anarchists don't have elections. anarchists have consensus and divide up or directly oppose each other if there's unresolvable differences.

the simple or flavorful use of 'authority' usually just means someone is well respected on a topic "She's an authority on electrical motors" or that they posses some leadership qualities and are well liked.

the second and more dictionary definition of authority is authorization to rule. literally to dominate others because they are seen as legitimate.

your example of a club is a good test ground for these differences. it's up to you to run your club, make agreements with other members and share responsibilities even if people are happy to let you decide things or do most of the work. but your club doesn't have any claim to legitimacy, to true authority, because it doesn't seek to control ALL activities of that type. in the case of government, it very much does claim authority over the entire nation, to determine who can move where, who can work where and how, who must fight and who must be put to death.

there's no competition allowed with a structure like government. either obey or resist and face consequences. i'd much prefer a world of overlapping autonomous 'clubs' whose members decide for themselves than a world divided up by the greediest and most violent mafias.

From my perspective "necessary authority" is a meaningless phrase. Authority is always justified to those who support it, and unjustified to those suffering under it. For example, the authority of a particular country to enforce it's borders is "justified" in order to preserve those borders. The authority of a catholic priest is "necessary" to uphold the values of the church against sin and pollution of the faith. But if you don't believe in those institutions then the justification is very silly! Anarchists just take this one step further and realize there is no single true authorized power structure.

Anarchists can do away with authority and just act directly. If some of us agreed to live a certain way it's us deciding that we want to do that. We don't need to hit others over the head with a magic scroll or manifesto to prove we are justified, and we don't need to ask their permission first. Likewise, if someone wants to push us around we don't give them the benefit of the doubt through authority. They're just another person trying to push us around, whether they're a government agent or a highway bandit.

How you approach others is what makes your world the way it is. If you want to treat others as equals, directly, and engage with them without an intermediary we could say you're an anarchist. If you think you need government (an authority, legitimate justified power) to push others around, i'd say you're not.

on my private tracker you get points for just always seeding, you can turn those points in for ratios boosts at a pretty good rate.

Yeah it's the issue with this 'middle ground' of federation. some ideal world would be fully p2p, identities fundamentally would rest with the user's device or backed up somewhere public and encrypted, then servers just become meeting hubs or caches of content. there's some protocols that already do this at a technical level, secure scuttlebutt and nostr are two. there's other issues that crop up, for one moderation and content discovery starts to be a lot more complicated.

so, not a solved problem by any means, but federation at least gives us a bit more freedom than a singular centralized service.

i think the point is more emotional or directional, despite the weight of centralized capital and state we have pioneered many amazing weird little projects on this internet. even thought it was heavily commercialized thousands of unique subcultures and open source movements have thrived. so you're not wrong but i just believe the piece is getting at something else

Oh no, this isn't me sadly. I recommend following them though, its a couple who lives on a sailboat and makes extremely DIY software among other things

Pretty amazing results

Sorry I should have explained more. It's definitely on the philosophical side but he's been living in a self constructed and worked on boat for decades, a true DIY-er in that sense. Maybe it's actually a little too far out as it's not a singular project so feel free to remove if you want.

It's good! but 'revolutionary praxis' is not gonna be compatible. A big change over the last 100 years or so has been a general turning away from the concept of revolution for many anarchists, including communist ones, though that doesn't mean everyone has excluded the concept fully.

while large scale movements and collective projects etc are all fine and good, it's also good to not get caught up in identifying with them. "I'd give it all for The Collective" etc. Things should serve us as far as we can get use from them, and be easily discarded when they no long work for us. This means any collective undertaking should be easily dissolved when it becomes more a burden than a help to those who operate it. We can organize ourselves to fight our bosses, to strike our rent against landlords, to feed and protect ourselves, but those organizations aren't "Real" things without the people to operate them.

It's a classic but i'm also a critical enjoyer. I enjoy it on two levels: It's kind of practical! A lot of it sounds pretty reasonable, seems to be in line with how i see people working together and the pressures of economics wrecked by distributed mass action. But I also enjoy it as a fantasy story, one person's mad dream with lots of humor and absurdity built in. Having a timeline for the creation of your utopian society taking less than 10 years and mapping it all the way a thousand years into the future with the breakdown of that society is somehow cosmically funny.

That said there's also a lot I don't like now that i've read more theory and criticism from people outside central europe. a lot of the ideas he has are kinda primitivist / of the noble savage. as mentioned somewhat in his updated notes there's a lot of odd ideas about 'other cultures' outside of the A/B deals, aka the "the third world". There's some weird colonial white guy attitudes in there.

Also the idea that people couldn't be excludable from bolos is very dangerous, radical scenes have huge problems with rapists and other abusers maintaining strong positions for years because of rape culture attitudes very much still present in our larger culture. It's a rough complex thing to deal with but it's surely not going to get better if you can't even ask that your abuser be kicked out of the group home you share.

Still, there's some banger quotes:

Reformists tell us that it’s short-sighted and egoistic to follow just one’s own wishes. We must fight for the future of our children. We must renounce pleasure (that car, vacation, a little more heat) and work hard, so that the kids will have a better life. This is a very curious logic. Isn’t it exactly the renunciation and sacrifice of our parents’ generation, their hard work in the ’50s and ’60s, that’s brought about themess we’re in today? We are already those children, the ones for whom so much work and suffering has gone on. For us, our parents bore (or were lost to) two world wars, countless “lesser” ones, innumerable major and minor crises and crashes. Our parents built, for us, nuclear bombs. They were hardly egoistic; they did what they were told. They built on sacrifice and self-renunciation, and all of this has just demanded more sacrifice, more renunciation. Our parents, in their time, passed on their own egoism, and they have trouble respecting ours. Other political moralists could object that we’re hardly allowed to dream of utopias while millions die of starvation, others are tortured in camps, disappear, are deported or massacred. Minimal human rights alone are hard to come by. While the spoiled children of consumer society compile their lists of wishes, others don’t even know how to write, or have no time to even think of wishes. Yet, look around a little: know anybody dead of heroin, any brothers or sisters in asylums, a suicide or two in the family? Whose misery is more serious? Can it be measured? Even if there were no misery, would our desires be less real because others were worse off, or because we could imagine ourselves worse off. Precisely when we act only to prevent the worst, or because “others” are worse off, we make this misery possible, allow it to happen. In just this way we’re always forced to react on the initiatives of the Machine.

deciding the relative value of things is deeply personal and very important if we care about individual people! it's not capitalism to not want to trade away beans for steak if you can make steak at home easily, or maybe you're happy to take a 'bad' trade because the person you're trading with needs some extra help.

you're right that basically no one did 'classical barter' trading apples for oranges directly, but there are numerous examples of people freely trading in credit (debt) over a variety of timescales and social systems.

it's not hierarchical to decide for yourself what you want and what you're willing to give up in relation with other people, in fact i'd say understanding the necessity of that is a fundamental part of anarchism.

where exchange gets tricky is when it's coerced, or the circumstances surrounding it are coercive. if there's an authority figure putting a gun in your back demanding money every month for the privilege of living in your own house, then trading with others to "earn" that money will definitely be a bad situation for you. it's the specific enforcement of properties as we know them under capitalism that's the problem, not exchange in the abstract.