You said
"We still have people attempting to police others based on personal opinion..."
and that almost sums up my perception of the entire universe.
Reddit and all the other media have devolved into insult arenas,
censorship rules the day but as I understood it
Steemit has a more user-driven (self-?)censorship model - but still heavily centralized.
The question you ask about who we are misses this point,
so I just mention in passing there are probably quite few of us who are here
to get off the reddit/facebook/twitter machines
until a fully decentralized global forum arrives.
An evolutionary migration, perhaps.
Nice piece of writing - keep going.
(I am mostly not an anarchist,
but it is a close a match as I can find to TheOneLaw)
P.S. - I have an old video I made about your comment:
"Your entire life you've probably been programed to think and in turn act a certain way. Go to school, get a job, be a good little worker-drone then go home and sleep so you can wake up to do it all over again. "
After reading both of your replies I realize I could have said a few things in my post a little better.
I think that people as a collective have this strange behavior which manifests it's self during times of distress, let me share a story with you to illustrate a point I think I was trying to make.
A while back I was introduced to the Rev-Share Scene... If you're unfamiliar it's basically an industry of calculated ponzi schemes with a bit of "advertising" thrown in to make it legal.
Anyhow... I joined up with a bunch of groups to numerous Rev-Share sites and just sort of sat back and watched what happened, it was interesting to see how rapidly things eroded from the inside when any tiny hint of change or potential negative outcome was found.
Each and every single site collapsed from within due solely to it's members lack of ability to keep composure and work together to build the platform and recruit more members. All I saw was "where's my payment?" or "how come this is happening, what should I tell my down-line, they won't trust me?" and so on...
The entire time the group's members were tearing the place apart out of fear and confusion the administrators and owners were making every attempt at damage control but to no avail. Eventually the thing collapsed and a lot of people were left burnt and out of cash. This happened over and over again like clockwork and it made me realize something important.
Anytime incentive is involved you almost can't rely on a collective to govern it's self because the illusion of order falls apart and collapse becomes eminent. I can see something like that happening with steemit once it grows large enough because that was another detail... this collapse and outbreak only happened once a group reached a certain size.
Now of course this is all speculation and I hope that it WONT happen this way. Chances are that the checks & balances in place were put there to prevent such things but time will tell if it all actually works. I hope it does. But that said, we as people need to have a fundamental shift in the way we think for such an open arena to be truly beneficial to us all as a collective. People tend to act like crabs in a barrel sometimes and that simply won't fly around here if those involved want to flourish.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post and respond, I truly do value everyone's input- it's an opportunity for me to learn more and expand my own perspective so thank you for engaging in the conversation.
Now that is an excellent description.
That there exists a human collective self-destruct mode is not something we often consider.
In engineering we examine material and system failure modes.
The same is not as known for collectives as much as it is for hierarchic organizations.
This bears consideration by those who design collective organizations.
Very eloquently put.. and I totally agree with you.