First, a tune and an apology for the silence on this page. For the past year I have been writing a book — the book that was promised years ago. It is now in the editing phase and will be out in the coming months. Since my writing efforts were focused there, I ended up not writing much here at all.

One of my recent lifestyle changes was to start attending Irish music sessions. A music session is basically a rehearsal in a pub or venue: a bunch of traditional musicians get together and practise tunes they know. While this is the main historical background story of these happenings, in practice, sessions are more fun than gigs because there is no official audience and no official performers. There is also mostly no original repertoire: it is all from the vast troves of public domain music available. And when a tune isn’t public domain? Well, you steal it.

Back in the days when recorded music was for a small select group of elite musicians, folk musicians had no other option but to learn by ear and follow an oral tradition of transmission. Bagpipers in Portugal were no exception, in that if they liked a bagpiper’s style or tune, they’d hear it and copy it and start playing it themselves. Piracy isn’t new — it’s as old as our capacity to communicate and to understand.

These pipers had a fundamental community purpose: they were the DJs and entertainers of their time. They played for dance halls for the sole purpose of making dances and festivities more enjoyable. The music itself always served the practical purpose of feeding the party, instead of any other particular high aesthetic (with exceptions, maybe, for airs and religious themes).

Whenever a particular tune was a hit among crowds, that meant more money for the pipers. It is no surprise, then, that most pipers took issue on teaching how to play pipes — if they couldn’t control the tunes themselves, they had to control the medium to prevent competition from other pipers.

Times have changed for folk musicians, but not too much. One of the things that has changed is the fact that the quantity of folk music that has been written down and documented and published as public domain is tremendous — more than any single musician could ever remember and play in a lifetime. This has an interesting side effect in the folk music scenes: authorship is a curiosity about a tune, not the main point. The main point, instead, becomes the interpretation and performance aspects of the tunes themselves: the interpreter effectively brings the public domain material to life. Learning and mastering the art itself becomes the main focus of the artists, and the tunes vehicles to express their creativity.

Traditional artists that record their own tunes quite often let their friends play them at sessions — authorship respected, playing with fellow musicians dissolves the economic interests that might have mediated their interactions with others.

This, to me, is one of the incredibly powerful ideas that comes from the folk scenes: music isn’t theirs to begin with, but that is accepted as part of a tradition, even when the tunes themselves are less than 50 years old and would therefore fall under copyright laws. In folk music, ownership of a tune is meaningless. It either is a hit for dancers and fellow session musicians, or it isn’t, and the way that success is measured includes how many other musicians like your tunes and decided to cover them (or better put, copy them and modify them).

While the way traditional music is studied and passed on has this interesting characteristic in regards to intellectual property, it also has another interesting idea in what a performance really is.

Here in Sydney the art scenes are ripe with “Look at me” type events where everyone has a shot at the stage, yet doesn’t watch what others do there. Be it an exhibition where the exhibitor doesn’t see anyone else’s work, or the gig where the band leaves early and doesn’t watch others play, the idea of stage and performance is fundamentally different to the one represented by sessions and dance halls.

In a session, musicians are rehearsing and having fun together, collectively exploring and practising tunes they don’t own and most likely didn’t write. There is usually no stage, and the venue is usually a pub where most people are interested in the big screens with matches than the music. The music in these places isn’t a commodity — it’s a collective experience. While a gig represents a ritualistic relationship between the musician and the audience, a session breaks that down and turns music it into an every day thing we do with our friends and acquaintances.

Like jam sessions, DJs mixing for a live audience, jazz dance halls, it is in the commoner’s world that music is alive — prevented from being merchandise simply because it is a vehicle for a communal experience. And while the congregation spaces where this happens might shift over time, the idea remains that we prefer art to be free to interpret and modify, since that serves the public enjoyment of that very same art. If property is an idea of alienation, then folk music is a perfect example of the opposite: how creativity persists and is enhanced by the absence of property, and how it creates bridges between people and communities that thrive.

That is why I abandoned most other music scenes and moved to folk music — it is where I find this rich balance of creativity, community spirit and a surprising lack of self-commodification persists and thrives. And in such an alienating world, it is a great source of fresh (moving) air.

There is something to be said about economic crimes and their perpetrators — they are virtually ignored in how serious they can be. In a worldwide ever-spreading austerity it is important to keep in mind what causes what, and how a seemingly innocent economic policy can have real world devastating effects. Though there are many such effects, I’d like to address xenophobia in particular, with its allied concept multiculturalism.

The signs are growing and clearer than ever. Golden Dawn party in Greece, riots in Sweden and violence in England. France’s seemingly ethnically driven riots a few years ago were almost like a warning. Meanwhile, news propagate the religious and ethnic logic instead of the actual economic causes. A clash of civilisations, of peoples, of religions or even of inborn intellectual capacities. Poorer countries and cultures are written off as lazy and incapable by nature. An interesting article in a tabloid read “White vs. Islamic culture”, as if religion and ethnicity were even comparable. Cui bono? Who exactly benefits from this ideology? What exactly is it saying?

While it may be clear in the literature that austerity and inequality lead to the root causes of riots and xenophobia, and that hegemonic states lead to violence between their own citizens, these are largely hard to understand because they require a depth of understanding of social processes not generally available to the public. So we buy into the “multiculturalism failed” and “islam as a bad influence on society”, when what we should be reading is “economic policies cause riots” and “economists responsible for crimes against humanity”. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

When living at SPCC I ran into a symptomatic situation involving xenophobia and poverty. One of our residents, let’s call him X, was a first generation Portuguese citizen with Muslim and African parents. Needless to say his family struggled but gave him a hard working ethics, which he followed sporadically. X was a street punk and enjoyed his drugs and alcohol, so he’d get odd construction jobs while living with us. During that same time, we also had to illegal migrant residents. Since for the most part we lived in a state of surplus, all residents got along fairly well. But when food wasn’t enough or some would put in more work than others, the arguments would start.

Note that since in certain surplus moments things were okay (meaning, food, energy, drinks, leisure weren’t an issue), and in moments of scarcity they weren’t, and since the people were the same, it was this “micro-economic” state of our community that was determining the changes in interactions and behaviour. Frequently I’d do a shop run for food just to prevent arguments. X was generally a positive and happy member of our community. The interesting thing was when our “micro-economy” would go in the red (not enough food, not enough working hands). X would turn to the migrants and say “Go get a job! Go back to your country! Fucking (ethnicity) not wanting to work!” X’s poor understanding of politics and economics meant he had no real way of rationalising his frustrations. The frustrations themselves were justified: there he was, a working class 1st generation citizen working his ass off for some beer, and there they were, the illegal migrants at our squat not wanting to contribute and living off our community for free. This is a political issue within the community, but since they also had an external characteristic (their ethnicity), that characteristic became part of the rationalisation and with it made X into a xenophobe. X, the black muslim descendant in a white catholic portugal was being xenophobic towards migrants. This, to me, was a profound contradiction but spelled out nothing more than that xenophobia, racism or even islamophobia are simply symptoms of socio-economic forces that create these tensions.

SPCC was a clear example of multiculturalism. We had hundreds of nationalities over, frequently 5 or more cultures interacting with each other and no conflicts in general, unless there was an economic issue with the community. X’s xenophobia is like the waves of xenophobia and islamophobia that we can expect only to get worse in the coming years. They express legitimate frustrations of working class people that have no other way of articulating their problems than the simplified we/them black/white catholic/muslim false dichotomies.

The media, whose job it is to inform and provide meaningful rationalisations to the public, does so according to an agenda that benefits the ruling class (generally white and judeo-christian), and therefore provides bogus rationalisations instead. “Multiculturalism failed” is going to be the catchphrase for the coming social turmoil of a disenfranchised generation. Meanwhile, the policies and policy makers that are responsible for it failing can walk away freely, since this logic protects them and instead blames the very people that are victimised by these policies. If it’s multiculturalism that failed, then it isn’t austerity and bad economic policies that failed, and economic crime can continue unpunished. If Islam and Christianity are incompatible, then it isn’t the bad integration policies and cultural education in schools. If black people are dumber than white people, then it isn’t that white people have enslaved and oppressed these minorities into submission. Clearly these phrases are terrifying, but they are the logic behind these news. Sadly, I fear that we will see more of this as inequality and austerity extend further and further.

In the light of this, I stick to what I know. Power determines behaviour and social unrest is a symptom of the incompetence and corruption of those in power. Whenever anyone in power attributes social problems to external factors, beware.

Perhaps on topic, perhaps not, but a classic nonetheless.

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