Infrapolitics
theconversation.com
I find this topic to be extremely political but it's like it has fallen between the cracks of the political discourse. I could be wrong, of course. Many countries worldwide are trying to implement some sort of digital ID and digital wallet. The way this is portrayed by systemic sources is that it is going to be just like our regular ID and wallet. Just better for us. Even tho the specifics will be different, there are some characteristics that will be standard. Both will be linked and controlled by a centralised entity or a combination of centralised entities (i.e. a government and a central bank). Meaning, someone else has total control over the content of your wallet, this includes our ID and our digital money (see Central Bank Digital Currency). CBDCs are going to be a by default a 2-tier system retail (for people) and wholesale (for big institutions). And this is why this system will not be like our regular IDs or wallets. Even tho as mentioned in this article this new approach needs to be adopted by the public, there are ways to force the public to do so. For example it could be required to use this system for tax purposes. This is already a lot, and in the same time not enough. Some more info on the topic, coming from institutional sources can be found here: European Union - [A digital ID and personal digital wallet for EU citizens, residents and businesses](https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/EUDIGITALIDENTITYWALLET/) World Economic Forum - [Reimagining Digital ID ](https://www.weforum.org/publications/reimagining-digital-id/) - [How universal wallets can help businesses unleash the full potential of digital identity](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/how-businesses-could-use-universal-wallets-to-unleash-potential-of-digital-identity/) - [CBDCs come in two forms: retail and wholesale. What's the difference?](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/02/wholesale-retail-cbdcs-difference/) Wiki - [History of CBDCs by country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CBDCs_by_country)
press.princeton.edu
[Pocket link](https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-it-s-bad-for-you)
Lengthy PDF discussing how certain technologies such as nuclear power shape power dynamics around them towards authoritarianism.
Available in the [latest release](https://taler.net/de/news/2023-11.html).
kolektiva.media
From [an unfinished documentary on Anarchism](https://kolektiva.media/a/anarchism_documentary/videos?s=1) filmed in 2010. Interesting because it presages the term 'Infrapolitics' by several years. There is a different nuance, but also has a lot in common.
This is a niche topic and I'm not sure this is the right community. Let's say we start to move on to a society less focused on capital. Not perfect but on the way there. There are still companies and there is an overall economy running around small businesses. How would a small business get started without access to "capital"? What are the alternatives?
www.yanisvaroufakis.eu
New book by Yanis Varoufakis
en.wikipedia.org
Full text available from the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/weaponsofweakeve0000scot) and [Void Network](https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Weapons-of-the-Weak_-Everyday-Forms-of-Peasant-Resistance-James-C.-Scott.pdf).
www.cairn.info
"The street is always two steps ahead of theory" -- Benjamin Shepard, PhD., Assistant Professor of Human Services
web.archive.org
[Paywalled New York Review of Books link](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/05/against-economics/) Ostensibly a review of "Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics" by Robert Skidelsky, Occupy Wallstreet economist [David Graeber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber) uses the New York Review of Books as a platform to toss intellectual bombs at the foundations of the academic field of economics. Graeber exposes orthodox economics as an expression of academic politics and institutional power, rather than a sincere practice of science. He dynamites foundational principles like the quantity theory of money, the efficient market hypothesis, and the concept of economic microfoundations themselves. Perhaps dismal but not science, economics is an ecclesiastical field of infrapolitical struggle, one in which the clergy of its orthodoxy must be toppled to allow science to return and society thrive.
www.cairn.info
Excerpt: >As a form of infrapolitics, protest graffiti achieve covert victories when they touch the conscience of receptive viewers with their idiosyncratic oppositional meanings. In the final analysis, taking protest graffiti seriously makes it necessary to focus on the interplay between the cultural and political dimensions of dynamics of social protest, and thus points to the problematic gray zone between individual discontent and collective action.
Hope this doesn’t break any rules, I think the discussion of justice is germane to infrapolitics. https://youtu.be/1lNT0c78ogo
theanarchistlibrary.org
> Just as much of the politics that has historically mattered has taken the form of unruly defiance, it is also the case that for subordinate classes, for most of their history, politics has taken a very different extra-institutional form. For the peasantry and much of the early working class historically, we may look in vain for formal organizations and public manifestations. There is a whole realm of what I have called “infrapolitics” because it is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity. The state has historically thwarted lower-class organization, let alone public defiance. For subordinate groups, such politics is dangerous. They have, by and large, understood, as have guerrillas, that divisibility, small numbers, and dispersion help them avoid reprisal. > By infrapolitics I have in mind such acts as foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight. Why risk getting shot for a failed mutiny when desertion will do just as well? Why risk an open land invasion when squatting will secure de facto land rights? Why openly petition for rights to wood, fish, and game when poaching will accomplish the same purpose quietly? In many cases these forms of de facto self-help flourish and are sustained by deeply held collective opinions about conscription, unjust wars, and rights to land and nature that cannot safely be ventured openly. And yet the accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts can have massive effects on warfare, land rights, taxes, and property relations. The large-mesh net political scientists and most historians use to troll for political activity utterly misses the fact that most subordinate classes have historically not had the luxury of open political organization. That has not prevented them from working microscopically, cooperatively, complicitly, and massively at political change from below. As Milovan Djilas noted long ago, "The slow, unproductive work of disinterested millions, together with the prevention of all work not considered “socialist”, is the incalculable, invisible, and gigantic waste which no communist regime has been able to avoid."
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/439246 > Serial doomscroller here. I guess it can't hurt to take a page from the optimists once in a while 🤷♂️
Infrapolitics
!infrapolitics@slrpnk.netInfrapolitics is to politics what infrared is to light. Its domain encompasses the acts, gestures, and thoughts that are not quite political enough to be perceived as such.
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