Ramsey Nasser on Nostr: not to pontificate too much but: the ethos that people should be empowered to solve ...

not to pontificate too much but: the ethos that people should be empowered to solve their own problems together by freely associating into short- or long-lived collaborations is the foundation of free software. it also works. modern computing does not happen without self-directed volunteers working together to make it happen. we have 30+ years of evidence at this point.

the roc package was broken in the AUR. i didn't need anyone's permission to fix it. the original maintainer made me co-maintainer. i merged my changes into the original package. i do not know this person, we'll probably never meet, but we collaborated and Arch Linux is better for it. computing is kept afloat by a million interactions like this.

and like... this is anarchism. if anyone asks or is confused as to what it is, this is it. with 200+ years of theory about how to think about it and manage problems and scale etc but this is The Thing as far as i can tell. people solving problems together without coercion or central coordination.

committed anarchists make the leap of observing the effectiveness and morality of this kind of organizing and ask how to scale it to other aspects of society, to all aspects. and there are answers to those questions. but it feels like a big deal to me that modern computing in large part is made possible by a kind of informal anarchist organizing.

a persistent frustration of mine is free software people struggling to make the bridge between the two, and i blame anti-left american propaganda and a limited western educational systems...