Practice

i’ve been working on my recording gear, i think slowly the quality is getting better. well, minus the talent, but i can’t buy gear to make that any better.

part of my recent reassessment of priorities was to redefine my social circles. until now, i mostly relied on my pre-existing connections or hobbies to help me meet people and increase my local circles. in practice, this let to very little improvement over all. somehow i still think regardless of the circles we’re in, we’re bound to empathize with a small subset of the whole group, no matter what the group is about. there are, however, differences in the size of this subset that relate directly to what the actual activity is about, i.e., self-selection of people attending.

one thing i tried was to increase the likelihood that i’d meet people equally interested in philosophical questions. meetup.com happens to work very well in sydney, and i ended up finding, and attending, a few of these meetups offered by different philosophy groups.

this brings me to this post. yesterday i attended a lecture on anarchism organized by an excellent group of people. needless to say, this is a topic that is very dear to me, for obvious-past-experience-reasons. while most of what was discussed was highly theoretical, one question was thrown at the room for the discussion: “is an entirely anarchistic society possible at all?”

i cringed. i had lived in working examples of anarchic systems (or at least, communal systems). one could argue that what i lived through wasn’t a real example because we were never really “outside” society, so never really demonstrated anything. i concede, there’s a lot of truth to that and what i lived through isn’t a proper controlled example. however, what i’d like to discuss is a completely different matter: that of political structures and their post-rationalizations, frequently oblivious to their implicit dogmas about human nature.

as the discussion progressed, the idea of anarchism was overwhelmingly ruled out, mostly based on the Hobbesian idea that humans are naturally brutes and need some kind of hierarchy to keep them under control. the modern version of this is a basic fallacy of appealing to that being a “fact of human nature”, as in, human nature is brutish therefore humans cannot be entirely autonomous, always requiring some form of “higher intellect” to prevent them from falling back into destructive behaviours. this is the old idea of the Leviathan, recycled by pop psychology and bad neuroscience magazines, using arguments such as that humans were naturally selected by living in hunter gatherer societies to cheat and to steal. while we may have been naturally selected without a doubt, i do wonder how that makes any difference to whether we cheat or not in practice.

when we discuss political models more often than not we’ll hear things like “democracy sucks but it’s the best we’ve got” or “power has always naturally organized itself the same way over and over, so anarchy isn’t possible because those patterns are part of human nature and they would repeat themselves”. i see these arguments as simple appeals to fallacious ideas of “human nature” or “tradition”. these fallacies stem from an unquestioned definition of human beings as limited, tending to be violent and power hungry, and entirely conditioned (and conditionable) by their surroundings. if we accept these premises, then obviously anarchy (or communism, or socialism for that matter) become logically impossible. but more importantly, these definitions of human beings are they themselves biased by the very political and social system in place. if we use an evolutionary argument for politics, we might end up concluding that patriarchy is good because it was “naturally selected”. i’m sure feminists would agree this is empirically verified nonsense, so i would like to steer this discussion in another direction, hopefully without (much) personal political bias. i will also not try to bridge the is/ought divide. i accept that words like “good” and “right” are problematic but they functional enough for my argument.

as a disclaimer, i am historically a leftist, but that only informs my anti-authoritarian criticism of society. my dedication to critical thinking overrides any theoretical leftist principle that contradicts peer-reviewed evidence. in that sense, i’m exploring how anarchism is possible and how it isn’t in the light of basic ideas of information and inference.

while i don’t think we are born brutish, i do think we are born with a limited capacity for knowledge and information. this means that to be entirely autonomous (i.e., make all the right decisions about our reality — no matter our definition of “right”), we either need to deal with a simplified world, as to not have too much information to deal with, or we must deal with a complex world collectively and intersubjectively. this seems to me a simple matter of evidence from history, and this is not a new idea at all (democracy and delegation have a long philosophical history of discussing this).

considering this, anarchism, defined as each individual being autonomous and deciding to the best of their knowledge what is the best outcome, is possible if a) the world is simplified and therefore computable or b) the world is complex but can be analysed in sub-problems collectively that provide a perfect global collective solution. to me, both of these are impossible, so under that light, and at the present social and political situation, anarchism is impossible in that sense. now, what makes it impossible is the present state of our capacities to approach these problems, and not our potential capacity to solve them. what constrains us is our belief in these bogus ideas of human nature, which feed back into our own self-identification with that hypothetical brutish human being.

i’ll use an analogy that hopefully will make it clearer. we as human beings cannot fly. it is our nature not to be able to fly, we are ground animals that occasionally can climb trees. if we were to say flying is impossible because human nature does not allow for it, then how come we have built planes? the mysteries of flight are virtually impossible to decipher to an individual with no prior scientific knowledge, and the engineering challenges of building a plane, drilling for fuel, regulating air traffic and so on are impossibly complex without a massive collective effort. however, it would be silly to deny that we do, in fact, “fly” around the planet. therefore, our human nature as beings that can’t fly does not inform our capacity to create conditions under which we will be able to (in this case, by jumping inside a plane).

this example shows how political bias tends to be stuck on the “we can’t fly” part of the debate, and tends to ignore the fact that societies are built collectively and based on things we ought to be and things we ought to do, and not things we are. i.e., societies express our desires to “fly”, to transcend our individual constraints, by engaging reality collectively, with our values subject to a seemingly impossible goal.

anarchism is simply another one of those goals, but it seems to us to be impossible because we have never seen it done, and we argue that it is so because “we have no wings”, or in anarchist terms, we cheat, lie and are power hungry. but what if we collectively engage this with the same mix of pragmatism and idealism as the quest for human flight? what is the difference between these two that makes one more feasible than the other?

my opinion is that we forgot that they are the same process, because politics and how society is organized are far too built into the fabric of our every day lives. we forgot that societies are no more than people agreeing on something collectively, that money is people agreeing that it exists collectively, that a lot of what we consider problems are actually a product of our own creations.

so how do i envision a possible anarchist society? (disclaimer, i wouldn’t like to live in one). i envision it in many different ways, depending on how far we can stretch contexts. i’d like to offer these ideas as open questions.

• does the population have absolute control over their own subsistence? if not, they will need power to prioritize who subsists and who doesn’t.
• does each individual in that population have the knowledge to decide the intersubjectively best outcome for the community? if not, then decisions will cause conflicts for the simple fact that they have insufficient information.
• does the collective allow for dissent? if not, then diversity will be stifled, and with it, autonomy, as autonomy is undermined by the impossibility of thinking differently.
• does the collective allow for self-correction of its own decisions, collectively and individually? if not, there is the possibility that an accidental bias in the collective will eventually undermine autonomy.
• above all, does this group of human beings have a capacity to look at its own group critically and recognize patterns such as the ones discussed by political theory and sociology? if not, then they will not be autonomous simply because they will exert authority via cheating, bullying, violence, coercion and so on.

these examples are things that need to be present in order for any of this to work properly, and i’d argue it is impossible in our current state of affairs to have anything like it. consider national borders, and how corporations exist beyond them. consider the commons and how they are privatised and at the whim of the few. consider now that you’d wish to start a commune somewhere? what guarantees would you have that you wouldn’t be raided and your resources plundered?

but given enough isolation and control over natural resources and means of subsistence, there is nothing preventing a group of critical and educated individuals from starting anything anarchist organisationally speaking. what elevates us from the brutish conditions of our subsistence is our capacity to engage reality critically, coherently, and according to abstract visions of seemingly impossible realities. like the flying steel bird, they are pure mythology for anyone unfamiliar with the scientific method and the basic principles of engineering. but for a 21st century human being, emancipated by thousands of years of reflection, flying, or anarchism, are merely ends for which we have the means in ourselves. we recognize that we have no wings, politically speaking, but we also recognize that we know how to create the conditions that allow us to fly. we created our political institutions to serve us, if they don’t, then it is only logical to abandon them and replace them with something different.

maybe this is naive idealism, or maybe it’s simple pragmatic social engineering. i do think there is a deeply rooted anti-human narrative that comes from a hangover from 20th century horrors, but that narrative is as flawed as any other naturalistic fallacy. we create our own social and political realities, so we can also question them, undermine them, and create entirely new ones along the way. anarchism is just another one of these possible ideas. lease out a plot of land and keep the gates open. you will be surprised by what happens if people squat it.

no matter the mindset, like Icarus, we will always build wings not from an embarrassment of not having been born with them, but from an irrational urge to fly closer to the light — an endlessly curious quest for the illuminating beauty of reality and our capacity to engage it and expand it.

a beautiful song for a beautiful poem («Madrigal á cibdá de Santiago» – Federico García Lorca)

i’ve been having lots of free time. one of the consequences of free time, at least for me, is that i picked up a bunch of new hobbies. but recently i decided to have a good look at what i was getting from them, versus not doing them at all.

intrinsic and extrinsic are usually used in terms of the subject (me). but instead, i’ll be addressing these in terms of the activity, which is already extrinsic, but to do this i will consider intrinsic and extrinsic as referring to within the activity and outside the activity, regardless of the person doing the activity.

when diving into a new activity, frequently we feel that things we learn while doing it extend to our lives elsewhere. i add this type of consequence to an extrinsic goal that comes from that activity. identically, if we feel compelled to do things in that activity that do not exist elsewhere, then we are following goals intrinsic to that activity.

when i moved here and realized i had all this free time, i decided to finally take up something i had always wanted to do, martial arts. it is perhaps the clearest way of looking at the big divide between the two. right on this topic, here’s a podcast episode about it.

some martial arts have ranks, say, Xth Kyu, Xth Dan and so on. these are intrinsic to the activity, in that they mean nothing to the outside world, and they don’t translate directly into every day things that we can use. on the other hand, mastering a particular move or skill instead, is an actual extrinsic goal. it doesn’t matter if you are an Xth Dan if you still can’t do a certain move that is needed to, say, survive a dangerous situation. being an Xth Dan might increase the odds that you do, but that is just because the intrinsic (Xth Dan) comes tied to the extrinsic (the new move).

i found, in my case, that the extrinsic effect of my activity was stunning. physically i felt better, i was more confident, my posture was much better, and i didn’t chicken out as much. i had chickened out frequently before in fight situations. but i also found that the intrinsic goals were tricking me into wanting to go up the ranks, not for the moves, but for the sake of it. being congratulated on going up ranks felt good, even though it was purely symbolic. all in all, if i balanced what leaked from this activity and what it sucked me in, it was a great net balance: a few hours a week had a tremendous effect on my everyday life. sure, i wouldn’t rise up the ranks as fast, but in the end that is my point: intrinsic goals sometimes distract us from what really matters.

another hobby, a slightly more embarrassing one, is card games. with my free time, disposable income and need to meet people, i joined a games shop and started playing competitive card games. again, i tried to look at it from an intrinsic vs. extrinsic perspective. the results, now, were different.

playing cards was, save learning how to be a good loser, had little to no extrinsic goals. all the popularity, success, progress, etc, came from following the intrinsic goals blindly. there was no other way. no quantifiable effect on outside life besides losing vast sums of money. great champions of the game still had no visible effect of the game in their lives (save a few rare exceptions). it seemed that in this case, this hobby had to go.

identifying extrinsic goals in an activity is important, in my opinion, because it allows us to choose between activities that complement (or don’t complement) our own intrinsic motivations in life. in my case, i’m highly motivated by personal improvement in terms of awareness and depth of knowledge, so martial arts and music are very compatible with this. on the other hand, the competitive nature of gaming, and its intrinsic “unlocked badges” and “experience points” do little to advance my personal goals, or at least that’s what i’ve found.

another casualty was couchsurfing. don’t get me wrong, i love it. but with time its effect on my life has become almost deleterious. it made me loathe meeting new people, and made me prejudiced against most people that i meet, assuming they are just like every other pampered backpacker. in this case, there is little in couchsurfing that is intrinsic (ok, maybe number of friends), but on the other hand, the extrinsic goals made my life better, then worse. over time, i went from eagerly learning from new people to be bored and tired of them. i had changed, but the guests hadn’t, and in sydney they were only getting more stereotypical. so i moved on, and that hobby is gone, at least for now in sydney.

it’s interesting to see these things over time. i imagine more martial arts will make me steadily feel good about them, plus make me better at it, in a somewhat logarithmic fashion. gaming, on the other hand, seems like a decaying exponential in that the big things we get from them, the realizations and the insights, are available from the start, but as we dive in it will just tend to suck life out of us. and then activities like couchsurfing are unstable over time, because what they give us depends on how willing and open we are to them, and how much of it we have done.

i felt it was important to share this idea because a lot of the time we are dealing with intrinsic systemic goals that add nothing to our lives. being promoted sometimes means losing out on much more only to get that extra 5k a year, that we wouldn’t need anyway if we were satisfied with what we have. identically, getting the ideal fit body, or the ideal musical skills to be a pop star, sometimes feel like going up ladders that lead nowhere but to a bigger fall. in this sense, i’ve been more and more keen on using this as a yardstick. what is the activity i’m in giving me in terms of my own personal motivations? what is it baiting me in terms of its intrinsic goals? how much am i being drawn to one or the other? this has become key for me, since it seems we live more and more in a forest of intrinsic goal-trees and the broad spectrum goal-horizon has become harder and harder to see.

some galician tunes on irish pipes

life in a big city has its frustrations, and one of mine is how i can be so hard to separate between genuine one-to-one interaction and a one-to-one interaction that favours a third party

consider talking to a stranger. at times it is hard but possible, and definitely some contexts help more than others. one of these is commerce. i’m reminded of a friend with a crush on the cute coffee shop attendant, too shy to ask them out. my friend would frequently shop there mostly because that interaction was possible, and hinted at the possibility of something more. except there was nothing more but commerce. many times commerce encourages the worker to be excessively friendly or sociable to bring sales up. we’re left with this strange feeling of not being able to tell apart whether someone is being friendly or just trying to get a bigger tip. sadly, it’s usually the bigger tip

while being street wise might help, i can’t help but think that somehow we’re heading towards a state of affairs where commodification permeates everything we do: should i friend this person on facebook? should i instagram this event? should i like this post? how will my reddit karma be affected if i express how i truly feel about this? basically gauging our interactions based on third-party metrics we have no control over

the prototype of this is what we already see and have seen for a long time: the salesman. a big smile, a taken-care-of appearance, perfectly tilted eyebrows to encourage trust. there’s a sense of unease when someone like that knocks on our door: it’s too obvious they’re there for something they will profit from. but when a cute bartender gives us a free drink and smiles, things are not as clear. there is a strong emotional response that is hard to disconnect from what it might be: not flirting, but probably a veiled promotion for that new drink. the reason why this keeps happening is because the vehicle for the interaction is itself commerce. inside a club, everything that happens that’s positive creates more business. on facebook, everything that happens and generates clicks means more business too. in a way, there is a panoply of third parties that benefit from the fusing of the commodified interaction and the uncommodifiable one and profit greatly if the two are indistinguishable

i grow weary of how this has quickly become ingrained in mindsets, to the point where one might hear “all friendships imply that each party has something to gain, so if a company gains something too there’s nothing wrong with that”. sure, relationships of mutual interest have always existed. what concerns me are these invisible structures that shape how we interact, exploiting our instincts, feelings of empathy or our sweet spot for smiles. third parties thrive on predictability, well behaved data, docile personalities. it is no surprise, then, that the social media intense world is a docile and non-confrontational one. netiquette, that has existed for as long as the internet has existed, expresses this bias clearly. it’s only a democracy while we all agree, so if you don’t, you will get downvoted to oblivion, unfriended by those that fear social repercussions, and so on

today, yet again, a beautiful fund-raiser approached me with smiles and warmness. who would i be smiling back to? the exploited underpaid worker that has had to smile all day without meaning it, or the CEOs and managers that are enjoying luxury thanks to the exploitation of human nature? these thoughts send shivers down my spine every time this happens. and yet, i can’t help but to smile back. it seems the profit someone makes out of our connection doesn’t outweigh how powerful it is in its simplicity. it’s almost as if the 21st century way of controlling us is with soft cushions and comfy chairs

ntrrudu · redondo/campanitas [midi pipes + gba synth demo]

another year, another mandala. featuring another of my game boy experiments. sound is pretty shitty, but i’m hoping to make it get better with time

i’m quoting here what i wrote for the garden blog, the community i participated in for my first 7 months in australia

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a mandala for the goddess

i left the garden yesterday with the sobering feeling that it will be gone soon

it was perhaps the most successful and beautiful of all events we ever put together (thank you Sara). everything worked perfectly, thanks to the months of devotion, hard work and generosity of everyone involved in the garden project: residents, guests, friends, and Ash’s guiding vision

it is hard to see it go, especially when we are ending on such a high note. but i’m not left with a sense of loss but instead with a sense of exhilaration. in tibetan buddhist tradition (of which i’m not a follower), there is a ritual called the sand mandala. monks gather around for a very long period and draw a symbolic circular sand picture. when the picture is finished, the sand is swept and poured into moving water, to return it to nature

during the last few months, we drew a giant warehouse painting, colored with the life stories of over 100 people that visited from dozens of countries, contributing and donating their creativity and work to the space. these contributions were driven, among others, by the natural desire of human beings to be part of a purposeful meaningful space, where beauty, art, music and conversations intertwine every day. a desire, i’d argue, to step out of the concrete boxes we live in every day and to let out what these boxes won’t allow us to: our songs, our colors, our sights and dreams for a better world

as we wash away the life from the warehouse and return it to the goddess, we will also be making a statement on how nothing lasts forever. this being both the shepherd street garden and the concrete boxes it questioned while it existed

so here’s cleaning this one and start drawing the next

物の哀れ

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i already found a place and am living alone at the moment. what we did was very well received so i imagine there will be more. for now, i’m taking a break

p.s.: some stats:

total guests: 116 (including entries with missing country info)

distribution by country (duplicates removed, missing data removed) data here

back to asturias

it should be no news to most readers that i’ve been involved in communities for the best part of the last 4 years now. one thing i sought when i moved to my present community was to be in a situation where i would have no power whatsoever over what happens, and would merely become a member that contributes

though many opportunities have come for me to “pound my chest” and bite my way up the pecking order, i’ve been forcefully trying not to (even though sometimes it might happen). i was interested in seeing whether the same issues i encountered as a leader would emerge with someone else as a leader, and what other ways would emerge to deal with it

considering the current setting is very similar to at least two of my previous residencies, the expected behavior was remarkably similar to my past experiences. risking confirmation bias, what i isolated as fundamental issues regarding the setting and power structure as essential for the outcomes have proven to be very accurate in predicting outcomes of these communities

regarding the setting, the broken windows theory applied to these spaces becomes an equivalent “dirty dishes” theory of behavior, where the presence of one dirty dish creates a crescendo of mess, and cleanliness tends to preserve itself that way. again, an invisible leviathan makes itself visible by the apparent order of a space, and as its physical order decays, so does social order. this was particularly strong in parties, where the messiness and rowdiness didn’t have a law keeper counterpoint (like a bouncer in a club), causing an excessive abuse of the facilities. clearly even in a small community, there is a need for some kind of law keeping, even if the inhabitants themselves have to implement it. without it, there will be frequent incidents of organization collapse (for example, in an exponential crescendo of mess)

as for the power structure, one of the strongest things i’ve found is that the spaces become an expression of the leader’s values, vision and character. no matter how things are seen, these features will come through. in this case, the leader is exceptionally kind and non-confrontational. this has led to a natural attraction by gentle and artsy types that enjoy this kind of unauthority. unfortunately, it also has generated abuse, namely, by people who know they will not be confronted with their own actions, especially when taking advantage of the facilities (food, shelter, internet, drinks, etc)

this has been particularly obvious in instances where, thanks to overhearing, some of the abusers confided on their friends how they could take advantage of the place because nothing would happen. this is tied directly to the leadership not having any confrontational and authoritarian methods. truth be said, none of the issues are serious, but they are the initial symptoms of possible future crises

but what prompted this article wasn’t the power structure itself, but a side effect of the lack of lawfulness in a community and enforcement of its values. while dirty dishes might be a problem, it isn’t what i feel is the most important

given my personal choice of not fighting back and just sit back, my personal position has been significantly lower than usual in the local hierarchy. though that has been quite liberating in terms of personal responsibility (i can delegate everything to authority), i also lost with it the privileged position to prevent hurtful comments and other types of minor dominance establishing rites, not to mention the capacity to enforce discipline and order (e.g., expulsion of members, enforcing of cleaning, etc). the standard was set by the initial residents, which found it appropriate to make derogatory comments about my personal life for fun. while that is all fine since we were all friends, that soon spread to the newcomers that saw that as socially sanctioned behavior. and while i’m quite good at making fun of myself, i found it very interesting that soon, the jokes and ironies became stronger in the newcomers, that didn’t make an effort to know me, and took the jokes at face value as who i am. this fed back into a very interesting (albeit new) situation for me: i have been slowly pushed lower and lower on the pecking order of the house, to the point where not only i’m not asked for any advice or help anymore, but any thing i might want to say is attacked, or even myself personally. while some members might have previous grudges against me, what was very new to me was how new residents quickly absorbed these opinions on me without knowing me, and quickly proceded to step over to reach up in the pecking order. this is expressed in several ways: comments about me or my personal life, physical damages to my property, disrespect for my personal space, etc. none of these minor instances of “weak bullying” is ever dealt with, since it is not detected, or even observed, by the leadership. in fact, my decaying social status has only been visible to myself because i was, at a previous point in my life, part of leadership, and therefore more sensitive to these subtle changes

this has been an incredibly formative experience in that sense. i’ve understood how community power can break down and weaken its members into docility, not by direct abuse, but by merely tolerating it, ignoring it, or simply just not noticing it or knowing about it. obviously, i have seen myself as a leader in the past as having exactly the same problems and dealing with them exactly the same way, which means i’ve indirectly bullied countless people without knowing. this is very sobering and humbling, and i’m very happy i could go through this experience

transparency and communication are key to prevent this, but once docility of its members settles in, it is unlikely that they will report any abuse, if they see that the leadership is apathetic towards it or even for it. it means that rising in the ranks requires a type of ruthless docility that is otherwise invisible to the leadership, but powerful against competition

i have to say, after much long pondering of both situations, that being a leader is much easier than a regular member. while decisions are tougher, there is little to no strain on one’s own personal well being beyond the one caused by oneself (e.g., by worrying).

the pecking-order battles are much more subtle and ruthless under the shade of a benevolent dictator. and at the bottom will always lie the ones that seek virtue, for virtue is incompatible with such games. it seems virtuosity can only exist at the very top, or at the very bottom, just not in the brawling in-betweens