I have a theory about us returning to our natural state as our end game, but I haven’t put it down to paper yet. That being said, for now, it’s either all the good things industrialization has brought (along with the bad of course) or we return to the short brutish lives we lived before agriculture.

Anarchy at this point has no real way of being implemented without another state forming the moment we decide we can do better than die short tragic lives.

That just sounds like nothing will ever get done, but it would be worth simulating. Maybe it is good, who knows.

If might makes right a state will end up forming anyways. A populist commune is still a state. Anarchy is not possible in any sense of what one might describe as a functional society. As soon as there’s a society a state will form.

But that’s also not how chimpanzee society works anyways, since mostly it’s an alpha challenged by a younger stronger chimp who takes their place and makes sure everyone else follows the rules. They even have something like a police force.

I guess you can call it that but as I understand it bio-essentialism denies that society has any roles at all in shaping the individual. For me there’s obvious environmental pressures that force us to act a certain way in order to survive which in turn shapes us as individuals and our societies. Of course I’m talking back to the very first human societies, but all modern societies by necessity must trace their origins there. But at a certain point we started to add rules that are based on idealized humanity, divinity, which is in my view inherently hostile to human nature.

We are animals and we have no real way to discern instinct from rational. For all you know every “rational” thought you’ve ever had is actually just an instinct. How would you be able to tell that it isn’t? But that’s neither here nor there, my point is we need to form societies that are sympathetic to our biological realities, instead of societies formed on moral values sourced from anti-human religions or idealized human religions. We would be much much happier.

I know people don’t like these type of stances because they are sometimes used to exclude trans people, or to justify racism but that’s just using science to arrive at the wrong conclusions.

How would you reach consensus between hundreds of millions of people?

Look, I am sympathetic to the cause behind anarchism but it doesn’t work because it insists on ignoring biological realities. We need to look no further than our ape cousins to see how some hierarchical structure is inherent to our society. Only through the existence of a state can we reduce hierarchy and increase equality.

A stateless society wouldn’t last 10 minutes before establishing a state.

I’ve seen people with dwarfism that do look like they could be teenagers when they are already adults. I know it sucks for OP but I’d rather cops do this than let potential abuses slide. Doesn’t seem like OP was very inconvenienced by this tbh other than being uncomfortable with the situation which is understandable.

Through the discussion I’ve had here I can see that I should have been more specific and defined what kind of algorithm is the problem. But that was the point of making the post in the first place, to understand why the narrative is not moving in that direction and now I can see why, it’s nuanced discussion. But I think it’s well worth it to steer it in that direction.

Exactly my point. In lemmy I can still see all the posts, Meta’s algorithm will remove stuff from the feeds and push others and even hide comments. It is literally a reality warping engine.

I dunno, old forums were fun as fuck and they had no algorithm beyond sorting by most popular, new etc. Hey if it makes people spend less time looking at their phone it is still a win in my book— I type as I spend hours on my tablet. I’m a hypocrite, won’t lie.

I think the point of that article is closer to my own argument than what I myself would have thought. I do still think that the problem is the design of the algorithm: a simple algorithm that just sorts content is not a problem. One that decides what to omit and what to push based on what it thinks will make me spend more time on the platform is problematic and is the kind of algorithm we should ban. So maybe the premise is, algorithms designed to make people spend more time on social media should be banned.

Engaging with another idea in there I absolutely think that people should be able to say that Joe Biden is a lizard person and have that come up on everyone’s feed. Because ridiculous claims like that are easily shut down when everyone can see them and comment how fucking dumb it is. But when the message only makes the rounds around communities that are primed to believe that Joe Biden is a lizard person, the message gains credibility for them the more it is suppressed. We used to bring the Klu Klux Klan people on tv to embarrass themselves in front of all of America and it worked very very well, it’s a social sanity check. We no longer have this and now we have bubbles in every part of the political spectrum believing all kinds of oversimplifications, lies and propaganda.

The easy answer for me would be to ban algorithms that have the specific intent of maximizing user time spent on the app. I know that’s very hard to define legally. Maybe like I suggested below we can ban what kinds of signals algorithms can use to suggest and push content?

Like I said below I think the distinction is that a) I have access to a algorithm free feed here and b) lemmy (as far as I understand it) simply sorts content, rather than outright removing content from my feed if it thinks it will make me spend less time on it. I could be wrong about that second point though.

But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?

While transparency would be helpful for discussion, I don’t think it would change or help with stopping propaganda, misinformation and outright bullshit from being disseminated to the masses because people just don’t care. Even if the algorithm was transparently made to push false narratives people would just shrug and keep using it. The average person doesn’t care about the who, what or why as long as they are entertained.