Anarcho-Capital Communism: A Proposal

Question: What does an AnCapCom entail? Isn't that a contradiction?

As an anarcho-capcom, I might be able to shed some light on the concept. I believe that people should divide themselves into communes with shared resources and communal ownership. I do not believe in very large communes because as communes grow they require an authoritarian state just for the sake of organization. As an anarchist, I see that as tyranny. Everyone in each commune should be able to know one another so that collective property is actually meaningful. Each commune decides the law of their land (laws must not violate the NAP) as defined by a form of adverse possession. Membership to any commune is entirely optional.

Since these communes are small, they will be equipped to specialize in a select few products rather than producing everything which is consumed. The free market facilitates efficient trade between communes. Communes will without force of state agree upon currencies to maximize trade. There will be glorious large, unrestricted corporations spanning communes. If you work for a corporation, your wage is paid to the commune to which you are a member. Hell, a corporation might hire an entire commune for its efficiency in producing a key product. It's worth noting that a corporation cannot buy a commune outright any more than a corporation could buy a person. (That would violate the NAP.)

Because resources are shared, there is no class inside a commune. Everyone is free to live a life with equals. No one must live among those judged by capitalism to be above them. However, to create the necessary capital differential (and to avoid state-mandated redistribution), different communes would have different wealth. This makes economic sense. The communes most capable of transforming their collective labor into a marketable product other communes wish to buy would control the most capital. And as the communes first form, people will prefer to band together primarily by class (which would of course be eliminated inside of every commune.)

Of course, individual rights cannot be infringed even if collective rights create a better society. Anyone is free to leave a commune at his discretion and join another commune if its laws allow it. Or many people could leave one or many communes and form a new commune with their own rules. An individual is even free to choose to live in no commune at all. Of course, that person could not take any of the commune's property with him. Claiming what is the collective's for one's own, much like taxation, is theft. As nearly all people would be raised in a commune and since commune membership would generally require the relinquishment of all personal private property, this person would be left with nothing. Hey, don't leave your commune expecting some kind of handout. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, bucko!

Also, a person without a commune would find himself isolated. Since communes are the only social groups most people would have, he would be truly alone. Corporations might hesitate to hire him. Living without a commune shows that you're not a team player, something which would likely be stigmatized. Also, it would probably be difficult to just figure out how to file the paperwork to just pay one guy. So while one is free to live without a commune, for most it is undesirable. After all, anarcho-capital communism would create such abundance, social stability, and high quality of life, that very very few will want anything about the system to change.

I hope this helped!

The Insidious Hug of Mental Health Memery

Content advisory: This post contains discussion of depression and suicidality.

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

Dying has a 100% rate of solving the problems. Forcing people to live against their wishes only enables a proportion of people to improve their lives. On the other hand, it still leaves them vulnerable to the conditions which caused them to be suicidal to begin with. It isn't fair to force the ones who won't have a "happy ending" to continue enduring a life that will never bring anything but pain and misery. The matter is exponentially worse when done for the sake of people who might have otherwise experienced happiness that they'd never have been deprived of had their wishes been respected when they were suicidal.

The above paragraph is not my own. It's a quote modified in this post for grammar, style, and context. It was posted in a discussion in response to a post featuring the following image.

^{Original Image: Stranger Things}

The image was posted on /r/2meirl42meirl4meirl, a Reddit user-created community or "subreddit" named for two communities before it. /r/me_irl is a subreddit originally intended for self-deprecating humor. /r/2me_irl4me_irl is a derivative of /r/me_irl for self-deprecating memes rooted in self-loathing. /r/2meirl42meirl4meirl is takes the concept another step further with over 100,000 users sharing memes about depression and suicide. It is one of many communities on Reddit and elsewhere in which people come together from all around the world come together to laugh at their depression.

The social internet has given unprecedented focus to mental health issues. Anonymity and pseudonymity break down the barriers of cultural stigma, and user-created subforums provide safe spaces for people everywhere to discuss their lives and mental health. However since the popularization of online life, mental health among young people is worse than ever, and use heavy use of social media is strongly correlated with depression. And a study conducted by Michelle L. McNicol, BPsych(Hons), and Einar B. Thorsteinsson, PhD found that discussion forum usage in particular was a strong predictor of unhealthy internet addiction among adolescents.

These issues are complicated. Certainly, negative depression meme communities are a symptom of a much larger problem which lacks any easy solution. But those vulnerable to toxic messaging about mental health can benefit greatly from understanding what these communities are and how they work and avoid unhealthy online environments.

Following are a few of the lies many mental health meme communities try to spread.

It's hopeless

These communities often find humor in the advice given by those who aren't struggling with depression or anxiety or in vain attempts to cure depression or anxiety. However, often this mockery of a lack of understanding by outsiders becomes a mockery at all attempts to get better. A great example of this phenomenon is /r/wowthanksimcured, a community dedicated to mocking unhelpful mental-health advice. This community rightly mocks advice like "just cheer up" or "happiness is a choice," but also often mocks advice known to mitigate the symptoms of depression in many people such as improving exercise, increasing time outdoors, and expanding one's social circle. Sometimes, even the idea that depression or anxiety can be mitigated at all is met with mockery.

Even when silly social media posts about smiling more are being mocked justifiably, mental-health communities dedicated to dismissing hope aren't healthy. Time can be much better spent supporting one another and focusing on advice that can actually help people. There is hope. It just doesn't make for a great meme.

It's not a big deal

We use comedy to put ourselves at ease about the problems in our lives and the world around us. Humor can be confessional in nature, revealing little secrets we don't share and feel ashamed of. For instance, a self-deprecating joke about eating too much junk food could be relatable to an audience and temporarily relieve the social pressure surrounding healthy eating. This kind of humor can be a positive part of mental health discussion. It can break down some of the mental health stigmas that hurt so many people.

However, if taken too far or not balanced with productive discussion about addressing mental health issues, this kind of humor can minimize the severity of the mental health crisis and rob some people of much-needed urgency in getting help. Mental health humor online often depicts extreme social isolation, dissociation, and suicidality as more common than they actually are, normalizing extreme mental states in echo chambers of misery. It's okay to use humor to call attention to our society's mental health problems, but not to dismiss them.

Medication is the only solution

Medication is a great tool for many people who suffer from many mental health conditions. For many, medication is a necessity. But medication is not the only way to mitigate the effects of many mental health issues. And medication alone is rarely a complete solution. Some mental health humor communities see anti-depressants as a panacea, after dismissing all other advice as unhelpful nonsense. Lifestyle often contributes both positively and negatively to mental health issues. Cynically ignoring lifestyle change as a means of becoming happier helps no one.

Alternately, some communities present medication as a cop-out that cannot help. These communities suggest that only once one accepts depression at its worst can he live with it, and that medication is a means of hiding from the real problem or numbing oneself. These attitudes keeps some people from getting the medication they need.

Ultimately, humor is a useful tool for de-stigmatizing and starting conversations about mental health. However, communities built around mental health humor without support can promote toxic mindsets around mental health and mental illness

Just Write! No, Not That.

If you want to be a writer, you don't need any fancy degree or giant vocabulary. Hell, you don't even have to have ever read a book. The first person to ever write a book couldn't have possibly read a book before writing theirs, and without them, books couldn't have ever been invented!

All you need to do is write what you want to say to the world! Oh no not like that. This is very poorly written. Take the story that's in your head and share it with everyone! This is actually offensive. I really disagree with this. Everyone has to start somewhere, and every writer has something worth saying! This is abhorrent. Is this document representative of your actual political views? And even worse...you're showing rather than telling! Don't worry about act structure or chapter length. Focus on telling the story that's in your head. All the rules are just guidelines! Is that a fucking adverb? And, holy shit, the passive voice is being used here! What the hell?

How Anonymity and Irony Online Make Communities that Isolate

This post was originally written for an assignment under a different name.

The world at large is just beginning to discover that it's a lot more than just memes. Over the past few years, many have been discussing what's been called the internet's “radicalization engine,” a collection of online spaces and behaviors of content-selection algorithms which have been leading some young people into extreme political ideologies. Those discussing this issue focus on explaining how people are unwittingly introduced to extremist content and communities and how that content and those communities present arguments that appeal to young people, particularly young men. In a world where arguments for extreme ideologies have become increasingly effective, this is a very important area of discussion. However, this conversation often fails to explore the many forces which enable such communities to spawn and thrive and which prime some lonely young men to be influenced by arguments that most people would find abhorrent if encountered in everyday life.

Often, these forces get dismissed. Some say that anger is the nature of young men, and that this is just another manifestation of that prehistoric angst. Others argue that radicalization is bound to occur when people are able to talk freely with like-minded people without moderation and that the internet has merely accelerated the natural process by which people have always formed tribes. Sometimes, these forces are identified as part of the nature of the internet, but not explored. Nevertheless, there is great value in understanding the particular elements of the social internet which are causing problems we observe in the world at large.

One of these is irony. Irony pervades internet culture, from ubiquitous ideas as basic as the “dank meme” to totally irony-dominated spaces like many 4chan boards and subreddits. Of course, irony is no invention of the information age, nor is it harmful by itself. However, irony plays a unique role in some anonymous and pseudonymous spaces online. Irony online, while sometimes used straightforwardly to mock ideas, is often used to shock and to confuse outsiders with a barrage of insincere ideas that can only be interpreted by those very familiar with the population of the space, if anyone. In many spaces it is impossible to distinguish between the ironic and the unironic. Often, the distinction ceases to even matter in what’s referred to as postirony. Online irony itself can serve as a path to extremism. Consider imageboards such as 4chan's infamous (and very NSFW) politics board, which are built on expressing the most repugnant positions conceivable, usually with a degree of irony. This creates a space where actual political extremists can comfortably congregate and hide behind a veil of memes if ever called out, insisting that outsiders just don't get the joke.

But online irony also has more indirect negative effects on the denizens of the darker corners of the social web. It fosters environments where genuine ideas and feeling cannot be discussed and wholehearted attempts at connection and discussion are met with mockery. Together, users around the world come together to create nihilist hell after nihilist hell. Why is irony such a dominant mode online? Certainly one factor is the demographics of the users. Many of the spaces most steeped in online irony are populated primarily by teenage boys and young men. Their propensity for edgy nihilism is hard to deny. Irony as a rejection of the wholesome is a suitable tactic for adolescent social rebellion.

It's also due to the nature of anonymity online. Many have discussed how anonymity frees people from social consequences permitting them to express unsavory beliefs and tell off-color jokes which they never would IRL. But there’s much more to the phenomenon. First, anonymity often negates the idea of a personal relationship. Most forms of social engagement are personal. People want to communicate with those whom they know and with whose identities they are familiar with. Larger-scale communication is usually less social in the colloquial sense. Consider an announcement or a book or a movie, for examples. But while these online spaces are very social, they are often bereft of personal relationships. This is particularly true on forums and imageboards and less true in spaces such as Twitter in which users follow one another. Instead of communicating with individual people, everyone is talking to everybody, and that to any user, all others are somewhat indistinct.

Second, anonymous community impacts individual identity. There are many reasons people use anonymity, some of which have more to do with security than identity. But in an anonymous community, users are socializing. They are finding communities they personally identify with. Because attributes of users cannot be distinguished, in the context of this social situation, users are only the words that they say. This goes beyond users not knowing the backgrounds and identities of each other; it informs the role each user takes in the space.

If with one group of friends, I dress conventionally, and with another I don clown makeup and slapstick antics, in the second case, I'm' not a conventionally dressed guy disguised as a clown. In that space, I’m just a clown. By existing in a space where I take a clown's role, I become one. Similarly, in an anonymous online space, users don’t have the same identities or even concept of identity. In that space people are only meaningfully a hivemind of words on a screen. When they participate, users take on part of that identity. That doesn’t mean that users cease to have personal backgrounds and ideas of their own, only that these things must be expressed in the anonymous collective consciousness if they are to be meaningful. And when individual identity and ideas are gone, it should not be surprising that truth becomes murky, a perfect recipe for postirony. For a collective mind, insincerity is an easy meme. When you’re insincere, you can say anything. It's a strong meme too. By its mocking nature it is difficult to criticize the messages of ironic media without appearing to not understand it. Irony encourages others to respond ironically in turn.

There are certainly benefits to anonymous spaces, but discussing them without their downsides is dishonest. When communities reject truth and replace it insincerity, its members become unable to support one another, and negative and shocking speech become both powerful and regular. Users with no prior bad intentions become used to seeing repugnant ideas and symbols posted in jest which makes it more likely that they won’t bat an eye when similar ideas and symbols are presented to them without mockery.