Also prisons and other concentration camps can be more than deadly enough if the sanitation isn’t up to standards. And would the GOP really demand that sanitation for prisoners is kept to a high enough standard?

Capitalism is nothing more than a collection of tools. Changing who hold the tools doesn’t change anything. Charitable billionaires that give their wealth away just means that in 20 years time wealth has re-accumulated with the next set of legal persons that exploit everything for short-term gain. The problem isn’t bad people, it’s the system itself.

The only way to change how capitalism operates is by changing the tools that society uses (where changing the people at the top can be indirectly useful by creating a window to do this). Failing that, you can at least try to prevent capitalism from accumulating more tools that enforce its structure.

AI by itself is nothing in the same way a Maxim gun by itself is nothing. Through its shapes - the cost of its computations, the scale of its data collection and the methods that scale requires, the legal ownership of its weights and outputs, perhaps even its moral patienthood, and the reward signal of its fine-tuned training - it requires a certain shape of society be made and used, and it imparts a certain shape upon society.

So AI has a place in a solarpunk society in the same way as biological weapons research does. Cancer detection AI are great, and it’s also nice to be able to preventatively research how to stop future pandemics, but their shape puts them at odds with solarpunk ethos. If they must be used they should be encapsulated by a tightly monitored system, so that that system can take the shape of something beneficial.

AI is a sword, we should not use it unless we can make it into a plowshare. And at that point, is it still a sword?

You’re reading my comment backwards. I’m not saying it’s okay to exile someone just because you have 20 people, I’m saying it’s absurd to consider it a problem that you can’t exile someone when you can’t even get 20 people together to do it.

You were the one complaining about not getting to exile them. You were the one wanting to use a power structure to commit violence. I’m just saying you can’t cheat by using cops as a force multiplier.

If you want a power structure to commit violence you’re going to have to convince people that its existence is just. You can’t just say that the people doing it are cops and therefore shouldn’t be stopped.

And I disagree that the Mafia arose in southern Italy due to things going on in the USA. I hope that helps. (Though to throw you a bone - people want justice and safety, and without anarchist principles there are many unjust ways to provide a shitty version of the two).

I’m not saying cops are good, but most of the anarchists I’ve spoken to have the idea that it would be great for everybody to be willing to be violent with others when disagreements arise.

Those anarchists aren’t telling you to be violent over a disagreement, they’re telling you that if you aren’t willing to be violent over something you shouldn’t be able to send a cop to be violent for you.

When a law requires constant violence to be upheld, that doesn’t mean you should personally be violent, it means your law sucks. Cops are a crutch that allows unjust laws to be enforced.

How do horizontal power structures handle problems of global scale? The COVID pandemic and how people behaved and created consequences for others comes to mind.

Horizontal power structures can only be stable if people have a healthy culture of proactively fighting selfish actions. Any teenager will have experienced students firing their teachers, the village taking children away from abusive parents, women going on a sex strike to get men to take allegations of catcalling seriously, etc.

So when COVID rolls around and some people act selfishly, people already know from experience how to act with it. People are already familiar with shunning friends because they refuse to grow out of hurting others, they’re already familiar with boycotting specific businesses and finding alternatives. And most importantly, people already know that all of this is waiting for them if they do choose to be selfish, so they are way more likely to choose the right thing from the start.

Ideally, horizontal power structures also come with Restorative Justice. For every crime that people have ever heard of, they’ll have seen the process of someone being kept at a safe distance until they learn why they were wrong and make amends to those they wronged, and receiving help with learning.

But sure, suppose somehow that 40% of the population doesn’t really care much about keeping each other healthy and is not going to budge without consequences. In that case: Making people sick is an act of violence, so people would be in their rights to use the threat of reciprocal violence to keep people that refuse to wear masks at 2m distance.

This would be a problem that needs discussion. My fifteen minute answer would be that those of the 60% that feel comfortable with it could be given consent by the community to walk around with 2m long halberds (shaped to be blunt when poking and sharp when slicing) and keep the 40% out of spaces where they would cause harm with the threat of force. They could share a digital zine on how to make these halberds from common household materials, and have the normal justice system for people that misuse those weapons.

can’t exile them without a power structure that can use force on them

If you can’t find twenty people to work together to overpower and exile one person, that’s a good sign that you’re wrong about wanting to exile them.

Another idea on that scale might be best exemplified by climate change (or pfas etc). Do horizontal power structures mean most people could ignore how they’re impacting others negatively? If not, how would that be handled on a global scale?

In a horizontal power structure, a nation disregarding the agreed-on CO2 output norms is the same thing as a person disagreeing the agreed-on “no catcalling” norms. Talking to them, boycotting them, using violence if necessary. If the USA and EU didn’t have a position of power over the rest of the world, their excess CO2 production would be answered with a boycott from the rest of the world.

The willfully negligent poisoning of others is also an act of violence. People who do not understand that reckless scientific experimentation or deployment of untested chemicals is murder can be stopped by any means up to and including violence. In a horizontal power structure, every Chemours factory would be carefully decontaminated rubble.

Though more realistically, Chemours would never have existed. There would not be a patent on PFAS. People would treat those that deploy PFAS without prior study on its health effects as violent. People would discover its toxicity and environmental harm within years of its discovery and before any large-scale roll-out, and the cleanup of contaminated sites would be manageable by volunteers.

The obvious alternative to this is touted to be open source, ie. people making things for free and sharing it with others.

Unfortunately, the amount of things you can achieve for free, possibly relying on donations, is very limited. If you want to become a serious business, you need a serious funding model.

That’s… obviously incorrect? Most important software is open source that was made for free. Most data centers run on freeware. And even with mass consumer facing software like youtube browsers the best options are freeware like Revanced. In academia, the whole concept of academic tenure is based on the empirical proof that professors do their job best when they don’t have any obligations and they can just get a basic income to do whatever.

The best way to organize the tech industry is to make copyright and patents illegal and to give everyone a universal basic income.