So, there's this concept of "implicit feudalism" in online communities. Essentially, the vast majority of online communities - from old-school forums, to facebook groups, to large platforms like Twitter and Facebook themselves, even to fediverse instances - they're all run as dictatorships by default. It's built into the software - you'll have a top admin who has full, unconstrained power, they might delegate mods who have some limited powers, and anyone else has to listen to what these dictators and lords tell them. We talk about "federating" here in the fediverse, but each individual community - as far as I'm aware of - is a little dictatorship. A federation of dictatorships is not a free society, anymore than the UN, an international body composed of "liberal democracies" and authoritarian regimes is truly democratic. We need a way to start governing online communities through actual forms of democracy.
boosts++
here's an article on this idea an its implications (people get socialized into feudalism/authoritarianism by the internet): https://osf.io/gxu3a/?view_only=11c9e93011df4865951f2056a64f5938
@anomaly If you read that article, regarding democracy it says "Governance systems that seek to inscribe authority within commonly agreed-upon rules ... generally through the capacity to transfer that authority to someone else.
Democratic practices can emerge within feudal technologies, such as when all-powerful moderators feel pressure to respect the values of their communities in how they exert authority."
Is this not the fediverse?
@anomaly Power paradigms are still present in democracies.
I think the feudalism doesn't apply to, say, Mastodon because everyone can start their own instance. You can exist here without a governing dictator however you can be democratically blocked by other users and instances.
@anomaly Also reporting offensive content grants a lot more power to Mastodon users than other social media platforms. On the bird site or Facebook you can report racist, sexist, transphobic things but those platforms do nothing about it.
@LydiaConwell @anomaly It's pretty much everything we've come to expect from capitalism too. There's not one non-feudalistic/authoritarian form of government out there atm because we've all been conditioned to expect that representatives in a congress or parliament is the only way.
@LydiaConwell @anomaly We still give them authority to create rules on our behalf, and those rules more often than not, favor the people that seek to oppress us with no repercussions given for this betrayal of our trust by the populace at large.
If we wanted, we could leave creating and voting on new laws to ballot initiatives and other directly democratic means and reduce congress/parliament "politicians" to bookkeepers.
@LydiaConwell @anomaly It's really not as complex as the capitalists make it out to be. It'd actually serve to simplify laws and regulations, as well as force more universal standards instead of the shitty "means testing" crap that capitalists force on the poorest in order to let the richest have an extra cent or two.
@KitsuneAlicia @LydiaConwell @anomaly In Sweden most politicians have regular jobs. Only the top politicians have it full time. You both get paid and have a right to take leave from work to do political or union work. Like tending a meeting. It's kinda like a hobby and many don't really have time for it. They chose to do other things instead.
On G+ you could have co-creators.
A problem on internet is trust. It takes time build. So you need at least a body that takes care of spam.
@shellkr @KitsuneAlicia @LydiaConwell @anomaly
Yes, we need a group which decides what information is high enough quality for everyone to see, in order to have the baseline common knowledge needed for any kind of democracy.
And like people still having regular jobs but given time and money to engage in politics, this group shouldn't be a separate, specialized class.
@KitsuneAlicia @LydiaConwell liquid democracy is an interesting idea that kind of allows a gradient between the two. You can vote on everything, or delegate your vote to someone you trust if you're too busy, and they can in turn also delegate their vote
@anomaly thanks! going to share this with some folks i know who work on these things