Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I’m not talking about the movie/show The Watchmen. I’m referring to the ancient philosophical question “quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or “who watches the watchmen”. Go read up on that elsewhere.
For those of you who don’t know and need a summary here, it’s a question often posed in reference to the fact that the person or people in charge of making sure the rules are honored have nothing preventing them from disobeying the rules. There’s never anything preventing the person guarding your treasure from stealing some of the treasure, for example.
What’s the best remedy to this that you can think of?
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread your treasure over multiple watchman, each holding only a part. Keep a public reputation system for each watchman. Make the loss of reputation more costly than treasure to could steal.
More than one group of custodians, ideally with conflicting interests, watching one another? Essentially some system of checks and balances?
Anarchism.
Can you give a link or description how anarchy counts be implement in a easy there is resilient to a subverted centralization of power that does not truly on an active majority?
Because we don’t have that, sadly. And I’ve never seen a concept that takes a silent and passive majority into consideration.
Dual-power structures, consensus-based democracy, and federated communes. Between those three are most of your answers.
And obviously we don’t have the conditions necessary for anarchism at present, or we’d already be living it.
Yay a rabbit hole! Thanks for the key words :)
No problem!
Honestly, one of the best introductions to anarchism is The Conquest of Bread by Petr Kropotkin. It’s a century old and still very relevant and approachable. You can find it for free on The Anarchist Library.
And one thing to understand about anarchism is that it’s very much a goal oriented philosophy more than most other political philosophies. What that means is that you get a lot of different approaches and concepts from people trying different things to attempt to achieve similar goals. And this often involves practical differences between different situations. Rojava is necessarily going to do things differently from how the maknovists did things and they’re both very different from how some punks who bought some land for a commune in the American Midwest will handle it.
Group with most weapons takes all, then infighting begins?
Tell me you don’t know anything about anarchism without saying it
What’s your definition of anarchism? How do you see it playing out?
The same as everyone else’s - a society without hierarchy.
I see it playing out perfectly fine, just like it has throughout human existence in numerous societies across the globe. But it takes a lot of work to get there.
Dr. Manhattan, obviously.
I dunno, but did they see the gorilla?
Smoke weed everyday
full accounting transparency helps… according to the blockchain believers.
Nakamoto Consensus, the mechanism by which Bitcoin is protected, is the original digital solution to this problem. Several others exist in modern cryptocurrency chains/ledgers.
With regards to protecting digital treasure, I think this fits the bill.
