Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Out of curiosity, is there such a thing as an anarchist homeless shelter? (Which of course would be structured differently from the typical ones)

A problem that keeps frustrating me is the 'marketing problem'. Centralized hierarchical systems have a non-obvious advantage in society today, because they have a clear spokesperson or representative, and people expect one.

As an example that you might not expect: a centrally-managed programming framework can advertise "easy upgrades!" because it lets you update components gradually, and this is a reason for people to use it. But then there is the (old) JS ecosystem, which has the exact same property but *without* the central control, and yet people don't know this because there is not one project maintainer responsible for *advertising* that fact, the messaging is all over the place and there's no canonical source of truth.

And the result is that the centrally-managed framework gains popularity over the collective ecosystem of independent packages because people (mistakenly) believe that they need to switch to that framework to get easy upgrades - because people are used to looking for the marketing statements and promises. And then in turns out that their experience is worse for it than it could have been, and they might never know.

For a completely different example: every leaderless activist collective ever. Journalists endlessly keep asking for the "leader" or "spokesperson", even after being told a million times that there is none (they simply will not believe that, ask me how I know), and so instead of listening to the explanations of the person they're talking to, they will keep asking until someone falsely says "yes I am the leader" and now whatever they say is published as truth without any checks.

And another example, anarchist collectives. Where the idea of "decisionmaking happens collectively" just doesn't stick in the public perception, and people keep looking for spokespeople and leaders and representatives and treat their words as "that is what anarchism is", with no recognition of the diversity of opinions. And with many views never even seeing the light of day because nobody bothers to ask anyone who isn't a spokesperson.

I'm not convinced that this is a fundamental problem, it seems to be very much a cultural one, where people are accustomed to waiting to be told something, and just do not have the habits and/or skills to build an understanding from the information and experiences around them, *even in* areas that are nominally their field of expertise. It also seems to have been getting worse and worse over the years.

How the hell are we going to get past this problem if we ever want to successfully organize things in a non-hierarchical manner? How can we break this assumption? "Just organizing harder" has clearly not solved the problem by itself.

Snow!!!