chobeat

White people discovering alpha amylase. Asians have been using it for millennia in stuff like amazake but also many alcoholic preparations.

Both questions would deserve a book each to really answer, but I will try.

How are you defining mass parties? Relatively large participatory base, strategy decided democratically, presence on the local territory and ties with communities. Here though I was more framing them as "parties designed for a mass society", where their strategy relies on the possibility to reduce the individual to mass, as in the case of workers parties. A one-size-fits-all organization, where one strategy, one identity and one theory of change is shared by millions of people.

When did they stop working, and why?

There are at least two big elements: the first is the end of mass society. Once we became all individuals, the mechanism of identification in a collective entity became harder. It got even harder over time, when most young people have no examples or memory of anybody around them ever acting collectively.

The second element is informational: mass parties are incredibly slow. The analysis-synthesis-action-assessment most ML parties are based on is predicated on the assumption that the social and political phenomena you're working with don't change too fast and between the analysis phase and the action phase, the underlying phenomenon is relatively stable. If the analysis is too slow or the phenomenon (i.e. specific industries, specific political landscapes, etc etc) change too fast, your analysis is always late. Correct, but useless. This renders anybody involved in such ecosystems (not just mass parties), very aware of the motivations of their own failure, but completely incapable of escaping them.

History does matter. In the same way mass parties wouldn't have worked in 15th century Europe, they won't work now. Learning history is useful to understand how entire system of thought and action survived way past their relevance, doomed and incapable of understanding their own demise.

Mass society in the West doesn't exist anymore. You're unfit to achieve anything you want to achieve and you lack the tools to elaborate to yourself why you keep losing. The world moved on and so should your politics.

It's obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

For people like Dennet, which I'm not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.

Agency is not will though. For sure genes have no will and neither does sand

While genetic agency is often appropriated by reactionary politics, it's a quite established scientific perspective.

ITT: very little pseudoscience. It's pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don't really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.

Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.

Memetics is not really pseudoscience. It was science, there there were compelling evidence and arguemtns that ideas have no agency on their own, contrary to genes, and the whole field died for good.

but then it's a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that's a different conversation.

co-operatives are started by worker's initiative. It's not something that comes to save you. If there's no co-op in your area, start learning what you need to start one, govern one, and how to find co-op funding.