Definitely thought the one on the right was wearing a plug, at first.

Poe's Law strikes again!

I'm with you in sentiment, but is this advice based on experience, or conjecture?

If the former, can you elaborate on your experience with open carrying at protests?

The cat can have a little mouse pointer. As a treat.

I can't agree. It's the lower authorities submitting to the higher authority. That happens.

Nah. The US hasn't been able to force Russia to stop their invasion of Ukraine, nor stop them from playing fuck-fuck games all over the rest of the world. And China is almost certainly stronger than Russia is. They both joined the internet because they wanted to, not because they were forced.

A small group of authorities is close to one. In fact none are monolithic.

Oh, they'll just choose to cooperate and act like a single central authority? Without a preexisting central authority forcing them to? 🤔

Yep. They want to enjoy the benefits of the collaborative effort. They are capable of maintaining their own separate network, but instead they chose to connect and put a ton of resources into managing the internet activities of their citizens. Knowledge of how to bypass those restrictions is apparently pretty widespread though.

Interestingly, North Korea does maintain it's own separate, fake internet. They manually copy approved sites over from the real internet, and *heavily* monitor usage.

The Internet is not an example of anarchy, of course. It's nothing without its backbone cables built with participation of governments and enormous corporations and treated as strategic assets. It's no more anarchist than sea ports. There was a sprinkle of anarchy there in its transient years from an elitarian scientific thing to a common medium. That was not stable. Nothing anarchist can be stable in a system of dominating hierarchy.

I admit it was easy to buy into this fairy tale when I was a kid. In 2006 it seemed that the humanity is one step from becoming free and, well, humane.

You're missing the point of the example. I'm not pushing techno-libertarian utopianism here. I'm not even talking about what the internet *does*, I'm talking about what it *is*: A globe-spanning megaproject that connects (nearly?) every country, and is used by a full 2/3rds of existing humans. And it was made without a supreme central authority forcing everyone to cooperate in its creation and maintenance. ARPANET was created by the US, but no one forced the Russians or the Chinese to adopt the IP protocol on their computers and connect to their neighbors.

This is important because a super common anti-anarchist talking point is that people won't cooperate (at least not at scale) unless an overarching authority forces them to. The existence of the internet demolishes that argument. It would be fundamentally impossible if that talking point were true.

I'm gonna go against the grain here and say that YDI retroactively for posting such a low-resolution screenshot. -_-

But also y'all, isn't it kinda weird to downvote YDI posts? It's not like they don't belong in this community.

The instance lemmy.dbzer0.com is dedicated to the interests of its admin, db0, who happens to be an anarchist. So it's not devoted to a particular ideology per se, but they're going to run it according to their values.