RE: https://kolektiva.social/@scrappy_capy_distro/117455129022316245
I think there are some pieces missing here. Hosting does scale down poorly, but it only scales poorly because of how we host. There *is* an increased cost and complexity to shutting down small sites. If we can change the way we host, make it easier to replicate, then there *is* an asymmetry. It was technically as simple as pushing buttons to shut down A/I, but it was not politically as simple. Forcing them to build a case to shut down every little site *is* a different order of complexity. It's easy to confuse the technical and the political. We should not be so naive.
We need to focus on making hosting easier, on simplifying the complexities, on building open federations (like Co-op Cloud) focused on sharing resources to make distributed systems more viable.
More importantly, self-hosting vs collective hosting doesn't change the impact equation. If repression can cleanly target it's victims, then repression wins. Resistence that works is resistence that forces the oppressor to attack people who aren't otherwise aligned. This radicalizes unaligned people into the resistence. Every victory by the agressor must be made pyrrhic.
This is done by mixing hosting. Stop hosting anarchist only sites. That makes an easy target. Host sites that help people. Provide free hosting for liberal orgs, for churches and temples, make the headline say, "church websites shut down in counterterrorism campaign." Start from the assumption that there will be a crackdown, write headline that would be the most damaging to the enemy, and work backwards.
It's time to learn some insurgency theory for fuck sake.
And about that cybernetic legibility thing. It's definitely one element to consider, but I don't think the zine really dug in as much as I'd like. Reducing legibility may mean dropping offline. The state has been tooling itself around controlling the Internet. Moving radical activity offline forces state forces to retool. That increases complexity.
But there are other methods of decreasing legibility. There are a lot of radical things that the system struggles to or cannot intepret as radical. This is why I advocate for centering disaster anarchism, community building (setting up tool libraries and community pantries). A small group of people can increase the complexity such that they absorb much of the capacity of the repressieve apparatus. But that doesn't really matter unless society is organized, invisibly, to leverage that opportunity.
Anarchism is not blowing up police stations. It is building systems of mutual coordination. That can be invisible, or illegible, to the system.
Cybernetics is all about control. The adversary of control is complexity. If you are resisting control, your goal is to make it as complex as possible to stop you. That doesn't mean "we should all take this new strategy" but, as hinted at but not made explicit in the zine, that we should *all agree on objectives but all apply multiple different strategies*.