this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Degrowth

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Internet wouldn’t have developed under an anarchist system. Think of just the process of manufacturing a computer. All the different parts come from every part of the world. The computer chips come from Taiwan, the parts are then assembled in China, plastics from Vietnam, engineered by people in the United States.

You shouldn't be taking that for granted, but asking "why do they come from different countries?".

The answer? For historical reasons - because that's where capital found cheap labour with a tolerable infrastructure and convenient legislation at a certain time period.

If the goal is to imagine an anarchist society, Taiwan is not the memory factory of the world, and China isn't the consumer electronics factory of the world. It's perfectly feasible to make microchips everywhere and assemble them into systems too.

If the world being imagined doesn't favour (via laws that protect investment) investing huge sums of money overseas - outsourcing won't happen.

As for computers, the first programmable computer existed in ancient Greece (as a toy, of course). You could program a robot's driving movements using knotted rope. :) Charles Babbage designed a mechanical computer in the 1800s, which Ada Lovelace wrote the first programs for. Alas, it didn't work - due to the limits of Victorian era manufacturing. Konrad Zuse designed computers using relays, and they worked. Computers are a thing that sooner or later appear, once need for automation and capability to manufacture components has arisen. Networking computers doesn't take an anarchist or hierarchist to figure out - it takes an engineer and coder to figure out.

Without postulating that in anarchy, engineers don't exist, mathematics doesn't exist, or coders won't exist once engineers build programmable computers... it's on very thin ice to say that an Internet can't exist.