", pandemics...) yet it does this in the perverse, totalitarian way of trying to absorb, eliminate, or deny the latter. Perhaps the root of this is keeping the mind as a silo in relation to affect and the body, keeping the basic primacy of desire over ego out of social processes.

The anti-"silo" discourse - which has its origins I think in management studies and cybernetics (open and closed systems, evolution/adaptation) - worries me somewhat, as forming "silos" is often a precondition for becoming autonomous from the dominant way of seeing (it's no coincidence that the resistance to lockdowns came from all the "silos", the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, the youths of the banlieues, radical Muslims, right-libertarians, fascists... as well as anarchists; and not to mention that non-porous countries and regions didn't get covid, precisely because they're silos). The border between the silo and "society" does not just keep innovations out and members in; it keeps flows of affective control and macrosocial groupthink out, and increases the capacity of silo members to avoid macrosocial pressures. Every bolo is a potential silo and an attempt to avoid ghettoisation will interfere with the rights to live and associate as one pleases, to drop out of systems one doesn't resonate with or cannot cope with.

Often anti-silo discourse intersects strongly with COIN attempts to prevent autonomous spaces and dropping-out because these are potential sites of danger to the system. For example, the European Court of Human Rights' refusal to legalise homeschooling is based on the state's interest in not allowing the formation of "parallel societies"; there's similar rhetoric around Macron's new "security law" in France, which incorporates elements of Soviet-style police-states (such as state appointment of religious leaders, and a cop/informer in every building). In academia, attacks on "silos" coincide with a slide towards a kind of neoliberal general studies where everything turns into business studies or job preparation. What's lost is the specific rigour of each "discipline", the insights and breaches with "common sense" which come from each particular methodology and topic. Radical approaches are hard-hit as everything becomes a kind of standard Third Way/idpol beige. We're now seeing where this leads with the replacement of specialist medicine with computer modelling and behaviour regulation in the covid crisis.

We're seeing something similar within anarchism/autonomous movements via the pressure to de-"silo" either via idpol ("imitate mainstream inclusion-diversity measures or you're a white racist silo!") or NGO-isation ("we have to get out the ghetto and link to the community!"). What goes missing is the fact that our scenes become *less different* in the process - and less habitable for people for whom the mainstream is implausible or unbearable. The Invisible Committee's commune/milieu distinction is against the usual kind of groupthink, but also pro-silo in a different way. There can't be lines of flight if everything remains inside the "society"-box.

A sensible researcher will triangulate different sources and be alert to the bias of each. Though, realistically, for anarchists this runs up against the vast range of sources and the emotional impact of reading too much bad or badly-slanted news. There's a general need for semantic awareness as it's known in general semantics, and an anthropological or discourse-analytic capacity to understand and reconstruct other worldviews, including those of enemies, "deluded" people, and people we hate (an ability today lost even in anthropology and discourse analysis). Anarchists often fall short in this regard, in understanding the grassroots right, or the appeal of left-radical electoral politics to take two examples.

Another important thing to realise, is that the plausibility of a belief does not just depend on the wider worldview someone holds or the reinforcement by others. It also comes down to making sense of one's affects (emotions) and the relations or events one comes across directly or through one's affines. Often this is framed in terms of "experience", although this is misleading because constructed discourses also affect what is experienced. Often several discourses fit/explain the same "experience" and people are quite capable of "experiencing" things that aren't real (by projecting). Being aware the affects others are articulating, the ways these reflect character-structures, and the limits they place on which worldviews are plausible, is very important. If one's own affects or "experience" are incommensurable with the mainstream worldview(s), one has little choice but to adopt a radical position; this is where one gets the desire for "silos" - it's not just an artificial effect of algorithms. But this doesn't guarantee anarchist or even vaguely progressive positions. I've come to understand diverse phenomena such as idpol, gang identity, conspiracy theories, left-radicalism, political Islam, ancaps, incels, and the far-right as different ways of making sense of (the same or different) affects/experiences outside the mainstream. For instance, someone might be unable to accept the "police are there to protect us" lie without an awful lot of self-hate, but whether they then reach anarchist "fuck the police" or some ideology about big government or class power or elite conspiracy or white supremacy is still up for grabs. Someone who doesn't resonate emotionally with "society" and can't take mainstream views (the minimum ones which are conditions for inclusion, for the Overton window) as plausible let alone unquestionable, *needs* silos. Take away the silos and you're taking away their entire capacity for social life. A silo is to a human as a habitat is to an animal, there's no point complaining that gorillas don't live in cities or the Arctic. There's ways it's better if the silos also communicate with each other and with the mainstream in productive ways, and don't just become groupthink hubs. But there's also dangers of the otherness of the silo being contaminated by the very dominant, often hidden, and subtly manipulative mainstream. A lot of the problems with silos disappear with semantic awareness and information triangulation IMO.

There's a certain paradoxical way in which the only non-silo is egoist anarchism: look at Freud's account of group dynamics, the way he sees all groups (from churches and states to families and small cults, to a dyad of hypnotist and hypnotised or a romantic relationship) operating on the basis of suggestion, which is actually a repetition of faith placed in parents in early childhood (the parent can be replaced as needed by a leader, or the entire group, or an abstract ideal). What kind of group (if any) would escape from this cult-structure? Only a group of morally autonomous people who do not look to the group/relationship/others for their own ethos and motive; in other words, a union of egoists. But then there's a problem: an egoist will not want to associate with non-egoists/non-conscious egoists based on the usual group-suggestion dynamic, so they're restricted to silos with other egoists. The difference just being how they relate to the group.

Another important thing to realise, is that the plausibility of a belief does not just depend on the wider worldview someone holds or the reinforcement by others. It also comes down to making sense of one's affects (emotions) and the relations or events one comes across directly or through one's affines. Often this is framed in terms of "experience", although this is misleading because constructed discourses also affect what is experienced. Often several discourses fit/explain the same "experience" and people are quite capable of "experiencing" things that aren't real (by projecting). Being aware the affects others are articulating, the ways these reflect character-structures, and the limits they place on which worldviews are plausible, is very important. If one's own affects or "experience" are incommensurable with the mainstream worldview(s), one has little choice but to adopt a radical position; this is where one gets the desire for "silos" - it's not just an artificial effect of algorithms. But this doesn't guarantee anarchist or even vaguely progressive positions. I've come to understand diverse phenomena such as idpol, gang identity, conspiracy theories, left-radicalism, political Islam, ancaps, incels, and the far-right as different ways of making sense of (the same or different) affects/experiences outside the mainstream. For instance, someone might be unable to accept the "police are there to protect us" lie without an awful lot of self-hate, but whether they then reach anarchist "fuck the police" or some ideology about big government or class power or elite conspiracy or white supremacy is still up for grabs. Someone who doesn't resonate emotionally with "society" and can't take mainstream views (the minimum ones which are conditions for inclusion, for the Overton window) as plausible let alone unquestionable, *needs* silos. Take away the silos and you're taking away their entire capacity for social life. A silo is to a human as a habitat is to an animal, there's no point complaining that gorillas don't live in cities or the Arctic. There's ways it's better if the silos also communicate with each other and with the mainstream in productive ways, and don't just become groupthink hubs. But there's also dangers of the otherness of the silo being contaminated by the very dominant, often hidden, and subtly manipulative mainstream. A lot of the problems with silos disappear with semantic awareness and information triangulation IMO.

Mapuche activists blockading roads? Mass revolt in Tunisia? Literal witch-hunts against the rich in Malawi? If you're suffering psychologically from lockdown and/or wider totalitarianism, do you understand the dynamic involved, and do you have any idea how widespread it is? You know about covid deaths, what about TB? We just aren't told most of what's going on, and that stilts things just as much as actual bias. Consider also how "civilisation" feels the need to keep itself in a silo from nature, "disorderly" zones, "black holes", etc (to contain state collapse in Somalia, suppress unwanted internet content, keep out "terrorists", pandemics...) yet it does this in the perverse, totalitarian way of trying to absorb, eliminate, or deny the latter. Perhaps the root of this is keeping the mind as a silo in relation to affect and the body, keeping the basic primacy of desire over ego out of social processes.
The anti-"silo" discourse - which has its origins I think in management studies and cybernetics (open and closed systems, evolution/adaptation) - worries me somewhat, as forming "silos" is often a precondition for becoming autonomous from the dominant way of seeing (it's no coincidence that the resistance to lockdowns came from all the "silos", the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, the youths of the banlieues, radical Muslims, right-libertarians, fascists... as well as anarchists; and not to mention that non-porous countries and regions didn't get covid, precisely because they're silos). The border between the silo and "society" does not just keep innovations out and members in; it keeps flows of affective control and macrosocial groupthink out, and increases the capacity of silo members to avoid macrosocial pressures. Fuck off IDpols. Mapuche activists blockading roads? Mass revolt in Tunisia? Literal witch-hunts against the rich in Malawi? If you're suffering psychologically from lockdown and/or wider totalitarianism, do you understand the dynamic involved, and do you have any idea how widespread it is? You know about covid deaths, what about TB? We just aren't told most of what's going on, and that stilts things just as much as actual bias. Consider also how "civilisation" feels the need to keep itself in a silo from nature, "disorderly" zones, "black holes", etc (to contain state collapse in Somalia, suppress unwanted internet content, keep out "terrorists", pandemics...) yet it does this in the perverse, totalitarian way of trying to absorb, eliminate, or deny the latter. Perhaps the root of this is keeping the mind as a silo in relation to affect and the body, keeping the basic primacy of desire over ego out of social processes.
The anti-"silo" discourse - which has its origins I think in management studies and cybernetics (open and closed systems, evolution/adaptation) - worries me somewhat, as forming "silos" is often a precondition for becoming autonomous from the dominant way of seeing (it's no coincidence that the resistance to lockdowns came from all the "silos", the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, the youths of the banlieues, radical Muslims, right-libertarians, fascists... as well as anarchists; and not to mention that non-porous countries and regions didn't get covid, precisely because they're silos). The border between the silo and "society" does not just keep innovations out and members in; it keeps flows of affective control and macrosocial groupthink out, and increases the capacity of silo members to avoid macrosocial pressures.

Often this is framed in terms of "experience", although this is misleading because constructed discourses also affect what is experienced. Often several discourses fit/explain the same "experience" and people are quite capable of "experiencing" things that aren't real (by projecting). Being aware the affects others are articulating, the ways these reflect character-structures, and the limits they place on which worldviews are plausible, is very important. If one's own affects or "experience" are incommensurable with the mainstream worldview(s), one has little choice but to adopt a radical position; this is where one gets the desire for "silos" - it's not just an artificial effect of algorithms. But this doesn't guarantee anarchist or even vaguely progressive positions. I've come to understand diverse phenomena such as idpol, gang identity, conspiracy theories, left-radicalism, political Islam, ancaps, incels, and the far-right as different ways of making sense of (the same or different) affects/experiences outside the mainstream. For instance, someone might be unable to accept the "police are there to protect us" lie without an awful lot of self-hate, but whether they then reach anarchist "fuck the police" or some ideology about big government or class power or elite conspiracy or white supremacy is still up for grabs. Someone who doesn't resonate emotionally with "society" and can't take mainstream views (the minimum ones which are conditions for inclusion, for the Overton window) as plausible let alone unquestionable, *needs* silos. Take away the silos and you're taking away their entire capacity for social life. A silo is to a human as a habitat is to an animal, there's no point complaining that gorillas don't live in cities or the Arctic. There's ways it's better if the silos also communicate with each other and with the mainstream in productive ways, and don't just become groupthink hubs. But there's also dangers of the otherness of the silo being contaminated by the very dominant, often hidden, and subtly manipulative mainstream. A lot of the problems with silos disappear with semantic awareness and information triangulation IMO. IMO. IMO.

A sensible researcher will triangulate different sources and be alert to the bias of each. Though, realistically, for anarchists this runs up against the vast range of sources and the emotional impact of reading too much bad or badly-slanted news. There's a general need for semantic awareness as it's known in general semantics, and an anthropological or discourse-analytic capacity to understand and reconstruct other worldviews, including those of enemies, "deluded" people, and people we hate (an ability today lost even in anthropology and discourse analysis). Anarchists often fall short in this regard, in understanding the grassroots right, or the appeal of left-radical electoral politics to take two examples.
Another important thing to realise, is that the plausibility of a belief does not just depend on the wider worldview someone holds or the reinforcement by others. It also comes down to making sense of one's affects (emotions) and the relations or events one comes across directly or through one's affines. Often this is framed in terms of "experience", although this is misleading because constructed discourses also affect what is experienced. Often several discourses fit/explain the same "experience" and people are quite capable of "experiencing" things that aren't real (by projecting). Being aware the affects others are articulating, the ways these reflect character-structures, and the limits they place on which worldviews are plausible, is very important. If one's own affects or "experience" are incommensurable with the mainstream worldview(s), one has little choice but to adopt a radical position; this is where one gets the desire for "silos" - it's not just an artificial effect of algorithms. But this doesn't guarantee anarchist or even vaguely progressive positions. I've come to understand diverse phenomena such as idpol, gang identity, conspiracy theories, left-radicalism, political Islam, ancaps, incels, and the far-right as different ways of making sense of (the same or different) affects/experiences outside the mainstream. For instance, someone might be unable to accept the "police are there to protect us" lie without an awful lot of self-hate, but whether they then reach anarchist "fuck the police" or some ideology about big government or class power or elite conspiracy or white supremacy is still up for grabs. Someone who doesn't resonate emotionally with "society" and can't take mainstream views (the minimum ones which are conditions for inclusion, for the Overton window) as plausible let alone unquestionable, *needs* silos. Take away the silos and you're taking away their entire capacity for social life. A silo is to a human as a habitat is to an animal, there's no point complaining that IDpols don't live in cities or the Arctic.

I imagine @critic had an issue with copy paste making it look like recursive commenting...which is neat...but likely unintended and confusing. Good provocation to remind us about the One Big Silo though.

Fuck off IDpol! This is misleading because constructed discourses also affect what is experienced. Often several discourses fit/explain the same "experience" and people are quite capable of "experiencing" things that aren't real (by projecting). Being aware the affects others are articulating, the ways these reflect character-structures, and the limits they place on which worldviews are plausible, is very important. If one's own affects or "experience" are incommensurable with the mainstream worldview(s), one has little choice but to adopt a radical position; this is where one gets the desire for "silos"!

Literal witch-hunts against the rich in Malawi? If you're suffering psychologically from lockdown and/or wider totalitarianism, do you understand the dynamic involved, and do you have any idea how widespread it is? You know about covid deaths, what about TB? We just aren't told most of what's going on, and that stilts things just as much as actual bias. Consider also how "civilisation" feels the need to keep itself in a silo from nature, "disorderly" zones, "black holes", etc (to contain state collapse in Somalia, suppress unwanted internet content, keep out "terrorists", pandemics...) yet it does this in the perverse, totalitarian way of trying to absorb, eliminate, or deny the latter. Perhaps the root of this is keeping the mind as a silo in relation to affect and the body, keeping the basic primacy of desire over ego out of social processes.
The anti-"silo" discourse - which has its origins I think in management studies and cybernetics (open and closed systems, evolution/adaptation) - worries me somewhat, as forming "silos" is often a precondition for becoming autonomous from the dominant way of seeing (it's no coincidence that the resistance to lockdowns came from all the "silos", the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, the youths of the banlieues, radical Muslims, right-libertarians, fascists... as well as anarchists; and not to mention that non-porous countries and regions didn't get covid, precisely because they're silos).

well this settles it. you're a bot! I TRUSTED YOU @critic

you literally start half your posts with "fuck off IdPol" now ...

I'm down for that becoming a meme and a buzz term at this point against these repressive tolerance driven ideologues.

next time write a forum post ya dingus
that’s what forums are for
make the format work for you, not against you

Please don't spam with textwalls @critic, and use the forums section which can only be beneficial for you, and avoid creating another *hums* Emile situation.

OK, first of all apologies this has ensued.

I posted 3 or 4 posts (original then 2 or 3 "continued") but then someone else has been using my username and re-spamming slightly-edited versions of passages from these and adding extra stuff about IDpols in, to make me look a bigger twat than I am. Ha de ha ha, nice trolling. My patron chaos god will hear about this, enjoy being jinxed mothafucka.

I created an account so people will know if it happens again. So fuck you to whoever did this, and sorry again to everyone else.

it's the most sincere form of flattery when somebody hates you enough to bother

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