"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
Anarchists should be more aware of this than anyone - it's the whole reason we uphold opposition to hierarchy as our prime directive.
Reddit is set up to operate as a forced hierarchy - the admins are at the very top of the ladder, with the top-most moderator of a subreddit occupying the next highest rung. Because the top active mod is above all the other mods on the hierarchy, no one below them can demod them.
Since we are anarchists, we of course tried to override this unjust hierarchy by making our mods answerable to the community in
r/metanarchism. We decided to elect and remove our mods according to popular vote.
Once someone has been on our mod list for years and years, the mods above them eventually drop off, and they rise to the top mod position. At this point, the true character of our comrade is tested - will they abide by the community's wishes? Or will they instead force their will on us, knowing we have no recourse to remove them?
In the comment chain of his article,
he used the word 'bitch'.
Another mod (a woman) tried to remove his comment and asked him to not use gendered slurs. He refused, ranted about them doing 'the deep state's dirty work', and reinstated his comment.
His stock responses to all his critics are 'meta is garbage', 'you're all just trolls', 'you won't still be anarchists in 6 months', 'idpol' and even
'I don't care about anarchists'.
His superiority complex actually enables him to believe he is the one true anarchist that is keeping this sub from descending into chaos and that refusing to listen to the will of the people is somehow heroic:
I'm not letting this place go down the tubes like
/r/soc
did. If I am de facto "king", and I reject all doctrines except reason, what does it matter?
The moral of this sad little story is that no one - even a respected post-left egoist anarchist like negroyverde can be given power and then just walk away from it. When he was elected as a mod 4 years ago, I doubt he ever suspected just how easily he could become corrupted. And if even the minuscule amount of power a reddit top mod is given by the admins is enough to corrupt - this is proof that
ALL power corrupts absolutely.