Anarchist Elements of Geocaching

[+WRITE SHOP ROBERT]

Why do people always assume that Anarchy is the same as Chaos and Disorganazation?

[+brslk]

Just think, if we had anarchy, every cache would be a 5 terrain because we would have no roads, bridges, lamp posts...

Does that mean that roads and bridges did not exist before structured governments? I doubt that.

Then you should study history.

 

Infrastructure has always been built by governments.

 

Take a look at any anarchy today - most lately Somalia and Afghanistan, and see what happens when 'the people' are in charge.

 

As much as I often disagree with TAR, I agree with this post of his. Not so much about Somalia or Afghanistan but his knowledge in general about reality. Without Government, There is no infrastructure. Unless of course you live in a kingdom or benevolent dictatorship.

 

Either way... average Joe may have built roads or bridges but to keep them usable for many years requires structured Governments.

 

Bruce.

[+TheAlabamaRambler]

I'm pretty sure the first bridges were built by gravity when trees fell, and the first roads were made by animals

OK, but after that roads were cart paths, most notably chariots and wagons.

 

Interesting tidbit of trivia for you... the first mass-produced transportation was the Roman Chariot, designed for the transport of Roman officials and armies. Thus roads were chariot paths, all made to the same size specification, which is why roads, then railroads, then cars all had the same wheelbase widths - the Roman government started it all!

[GOF and Bacall]

I'm pretty sure the first bridges were built by gravity when trees fell, and the first roads were made by animals

OK, but after that roads were cart paths, most notably chariots and wagons.

 

Interesting tidbit of trivia for you... the first mass-produced transportation was the Roman Chariot, designed for the transport of Roman officials and armies. Thus roads were chariot paths, all made to the same size specification, which is why roads, then railroads, then cars all had the same wheelbase widths - the Roman government started it all!

 

They also started the whole mile marker idea. So those of you hiding caches on those 1/10 mile signs need to thank the Romans. Those of you who get all worked up over it, well, you know who to blame.

[4wheelin_fool]

I'm pretty sure the first bridges were built by gravity when trees fell, and the first roads were made by animals

OK, but after that roads were cart paths, most notably chariots and wagons.

 

Interesting tidbit of trivia for you... the first mass-produced transportation was the Roman Chariot, designed for the transport of Roman officials and armies. Thus roads were chariot paths, all made to the same size specification, which is why roads, then railroads, then cars all had the same wheelbase widths - the Roman government started it all!

Thats from this e-mail which was widely distributed several years ago:

The U.S. standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is four feet, eight and a half inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the U.S. railroads.

 

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the prerailroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

 

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

 

Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

 

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of its legions. The roads have been used ever since.

 

And the ruts? Roman war chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, the standard U.S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches derives from the specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

 

Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's a** came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses."

 

and supported here:

 

following in the book Gordian Knot: Political Gridlock on the Information Highway by W. Russell Neuman, Lee McKnight, and Richard Jay Solomon:

 

[A]s an accident of history most road carriages in the the Middle Ages inherited the old Roman cart gauge of approximately 4 feet, 8-1/2 inches. Julius Caesar set this width under Roman law so that vehicles could traverse Roman villages and towns without getting caught in stone ruts of differing widths. Over the centuries this became the traditional standard.

 

Richard Solomon, the source of this bit, has elaborated in a message posted to the net that Caesar decided on standard gauge after seeing a "grooveway" at the isthmus of Corinth in Greece. This was a purposely built set of ruts used to guide the wheels on carts carrying goods being transshipped across the isthmus. Prof. Solomon says he personally measured an excavated portion of this ancient grooveway and found it had a gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches.

 

and here:

George Stephenson based the gauge he used for his locomotives on the width of these ruts. Here's what Housesteads by James Crow (Batsford, London, 1995, pp. 33-34) has to say on the subject:

 

The gauge between the ruts is very similar to that adopted by George Stephenson for the Stockton to Darlington railway in 1837 and a 'Wall myth' developed that he took this gauge from the newly excavated east gate. There is a common link, but it is more prosaic and the 'coincidence' is explained by the fact that the dimension common to both was that of a cart axle pulled by two horses in harness (about 1.4m or 4ft 8in). This determined both the Roman gauge and Stephenson's, which derived from the horsedrawn wagon ways of south Northumberland and County Durham coalfields.

 

But according to Snopes, the South used 3 different gauges of tracks, and was one reason why they were conquered by the North which rebuilt their railroad system.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp

 

 

Anarchy would have resulted in no standards, due to no hierchy and nobody with any authority to promote any one gauge in particular..

[Slackmason]

 

Anarchy would have resulted in no standards, due to no hierchy and nobody with any authority to promote any one gauge in particular..

 

you may or may not be correct. because your conclusion is drawn from an equation with large amounts of missing, unattainable info.

all we know is that we have had these authorities dictating things to us. there are a few examples in history when the people have wrested control of their systems and successfully organized and designed complicated methods of production and distribution. in an egalitarian fashion.

 

the first examples that come to mind immediately are, A.The Spanish Civil war and B. The Ukrainian Anarchist resistance to both the Russian Red Army, and the Tsarist White Army during the Russian Revolution. unfortunately both of those experiments where terminated violently by fascists from both the left and right of the spectrum. here, i'll post a list of the various Anarchist communities that have existed in the past and present from wikipedia.

I would love to get Geocaching added to this list!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities

 

Anarchism, does not portend to throw away the totality of our current technologies and infrastructures. after all. Anarchism is a workers movement. and workers have built these roads, and other various infrastructures. and we can build others, and better ones.

 

Anarchism, despite how the subject is treated by our school systems, is a cohesive ideology based on ORGANIZATION. which is why i can relate it to Geocaching. Geocaching is very organized. yet. it is done so horizontally. with very little hierarchy.

 

sure, you have these people that run this forum, and the website. but they are not necessarily the heart and soul of the sport. if they killed the forum. and discontinued the website. the sport would carry on. i have no doubt about that. because the sport is a product of the labor of a vast group of volunteers. and this product is a collective effort that anyone is welcome to get involved with.

[Clan Riffster]

and the first roads were made by animals

Wouldn't those be game trails? At what point does a meandering game trail become a road? Enough people follow the game trail, turning it into a social trail. Is it now a road? At some point, someone decides that improving the social trail will increase travel efficiency. Part of this decision includes realizing that any long term improvement is going to require tens of thousands of man hours and heaping gobs of natural resources. Will all this labor be undertaken by folks trying to improve the social welfare of the community, or will it be done by workers, being paid, by a government?

 

I think that, for any trail to get to the point where we could reasonably call it a road, would require a lot of government.

[+Castle Mischief]

and the first roads were made by animals

Wouldn't those be game trails? At what point does a meandering game trail become a road? Enough people follow the game trail, turning it into a social trail. Is it now a road? At some point, someone decides that improving the social trail will increase travel efficiency. Part of this decision includes realizing that any long term improvement is going to require tens of thousands of man hours and heaping gobs of natural resources. Will all this labor be undertaken by folks trying to improve the social welfare of the community, or will it be done by workers, being paid, by a government?

 

I think that, for any trail to get to the point where we could reasonably call it a road, would require a lot of government.

 

I think it's just a matter of semantics at this point. There are "roads" on our property that the government does not maintain, but are easily driven by a car. We don't do much maintenance on them either, the simple act of driving over them keeps them in existence. What makes a road a "road"?

[+WeeWillie]

The satellites we use for geocaching are owned and operated by the Department of Defense.

 

You purchased your GPS from a store where you used money created by the US Government.

 

Some of that money was used to pay taxes to your local and state government.

 

Your anachry only exists because a structure allows you to live the illusion that you are an anarchist.

 

By the way, you are communicating to us via the internet. The internet was created by the US Army (not Al Gore).

[GOF and Bacall]

The satellites we use for geocaching are owned and operated by the Department of Defense.

 

You purchased your GPS from a store where you used money created by the US Government.

 

Some of that money was used to pay taxes to your local and state government.

 

Your anachry only exists because a structure allows you to live the illusion that you are an anarchist.

 

By the way, you are communicating to us via the internet. The internet was created by the US Army (not Al Gore).

 

Al! Say it ain't so!

 

 

[+TeamBMWebb]

I thought this broke it down quite well:

 

[Slackmason]

The satellites we use for geocaching are owned and operated by the Department of Defense.

 

You purchased your GPS from a store where you used money created by the US Government.

 

Some of that money was used to pay taxes to your local and state government.

 

Your anachry only exists because a structure allows you to live the illusion that you are an anarchist.

 

By the way, you are communicating to us via the internet. The internet was created by the US Army (not Al Gore).

 

Al! Say it ain't so!

 

 

 

yea, some of that is true. except, only until recently, governments have had a monopoly on putting up satellites. you think it is impossible that industry would have, if left to its own devices, found a reason to develop satellite technology?

 

my first GPSr (garmin GPS60) was a gift. i ordered my second GPSr (nuvi 780) from the internet. thus usurping the tax system. tee hee. not that that matters. just because a slave wears his chains, does not mean he doesn't understand what freedom means.

 

The internet its self may have been a development of the State military. but it has been expropriated to a certain extent by groups and individuals, the internet is a great tool for Anarchists and other people of resistance.

 

Here is a quote by Peter Kropotkin that kind of summs up my view on currently existing technology.

 

"There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man...

 

 

...Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

 

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle--all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

 

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say--This is mine, not yours?."

 

Basically, technology is an inheritance, the birthright of every human, and no human or group of humans can honestly take total credit for anything we have today.

 

also, my point was not that the technology used was what made Geocaching a good analogy for Anarchism. it was the open decentralized way that the game works.

 

try to be careful about the strawmen you build, they are highly flammable! hahaha

Edited December 5, 2009 by Slackmason

[GOF and Bacall]

The satellites we use for geocaching are owned and operated by the Department of Defense.

 

You purchased your GPS from a store where you used money created by the US Government.

 

Some of that money was used to pay taxes to your local and state government.

 

Your anachry only exists because a structure allows you to live the illusion that you are an anarchist.

 

By the way, you are communicating to us via the internet. The internet was created by the US Army (not Al Gore).

 

Al! Say it ain't so!

 

 

 

yea, some of that is true. except, only until recently, governments have had a monopoly on putting up satellites. you think it is impossible that industry would have, if left to its own devices, found a reason to develop satellite technology?

 

my first GPSr (garmin GPS60) was a gift. i ordered my second GPSr (nuvi 780) from the internet. thus usurping the tax system. tee hee. not that that matters. just because a slave wears his chains, does not mean he doesn't understand what freedom means.

 

The internet its self may have been a development of the State military. but it has been expropriated to a certain extent by groups and individuals, the internet is a great tool for Anarchists and other people of resistance.

 

Here is a quote by Peter Kropotkin that kind of summs up my view on currently existing technology.

 

"There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man...

 

 

...Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

 

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle--all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

 

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say--This is mine, not yours?."

 

Basically, technology is an inheritance, the birthright of every human, and no human or group of humans can honestly take total credit for anything we have today.

 

also, my point was not that the technology used was what made Geocaching a good analogy for Anarchism. it was the open decentralized way that the game works.

 

try to be careful about the strawmen you build, they are highly flammable! hahaha

 

I suspect that you would find terracaching more to your liking.

[Slackmason]

The satellites we use for geocaching are owned and operated by the Department of Defense.

 

You purchased your GPS from a store where you used money created by the US Government.

 

Some of that money was used to pay taxes to your local and state government.

 

Your anachry only exists because a structure allows you to live the illusion that you are an anarchist.

 

By the way, you are communicating to us via the internet. The internet was created by the US Army (not Al Gore).

 

Al! Say it ain't so!

 

 

 

yea, some of that is true. except, only until recently, governments have had a monopoly on putting up satellites. you think it is impossible that industry would have, if left to its own devices, found a reason to develop satellite technology?

 

my first GPSr (garmin GPS60) was a gift. i ordered my second GPSr (nuvi 780) from the internet. thus usurping the tax system. tee hee. not that that matters. just because a slave wears his chains, does not mean he doesn't understand what freedom means.

 

The internet its self may have been a development of the State military. but it has been expropriated to a certain extent by groups and individuals, the internet is a great tool for Anarchists and other people of resistance.

 

Here is a quote by Peter Kropotkin that kind of summs up my view on currently existing technology.

 

"There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man...

 

 

...Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

 

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle--all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

 

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say--This is mine, not yours?."

 

Basically, technology is an inheritance, the birthright of every human, and no human or group of humans can honestly take total credit for anything we have today.

 

also, my point was not that the technology used was what made Geocaching a good analogy for Anarchism. it was the open decentralized way that the game works.

 

try to be careful about the strawmen you build, they are highly flammable! hahaha

 

I suspect that you would find terracaching more to your liking.

 

terrachaching does look very interesting. i like the structure and membership precess.