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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I actually dislike the term “social media” in the first place, only used it above for convenience…

    I (seriously) discovered that there were websites that allowed the general public to participate in the mid-2000s when I was a preteen. I immediately liked that concept and started to participate on such sites (first forums, later wikis) myself and found that fun.

    Then around 2008, everyone started to insist that such sites were now called “social media” and the most important ones were Facebook and Twitter, both of which I hadn’t heard of until around that time, and both of which didn’t seem like very fun or appealing places at all.

    Now I keep hearing about the horrible things apparently caused by “social media” and wonder, what do you even mean, what could possibly be wrong with web forums.









  • Both of these terms have more than one meaning, some of which overlap with each other, so the question is impossible to answer objectively. Both terms can refer to a belief system that people would usually describe as “left-wing” (~ “anarchism”, “libertarian socialism”, “left-libertarianism”, “anarcho-communism”), or one that people would usually describe as “right-wing” (~ “anarcho-capitalism”, “(right-)libertarianism”, “minarchism”).

    Myself, I use “libertarian” as the antonym of “authoritarian”, so “libertarian” is a positive term for me; after all (like most people) I think authoritarianism is a bad thing. But libertarianism doesn’t need to be, nor is it usually, completely 100% against all hierarchy and all authority. It can still hold that some hierarchy and authority is necessary for getting things to function, but that it should be limited or accountable.

    I don’t consider myself any sort of “anarchist”, I think it’s impossible to completely do away with authority, hierarchy, or government, no matter how much I think those things should have limits to their powers.

    Of course I also very strongly believe that what leftists call “capitalism” (i.e. the economic system the world currently mostly runs on) is not, like they say, just another class society where the function of the state is to keep the ruling class in power. There are no formally defined classes in a liberal democracy like there were under feudalism. The mere existence of private property rights and wage labor doesn’t create a class society; those things have existed for millennia of human history and are here to stay. So for that reason I disagree with anarcho-communists when they say that in an “anarchy”, there would no longer be private property.