I want to start an online anarchist research university. Fuck signalling and degrees and publication count, I want to host a place where people come to collaborate on building knowledge and to learn and teach things. Not so you can "improve your resume" or "get a job" or create connections to help get you hired or any capitalist bullshit. Just specifically because you either want to know something, or you do know something and want to share it with others.
And I want to build it starting now.
I think one of the first steps is to create some online collaboration space and recruit some people to participate. I want to host it myself for the moment. And I want something I can host on yunohost to keep the cost of admin down.
i looked at "collaboration" in the app list and found "Tracim" and it looks... pretty interesting? Who has used it?
Its not easy to imagine how this thing works exactly. But I want to recruit people who have questions and potential research projects, as well as people who have mentorship and skills to help guide that research.
This kind of expands beyond my original idea of doing some videos where I personally help people do some kind of modeling and data analysis, and into a kind of broader ecosystem not focused on me but focused on groups collaborating on common goals...
How are we gonna afford this? you ask... no idea. But let's put people together to work on projects and see if we can get institutions to fund the projects, or fucking kickstarter or gofundme or whatever the projects.
What if RAND corporation except for socialist anarchist peacenik weirdos?
You get me? Sign up... right here in the frikin comments.
And I wanna use the internet in weird and collaboratory ways... anything from multicast conferences without centralized Zoom servers, to maybe building some kind of distributed paper publications, to building hand curated research "editor lists" of recommended publicly published works, etc.
Forget centralized systems like ArXive or whatnot. forget gatekeepers, what could we do if you dont need **permission** to be allowed to do research and create ideas and share them?
Ive had ideas like this bouncing around in my head since like 2013. But now we have lots of tech that we didnt have in 2013. Peertube, Mastodon, IPFS, Moodle, whatever.
so. Thats my idea. My "prefiguration" of a better world.
Cheers BBS
This whole idea needs a hashtag you can follow... how about
Following you to see how this goes. Would you be open to allowing people to teach classes anonymously? Or semi-anonymously?
Because I earned a graduate degree in history, with a focus on labor history from 1880-1930 in the United States of America (as a way of really finding the answer to the question, "what happened to the anarchist movement in the U$"). Given that I wanted to study anarchist and labor history, I wasn't accepted into any doctoral programs that I applied to, and now I'm too old, but I would hope a MA is sufficient.
I've always wanted to teach a course on the intellectual history of anarchism, and was thinking about it as a retirement thing to do to keep busy.
But I'd rather not wait.
I also have to laugh at the person whose first question was how to make money off this. Like, my dude, I feel like you have missed the plot.
Unless he didn't. Wait, this isn't like some anarcho-capitalist university is it? Because if that's the case, I am not only not interested, but woof!
@sauc3
No, the point isnt to make money and I'm NOT an anarchist capitalist.
but I also recognize we live in a capitalist world and we need money to eat... so I happen to know the person you mention has been struggling to feed his family. so let's give him some grace because of that.
As for your participation... seriously a major goal in my mind is to liberate people like you!! give you a place to bring your expertise and share it with people...
I can appreciate both your points. I have just been unfortunate enough to meet an anarcho-capitalist in meat space and so I am always on guard.
But I have solidarity across the left. I am happy to work with anyone (on the left) who doesn't suggest I should be put up against the wall for what I believe. I feel like that's a pretty reasonable starting point.
To be clear, I'm not a purist, and I definitely think that workers should get paid. I am not suspicious of workers getting asking for and being paid. To that larger point, I think that the "circular leftist firing squad" has historically been a problem, and we would be wise to learn the lessons of our shared past.
We can't really afford to take each other down, while our common enemy watches and laughs.
solid position in my opinion.
In any case I would love to have you working on teaching a history of anarchy if that's your passion. Keep following my posts until I've got some way to branch off this topic in its own space.
solid position in my opinion.
In any case I would love to have you working on teaching a history of anarchy if that's your passion. Keep following my posts until I've got some way to branch off this topic in its own space.
I would love to see more
I have taught with formal ECTS in Denmark, and am really tired of the formal ways
I also have quite a lot of material in the infosec and network area, at Diploma level, open source
@kramse
Thats awesome. I guess I'm gonna post on this idea on the hashtag #anarchistuniversity so follow that
I want to have some kind of collaboration system up and running in the next month where curious people can actually do stuff... I'm not sure what that means, maybe I buy a server and put it in my closet, or rent a Hetzner server or something.
follow the hash tag and chime in let's keep talking
The larger question becomes - how shall such a research university govern itself ?
The ancient universities of Paris and Bologna give us two different models. Bologna gave us the student-controlled model and Paris gave us the model we sorta see today, faculty and departments in charge.
Our problem today is the Paris model didn't see the scheming administrators seizing control of the academic rudder.
Well. sure, but at some level we need kook detection and principled reviewers etc.
If one of these becomes kooky, it gets ignored. People move their efforts elsewhere. right now its just proof of concept, create a smallish one... 10-20 people, get the infrastructure set up, probably some kind of existing ongoing projects that get adopted or something.
So the university president is sitting in the doctor's office with a frog on his head.
"What's going on here?" asks the doc.
"Well, it started out as a wart on my ass" says the frog.
@dlakelan Have you read about the Science House?
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/lets-build-a-fleet-and-change-the
The team I'm part of at @digiresacademy has been thinking about how to do something similar, but focusing on #MetaResearch / #OpenResearch. We run an event called the Open Science Retreat, and often think "what if this wasn't limited to a week?"...
@schmidt_fu
Thats awesome, my German is super limited, but I'll take a look at their site tomorrow!
in person is great but so many people are spread out or isolated from physical contact with others who might collaborate.
One thought I have though is to maybe create cross collaborations between the anarchist version and the centralized existing universities. i mean, there are plenty of people who need anything from undergrad thesis projects to PhD projects... why not collaborate with others?
@schmidt_fu @dlakelan Universiti Alternatif in the far southeast of Malaysia may be similar in concept?
https://malaysiansmustknowthetruth.blogspot.com/2024/12/universiti-alternatif-hope-for.html
Edit. Adding original source in the respected Malaysiakini, which is paywalled:
https://malaysiakini.com/news/730107
@SometimesLovely @dlakelan
I went through the Open University system and it opened my eyes to so many things that I'd never considered, but it was enshitified by government and is now a shadow of it's former self.
What the OP seems to be describing was the original purpose of the Workers Education Association, which is still strong in some areas, but doesn't offer the range of opportunities it did 30 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Educational_Association
@dlakelan Signature appropriate reaction to a world perverted by the wrong people.
As we progress thru education levels we specialise more - when the world REALLY needs combinational, holistic thinkers. Teams with diverse understandings combining.
@dlakelan
i've thought about this before
like Khan Academy meets Modern School
@dlakelan to be clear: I had hundreds of interviews with interested people and 100-200 selected people onboarded into our Discord. I personally helped most of them( from explaining how to use our tech, to explaining to them how to use GitHub). Everyone wanted to receive services. Nobody came to give something (other than the 2 of us who started this).
So the major issue you will face is finding people who want to give and protecting the community from those who only want to take.
Thanks for this insight. Yeah, I recognize this is very true.
@dlakelan I will follow along.
If you find more people and need infrastructure for measuring volunteer effort, I can bring back mine.
It is blockchain-based (my own WASM engine), I have identity integration (even OAuth2 backed in the blockchain infra).
My tech has never been used for "crypto" coins, and the idea was that nobody could trade volunteer points and medals for external assets. And that points are given for a documented action, verified by peers.
Feel free to follow along. I think I'll probably not want the blockchain stuff, but that's ok!
It'll be a little fits-and-starts here, because there's also day to day life, but I have some ideas for a name, and will buy a domain, and then set up infrastructure for the collaboration, and try to get some education and research and talks going by May or so.
Daniel Lakeland
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mycorrhiza
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tuban_muzuru
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thick but spreadable 
Ciarán (mc)
Artemysia
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SometimesLovely
Mike 🇬🇧 🇪🇺
Adam Greenfield
Neil Moffatt
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DoomsdaysCW
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