Poverty is the root of all evil

[The Dharma Bum]

[The Comrade]

yeah? my f**k phone can bring me breakfast in bed? and clean my toilet?

[Libertarian602]

[lnrw]

[broken robot]

[exploited]

I wanted to respond to a few of those points:

1. "Imagined communities" is a great label, I like that. Thanks to the internet, media and the breakdown of traditional social institutions, people and particularly young people have a really complex web of loyalties. Existing family is still likely the most common and most basic community people belong to... but whereas that would have spread out into school/class/family networks, churches, political parties, labor organizations etc. in the past, now we are organizing along interests. You have the social justice camp, which is really fragmented, with people of all walks relating more to people with the same ideas rather than people of the same race or class. You have, as mentioned, militias and conspiracy groups. You have people getting together regularly because they belong to the same website, for instance, or getting a free beer because they're wearing a Chive shirt. You have people organizing socially around owning a Jeep, for God's sake, and some of the car forums are some of the biggest and most active online. And in almost all instances, these communities are engaging with the greater world - Chive and Reddit do regular charity drives and organize large-scale political action. Car forums are writing letters about Tesla being shut out of Michigan. People are using Facebook and Twitter all over the world to organize protests, direct action, even rebellion.

2. There is this whole other world, completely unrecognisable from the geographic world that supports it. This world exists online but has massive, mind-blowing, real world impacts. Nobody has really harnessed this politically yet. I mean there are lots of people using Twitter or Facebook to organize politically, and e-mail and text messages are also a huge part of how people do things... but what I mean is that nobody has tried to actually provide a common, open, egalitarian platform for all of these imagined communities to make decisions over. This needs to be done, and that, along with a focus on poverty, should be the basis of our organization.

3. You brought up conspiracists, and it's interesting, because I am pretty sympathetic these days. There really is a global network of capitalists making all of the most important economic decisions, blackmailing countries, and punishing disobedience. We call it the WTO or IMF. Further, the government really is spying on you.

[broken robot]

[eynon81]

[eynon81]

[Mr. Shaman]