It’s a little jarring in a world of deep-fried memes.

No worries, Know Your Meme is still fairly reliable.

The Freedom Frank is War, Hallowiener is Death, Mtn Dew is Pestilence and Baja Blast is Famine.

I think this is how the smaller ones flourish - people look for alternatives.

Based on the space I would guess it just had “girlfriend” because that’s a pretty straightforward joke.

But I found it instead of guessing:

I remember reading about digital warfare and how the character of different weaponry can be stabilising or destabilising.

So the example given was nuclear weapons. The consequences of using them are so disastrous that there is no good use case, and so they tend to be stabilising. They discourage use.

Digital warfare is destabilising, because it’s very easy to do and very hard to catch, so you’re better off using it, even without any declared war.

Information warfare is probably very similar, it encourages use, but that’s because it’s very low-stakes. It wouldn’t be very exciting. I imagine it’d make a better comedy than a drama.

Kind of a weird semiotics misunderstanding. There was this trashy tabloid news program that did sensationalised nonsense most of the time, and they advertised the show with these teasers that were like, “tune in for the shocking conclusion OMG SO DRAMATIC”, it was ridiculous.

One time they were talking about a security guard who was killed, and the ad had some footage of the incident - or a reenactment -shown in slow motion with a red filter. The implication was you were seeing real footage of a lethal encounter, and OMG SO DRAMATIC.

Then later that week they were doing a piece on school bullying, and they had what was probably actors where two kids walk past each other in the halls and bump shoulders, you know, like you’d do in a TV show as shorthand for bullying. They put the same slo-mo red filter over it, and the same ominous DUN DUN soundtrack OMG SO DRAMATIC.

I thought that red slo-mo filter meant death, so I thought I was watching security camera footage of the lead up to an incident where one kid literally killed another kid. It was pretty traumatic.

I’m glad I didn’t grow up on a diet of that, I just saw the ads and didn’t like it. This is how people grow up to be afraid of everything they’re told to be afraid of.

That B, I and I are basically the same thing reworded three ways so they can spell the word.

Okay, I appreciate you saying you’re interested, I’ve found that’s a useful filter to find good conversations, and I’ve always found this particular topic very frustrating to talk about. Hierarchical realism - the idea that there is no alternative to hierarchy - is incredibly pernicious. People seem to have a hard time questioning it.

So as to the assumptions:

That’s when you have an organised force opposing them, which doesn’t need to deal with internal disputes the way an anarchistic force would need to.

You have drawn the dichotomy between “organised” and “anarchistic”. This is such an entrenched misunderstanding that you can explain it plain as day to people and it’s like they don’t even hear it.

Anarchy requires far more organisation than hierarchy. In fact the classic anarchy symbol of a circle A means “anarchy is order”. Anarchy isn’t chaos, it is the absence of hierarchies of domination.

And internal conflicts happen within established hierarchies, all the time. You see this in strikes and labour activism. They’re a much bigger problem in hierarchies because the bosses can’t acknowledge or deal with them. They don’t know what to do when the “do as I say” lever stops working.

In fact, something that tends to get left out of typical histories is the military revolt that played a significant role in ending the US’s invasion of Vietnam.

So the idea that organisation is a feature of a dominance hierarchy is wrong. Domination is used when organisation can’t be. Anarchies have to be supremely organised to exist in the first place, and it doesn’t magically stop working because conflict occurs. The thing about organisation and consensus building is that it is actually far more robust than dominance hierarchies.

Hierarachy is strong but fragile, because it is necessarily arrayed in tension against itself like the molecules of a Prince Rupert’s drop. It seems impossibly hard and unassailable, but disrupt the right part and it explodes. It has no flexibility.

There would be no reason to believe hierarchy were better in any respect except that it is currently the dominant world order. That wasn’t always the case and it seems to have a hard expiration date. The question is whether we can destroy it before it destroys the ecology.

So that’s the spiel about assumptions. Sorry I went so long, I didn’t have time to edit it down. I could go on about how hierarchy has embedded itself so deep in all our psyches, but I’ll spare you that.

So as to the question about internal criminal activity, which seems like the best way to put it. You’re asking about any alternative to an “involuntary or enforced way of preventing them from exploiting society”. Well, there really isn’t one.

Like I said, voluntary prison is a method for dealing with individuals whose behaviour necessitates such treatment. Organised groups are a different situation, so the idea just doesn’t apply.

When I said the answer was violence, I was trying to make that point.

As for how to stop such organisations from metastasising, I don’t have any examples of such a thing actually happening, so I don’t know, except to point you to societies where it just… doesn’t come up. Rojava uses a reconciliation process to prevent things like murder from turning into full-on blood fueds, which used to be a problem in the previous society, but that’s a little different.

Apart from telling you that the problem just doesn’t appear to arise in the first place - and I could talk about “leveling mechanisms” here, but that’s getting pretty deep in the weeds - I can point you to an example where an indigenous horizontalist society excised criminal and state elements that were deeply embedded. It’s not the same, but I hope it’ll be illustrative.

It was Cheran, Mexico, where politicians, cops, illegal loggers and drug cartels were merged into a fucking rat king of corruption that was smothering the town. Murders were a daily occurrence, plus all the other problems you would imagine in that scenario.

An underground network of women organised and rose up against them. On the day it happened, there was so much popular support that they were able to evict the entire oppressive structure at once without undue violence - there were zero deaths. Once they’d clearly won, some young men wanted to start lynching the captives, but the women who’d run the day stopped them and told them to simply let them go.

The town still runs on horizontal organisation principles, it keeps out the state completely. No cops, no politicians, no corporations, no drug cartels. The murder rate dropped off a cliff.

Now, that’s not the end of the story. Let’s imagine you’re in a town with that history, and you want to start a crime syndicate. How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How long do you think it takes before you’re dragged in front of a town meeting to be dealt with? Would it even occur to you to try?

I suspect this is why the problem you brought up doesn’t have any examples.

There are so many assumptions in what you said that I don’t know where to start dealing with them. You’ve packed so many common misconceptions in such a short comment it’s kind of overwhelming. Let me know if you want to hear what I have to say, it’s a lot of work if you’re just trying to tell me I’m wrong.

But just quickly:

It’s well documented that decentralised autonomous cells are extremely effective. Special forces take a large portion of their tactics from guerilla fighters that operate the same way.

There are examples of decentralised societies today that are incredibly effective fighters. Rojava and the Zapatistas are two excellent examples, plus numerous small regions that have held off vastly superior state forces without centralised leadership. Community self defense is a powerful method that works even within overarching state oppression.

Yeah, she’s the very epitome of born sexy yesterday. She literally strips in front of them because she’s too naive to understand modesty like a toddler.

Anarchism isn’t non-violent. To assume anti-oppression and pacifism are one and the same is to make the same mistake Engels makes in On Authority.

Authority is violent, but violence is not authority.

Edit: on this topic I’d recommend Anark’s video on Power, where he explains that anarchism seeks to create a horizontal power structure. It is not the absence of power structures, it displaces oppressive power structures with egalitarian ones.

It makes sense if you think of them as extremely well-funded frat boys with a free pass to break laws.

They just kind of do shit, and if it doesn’t work they keep trying until something sticks or they run out of steam. They get killed all the time.

It’s still scary, but just a lot less cool.

The reason we think of them as hypercompetent masters of espionage is because that makes better movies, and also because the US government funds movies that make them look good.

Okay, so you’re talking about an antisocial group that is attempting to prefigure a society of domination within the existing anarchist society.

Well, assuming they’ve established themselves as a continuing threat, the short answer is: violence. We use defensive violence against their encroachment until their group crumbles, which shouldn’t be hard since by definition most of their members are living a way worse life than they would without their oppressors, and they’re surrounded by examples of people living free.

Hierarchies are fragile. Also, in order to exist, an anarchist society must already solve the problem of how to keep hierarchies from forming.

The voluntary prison idea is a way of dealing with individuals, not organised groups. That’s an entirely different situation.

I’m not really sure what question you’re asking. What situation specifically are you talking about? Are we dealing with capitalism from the inside or from the outside? Are you asking about a theory of change, or about how an anarchist region deals with its state neighbours?

These all have answers, similar but different, but I don’t really want to spend the effort answering every permutation of the question I could imagine without knowing what you mean.

And further to that we have voluntary prison. Essentially, if you’re guilty of something and want to have the benefits of this society, you need to agree to a loss of some privileges - in whatever form is necessary. If you won’t, well good luck surviving when nobody will trade with you or let you live near them.

If you won’t agree to that, you can leave, but the full details of your trial and conviction are public and your decision to leave will be broadcast, so our neighbours know to look out for you.

That means trials will need to be fair, and seen to be fair, or else it will be easy to ask for asylum. Prisoners need to be fairly treated, or they will try their luck in a nearby place.

But if someone chooses to leave and is just trying to run from the consequences of their actions, well they’ll have a hard time being accepted anywhere else.

Authority is usually understood by anarchists as a component of hierarchy. I’d be interested to hear your definition that doesn’t make it hierarchical.

And there are ways of enforcing rules that don’t require authority, like diffuse sanctions, essentially community-based enforcement.

There’s a whole school of anti-carceral justice thought that deals with this.

Sure, and I’d say that’s piracy too. I wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t also being siloed into private hands to enrich the wealthy and screw the rest of us.

I’d say if the copyright holder says you’re not allowed to then you’re not. It’s piracy.

People will tell you that you’ve already downloaded the data so saving it is fundamentally, technically no different, but that doesn’t matter to the law, it’s still piracy.

Like yeah, it’s absurd and pointless and anti-consumer and anti-knowledge and unenforceable and unsustainable, but that’s copyright. It’s always been that way.

Copyright destroys culture and piracy is our ethical duty in the face of that. The only reason to care about it is so you don’t get caught.

Right click -> inspect element (Q) works.

You can also press F12.

And if right click is blocked, on Firefox holding SHIFT will unblock right click. There is also a plugin that does this for you.

Often websites will put an invisible element in front of the content to intercept this trick, but you can navigate through the elements to find the one they were trying to obfuscate.