Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.
I think that's a very weird interpretation of that, but fair enough :)
To be clear, I wasn't advocating for organized violence as a good tactic. I was just picking a simple example.
I still think that Bevins's history and analysis has merit, even if you disagree with his conclusions. I've read at least two books by anarchists that put forth similar concepts of legibility: Graeber's "Utopia of Rules" and James Scott's "Seeing like a State" (which I actually read to write this post and have a bajillion opinions about, but that's a post for another day). Regardless of your stance on whether your movement should or shouldn't be legible, you have to understand legibility, both to the state, and to other capitalist powers like, say, social media (to pick one at random 😉 ).
I once again disagree with your characterization of the book.
You realize how funny it is that you post this in an Anarchist community?
That's stupid. Anarchist revolutionary theory and historical practice are full of ideas that are perfectly compatible with this analysis, even if Bevins himself is clearly not an anarchist. There is no more legible act to the state than organized violence, for example.
I'm not sure why you've taken this unpleasant posture towards me. I'm genuinely here for a discussion, but this is my last response if you keep acting like I'm some sort of uncultured idiot that needs you "to start from the basics 😒"
Yeah, again, I take pretty strong issue with your characterization of Bevins's stance. Have you actually read the book? I think that this is an interesting and worthwhile discussion, but I also don't want to go in circles if you haven't...
When he says that they're illegible to state power, he doesn't mean that they want to appeal to the people currently in power (and maybe this is a conflation that I accidentally invite in my own write-up). He means that they cannot participate in state power as an institutional apparatus, be it as reformists or revolutionaries.
I get what you're saying, and I agree with a lot of it (but not all of it), but you're just not responding to an argument that Bevins makes, at least in how I read him. You are responding to one that many in western media did in fact make, and I agree with you in that context, but that was just not my reading of Bevins at all.
I don’t think its wired to critique someone for having a widely different interpretation of what happened than multiple others that were directly involved and then taking this very peculiar subjective interpretation to make wide sweeping (and IMHO wrong) conclusions about what we should learn from it.
It is because that's literally what the book is about. The book is addressing that very phenomenon as its core thesis. That's exactly what he is talking about when he says that the protests are illegible. If someone says "people disagree a lot about what happened and that's a problem" responding to that by saying "i disagree about what happened" isn't really engaging with the argument.
My impression is that Bevin started out with a preconsived notion and then kinda made up a retrospective narrative of these protests to fit to that.
I'm sorry but I don't think that anyone who has actually read the book in good faith can come to that conclusion.
edit: added more explanation
Just because a postcapitalist world should have a battery for every house does not make batteries in and of themselves solarpunk. The story surrounding the battery, in this case, the branding, is actually precisely what matters, because solarpunk is explicitly about speculative futures. It's a genre of science fiction that creates an optimistic and green aesthetic to aid in imagining a postcapitalist world. Posting a link to a currently existing consumer grade technology with consumerist branding is, by definition, not solarpunk.
"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." You're posting the automobile. Science fiction is about the social context of the technology as much if not more than about the technology itself.
Again, I'm not saying that personal batteries are bad, or have no part in a postcapitalist future.
That's kind of a weird critique, because it's actually consistent with the book. He spends a lot of time talking about how wildly different every person's interpretation of the event is, and that's kind of the problem. It's part of why these movements are illegible to power. He's very clear that this is his interpretation, based on his own contacts, experience, and extensive research, but that it's not going to be the same as everyone else's.
Same is true with the moniker. Whether or not the people on the ground felt that way about it or not, that story, fabricated without input from those on the ground, is what ended up creating meaning out of the movement, at least insomuch as power is concerned. That's like the core thesis of the book: The problem with that wave of protests was not being able to assert their own meaning over their actions. The meaning was created for them by people like western media, and they weren't able to organize their own narrative, choose their own representatives, etc.
edit to add: IIRC, he even specifically discusses how the different people in the core group of Brazilian organizers disagree on what happened.
Oh hey I wrote that lol.
Not all protests for Gaza were meant to gain engagement, many were organized to cause direct economic disruption to those that profit from the war, that is a goal.
I actually totally agree with you. I should've been more careful in the text to distinguish between those two very different kinds of actions. I actually really, really like things that disrupt those that profit, but those are not nearly as common as going to the local park or whatever. I might throw in a footnote to clarify.
This kind of consumerist green-tech is not solarpunk. Solarpunk is about imagining a postcapitalist future, when human needs are met not just within ecological constraints, but as part of a healthy ecosystem, and technology exists to aid us in doing that. It's about envisioning a radically changed world. Tools like these are the exact opposite end of green-tech: They're specifically designed to fit neatly into our life as it exists today. The ad copy is super clear about that. The promotional materials even have an SUV.
To be clear, I'm not taking a stance on whether they're bad or good, but I am saying that they're not solarpunk.
"The workplace isn't for politics" says company that exerts coercive political power to expel its (ex-)workers for disagreeing.
I'm feeling better and better about my "pornetariat" theory.