An update – connecting…

from Mathematical Anarchism

An update – connecting…

So, it has been a while since I made a blogpost here, but it’s not like I haven’t done anything in the meanwhile.
My booklet “Mathematical Anarchism – Root out power so that freedom can flourish wildly” is now available in three languages – English, Dutch and French. It summarizes the main insights from my PhD in easy language, aiming to understand hierarchy so that we can combat it.

I’ve made a video combining some of my parkour with thoughts about freedom (following the video on “What is Hierarchy?” which I already mentioned earlier).

But well, I am having a motivational dip – as a lot of people are I guess having with the Covid. I’m getting tired of the constant stream of information sugar – while still also remaining drawn to surfing it. And I don’t want to be just another droplet contributing to this flood.
I don’t want to just do things ‘in the void’. At the moment, it feels too anonymous and superficial, making content without knowing whether anyone is seeing it or is interested. The views or like stats are too abstract. I should spread the content I have more, as few people will continuously check this site where not a lot happens (though you can subscribe to get notifications when there is new content). But I don’t really know where, how to play the game (any hints welcome), and I don’t like being self-promotional (hell, I know I’ve put a lot of I’s in this text of mine).
So I’d like to have more profound contact. I still hope to do my Europe tour in October and discuss with some of ya peepz in person (if you’re interested in a workshop, you can always still contact me). But while circumstances don’t allow it, online more direct stuff, like a chat discussion, also interests me.

At this moment, I want to do something WITH other(s), buiding something together. Where I can significantly shape the direction (not just being a ‘worker’), but where I’m also not just asking for feedback or other stuff (where the other is more than just a ‘worker’). Where other(s) also get something out of what I do. Finding motivation purely within myself is hard, and usually it easely goes to solving riddles and playing language games.

Now, it’s not like I’m lacking ideas, both for more collective stuff as for content I could create. In the following they’ll be summed up, let me know which ones make you enthusiastic, both to be involved in as to read about.

  • A chat place (for example a discord server) to discuss how to move to a free world. I want it to be broader than just mathematical anarchism (which is too much around me), problably also broader than complex anarchism (using complexity theory and systems science stuff). But I’d also want it to be a place to discuss new ideas, really think about how we could change things, and not just complain about the current situation or narrow to small concrete things.
  • An academic anarchist conference around the same idea – well it doesn’t have to be just academic, mainly bringing together interesting anarchist thinkers with lots of room for interaction and discussion, not just your average boring conference. (That’s a post-covid thing)
  • Building some alternative economy, for example an offer network, bottom-up. As we are facing an economic crisis due to the inherent flaws in our current system.
  • A course on mathematical anarchism, to more throrougly get into the ideas, and then also together apply them to some concrete situations and struggles people are involved in. Probably on-line, unless (some) participants can easely come to Brussels, then it would be (partly) irl. If there are at least five people interested, I’m willing to do it.

There is also some possible content I could create, some of them still have some blockages:

  • A scenario for how we could escape the current situation with power and unfreedom of all sorts- working title “This in not a blueprint for the revolution”. I’ve already written something which is partly poetry, partly story, partly keywords of bigger social changes/acts (and well, mostly in dutch). Story a bit in the line of the ‘A utopia‘-post. So this could be more as a story or describing more general things – in a poetic way or rather as a fluent text.
  • A sheme of the mechanisms causing the most important world problems/powers that be, and the interactions between them (so that we could see where we can intervene to stop these mechanisms). I’ve drawn this, but I’m not yet happy about it, not yet connected enough and too text-like.
  • A video ‘A formula for how much you are in control’ – the Det_A(B) formula for internal and external control. I’ve filmed one already, but the sound was terrible, and it might be just as well or better explained in the video of my PhD Defence . I could cut that part to a seperate video to make it more digestable.
  • A paper about this formula. Because I think this formula can also interest some people in academia, and well because for my academic carreer I should publish more.

So I’d like to hear what what you ‘d like to see: more in the form of stories, or rather analysis? Abstract things, or more applied to a specific situation (like with the ‘Possibilities after corona‘-post). Maybe more personal stuff, maybe other subjects, …? Rather text, or rather video, or another format?
And would you be interested in a chat group, a conference, an alternative economy or a course?
So don’t hesitate to reach out, as a comment or by contacting me – to discuss some of these ideas (or others), to let me know what you think, …

There is 1 Comment

It would be very interesting if there was a debate between Evo (the author of the Mathematical Anarchism booklet: https://mathematicalanarchism.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/bookleteng.pdf) and Aurora (the author of this piece https://anarchistnews.org/content/problem-scale-anarchism). Both use a mathematical approach, but seem to apply different tools, principles, values, and draw different conclusions which contradict each other while still sharing some overlap.

I'd say a key difference is Evo seems to tackle some philosophical questions of anarchism with math, while Aurora seems to attempt to solve the bureaucratic and management problems of resource distribution and allocation of communism conceived as a centrally planned economy. Both speak of networks, hierarchies and decentralization. Evo seems concerned with eliminating hierarchies in self-organization while Aurora seems concerned with ensuring the efficacy of decentralized networks of distribution by centralization computation of the economy. Evo describes a series of principles towards that, while Aurora describes the types of equations that would be helpful in computing that economy.

It would seem Aurora's proposal is an example of the type of hierarchical scheme describe to the right in the diagram shown at page 25 of Evo's pamphlet (https://mathematicalanarchism.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/bookleteng.pdf) and may suffer from the noise from order principle mentioned in page 23. Meanwhile, Evo's approach might seem to be more descriptive , while Aurora's seems eager for a proof of concept application to current supply chain.

Both authors are showing simplified versions of their pet thesis to the general public. They could benefit each other, as well as the general public, through a detailed dialogue. But the overall lesson we can take home is: never do math, kids; math is for nerds. jk

A final note, with regards to the chat aspiration that Evo mentions in this post, it would seem cabal or usenet would be a better fit in line with the non-hierarchical networks described in his pamphlet, instead of discord. Though using discord as a platform to discuss and illustrate hierarchies through mod/privileges use and abuse would be instructive as well.

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