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This is a follow-up to Ancom 2020? where I argued that the 2007 IPCC shook my ancom foundations.
There’s another problem that’s come up more and more these last few years: the tension between autonomy and human rights.
The federalism component of ancom was that every workplace, every village, every city block should be autonomous. The drawback of that view is that the bar for how humans treat each other can get placed a li’l too low and things like systematic racism can thrive. We’ve all seen the old “states rights” arguments that tramples human dignity in the name of autonomy.
Humanism and “human rights” can be nebulous and get co-opted by copyright proponents but the world is connected now. We keep seeing people raising their local issues to a wider scope and other people in the same community having the same issues and pooling together remotely to work out solutions.
Let’s zoom out a bit and explain what was going on. Both kyriarchy and federalism had the same “shape”: a tree, which divided a world into countries into cities into blocks into workplaces etc. Kyriarchy is evil and imposes the law from above. World Superpope makes something up and everyone downstream needs to fall into line. Federalism is cozy and is bottom-up. If you have a problem, maybe you can solve it locally. You only escalate when there’s something that also affects others on the same level. For example a big tidal wave might affect several neighboring cities so it’d be addressed on that level.
In addition to the problem I raised in Ancom 2020? (that problem being that federalism cannot efficiently address climate change since local actions have global consequences, and federalist economics are very susceptible to abusing externalities, just like market capitalism is) we’ve been seeing widespread sexism and racism.
Now, both in kyriarchy and in federalism, there are often several intersecting trees since society can be sliced different ways. For example, syndicalists have both local organizations and parallel, wider-scoped branch syndicates. This doesn’t solve the issue. The classic example is black women who, in the 20th century, faced problems both in anti-sexism groups and in anti-racism groups. As Crenshaw et al found, intersection logically has the opposite problems of addition. !(a && b) = (!a || !b).
We need a different way of thinking about these problems in a connected world. Unplugging feels great but is best in moderation, since connection gives us opportunities to share solutions.