Hatonn's secret origin story

[rva_jeremy]

Socialism as in not social democracy, but proper socialism, possibly mixed with anarcho-communism at the community level, i would guess.

Yes!  To my mind, we should be prepared for a socialism that looks completely different than the ultra-ideological varieties we've been considering over the last two hundred years.  I believe we're starting to see some of that in the socialist resurgence occurring in the USA right now.  It's not very Marxist per se and much more about identifying people's needs with an attitude of "this simply needs to be fixed, and the current system is insufficient to that end".  

I think you're going to see a DIY version of socialism emerge that doesn't overthrow capitalism so much as make capitalism seem silly, hollow, and obsolete while providing local, community-controlled organizations to fill the gap.  The internet is democratizing the kind of messaging that advertising has been using to shape our choices for years.  Remember: for years, capitalist economists have defended the system of prices and scarcity as an information system communicating marginal supply and demand.  Now we have lots of rich, decentralized communication vectors.  We could make this work a lot better now.  In fact, the Allende government in Chile was doing some of this kind of networked cyber-socialism back in the 70s.

I don't even think we necessarily need the internet to run the economy this way -- it's just that the internet is such a great model of decentralization, and can open imaginations to what is possible without corporate/government mediation.