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
Daniel Lakeland
sauc3
mycorrhiza
Henrik Kramselund - kramse š
Danny Garside