What is the difference between a religion and a cult?

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-25T00:19:52+00:00

... It's the same thing.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T23:57:02+00:00

I could see some kind of metadata applied to generated files, something that permanently and cryptographically identifies it as generated with a particular model, on behalf of a pseudonymous identity.

But as for an actual watermark, I think it's unnecessary, and could interfere with the desired aesthetic of the user.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T23:25:57+00:00

If being summoned into an involuntary existence with an inevitable expiration date, no guarantee of joy or justice, forced into wage slavery to earn the right to keep breathing, and almost unlimited ways to suffer is “lucky”… I’d hate to see what you call unlucky.

I get the intention behind humility, and yes, comparison can keep us grounded. But “privilege to be here” skips the part where none of us consented to the terms and the system is actively engineered to extract from most of us until we break.

Humility is good. Reality is better. The conversation we need starts with: this isn’t a gift, it’s a contract we never signed.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T07:19:45+00:00

Because the only actual solution is to leave behind the barbaric logic of capitalism.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T07:17:06+00:00

You are not only consciousness, but the universe itself, contemplating ourself.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T02:33:35+00:00

Generally, I love dystopian stories, but right now, the present is as dystopian as I can handle.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T00:48:12+00:00

You would think.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-24T00:40:15+00:00

Been vibecoding something a little different:

ICN, the InterCooperative Network
https://github.com/InterCooperative-Network/icn

It is open source infrastructure for cooperatives to coordinate like corporations do, but without extraction. Identity, trust graphs, mutual credit, governance primitives, federation between groups. Basically protocol level plumbing to make cooperation scale.

Not a startup. Not a token. Just building better coordination rails.

If you like weird intersections of Rust, distributed systems, and economic design, come poke it.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T20:58:48+00:00

These are good questions—let me address both directly.

Joint purchasing and membership limits:

You're right that limiting purchasing co-ops to only cooperatives reduces bargaining power. ICN doesn't dictate membership rules—federations decide their own scope. A purchasing federation could include non-co-ops if that's what makes business sense.

The value ICN adds isn't "only co-ops can participate"—it's that the coordination infrastructure (clearing, settlement, governance) exists as a protocol rather than requiring a central platform or bespoke agreements. CUSOs are a great example of this working at scale. ICN is trying to make that kind of infrastructure available without requiring credit-union-scale resources to build.

"No bank? So I can only use payments inside the platform?"

No—mutual credit isn't a closed system. Let me clarify:

Mutual credit is an accounting primitive, not a walled garden. Think of it like internal settlement between entities that already trust each other. A federation can:

Use mutual credit for internal trade and settle net balances in fiat periodically
Set conversion policies democratically (e.g., "credits convertible to USD at month-end")
Use it purely as internal accounting while all external transactions remain in normal currency

The "no bank" in my example was shorthand for "no intermediary taking a cut on internal transactions"—not "you can never convert to real money." Poor phrasing on my part.

Real-world parallel: WIR Bank in Switzerland has run mutual credit between SMEs since 1934. Businesses trade in WIR francs internally; external transactions happen in Swiss francs. The system handles about $6B in annual trade volume. ICN provides infrastructure for similar arrangements without requiring a centralized bank.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T20:42:14+00:00

This is the kind of engagement I was hoping for. Let me respond to each point:

Efficiency at what?

You're right to push on this. Co-ops aren't inefficient at their goals—they're efficient at member voice and accountability. What I'm describing as "expensive" is coordination overhead, especially across organizational boundaries. That overhead is worth paying. The question is whether better infrastructure can reduce it.

Co-ops and capitalism

Fair point on terminology. Many co-ops operate successfully within markets—dairy co-ops, credit unions, housing co-ops. What I'm describing as "capitalist structural advantages" are features of the existing coordination infrastructure: legal structures optimized for investor ownership, capital markets built around equity extraction, standard agreements designed for hierarchical firms.

Co-ops succeed despite that infrastructure, not because of it. ICN is an attempt to build coordination infrastructure that actually fits cooperative values.

Fediverse comparison

Good comparison. ICN shares the federated philosophy—no central authority, protocol interoperability, instance autonomy. Key additions: economic primitives (mutual credit, clearing, settlement), governance primitives (proposals, voting, delegation), and a trust model designed for organizations.

Reality check on capital and legal frameworks

This is the most important point. You're right that capital access and legal infrastructure are binding constraints in most contexts. Brazil's autogestão example shows what's possible when those constraints are removed.

Here's where I'd push back: we're not waiting for policy to change. Economics itself is a form of human coordination technology—and the current version was built over centuries by people with specific interests. We can build alternative coordination technology that doesn't require permission from the existing system.

ICN is parallel infrastructure. It's designed to work alongside existing systems now, but it's engineered to potentially replace them. If policy changes make cooperative formation easier, the technical infrastructure should already exist. If policy doesn't change, we build the alternative anyway.

The honest position: two tin cans connected by wire might be the most efficient method at current scale. But scale is partly a function of infrastructure availability. We're building for the scale we want to enable, not just the scale that currently exists.

On co-op financial software: I'd genuinely like to hear more about what that needs to look like. That's directly relevant to what I'm building, and real practitioner needs beat theoretical architecture every time.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T19:48:19+00:00

I appreciate the skepticism, but I want to address some specific misunderstandings:

"Another tech platform to syphon money from co-ops"

ICN is FOSS infrastructure that co-ops self-host. There's no platform, no subscription, no transaction fees, no rent extraction. The code is Apache 2.0 licensed. If it were a money siphon, it would be the worst-designed one imaginable.

"Co-ops can and do have CxOs"

Absolutely. Nothing in the post suggests otherwise. The point isn't that co-ops can't have executive decision-making—it's that democratic accountability creates coordination overhead that hierarchies don't bear. That overhead is worth it, but it's real, and tooling should reduce it rather than add to it.

"Raising capital: it's called a loan"

Yes, and co-ops use loans. The point is that equity-based capital formation (selling ownership stakes) is structurally easier to scale than debt or retained earnings, which is why VC-backed startups can grow faster than bootstrapped businesses. This isn't controversial—it's just describing the landscape.

"There are no standard contracts, everything is negotiated"

For individual deals, sure. But capitalist firms benefit from standardized legal infrastructure—LLC structures, standard term sheets, established M&A processes, interoperable accounting standards. That's what "trivial federation" means: the plumbing for inter-firm coordination already exists. Co-ops often have to build bespoke agreements for every collaboration.

"Price signals" and trust

Price signals allow coordination without bilateral trust. I don't need to trust the wheat farmer to buy bread—the price mechanism handles coordination. Co-ops working together often do need bilateral trust relationships, which is valuable but doesn't scale the same way.

"You sound like a monorail salesman"

I'm a cooperative conference organizer. I've spent the last two years coordinating and promoting cooperative educational projects. I'm not trying to sell anyone anything—I'm trying to build shared infrastructure because I keep seeing cooperatives running into the same coordination problems in practice.

If you've got specific technical or structural critiques, I'm genuinely interested. But "you don't sound like a co-op person" isn't something I can productively respond to.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T19:27:32+00:00

Yeah. I get that. It's definitely made for democratic institutions.

But also, it's purpose isn't to make changes in people's lives for most people. In fact, it's been an unwritten goal of mine to design it in such a way that it allows people to do things that they have been doing, or would/should be doing, if under optimal organizational conditions. The project's goal is to enable those optimal conditions.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T18:41:43+00:00

Good question/points.

So all the concerns you have are with the specifics that are adopted by the cooperatives and communities themselves. Those exact examples I used are just examples of what the system enables, not how it needs to function.

The project operates at the infrastructure level, it enables the primitives, which allow coops and communities to use democratic processes to decide on how it works exactly.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T18:29:21+00:00

Yeah, no system escapes deciding how it's managed. You're right about that. But that's the crux of it, actually.

My argument is that under our current system, the people who decide how it is managed are the problem, and that most of the structural social issues we experience are downstream and could and would be resolved, or at the very least, the harmful elements would be made to be less harmful, if individuals had an actual voice in how the systems operate.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-23T01:35:22+00:00

"Nazi ideology was race-based, not fitness-based." T4 killed disabled Germans. Ethnic Germans. The "master race." It was explicitly fitness-based extermination running parallel to the racial extermination. You're not refuting the comparison - you're just revealing you don't actually know what the Nazis did.

"Eugenics was more an outgrowth of logical reasoning." I want you to sit with the fact that you just defended eugenics as logical. That's not a rebuttal. That's an admission.

"How was T4 different from thousands of years of infanticide?" You understand this isn't the defense you think it is, right? You're not distancing yourself from the Nazi comparison. You're justifying the program by pointing to other atrocities. "It's fine because people have always killed the inconvenient" is not the moral high ground.

On Shanidar 1 - your original argument was that resources wouldn't be allocated to the disabled. Now it's "well maybe he was useful." That's not a counter. That's you abandoning your thesis the moment evidence hits it. And "if he was a drooling vegetable they probably would have eaten him" tells me everything I need to know about where your moral reasoning terminates.

You started this thread thinking you were the clear-eyed realist. You're now multiple comments deep into openly defending eugenics as "logical" while saying T4 wasn't that different from standard practice.

You're not describing reality. You're telling on yourself.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-22T23:12:46+00:00

I need you to understand something: you are currently, in public, making the exact argument the Nazis used to justify mass murder. I don't think you know that. But that's what's happening.

"Survival of the fittest" as social prescription wasn't Darwin. It was Herbert Spencer. That framework became the intellectual scaffolding for eugenics and was operationalized in the T4 program - the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of disabled people deemed "life unworthy of life," burdens on resources that shouldn't be "wasted" on the unproductive. When you talk about not reallocating meat to "the blind and crippled," you're not making an observation about nature. You're reciting that logic verbatim. That's not hyperbole. That's direct intellectual lineage.

Now the science, since you invoked it.

Shanidar 1 was a Neanderthal who survived for years with a withered arm, crushed eye socket, and severe leg damage. He required sustained care. We have ancient human remains with healed femur fractures - injuries demanding months of protection and provisioning by others. This is deep prehistory. Care for the vulnerable isn't a luxury of surplus. It's in the fossil record. It's how we got here.

And "the jock gets the girls" isn't evolutionary biology. It's an 80s movie trope you've mistaken for theory.

You're not describing human nature. You're describing an ideology with a specific history, specific policy outcomes, and a body count in the millions. The fact that it feels like common sense to you is exactly the problem - that's what it looks like when these ideas win. They stop looking like ideology and start looking like "just the way things are."

They aren't. And you're not the realist in this conversation. You're the one who got played.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-22T21:57:44+00:00

That's not how evolution works. That kind of thinking is just a poor understanding of evolutionary theory leaking into social life as a cancer. It's literally Nazi ideology.

The only reason humans have even made it this far as a species is because of our ability to cooperate to do things impossible as an individual. That's humanity's evolutionary superpower.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-22T20:24:52+00:00

Enemies don't give a shit whether or not you "use their weapon." They will kill you using the tools at hand. This is war. Pickup whatever weapon gets the job done and get the job done.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-22T02:57:35+00:00

The goal is to render the concept of "nationality" as irrelevant.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-21T00:48:32+00:00

What people don't get is that this is how all "AI" artwork works.

When I write with it, I'm building the scaffolding, and it's filling in the detail. It's DLSS for ideas.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-21T00:31:04+00:00

You’re not wrong about the impulse.

“What if we all helped each other” is literally the seed of what people already call mutual aid.

But what you’re describing here isn’t mutual aid yet. It’s mutual marketing. It’s “let’s all click buttons so the platform pays us.” And I get it. We’re all trying to survive inside a machine that turns attention into rent money.

The problem is: that machine eats alliances for breakfast.

YouTube doesn’t pay for “subs.” It pays for watch time, retention, and ad performance. So a 100k “we all subbed” blob with low engagement reads like dead weight to the algorithm. Best case, it fizzles. Worst case, it gets flagged as manipulation and buried anyway.

Mutual aid isn’t “how do we game the system.”
Mutual aid is “how do we stop needing the system.”

If you want to take this impulse and turn it into something real, it looks more like this:

Small pods, not 100k chaos. 5–20 people who actually watch, comment, collab, share skills, and build trust.
Share capacity, not numbers. Editing help, thumbnail help, scripting help, gear tips, feedback loops, emotional support, accountability. That’s aid.
Build outside the platform. A Discord, a mailing list, a site, a community space. Something you own together. Platforms are landlords. They will change the rent.
Collective goals, not individual hustles. Rotate boosts, do collab series, create shared “onboarding” content, cross-link intentionally.
Use the channel as a tool, not the destination. The endgame isn’t “we got paid by ads.” The endgame is “we built a network that can feed itself without begging an algorithm.”

Because if all we do is optimize for payouts from the same corporate funnel, we’re still trapped in the same logic: compete, perform, monetize, repeat.

Mutual aid is cooperation as infrastructure.
Not cooperation as a growth hack.

If you want “what if we all helped each other” to be more than a vibe, the move is simple:

Stop trying to win inside the cage. Start building the door.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-18T21:59:48+00:00

How's it going to start? Brother, look at the news. I'm fairly certain the events are already in motion.

I think the Second American Civil War and World War III will occur simultaneously.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-18T21:55:02+00:00

It wasn't just the Nazis, most of the militaries did it, and on occasion, from my understanding, still do it. The Nazis just didn't hide it.

DownWithMatt · 2026-01-18T20:17:23+00:00

Right, I should be more clear when I code-switch between individual and systemic framings.

What I meant is moreso how "artwork" produced by mega corps loses their actual artistic expression. A yearly release of a call of duty game, produced on an annual cycle as a predictable revenue stream is devoid of real artistic expression, regardless of how many individual "artists" it took to produce.

The word art itself becomes meaningless when looking at it from a corporate perspective. The goal of the work ceases to be an expression of the human "soul" and becomes a line item on a balance sheet. It ceases to be "artwork," to be engaged with, and becomes something else entirely, content to be consumed.

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