The first use-case that came to mind for me is research. A distraction-free dedicated application for wikipedia could be a great way to keep organized, especially if new features are added and expanded upon over time that go beyond the typical browser experience.
It’s not a workflow for everyone and if wikipedia is something that’s usually just accessed through other search engines then this probably won’t be all that useful to you.
Yeah sure it should be used for its utility on a needs-basis, I don’t really disagree with you or care if people use it for whatever reason they want to.
Point was that as a global general-use currency it doesn’t provide much added utility for the average person or provide a real solution for any of the underlying structural issues that people say it does.
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There’s so many more comparisons to be drawn between the US and China than most in the west think, the credit system is a great example of that since a lot of people don’t realize how fucked it is in the US.
Just the idea of permanently ascribing a number to how profitable someone is for banks and dictating what opportunities they can get based off that number is horribly dystopian in itself, but people are so accustomed to it and have so many misconceptions to its purpose that there’s not nearly as much criticism over it as there should be.
Another part of it is the rigid west-east dichotomy that’s still brought up so often even as it’s become increasingly irrelevant in the past several decades, I’d recommend anyone who’s interested check out There Never Was a West, it’s a short read but I think it can be pretty eye opening and puts a lot of the modern day rhetoric about international politics into a broader historical perspective.
Really don’t think it was made to be useful or practical in any way, just seems like some dude making shit that looks cool for funsies and trying to fund it, plus i mean its culturally relevant and stuff like that is in tons of media
(This ended up being a ridiculously long post so no worries if you don’t want to read it all but I think I do clear up and expand on a lot of things you’ve mentioned or asked about)
I think on the base level, the link to anarchism lies in the traditional cultural values and forms of organization of these societies took on pre-colonialism, which aren’t able to exist currently due to continued oppression and lack of sovereignty, but these values likely would manifest themselves if they had the space to since a decent amount of indigenous culture has been preserved through the last few centuries.
I’d also like to mention again that it’s really difficult to argue that indigenous nations are ethnostates because they are not states, they are comprised of people of a socially constructed class that was delegated as inferior - forced into this foreign class grouping through colonialism, and the nations which covered an area of a single ethnicity of people (due to natural historical and geological events) predate the notion of racial stratification that was brought in from europe. Indigenous people aren’t brought together by ethnicity, but by the shared experience of how they were treated through the process of colonialism. If following the treaties being honored, and sovereignty being returned to them, the portion of nations which currently do draw lines on ethnicity or heritage continue to do so, then you would be right in those individual cases, but going off of what I’ve seen, read and heard from the indigenous perspective, that’s not very likely to continue once the hand of direct colonial oppression is lifted and communities can rebuild.
On top of that, I think there’s definitely a tendency especially in recent decades for anarchist activism in colonized countries to take a focus on combatting not only systems of direct government control or economic structure, but also the systems of white supremacy and racism that have rooted itself in every facet of daily life through colonialism (one example which you commented on was race and census data, a surprising amount of which has its roots in the “skull size” theories of race from the 19th century) - For the sake of clarity, in most colonized countries, whiteness holds a different meaning than in Europe as it’s usually defined as being an absence of perceived physical and cultural qualities of the other (i.e. Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, etc. folk) instead of being defined on ethnicity and direct, traceable heritage. This is another example of how extensively colonialism has informed our social systems. - It’s important to recognize that it’s not the census policy itself that’s creating white supremacy and racism, but that the policy is a manifestation of those existing systems. Because of this, in the US there’s a good amount of mutual aid and democratic organization by anarchist groups that directly engage with aiding those who have been/are specifically targeted by these systems, rather than engaging indirectly through the lines of class.
I hope I didn’t come off as argumentative or combative because I definitely think there tends to be a hard-to-navigate disconnect in leftist thought and activism between european countries and the americas (both north and south) due to how differently colonialism and white supremacy has manifested itself in our modern societies. A lot of the time it’s hard to have both people be on the exact same page in conversation.
If you happen to be at all interested in reading some US-centric texts related to this then I could definitely recommend some but I know it’s already exhausting seeing so much of that perspective online
These systems already exist because these indigenous nations already exist with their own governments, and have existed as self determinant, democratic political entities far before the colonization of North America.
It goes far past the reservation system and legally, per treaties signed by the US govt., these nations should be fully sovereign and politically independent. The genocide of a group of people doesn’t make some of their nations policies around citizenship right, but they exist as a direct result of how their governments are forced to operate under the current regressive US reservation system, and as mentioned before, these specific policies are rooted in previous US policy around census data (see Dawes Rolls) which was forced onto them.
It is unfair though to group all indigenous people as being racist or regressive for having rules within their own communities to limit access based on cultural or family background in order to maintain solidarity and survive centuries of genocidal policy that’s continued into the 21st century (see the infiltration of Indigenous leadership by the US govt. in the 20th century, i.e. the Navajo and Hopi). It’s also worth mentioning that all of this goes for the rest of North America along with Oceania due to very similar colonial history.
At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter how one feels about a group’s culture or survival mechanisms a group engaged with in order to recognize that the continued injustice against them should end and that they have a right to autonomy and self determination. It really shouldn’t be controversial, and the issues towards specific indigenous groups and their policies as they are now in the reservation system are separate issues to be covered after they have some form of real autonomy and political separation from state oppression.
every dollar prevented from going to cengage or pearson is a win for college students
but their online homework and grading subscriptions that they tie in with textbooks is definitely making it harder, especially the way they pay off schools to push their texts and curriculum on professors in stem fields, it’s awful and puts students in a position where they’re forced to pay for a textbook regardless
Its immediate focus, at least in the US, is sovereignty of indigenous nations where each nation’s land would be defined by current federally recognized reservations which indigenous folk occupy right now. Past that would be working to reverse legislation which has broken up this land, deny resources, repress indigenous culture for those living off reservation etc. I think the discussion of reparations should be had as well but realistically that’s probably a bit far off.
Ideally, in a world where western governments acted in good faith and with care for human life, we would be able to work directly towards returning land traditionally occupied by indigenous folk across the world to them as each peoples/nation saw fit, but realistically this takes the form of returning full sovereignty of what little land is officially recognized as belonging to each indigenous group, and then working from there through community organization, protesting, lobbying etc. to continue working to advance the rights of indigenous folk and repay in some way what has been stolen from them
To your last question, again in the context of the US, many indigenous groups already have their own governments where citizenship is determined how they see fit, some are stricter and go off of the standard of blood quanta which was put in place by the US govt. centuries ago, some go off descent, while others welcome anyone who has a clear cultural connection to the people. Part of returning sovereignty to these nations is allowing them to define citizenship however they see fit.
The movement isn’t saying that every precolonial society was better than ours in every metric, or that we should roll back the clock a thousand years, all it’s saying is that we should work towards giving back what was lost through the countless genocidal policies and violent colonialism that indigenous people across the world have faced.
Also I will say, at least in North America, which I’m most knowledgeable of, many indigenous societies were absolutely far more egalitarian and democratic than most western democracies, but are painted in a far different light when reading of them from the colonial perspective.
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anecdotal but i ended up switching from ddg and searxng to brave because of how much more relevant and well structured i found their search results to be so i’m not sure i agree with the findings for that column
absolutely hate the company and am skeptical of their practices, but even considering all that their search toes the line of privacy and functionality better than some others, at least in the case of a daily user who needs a service that lies somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes
I’ve felt the same way, not only for what you said on the trans experience and atmosphere, but also in a more personal sense where a lot of the time posts like that start making me think critically about how I’m perceived, which is something I try my best to ignore to be able to get through the day lol.
I do get that a lot of us don’t really have any support networks or healthy outlets for our struggles with dysphoria and could really use someone to help ground our anxieties, so I don’t want that to be taken away from those who really need that, but on the other hand this is a pretty closely knit public forum where posts are seen by many people who are less vocal so i’m curious to see how others feel
Same here! Still carry mine around and it’s partitioned so it’s also useful when someone wants to share a large file but doesn’t have the time to upload it or have the cloud storage to host it