TOTW: Play in the time of corona

fun or death!

Of the human experience, play has a great potential to tell us about ourselves and as we find each other increasingly quarantined in a world of chaos, what are you playing? Did you ever stop? How are you keeping yourself occupied in this time of societal disruption?

What are your ideas or plans on how anarchists can continue to play and interact in this time of crisis and increased social isolation and distancing? Any favorite anarchist-ish related games to pass along? A favorite anarchist take or critique on the ideas of play?

Game on.

There are 135 Comments

addicted i get to people panicking and having crazy discussions. Everything is play, even pretending that you are the big adult in the room, shitty imagery yes. Praise to shitty imagery, never been able to purge that shit from my head lmfao.

Weather is changing. Now is the perfect time to escape to the woods for a little time away from people. If you have access to that sort of thing.

To Camo@annie (Oakley ?) You explained very well your Anarcho-Prepper status and I congratuate you on your desire to live independently of the State as much as possible, and to pursue a certain degree of self-sufficiency. I have been there and done that, but in the end found myself still a slave to the mental yoke of the legal requirement for civility. It was not about guns, walls, food stockpiles, or fear, but rather, gaining a certain self-confidence with my individual sovereignty amidst the hordes of the victims of apocalypses or losses of civilization. To walk amidst the ravenous, desperate and lost souls of the plagues and end days, like a healer of sorts, comforting them and teaching them about the beauty of not having materialistic values, informing them about the aesthetics of desolation and the nurturing of loving relationships within the destitution of the nihilistic society. Since that moment, that epiphany, things have been fun and enlightened.

Funny and ironic, the preppers forgot to play, they took it all to seriously, instead of laughing at death, they panicked.

and you base this statement on what exactly?

it probably wasn't many preppers doing the panicking, no need since readiness has been a part of the gig from day one.

some of us find it quite fun to do shooting practice, plinking. adventures learning how to find and safely eat wild foods. even to play in gardens. have you ever built a tree or bush house in the forest? practice hide and seek games? learn more about yourself in two weeks of no grid, no people than in years of proper education?

perhaps you find enjoyment in building and maintaining your strawmen. i hope they were playful scarecrows.

What I'm hinting at is that the whole prepper methodology is humanistic and anti-existentialist. Its a paranoid attempt at intercepting fate by pursuing a dominant anthropocentic and eschatological agenda.
You go and keep playing your childish little games wrought with false prophecies, I'm going to have fun and play as if the next stranger I see in the woods is a friend and fellow windermansch.

i hope you have fun with your grown up games. i wonder what you will think if that stranger is one of your "childish" preppers"? you sound terribly boring to me.

The dude's imagination is too powerful for boredom to enter his existent.

Well, a day has passed, and I'm still frolicking in the park playing, not a worry in the world while it drowns in its self inflicted pitiful angst, worried about losing jobs and where to find food and ammo, and I'm just like, tweedle-dee-tweedle-dom-fuck all -you-prepper-morons ;)

You took time out of your fun time in the park to respond to someone on anarchist news. lol

A real nìhilist has good manners enough to at least acknowledge and reply to another's offer for conversation. I am referring to the cerebral park, oh wait, you açtually thought we've been discussing a physical playground park with trees and things. Lol, that is so reptilian.

"They are stupid because most of the ones on the reality show I watched had glaring weaknesses "

well, you have just made clear why your critique is so shallow. back to your regularly programmed schedule.

i could be called an anarcho-"prepper". it makes sense to me to take my desire for a life without a state or socio-economic systems from theory to practice. even as i fully recognize that to do so completely is near impossible. so rather than be stuck to a rigid goal doomed to disappointment and/or acquiescence, it is an ongoing and expanding (sometimes contracting) practice of daily life.

preppers have an expectation (many with a desire) that the current systems will either eventually or under the right circumstances - like disasters and unexpected emergencies - fail to meet the even the most basic essentials of food and water and shelter and protection. temporarily or permanently. therefore, want to take these essential aspects back into their own realm as much as possible. some are just fearful poseurs with too much money and time, sure. some keep long-shelf life food (think Mormons), some learn what grows wild no matter where they are. some learn where it can be stolen. some buy big guns, some learn to make bows and arrows, get good with a club, knife, or machete. some build fancy underground shelters, some learn how to make a little hidden cave. some stay mobile.

i thought anarchists would approach life similarly. i learned a long time ago this is not the case. and just like anarchists, people who are doing this prepping come from many places with many different desires and goals for their lives. different ideologies and anti's. as to sharing, preppers will or won't as they see fit since they are not allies of other preppers any more than anarchists are allies of other anarchists.

now the bay area lockdown has begun, you will have lots of time to play. no derive though :-(

seems like playing in prison cell blocks, tho. That's blatant acquiescence with whatever despotism is thrown at ya, and whatever freedom is being taken away from ya.

...and in the hope of avoiding yet another internet cascade, it's totally fine and healthy that prisoners play within their cell blocks. Because that's the best they can do in their situations.

I think we got a lot more latitude than that when being pushed inside when "outside". As long as there ain't a cop at every door, there's ways to evade. This is what I'm thinking the most atm, as chess taught me to think of the potential moves in advance.

doesn't seem to me like there is an outside. maybe just some perimeter edges less paid attention to. so getting "stuck" in your own place doing those things you like with critters you enjoy...how bad can it be. maybe it takes on a different feel when it is forced... but it could be a great time to regroup, to suss out next moves.

I get that, but the walls of the perimeter are pretty permeable when they are ditches by a road side or a pad of gravel. The only thing really drawing someone back "inside" would be the same conditions of accomodation to society than seen during the 2010 Kyoto monkey escape by catapult incident.

Hence, "breaking free" from the prison walls would mean adopting a counterculture that is solid enough to make us thrive "outside", so that the "inside" becomes undesirable again.

Hide and seek is a good game, playing evasion, keeping away from people and being unseen. practice moving around the city without being noticed by people, staying away from people. 2 meter tag when the other people don't know they are playing. there are all good skills to work on, and these days no one will look at you odd on the streets. if your playing it. it reminds me of old times sneaking through the woods trying to avoid the freddies.

Freddies? Do you mean followers of Nietzsche? Strange plaýing hide and seek with Nietzscheans. Were they armed?

FOREST PIGS

unfortunately when i was a child i didn't have enough freedom to run around in the woods, but as an adult i have jokingly referred to park rangers as "forest pigs", good to know that someone made a shortened version of it, lmfao

You've obviously never confronted the outrageous horror of meeting a Nietzschean at dusk in a dark gloomy wood have you?

RIP 2020

https://www.socialdistancingfestival.com/
This is an exciting project to me. I work in theatre and everything being shut down means all the shows people have been working on are cancelled or postponed. The link is a guy in Toronto who's trying to encourage performance artists to provide recordings and livestreams of their cancelled shit. There's some talk in the circles I move in of getting DJs and bands we know to perform through video conferencing software so that we can have decentralized masquerade dance parties.

I think I'm going to start playing Minecraft again. I might get into CS Source again, cuz my computer can run it and it's a good twitchy shooting game. I've been joking with a friend about setting up a Club Penguin private server, just for the lolz.

As the weather gets nicer here I'm going to dig out all the unrepaired bikes I've been neglecting and get them working again, maybe I'll bike around the countryside for a few days once the snow has all melted.

j/k...

it really does seem that COVID is starting some sort of a social revolution of sorts, was the last election the only thing of this scale in comparison? I'm all ears in figuring out what implications this whole thing has in terms of people's assumptions and activities...

Boi... I can't stand these Corona revolutionaries already, and we're only 3 days into the shutdown. I mean, dude, get a life.

Oh wait... no longer possible coz you're stuck inside 10x more than before.

lotta clueless mofos out there, for sure. er, stuck in.

priming dreams, lucid dreaming and other sorts of experimentations with dream states, you can play while you sleep!

Apple and Facebook are losing a court battle with lawmen over encryption technology. If this happens, all the “encrypted” platforms we depend on will come stock with 3rd party law enforcement software scanning our messages for objectionable content. As COVID and other plagues force us more and more inside, I have a feeling states will mount an attack on encrypted comms like never before, so kiss your privacy (smooch) goodbye.

In my country, they are saying, “only go outside for work, for groceries, for medical appointments and for ‘walks’” in a tone that says, “these are only suggestions but not really..” and they are as we speak easing us into a full on socio-sanitary techno-fascist regime, complete with talk of “quarantine officers” and all this eerie talk about what to do about people who live on the streets..

This changes everything.

sorry for the reality check, but anyone young enough to never have lived a life without phone appendages and the interwebz, has NEVER had privacy. and anyone old enough who still lives on the net/phone, same dealio. is privacy a core concern during this time?

leaving grocery stores open is probably the only way many people (esp in cities) can get the supplies they need to survive. the fact that some dummies are hoarding toilet paper (and fighting/stabbing others for it) just speaks to the complete disconnect from real life that most people seem to embrace.

Well thats just plain wrong. If the state could just magically get into your phone with no problems they would but they can’t. Remember the iphone of the san bernardino shooter? They had to pull out all the stops, spend a shit ton of money and contract some elite Israeli IT firm to crack into it. These are resources they cant just use up on every single person with a smartphone. The FBI leaned on Apple all the way, but Apple never caved, for whatever reason. And theyre for sure detestable for many things dont get me wrong. The point is that encryption clearly works otherwise the state wouldnt be spending millions to prosecute this case against the tech giants with the goal of installing mandatory backdoor spyware into everything.

Or maybe you’re right, and its all just a big spectacle to cover up a conspiracy idk.

encryption "works" only until someone breaks it, which is inevitable. don't forget that there are really smart folks in every walk of life, with every perspective. assuming encryption is safe is high risk. depending, of course, on the specific platform, endpoints, etc.

Trusting Facebook & Apple for their encryption is like trusting anything the confidentiality of you say at the police station, lol. It's just a confirmation that these tech companies were never good at all, and that if anyone cares about privacy they'd never put their lives and friends' lives on social media in the first place.

That counts for the anarcho-idiots STLL using the Fedbook for social networking, no matter what's been in the news. Fucking snitches.

Why do you depend on Apple and Facebook if you're concerned with your privacy? Facebook doesn't encrypt much and nowhere close to an end to end encryption. The US and other countries have tried to pass laws requiring tech companies and others to include a backdoor many, many times. This isn't new and has been going on for a long ass time.. You seem incredibly naive considering you seem to think these tech companies and other companies give a shit about your privacy. The NSA can crack the iphone

Weird to complain about facebook not respecting your privacy on anews. Like, no shit.

encryption. If the state installed third party software on all platforms for that purpose, then shortly afterwards individuals with access to the right software would be able to de-encrypt all information, confusing matters for authorities. Don't you want that? Why not delete your facebook and laugh, i'm really close to deleting mine for a third time.

and if the state had a backdoor to every single computerized device we used (oh they already do they can search and hack any device if they wanted to), then the more paranoid/radical of us would stop using those devices. A clear beginning deathblow to civilization as we know it. Hooray!

"Your life will change in the next few weeks"

As a thinly-veiled order to people that they must change their lives, or else you become a threat to society.

Also I didn't hear much talk about the homeless, but too the view of docile liberals who've been plunging head-first into isolation, hobos and crackheads must look like psychopathic monsters hellbent on going "ACHOO" on everybody.

I think this is gonna fuck a lot of people up, and Im not even talking about getting sick of the virus. I mean, the trauma generated by this new, socially imposed hikkikimori life with no definite timeline or endgame in sight..

The good side of this is that many pretentious socialites and other hipsters will finally get to experience what it's like to *not* be part of the in-crowd... 9_9 Actually that's the case with some of those I know from irl, and it's funny how they fell in the trap.

nah, this situation just makes "social media" that much more relevant for those that need to live out loud. celebrity does not go away, only close human contact.

i suspect we will now get to see urban humans behave more like the zoo-caged animals they are.

Wdym?

i would guess that is a reference to the comparison of urban human life to that of caged zoo animals. there is a book "the human zoo" which describes exactly that.

Ironic we finally get lower gas prices now that we arent allowed to fuckin go anywhere. What a cynical piece of shit system!!

That's been a thing for a while now and is a symptom of long term decline of easily available oil. In time gas prices will hit $250 and 3 decades from now it will probably be over a thousand.

If this goes on long enough everything will be free except us.

I've been thinking that anarchists will see this stay home thing as oppression, and I get that. On the other hand, this world needs to change. Instead of looking at this as the state forcing one to stay in, maybe try to see it as solidarity & mutual aid to those with compromised immune systems. A hitting of the reset button.

I'm in the bay and I live on a main street, the quiet last night was exquisite. The air even smells better already.

What if we all just never went back to the shitty jobs we had? Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for garbage collectors, grocery store clerks, nurses. meaning I am appreciative some people go to work. What I would really enjoy though is tearing up the asphalt and planting a garden.

I'm not naive enough to think this can't have an authoritarian turn, of course it can, but maybe if we stay home voluntarily for now we can not be forced to later. And when they want us to get back to normal we don't.

I get that this is fantasy but why is it fantasy?

We can change our minds.

i like your fantasy, nettle. and yes, people can change their minds.
the question is, can they change their behavior? can they change their utter and complete acceptance of the state and capital being in charge of meeting their needs? can they think seriously about what it really means to survive by directly relating to the place where they are?

I forgot the point about staying in one place. Now it is our homes, but after maybe we can reconsider moving around so much.

I agree, behavior change is a tough nut. If I start now to stay in and take care of the place I am in maybe in a few generations things will have shifted enough. And to be clear, place is ALL the critters in a local. This is not about human survival alone. We need all the critters, and that mostly means leaving them to do their own thing while we do ours.

What does it mean to be a human critter? What is our thing? Those are some of the questions I want to playfully ask and ponder.

I like your train of thought nettle. what if this somehow merges into the infinite strike, if no one goes back to work, and if we get an idea of what is really important in our lives, specifically human and nonhuman contacts and communities, and not consumer crap and bullshit jobs. what if we refuse to return to work, and instead use the freedom we have and lust for human contact after this to form new and strong bonds with the people around us. what if this kicks off into a refusal of society's tricking us into working hard and living reproductive lives, and we creep out of the cracks of social isolation to build bonds among our local environment and the people around us. there will be no going back to work, no return to the normal. the state has shown its authoritarian power, and the veil falls. lets play with new connections and a new lust for life!

on the flip side, maybe trust in humans we don't know breaks down, the trust that is necessary for capitalism to function, and this distrust leads to the building of real affinity with the people we find around us, such that we need to depend on each other for sustenance and survival. this loss of trust can be interesting to play with. lets plant those seeds in the people we do interact with during this time of social isolation, water, and see what grows.

i agree with most of that.
but the trust thing is huge. i would posit that capitalism (and the state) thrive specifically because of an understood LACK of trust. the very purpose of "contracts" (which only seem relevant in economic and legal contexts) is to engage with someone you do not trust, with the supposed assurance that if either of you break the contract, some authority will step in to remedy/enforce the contract. based, of course, on law.
it's is a rough one. for me personally, trust has to be earned. how that happens is completely contextual. take for example, how so many people implicitly "trust" the government to act in their best interests. i realize that trusting an institution may come from a very different place from trusting an individual, but i'm really talking about the mindset, which applies regardless.
it is nice to fantasize about how this situation could result in truly radical social upheaval. believe me i have spent quite some time thinking and talking about exactly that. what i don't tend to see is even a conceptual rejection of mass society (the root cause, imo, of most modern disease and their spread, among other things) and ever expanding human population and domination of the planet (and if many of the ptbs have their way, way beyond this planet).

of the authoritarianism, the truly afraid and panicky are keeping to themselves till everyone else stops panicking or there's signs that things are better under control. This is not a rant against them. Most institutions and businesses know that this is an extremely contagious and new flu variation so they are basically just letting it spread because they can't do anything about it anyway, and who really wants to see people looting and robbing each other? I had to laugh when i saw that someone in the UK got mugged over some rolls of toilet paper.

I read an article that was pretty optimistic that they were gonna pass a bill giving every american $1k, i'm skeptical for a number of reasons, but that's probably the nicest thing i've seen the politicians here do in a long time. Every time i look into that world of oligarchy i'm just speechless.

I'm over my fear of the panic phase, just resting from work and hoping i have enough energy to plant my spinach today...

Unfortunately i think a lot of elderly people are still going to suffer from this in part because COVID-19 seems to live a couple of days without a human host, but people have been freaking out about the innovative mutations of diseases in the anthropocentric era for a while, so we can only learn from the wrath of bacteria and keep trying to enjoy our short lives.

My biggest personal concern with the virus is my insomnia acting up while having it, luckily i've got some sleep medication for that.

You wanna try camomile tea for insomnia and get off the barbiturates. You doing some physical exercising, that helps?
One positive to come out of this is regions may begin returning to a self-reliant and independent production of essential goods and less reliance on the Maohegemony and exposure to their germ ideology.
Also a toughening up of the average immunity system and a weeding out of the more inferior genetic strains. Don't be shocked at the latter, I am a afterall a nihilist ;)

has been cut down on my consumption of a lot of that garbage, and i've been mostly successful. However, my sleeping issues can be so serious that chamomile does not work, i just use the standard over the counter drug when it is necessary, which hasn't been for like a week.

Yeah and i agree that we all need to come to terms with real natural selection, not the superiority based eugenics that wealthy people have been peddling for the past couple of hundred years. I'm truthfully not afraid of death, yes i'm afraid of suffering but if someone were to tell me i was die tomorrow i could only shrug and reflect on it. Some people will get upset if you talk about the old folks they know as being in danger of being "weeded out", so be careful about that lol.

You have commendable anarch/nihil tendencies. Bravo, welcome to the anti-club association!
The wise ones would imbibe mild poppy seed tea before sleep, alas, the humanists have banned this harmless cure, and created a toxic blackmarket.
Death is a distant rumor to the young, don't let death become a tumor when you age.

yeah and i actually thought about growing poppies a while back but not really worth it, all the indoor lighting and maintenance to grow something you'll want more of.

poppies are very easy to cultivate. why would you do that indoors? and if you want for more you just have to wait for summer!

Its just so crazy that something so small we literally can’t see it could bring down something so big we literally can’t see it..

What is life? Lol..

nobody has been bringing up the fact that being overly hygenic has been proven to compromise immune systems. I'm not about to go licking shit but, so everyone is in a state of emergency right now >> then everyone feels confident it's under control and the economy booms again >> then everyone randomly gets the coronavirus more severe and worse when they're least expecting it. How do you control this? The obvious answer is the vaccine, which does not exist.

Yeah the folk from underdeveloped countries which are mostly young populations cos most people die before 60 years of age, these countries will shrug this germ off like its just a small splinter in the ass they got from a wooden bench.

i guarantee you the rich and powerful do not want the stock market in a nosedive. they are prepared to push the rest of us out of the lifeboat, sure. they don't care what happens to us. but no, no one really wants us to panic or wants the economy to collapse, except for maybe fascists...i hate to imagine what they're getting up to right now....

but it's weird to hear anarchists parroting this line. it reminds me of nothing as much as the maga folk / white evangelicals who usually act like the sky is about to fall on them at all times, but now - i guess because they hate science and love trump? - they're mostly of the opinion that this is all fake. you know - the kind of people who used to rave about fema camps but now are elated that there are real concentration camps. speaking of which ......... we NEED to get those people out of those deathtraps before covid hits them. i know we probably can't and won't. but we need to now more than ever. if there was ever a time for the left to do a damn thing in this country.

it's a moment of crisis which is bad for the overall system; their response will be as always to take it out on those already most marginalized. but there is a big crack appearing right now in the world order and who knows what will come of it.

and really, it's not in general true that people are eager to panic at the drop of a hat. this is something that power holders like to say to justify authoritarian moves - to protect themselves - in crises. generally people go along rather blandly and tend to assume nothing is happening unless it's really in their face. there is good reason to be on edge and i think most of what we see of that is due to the capitalistic feeding frenzy mentality of competition - other people are buying toilet paper?! oh man i better buy some too. the reason could be anything.

and then there is a kind of weird excitement that people experience in disasters sometimes. partly it's a more or less rote reaction like getting the giggles at a funeral. but partly i think its the real ek-stase , not of disaster but of the suspension of the 'normal situation'.

it's just weird, i generally feel sad on a daily basis just because i don't feel enough connection to other people and am confused on how to move forward. People around where i live are showing the exact lack of interest in forming connections with me as they were before. Of course people would show affection towards me every once and a while and pop up, wanting to hang out or do something, but now this desire for capitalist self-perpetuation has gotten even stronger. Like before, the only real friend i have is my mother. My ability to form bonds with other people is going to get harder.

But somehow i'm also very excited by this terrifying change that occurred seemingly overnight to the global humanist culture. The only thing I'm certain of at this point is: nothing will be the same every again. The human psyche has been shaken. My future may be bleaker than it was before, but i must remind myself: there is no future. Life is a series of moments.

I have no more pedictions, i think this business of the quarantine will last for another few months because as has been said before, the capitalists/"plutocrats" are still in control of the situation. The "they" who want us to panic are the people who are scared of the virus. I was already isolated, so I'm strangely equipped to adapt to this situation. People are going to their cabins!

The thing I'm most thrilled about is that business as usual is gone forever, if you weren't already looking at life as a series of moments before, you will have to now. Fuck your concerns! This is existential chaos in action. Nobody is safe, especially not me.

Yo, that's why anarchists should SHOW SOME DAMN RESPECT for this virus!

I'm thinking a lot of the stories I've heard from anarchists older than me about how 9/11 pretty much shut up and sidelined the movement for years to come. This feels similar but with a much more meek culture and with a much more convincing guilt trip to level at those not going along with the state's program. It'd be a shame but it seems likely. A dismal silver lining is that from all appearances the Trump-era authoritarian left seems to be showing its hand as the joke it is (if society's problem is all old men with bad opinions and any level of killing is justified, the solution is as close as your front door) but whatever.

Whether or not the virus becomes a crisis all on its own, a crisis is absolutely here in all the people left without work, kids out of school and world shut down. People have a strange habit of doing whatever it takes to survive and anarchists would do well to help with that. This certainly includes finding our own ways to take care of those at risk around us but it also means confronting the decisions that are fucking over millions made by politicians who have no clue what life on the fringes actually looks like. We will lose friends and get called horrible names for it but @s make it nowhere playing it safe.

as being the most important question for anyone wants to live without the state and capitalism, because that's the entire reason why those tangled structures continue to survive and spread across the planet. If people lived in more isolated communities and there were no planes and cars, then it would be harder for something as simple as a cold virus to destabilize everyone's life all at once.

I've been wondering over the past couple days whether i should just try and stop thinking about the coronavirus and abandon social media altogether, but my life was already kinda boring and troubled so that just wouldn't get me anywhere. I've come to realize that the biggest issue with capitalism is that everybody's everything is "their own business", and judgement is deferred to these creepy humanist ideologies, buzzwords, and corporate codes of conduct. The isolation has benefits for pleasure seeking but it doesn't really matter when humans were not fit to live on fixed schedules and deferred gratification. The one major positive about this outbreak i've seen is that now americans are being forced to question the cruelty of not getting payed for sick leave, and maybe this will undermine the lives of those who live to make money and show off their value to society as an individual. However, i think most positive predictions about the world of people are pretty naive. I just keep wondering how long it's going to take for this whole thing to blow over, 2 months? Half a year? Never? Are we now in a permanent state of ideological/sociological crisis?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-virus-plan-anticipates-18-190626012.html

i mean, you can never even trust whether this is going to be a real fascist crackdown when the president basically just spends all his time "pwning the libs", are we in for a real "People's Republic" revolution here in the united states? Time to start deconstructing all of our habits over the past few months, it should be easier now as in panic already made this a work in progress.

I can see that the U.S. is no longer a place of refuge for the world's sick and impoverished. This is some pretty crazy shit! Nation states are inherently fragile and the weak spots are being exposed.

"I'm thinking a lot of the stories I've heard from anarchists older than me about how 9/11 pretty much shut up and sidelined the movement for years to come. This feels similar but with a much more meek culture and with a much more convincing guilt trip to level at those not going along with the state's program"

9/11 was different. it was a "terrorist attack," not a virus. a harder enemy to rally around or be patriotic about it while doing it. thus, after 9/11 anarchists couldn't really have much sway. anyone who tried could be label a terrorist, and some of us were.

i mostly disagree that this will sideline anarchists. it's possible, but the State's response to this is wretched and we're all getting shafted. this crisis is gonna last a long time and the legitimacy of State and capital might very well be called into question. but also you might be right, but i think there's some chance that it wont go that way...

Could you even fucking imagine this state of affairs protracting into half a year? A full year? Indefinite? Thats impossible. This quarantine life isn’t sustainable. Even the capitalist economy can’t have us living like this forever. How long until there are major problems in the supply chain? How long are people going to be guilt tripped into staying indoors? How long until this whole shitshow combusts wide open? I recall some anon pointed out how the black death was a watershed event preceding the end of the feudal era. Are we on the cusp of similar changes?

What if this virus goes endemic and becomes a seasonally recurring phenomena? Until a proper vaccine is mass produced (easily 1 - 3 years) we could be in a “logans run” situation for a minute..

So this virus is clearly fucking up my life right now, and yet I can see its helping to do what all the green anarchy in the world couldn’t — stop the global economy; save the planet, etc. You can think all these things about yourself that youre on the side of the trees and bumblebees n stuff but it sucks to have these situations cast into sharper relief just how deeply embedded, complicit and dependent you are on a system you hate thats destroying the natural world and producing meaningless lives.

Fuck everything...

the IGD article i just commented on in a nutshell, capital makes a total mockery out of human ontology, must submit, must smile more, must make lists.

oh and if you spend too much time ignoring this, must die...

No 10:14, freak your complicity, we nihilists live by amor fati, we frolick in the park with empty stomachs while you whine with a gut full of humanistic McDonalds. I love Natural responses in the Now against the Other ;)

Who believe in fate, take that McNihilist

I really think we should be analyzing the role that confronting something directly can have, and how empowering that is. I'm really sick of bureaucracy and staying calm to satiate other people, let's burn it down

Hoooooowl, howwoooooo howoooooooo. Hooooowwwwl *frolicking in the park* ;)

Are you 11 years old? You can swear on here, yknow, its not like your mom is watching or something...

Angels with dirty faces don't say bad words.

"...we nihilists..."
speak for your fucking self!

Go ahead and love fatties and lick afros if you want but I dont think there are any items made from human flesh at McDonalds so nice try but we're not cannibals.

There's lots we can do without going out. Read, write, program, stream, paint, poet, hack. I'd like to see anarchist games like Kriegspiel online, and anarchist sites on the dark web. Why not an anarchist Second Life alternative? I know it's no substitute for real-world interaction but it keeps us talking.

I'd like to see this being defied more though. First off, nothing justifies police-state measures. Not even if everyone dies. Better live a day as a lion than a lifetime as a sheep. Better sustainable human life than extinction - but better human extinction than an endless police state. A police state causes more misery than joy so life isn't worth living, whereas if humans died out at least animals could keep living wild and free. This is all ridiculous anyway since this disease almost certainly has lower than 1% death rates and anyway we'd be much safer in small communities, then we could self-isolate as communities and still be autarkic and have a social life. The way things are now, they could kill more people with these lockdowns and the resultant poverty, suicides, starvation, lack of treatment for routine illnesses etc etc than they supposedly save. If there was a stronger movement I'd say there should be revolts in the streets, open defiance. As it is, we may be limited to Scottian resistance. But we should develop and use this to the utmost. Find routes which aren't guarded. Find ways to exploit the reasons to be outside, use them to keep meeting. And FFS start moving outwards from the core sites. We need anarchist prepping, we need rural communes and base areas where we can stay free when shit like this happens.

Second off, I'm sick of everyone trusting the authorities. Why aren't they encouraging use of N95 masks? Why are they "social distancing" instead? We know why - because the state wants lockdowns as a norm, it doesn't want masking as a norm. People in China masked during SARS, it worked but now it's a norm and it's hurt the state during the Hong Kong protests. N95 masks work most of the time. They're not perfect, people have to learn to use them properly to prevent infection and there's a small risk something will get through (like condoms). But the risk of infection at (say) a rave where everyone wears a mask then disposes of it at the end is totally minimal. Lower than the risk of getting it off a delivery driver.

Also we need to encourage self-testing. People with the disease DO NOT need to isolate from others with the disease, people without it DO NOT need to isolate from others without it. So all this atomisation is really unnecessary, it's premised on nobody knowing who's infected. There's reliable tests and the state aren't using them (unlike China). So we need to start producing them ourselves, Four Thieves style. If they can be 3D printed, so much the better. Then we need to organise events for each group, affinity-groups of the infected a la Treatment Action Campaign and groups of the uninfected who keep up regular activities. Then scale-up the events and start defying the prohibitions - starting somewhere like Italy.

The big risk here is paralysis. The state wants us atomised and scared, or better still, atomised and fatalistic, accepting there's nothing we can do except OCD rituals like washing our hands. Anything that gives back agency is potentially empowering. Mutual aid initiatives are a good idea where possible. They're needed to support the homeless, refugees, etc already, and hard/controversial to ban. They could be used as covers for keeping socially active. And not everyone is intimidated. There's been protests in Indonesia despite the shutdown, there's been sabotage actions in Italy. Hunger strike in one of the French detention centres. Several prison revolts and breakouts. And the panic is worst in Europe, US, East Asia - the rich and middling areas. So far nowhere in the poor world has attempted full-scale lockdowns. Obvious reasons. People wouldn't obey and more people would die anyway because of poverty. We're only powerless because everyone's sheepishness makes us powerless. Let's take our power back.

thank you for your very wise medical opinion, doctor. you are clearly the informed voice of reason and we anarchists will be better off having listened to you and living our final days as free wolves woo woo woo woooooo! let us program hack bots like our wild and free unparalyzed self-tested powerful spirits desire, sheeple be damned! ahwoo!

pls send snacks

I don't really socialize to begin with, so this "disruption" has no affect on me.

Is there something preventing anarchists from continuing to do whatever it is they were doing like a few weeks ago? If they're concerned with getting the flu or SARS 2.0, maybe wear an apocalypse mask or respirator.

The Allen Iverson, NBA 2k and Wild Style tags made me lol out loud. A lolol. Is someone sad the NBA suspended the season for a month and a big Allen Iverson fan? The Wild Style is a pretty good movie about graffiti artists. Whoever wrote the tags should watch Beat Street. It's about break dancing battles and a graffiti artist. It's like Wild Style in the sense that it had early rappers who played themselves and were wrote into the movie. The Battle at the Roxy of Beat Street vs Bronx Rockers is dope, so is the subway battle.

Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.

To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.

We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.

It’s now widely agreed (even by Britain, finally) that every country needs to “flatten the curve”: impose social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so that the number of people sick at once doesn’t cause the health-care system to collapse, as it is threatening to do in Italy right now. That means the pandemic needs to last, at a low level, until either enough people have had Covid-19 to leave most immune (assuming immunity lasts for years, which we don’t know) or there’s a vaccine.

How long would that take, and how draconian do social restrictions need to be? Yesterday President Donald Trump, announcing new guidelines such as a 10-person limit on gatherings, said that “with several weeks of focused action, we can turn the corner and turn it quickly.” In China, six weeks of lockdown are beginning to ease now that new cases have fallen to a trickle.

But it won’t end there. As long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can and will keep recurring without stringent controls to contain them. In a report yesterday (pdf), researchers at Imperial College London proposed a way of doing this: impose more extreme social distancing measures every time admissions to intensive care units (ICUs) start to spike, and relax them each time admissions fall.

"Periodic bouts of social distancing keep the pandemic in check."
-- Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team.

Each time they rise above a threshold—say, 100 per week—the country would close all schools and most universities and adopt social distancing. When they drop below 50, those measures would be lifted, but people with symptoms or whose family members have symptoms would still be confined at home.

What counts as “social distancing”? The researchers define it as “All households reduce contact outside household, school or workplace by 75%.” That doesn’t mean you get to go out with your friends once a week instead of four times. It means everyone does everything they can to minimize social contact, and overall, the number of contacts falls by 75%.

Under this model, the researchers conclude, social distancing and school closures would need to be in force some two-thirds of the time—roughly two months on and one month off—until a vaccine is available, which will take at least 18 months (if it works at all). They note that the results are “qualitatively similar for the US.”

Eighteen months!? Surely there must be other solutions. Why not just build more ICUs and treat more people at once, for example?

Well, in the researchers’ model, that didn’t solve the problem. Without social distancing of the whole population, they found, even the best mitigation strategy—which means isolation or quarantine of the sick, the old, and those who have been exposed, plus school closures—would still lead to a surge of critically ill people eight times bigger than the US or UK system can cope with. (That’s the lowest, blue curve in the graph below; the flat red line is the current number of ICU beds.) Even if you set factories to churn out beds and ventilators and all the other facilities and supplies, you’d still need far more nurses and doctors to take care of everyone. In all scenarios without widespread social distancing, the number of Covid cases overwhelms the healthcare system.

How about imposing restrictions for just one batch of five months or so? No good—once measures are lifted, the pandemic breaks out all over again, only this time it’s in winter, the worst time for overstretched health-care systems.

If full social distancing and other measures are imposed for five months, then lifted, the pandemic comes back.

And what if we decided to be brutal: set the threshold number of ICU admissions for triggering social distancing much higher, accepting that many more patients would die? Turns out it makes little difference. Even in the least restrictive of the Imperial College scenarios, we’re shut in more than half the time.

This isn’t a temporary disruption. It’s the start of a completely different way of life.

In the short term, this will be hugely damaging to businesses that rely on people coming together in large numbers: restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs, gyms, hotels, theaters, cinemas, art galleries, shopping malls, craft fairs, museums, musicians and other performers, sporting venues (and sports teams), conference venues (and conference producers), cruise lines, airlines, public transportation, private schools, day-care centers. That’s to say nothing of the stresses on parents thrust into home-schooling their kids, people trying to care for elderly relatives without exposing them to the virus, people trapped in abusive relationships, and anyone without a financial cushion to deal with swings in income.

There’ll be some adaptation, of course: gyms could start selling home equipment and online training sessions, for example. We’ll see an explosion of new services in what’s already been dubbed the “shut-in economy.” One can also wax hopeful about the way some habits might change—less carbon-burning travel, more local supply chains, more walking and biking.

But the disruption to many, many businesses and livelihoods will be impossible to manage. And the shut-in lifestyle just isn’t sustainable for such long periods.

So how can we live in this new world? Part of the answer—hopefully—will be better health-care systems, with pandemic response units that can move quickly to identify and contain outbreaks before they start to spread, and the ability to quickly ramp up production of medical equipment, testing kits, and drugs. Those will be too late to stop Covid-19, but they’ll help with future pandemics.

In the near term, we’ll probably find awkward compromises that allow us to retain some semblance of a social life. Maybe movie theaters will take out half their seats, meetings will be held in larger rooms with spaced-out chairs, and gyms will require you to book workouts ahead of time so they don’t get crowded.

Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.

We can see harbingers of this in the measures some countries are taking today. Israel is going to use the cell-phone location data with which its intelligence services track terrorists to trace people who’ve been in touch with known carriers of the virus. Singapore does exhaustive contact tracing and publishes detailed data on each known case, all but identifying people by name.

We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.

We’ll adapt to and accept such measures, much as we’ve adapted to increasingly stringent airport security screenings in the wake of terrorist attacks. The intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.

As usual, however, the true cost will be borne by the poorest and weakest. People with less access to health care, or who live in more disease-prone areas, will now also be more frequently shut out of places and opportunities open to everyone else. Gig workers—from drivers to plumbers to freelance yoga instructors—will see their jobs become even more precarious. Immigrants, refugees, the undocumented, and ex-convicts will face yet another obstacle to gaining a foothold in society.

Moreover, unless there are strict rules on how someone’s risk for disease is assessed, governments or companies could choose any criteria—you’re high-risk if you earn less than $50,000 a year, are in a family of more than six people, and live in certain parts of the country, for example. That creates scope for algorithmic bias and hidden discrimination, as happened last year with an algorithm used by US health insurers that turned out to inadvertently favor white people.

The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615370/coronavirus-pandemic-social-di...

and then you read this:

"But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable."

it seems like what's going to happen is that the coronavirus is a new era of social misery. I can't make any conclusions beyond this. It certainly isn't indicating a less destructive economy (through people providing for themselves instead of foisting their expectations on other people) like i dream of.

All because the disease reached the "comfortable" old people of the first world...what's going to happen when they become even further marginalized by the spread of the virus? None of you know anything about caring for the vulnerable, you don't even know about how vulnerable YOU are. Improvements of the broken globalized healthcare system have probably already been blocked by all the fake generosity and compassion. If anything could have forced the U.S. wealthy to pay for the medical expenses of everyone else, it would have been these fictitious "overcrowded hospitals" strawmen being shoved in your face.

But that's okay, let's be "strong in the face of adversity". Let's stop talking about what's going on in our lives, let's continue to appease the human race. Humor me. How long is it going to take for you to return to normalcy? How long is it going to take before things are "not that bad" again?

Or in other words -- welcome to the internet dystopia for anyone who doesn't fucking run away from it. The reality tv show the circle just became real reality!

Fear mongering bullshit. Disease ain't bad. Hardly coughing, fever and chills barely noticeable. The lockdown is for the sake of the most vulnerable, not because it is bad for healthy people.

My guess is if we allow the system to keep the fear cranked high and *othering* most people (most people will get this), they will justify hurting segments of society while people pretend they never had it. Immigrants in the U.S. for example, will most likely be targeted when it was primarily brought by rich tourists.

Don't believe the hype but also if you care about older people and people with health conditions, isolate if you can so they don't die early. But also stand up for the infected too because it is the poor who couldn't isolate that keep the disease alive. At some point if this disease doesn't end, we might have to choose who matters more, the infected majority or the vulnerable minority.

"we must do something now, you need to quarantine and self isolate" and "anyone who doesn't agree with me is a trump supporting conspiracy theorist", because i've already encountered this. Really all the freakout is just distorting information and practically addressing this novel virus. Don't believe any of the numbers because not everyone who shows symptoms can get a good test, and most of the people who are hurt by this will not get tested.

Fucking depriving me of friends... FUCK YOU.

The fish have returned to central Venice and the canal water is clear without the scourge of tourism.

Cashless: increased surveillance on it's way via 5g. Starbucks (UK) have stopped accepting cash citing the virus! What a innovative way to bring the cashless society in supposed free democratic countries. Needless to say, the staff didn't even consider the fact that germs etc etc are all around us even in us! All they had on their TINY minds was corona virus (cue dramatic music). I also think there will be other mandatory temporary aka permanent measures brought in. Stirner may have right with his lost essay called 'The Unique and his Toilet Roll'

'I also think there will be other mandatory temporary aka permanent measures brought in. '

so true. theres a lot of people who imagine that things will "go back to normal" when in reality whenever the state gains ground, it almost never lets it go. Much like how the borders of the US never went back to their normal state after the 911 attacks.

My god. How the hell is dating and even just meeting new people going to be a thing now?

IT WILL BE ILLEGAL ! ITS IMMORAL FOR PEOPLE TO MEET AND POSSIBLY SPREAD THE CONTAGION, OR TO MIX WITH THE SINFUL WRETCHES WHO BROUGHT SATAN'S GERMS FROM THE DENS OF INIQUITY TO SPREAD AMONGST THE CHOSEN. ABSTAIN AND REMAIN PURE LIKE MY CELIBATE TRUE BELIEVERS IN MONASTERIES.

I'm literally coming across people all over reddit talking about "virtual dates" thru skype, discord and some firefox add-on for netflix. I've also seen people talking about going out on dates but staying 6 feet away from the person they're out with. What a fuckin joke. How pathetic. If this is what social life and dating life is turning into, there's going to be a suicide pandemic, on top of this particular viral pandemic...

Sooo cool, I new I was a trend setter! , Now jerking off in front of my screen to dates through Skype from my basement is going to be considered normal. My mom's gonna see a more confident and happy son now.

is why american anarchism can't have nice things

Hey anon...

...corona n chill? My quarantine, or yours?

This is no chill situation when people made by authorities to be scared of getting cozy with others, including but not limited to getting laid. This makes flirting several times more complicated, and also people into relationships are being almost coerced into not having sex, going out, etc. Even as a loner I kinda sorry for them.

My best hope for an outcome in the short term is that people would stop taking the virus seriously and get really pissed off at the governments undermining their lives. I guess anarchos can contribute to this, at least.

we can all conjecture what's going to happen but we don't even really know, it's even calling into question what i want out of life now. I kinda want to get the coronavirus, what would be the best way to do that??

Find the place where they are quarantinong people, pose as a cleaner, doctor or whatever, sneek into the octegenarian section of the Covid-19 quarantine ward, and do a 30 second fervent tongue kiss on one of the patients there. This would be the cheapest and quickest method I think of at the moment. Hope this helps :)

But also good luck convincing anyone out there to do it with you. At that was part of my point above.

Are techno-feudalists gonna get more efficient than old-school Puritan/Catholic moralism?

We're like 9/10 steps away from total proletariat victory by way of plague-sanctioned general strike if we just never go back to work when things calm down again.

All we have to do -- is stay right here.

Vote Union! Vote Plague!

Hail the invisible microscopic warriors of death!

You mean by getting the vast majority of workers around the world to walk off the job on some kind of indefinite wildcat-plague-strike??

Yes.

Has anyone explored the idea that CoronaVirus is an engineered bioweapon designed by perhaps China to destroy the global economy and usher in full communism? Iran did say they would hit us back for the assassinations and they are China's number one trading partner. That was my initial hunch when this first started.

would be stupid enough to think that would work. You're assuming that mother nature doesn't have any tricks up her sleave!

Otherwise we're all going to die from climate change. China has to save the world from the United States. Without mother necessity where would be?

china's government responded with incompetence originally, and i also don't think they would shut down their manufacturing sector as they did unless they were scared. They are capitalists too they understand that their People's Republic is their way of keeping their very poor population under control. It could be that the U.S. will eventually do that but highly unlikely because of the individualism of our culture...

recommend me some crust/grind/punk/doom/death/etc. to celebrate the end of the world! No links, just list some tracks pls.

Fall of Efrafa - literally their whole discography
Loss - Cut Up, Depressed, and Alone

kinda reminds me of Sun O)))), but it has kinda changed to that explosion in the sky type sound.

I'm thinking of changing from a Nihilo-Anarchist to a Viruso-Nihilist. Anyone wanna join me? :)

but ill stick to my obscure/silly meanings

Whats the album? I don't think click on links. Esp not on here. Better safe than sorry!

you can generally be pretty sure that any www.youtube.com link is okay, i mean someone could plant some malware on their server but you would probably have to install it on your computer for it to do any harm...just go ahead and click it, it's the album.

Rapture really hits at the stifling incarceration and censure of free critical thought by religion.

Bathory - the reaper
Craft - pretty much anything off "fuck the universe" and "terror propaganda"

songs that we're kinda punky/thrashy, their song "a fine day to die" is vert apocalyptic and fun to listen to as well

are fucking classics plain and simple with The Return...... and Black Mark being their greatest albums.

Early toxic holocaust is pretty good plague apocalypse music, too

Could there be some sort of permanent space on this site for us to discuss the plague for as indefinitely as it sticks around? Having this as a "topic of the week" just feels like it doesn't cut it for something we're obviously going to be talking about, dealing with and painstakingly learning to overcome for a not-insignificant period of time

Could this TOTW be sent to the Forum section maybe? Or just start yourself a forum thread dedicated to reporting and commenting on the current downfall.

the virus is going to dominate conversation here as long as it dominates global political discussion, let's not advocate more threads about it...

btw there's already two virus threads on the forum

a cool game to play in the dark is to look at your hands. do different hand movements and see the dark silhouette against the dimly lit background. stare at them and don't mind the passing of time. then after a while, caress each hand. think each hand is a separate entity and that they both communicate with each other through caresses.

I wait till its dark and look at my hand and my penis silhouetted in the dim background and begin caressing and not minding the passing of time and then a communication begins and intensifies and eventually climaxes. Is that similar to what you are referring to?

WHoa, settle down, no nead to shout, it seems you are stressed right out. You need to read Reich's " The Function of the Orgasm" and "The Mass Psychology of Fascism"
Then you might learn to joke about masturbation!

the gun is good
the penis is evil

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