Human Iterations

2009-07-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

(Three Thousand Years)

'On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself - previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years - was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.'

I've oft quoted some of the archeological explorations of non-hierarchical town and city cultures in Turkey, mostly because they directly refute primitivism at its core. As Ken comments in the above post, there was "no evidence so far of any social division between the sexes, and no evidence of any deaths by violence, over a very long time. That's staggeringly unusual." Something that simply cannot be emphasized enough. But as I was not aware and Ken documents further, not only is there great evidence to suggest that this state of affairs came about through a revolution, this completely game-changing society "spread for thousands of miles and remained free, equal, happy and peaceful for three thousand years." Three thousand years.

2009-06-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

(In Case Kinsella Asks)

I absolutely refuse to condemn the Iranian protesters throwing molotovs or smashing and overturning property in the streets as impediments to the riot cops. Because I am a vandarchist.

2009-06-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

(And Then, Of Course, The Comments Section Just Fails)

I realize I've been a bit lax on the snark and the SF/culture commentary here, most of that jazz has migrated to my Facebook feed -- now with 300% more insularity and arXiv links! But while I'm trying to shift the focus here to hard political texts, if you need a fix of old school Human Iterations you should head over over to this bit by China Mieville that perfectly channels the infinitely meta-ed snark.

2009-05-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

(You Always Bring Me The Very Best Math)

It's an uphill battle to avoid turning this blog into a pile of esoteric links to awesome papers in the physics arXiv. But in this case I'm going to have to make an exception. You're only required to read the extract:

Many mechanisms for the emergence and maintenance of altruistic behavior in social dilemma situations have been proposed. Indirect reciprocity is one such mechanism, where altruistic actions of a player are eventually rewarded by other players with whom the original player has not interacted. The upstream reciprocity (also called generalized indirect reciprocity) is a type of indirect reciprocity and represents the concept that those helped by somebody will help other unspecified players. In spite of the evidence for the enhancement of altruistic behavior by upstream reciprocity in rats and humans, this mechanism has not been really supported in theory. In the present study, we numerically investigate upstream reciprocity in heterogeneous contact networks, in which the players generally have different number of neighbors. We show that heterogeneous networks considerably enhance cooperation in a game of upstream reciprocity. In heterogeneous networks, the most generous strategy, by which a player helps a neighbor on being helped and in addition initiates helping behavior, first occupies hubs in a network and then disseminates to other players.

The key bit, highlighted more prevalently in the paper itself, is that while altruistic strategies can be effective through "what goes around, comes around" mechanisms, they can end up doing so best in jumbled, heterogeneous societies and further, in such cases, do so disproportionately. Those individuals that have the most connections -- or the most relevant connections -- with others will end up benefiting the most.

I know the point here is nothing new to many of us but, given the frequent assumptions and general state of affairs in the activist community, forgive me if it seems worth reiterating:

The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.

If the benefactors of such expansions have a random component to their selection, then we can retain and advance any advantages of heterogeneous societies while simultaneously avoiding both the martyred suppression of the most connected nodes as well as any perpetuated unequal accumulation of benefits.

This provides an interesting context from which to evaluate evolutionary fitness claims regarding Dunbar's Number. But it also clarifies the very real problem that faces major radical activists and organizers as well as simply folks in communities built on mutual aid wherein the scope of our personal connections both seems to best facilitate collaborative benefits for all, but also places us in -- what should at least damn well be -- an uncomfortable situation vis a vis the advantages that come back to us personally, compounding and further embedding us in such roles. I think it's incumbent upon us as anarchists to respond to these advantages not necessarily by hobbling or martyring ourselves through severing our personal connections but by acting consciously to expand and deepen the connections of others. And, in such rare homogeneous situations where everyone is as connected as they can be and this is less efficient than a more heterogeneous arrangement -- given contextual limitations -- periodically, in different ways, we can make the choice to step back and let others function in a more hub-like capacity. Weirdly enough, such a meta-strategy can even be in our best interest individually.

2009-05-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

(Fractured Rulership)

Is power stronger when it's centralized or when it's decentralized?

It seems quite strange to assert that the psychoses of power are capable of accomplishing far more when centralized as opposed to decentralized, when this is not true for anything else. Empire is not magically apart from the psychological roots that give rise to it. So why should the project of oppressing people be accomplished more efficiently by the centralization of those efforts rather than through diffuse decentralized approaches?

Certainly it's worth noting that, somewhat unique among goals, power has the property of diminishing the strength of the mind its rooted in, but I fail to see how this makes the many-minded pursuit of power different from more single, collective or centralized approaches. It's not like the trivially differing particulars between individual power-goals conflict with one another in any non-trivial way. Introduce yet another prince or warlord to a conflict seeking to personally rule all and you hardly lower the body count or the efficiency of enslavement.

Indeed one is left to wonder why those who are otherwise quite aware of the innate inefficiencies and diseconomies of scale in corporations or communism, nevertheless approach the state's attempts to subjugate us as though they were exempt from the same realities. Surely all of Hitler's meticulous clockwork of genocide was proven fundamentally out-gunned in speed and gumption by poorly armed peasants in Rwanda.

It has always appeared quite clear to me that we should consider ourselves lucky to live in a world defined by global Empire. Obviously our world is still a horrific one, whose innate evil and daily atrocities we, as anarchists, can never begin to accept. But while we work tirelessly to overcome and eradicate power, seizing every opportunity to change the parameters of the game, it does not seem clear to me that we should simply leap upon developments that remove the largest impediment our enemies currently have.

2009-05-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

(Alright, But That Won't Stop Me From Calling Them "Twats")

The thing about writing is that good reasons for avoiding it often promote bad reasons. You will always have a million things to write; emails to follow up on and comment threads to finish. Your time will always be compressed between blocks of weighty Importance. But when you're gifted with a formal and much wider public space like this the trick is not to try and paint it as another responsibility, but as a release valve for yourself. Inspiration can't be caught or relaxed into. It can't be systematically stoked like a fire because you can't separate it from yourself. And trying to does violence to you both.

As an excuse for this post I see that Chris Acheson has put together an easy to use, portable package of Firefox with crypto for the simpletons among us like me. I'll link to it through the @H+ blog so as to spread the much needed props all around.

Returning somewhat to the initial topic, How The Other Half Writes is an enviable defense of Twitter. Of course the specifics of Twitter are inseparable from the internet's current context of centralized services rather than truly networking protocols. If the dominant use of certain technologies appears inane or dehumanizing rather than connective, it's worth remembering that their boundaries are shaped just as much by the luddite pushback against the potentials we so champion.

2009-04-22T02:44:00.000-07:00

(Direct Action)

We had been complaining about how hot it was for years, but management refused to buy a fan or install air conditioning because it was "too expensive." At the same time, our store was pulling in $30,000 a week.

One morning, four of my coworkers walked into the back room of our store and gave the boss an ultimatum: "Will you buy the store a fan? Yes or no?" He stalled....so my four coworkers walked off the job, got in a car and drove to Target, leaving the boss to cover the floor. He was livid.

About 20 minutes later, my coworkers walked back in with a $14 box fan. They plugged it in, wrote "Courtesy of the IWW," drew a small black "Sabotage cat" [the IWW logo] on it, and enjoyed the breeze.

This left management with a choice. They could either remove the fan, in which case they would look like jerks. Or they could leave it there, as a monument to their own negligence.

To their credit, they did the right thing. Two days later, the district manager arrived with a $150 industrial floor fan. Two weeks later, they began installing air conditioning. This is the power of direct action. One week, $40 is too much to spend to bring the temperature in the store to within OSHA standards. The next week, management is spending $10,000 to keep the workers happy.

Every time I hear this story I fall in love all over again.

Congrats on the Bank of America shout-out.

2009-04-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

(The Union Makes Us Weak)

I wrote a pretty lengthy response to Iain McKay's recent bit on post-leftism and was asked to repost it beyond Infoshop.

First, let's ignore the non sequitur anti-science and anti-tech bullshit for now, since perspectives on either have absolutely nothing to do with post-leftism. After all while there are primmies and anti-civs within the post-left, there are also a plethora of transhumanists, cyberpunx and general internet-loving radicals who see invention and exploration as inherently liberatory acts.

Post Left Anarchists are functionally distinct from Left Anarchists in our distaste and suspicion of organization. That is to say our focus on critiquing the drive for organization-as-an-ends-unto-itself. Yes, we recognize that for all the profound changes in social and economic context since the days of yore, there are still workers and bosses and that very real advantages can be wrung out of the system through collective action. But we find the drive for mass and momentum as a primary ends to be constricting and ultimately self-crippling. We see Left Anarchists, and the Left as a whole, as instinctively clinging to the idea of numbers as a solution. Perhaps this is primarily a relic of those ancient days when any social adversary could be squashed by simply throwing enough bodies at it, or perhaps it is a perversion wrought by years of indoctrination in democratic ideals. Modern politics views building mass as the definition of success -- and certainly we will not see anything near true anarchy until every single human being comes to the realization that power relations are always evil -- but getting people to march under a banner is not the same thing as bringing them to a fuller appreciation of the nature of power. (Similarly, discussions on class-relations circa 1917 will not lay the groundwork to the better interpersonal relations that must come before any larger project.) And yet we feel that too often conventional Left Anarchists focus on getting people into the organization (as well as building the solidity of said organization and its brand name) to the detriment of these fundamentals.

Maybe that was pragmatic a century ago, but today mass matters a whole heck of a lot less. The state, the class system, etc, are underpinned less through the application of blunt social force and more through complicated machinations. The ecosystems of power relations we find ourselves embedded within can sustain great pressure, they can handle mass. The key to winning the war today is not mass -- we're not out to win some Revolution as though it were an election by another name -- the key is intelligent proactive exploitation of weak spots. Killing the motherfucker will involve a whole lot less brute grappling and a whole lot more hacking. We will win not as an army of soldiers but an insurrection of generals.

Hence our annoyance with the inclination to build a sense of structure and mass first and apply it -- or figure out how to apply it -- second. We've always seen the world we're building as an ad hoc one of projects and discussions, not organizations and federations. Our take away from this dream is the realization that if a project needs to focus on structure and lines of inclusion and exclusion in order to motivate action then, in the words of a cute kitten, "ur doin' it wrong." The Union hasn't made us strong, the Union's made us weak. It's wasted our time, suppressed our innovation and chained us to groupthink.

That's not to say that we're completely different from Left Anarchists. Certainly they as well have at times expressed a mild realization of the problems with this, just as we have participated in large federations and wasted hours of our life in rooms debating process documents. But even if it's only a matter of degree, in practice this difference of opinion/desire/strategy is still an important distinction.

And, if we are to be allowed to make this distinction, it's worth noting that our perspective is quite at odds with the overwhelming historical nature of the Left. Or, at the very least, the Left outside of Anarchism. So why the hell not define the Left in these terms of mass and structure worship and ourselves as outside it?

"Perhaps it is the American political climate which demonises "socialism" (in all its forms, equating it to Stalinism usually), a climate they are adjusting themselves to?"

And why shouldn't we?!

Putting aside Iain's smug british-chauvinism in this quote, it's worth wondering just why in the hell anyone should want to continue fighting a definitional war over "The Left." The Left-Right polarity in politics has shifted dramatically throughout history and is grounded in an almost meaningless obscurity. There were radical free market folks of worse behavior than the worst ancap today who sat to the left of the president's chair. Even worse the revolutionary distinction between "left and right" was in the popular mind considered one of action vs theory. Seriously none of us want to chain ourselves to one of those at the total expense of the other?

Yes, in America "The Left" is largely synonymous with authoritarian socialism and paternalism... just as it is in the rest of the world. Even if the devastating effects of the Soviet Union's influence could be overcome in the public's mind, that's not a battle most anarchists around the world are fighting. In much of Latin America and Eastern Europe anarchists have completely abandoned self-identification as Leftists. Western Europe is a more complicated matter, but there are plenty of anarcho-syndicalists who refuse to call themselves left. Just as similar although not entirely overlapping numbers of folk have abandoned the term "socialism". Indeed, on a global scale, the British Isles seem to be the only ones making a shrill fuss about this.

Yes there's a history that's important to be aware of. Folks who took exception to the same things we take exception to but worked under the Left nonetheless because it was the only possible game in town back then. But things have changed and the example of the rest of the Left and Socialism, much less their influence, have become serious concrete blocks on our feet. We fight over the definition of the word "anarchy" because we're forced to. Because an-archy has a clear etymological definition that it'll never shed and we have a drastically different evaluation of "without rulership." We're going to have to die on that hill no matter how strategically inopportune. But "social-ism" much less "left" are fluid, entirely fucking arbitrary words. They're defined by what they're associated with. And that's pretty awful company.

2009-04-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

(Space... The Final Revolt)

Sometimes I really wonder why I ever bother thumbing through old leftist texts. And then I find something pretty.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: the revolt that will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils.

--Internationale Situationniste, 1969.

2009-04-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

(Preoccupied)

In the meantime enjoy this quote from someone who is famous. And on TV.

Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.

--Charlie Brooker, in a column semi-endorsing Class War UK.

2009-03-22T02:12:00.000-07:00

(Best Review Ever)

"and then everybody decides to be freegans and live in dirt huts and make life suck for themselves even worse than on New Caprica, because cities are evil. Sam pilots the entire Fleet into the sun so that just in case anybody starts getting the idea that progress and intellectual development and the human urge to excellence lie anywhere other than somewhere on a scale between inconvenient and vile."

[...]

"Once again, the only emotionally resonant part is Gaius and Caprica, who are back in love and ready to make a go of it as farmers. This is intense because of how Gaius has always defined himself as not-farmer, and so after all the letting go and handing the cult over to Paulla really only has one lie left. It's maybe the biggest emotional step he's taken this whole show, and it's amazing. The angels show up and explain that there wasn't really a point to all of their bullshit except to keep Hera safe long enough to get her to Earth, and then Other Earth. Meanwhile, Helo and Athena teach Hera to surf and grow beans, and the Chief heads off to invent Ireland."

Thanks, tvpity. We wouldn't have been able to make it through this goddamn show without you.

Me? I'm having a hard time writing anything longer than Arrogant Liberals are Arrogant.

2009-03-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

(Brandon Darby Is Our Fault)

Let's talk about Brandon Darby.

Brandon Darby was an activist rockstar who took over one of the most visible projects in the anarchist milieu. Brandon Darby was flipped by the cops. And, as of Monday, it's safe to say that Brandon Darby ended up putting two people behind bars.

No sense in dressing it up. Beyond even the jail time, in the realm of perception--both public and internal--this was a great loss for us. For a million reasons we shouldn't be in the condition where we have activist rockstars, and we shouldn't be in the condition where our rank and file are ignorant and shallow enough to crack. But we are.

Brandon Darby's inclusion within the Anarchist milieu was always extremely problematic and indicative of a widespread and longstanding crisis point in the movement. Because:

1. Darby exhibited prominent indications of power psychoses in his day-to-day actions.

2. Darby's political and ethical stances were logically ungrounded.

It's clear that Darby was never an altogether great person, but at the end of the day it is we who are responsible for the clusterfuck that he's become. Blaming or hatemongering Darby is as useless as blaming or hatemongering an inanimate object or a liberal.

Darby was not someone who turned away from the light, Darby was one of the great many within our ranks who have never actually seen it.

I'm not particularly happy about using the revelation of an informant in our ranks to open an internal tirade on the state of the movement, but feel obliged given the sort of language that's been bouncing around the scene since.

Whenever something momentous happens in our little world everyone struggles to use it as proof or justification of their existing opinions. And yes, we should have practiced better security culture, we should have at least addressed -- in some way -- Darby's powergaming. But what's unique about Brandon Darby's case compared to the usual planted informants and undercovers we deal with is that while those approaches would have helped limit the damage, neither of them would have stopped it outright. Brandon Darby was already among our ranks, already embedded in circles of trust when he jumped ship.

Amid all the bellowing about building a threatening gangster-like culture of "stitches for snitches" and more cogent -- if still unfortunate -- calls for retreat behind walls of personal trust, every single voice I've heard has spoken with unison on the futility of addressing the problem itself. "There will always be Brandon Darbys" begin a million forum posts and zine features.

No.

No, there don't have to be. And the very fact that so many people believe this an occasion unpreventable, points to a profound crisis developing in our movement.

Brandon Darby and his still hidden brethren are the consequence of a culture that has abandoned intellectual vigilance and left us poorly inoculated against the sort of laughably shoddy logic that blindsided Darby and motivated him to seek out collaboration with the state.

Remember that we're right. Reason is our home court. We not in any danger of losing an argument on ethics. The very idea is preposterous. We've nothing to fear from deeper examination of any issue; it can only make us quicker and more agile.

There's never any danger in challenging our own ideas because it's our boundless vigilance in our search that differentiates us from the statists. For us there is nothing to be lost and much to be gained in adopting as instinct the habit of questioning our own thoughts and delving deeper.

And yet not only has this become the exception rather than the rule, but we've arguably reached the point where little in our ranks is so despised and frequently spoken against than the practice of thinking things though. We are not a movement of those damnable outdated geeky anarcho-syndicalists, afterall, with their endless prattling on about unsexy things like theory. No, the anarchists of today, we're all about getting things done. Theory insofar only as it directly relates to practice. Obviously it's alright to talk about touchy-feely matters of personal perspective -- that's just a matter of not oppressing one another and tearing ourselves apart in the process of getting shit done -- but constantly exploring our own logic? active philosophical analysis? valuing consistency, coherency and general rootedness? ...talk about your irrelevant circle-jerks.

We've created a situation where vague, nebulous emotional motivations are valorized while vigilant examination is frowned upon. Where a prideful or meritocratic focus on 'getting things done' has trumped actual engagement.

Not only does this create ticking timebombs like Darby, it actively recruits them.

A large swath of the anarchist movement has been set up as an ancillary to liberalism. Folks move from liberal activism, to getting particularly outraged about a given injustice or two (old growth logging, working class exploitation, border enforcement, queer assimilation, thuggish police... etc), which drives them into social circles that sloganistically champion their wider set of preexisting political opinions in a more militant fashion. At one point their grievances against their own government pile up to the point where they stop seeing the state as a tool, ally or arena. There's a little "oh, hey" moment when they realize they no longer support the state, figure they must finally be "anarchists" like everyone around them, and then that's that.

The problem with this transformation is that it's governed by nebulous emotional and social trends. New arguments are seized upon when offered because they seem like an upping of the anti, a deepening of their existing political identity and a strengthening of their resolve. The extremity of the reasoning (and associated action) they encounter is audacious and exhilarating, and to top it all off it makes sense. But the context in which they pick up and adopt these arguments is one of passive integration rather than aggressive engagement.

Folks become entrenched in a social position and engaged in actions that constantly reinforce their emotional commitment, but remain poorly immunized with habits of direct logic and analysis.

Emotional loyalty can deflect the occasional apparent empirical counter-example, and they can shut out particularly successful critiques for a while, but in the long term these at the very least create an unhealthy tension, and at worst prescribe an inevitable break.

Since his proud declaration of proactive complicity in the state's prosecution of certain activists Darby has presented a variety of justifications for his actions. Although excluded from the activist community and demonized by the broader anarchist movement, Darby has nevertheless worked quite diligently to make his reasoning heard. It's an interesting situation because even if his intentions are less than noble, Darby must still assume his arguments are potent.

And that's exactly the problem. Because every justification he's made to in the public press has been laughably stupid:

1. You can get more done by working with the government.

Well yes. But contrary to some myths, 'getting shit done' is not the endall of our activism. We're not anarchists because in today's context an antagonistic position toward political power is particularly effective at getting community centers built or aid distributed or old growth forests protected.

We're called anarchists because we believe the State to be evil. Because we believe power is immoral.

We're anarchists not because we want to reduce the amount of mercury injected into puppies, but because we want to abolish the motherfucking state. We're anarchists because our goal is to abolish all power relations. Everything else is a means to that end. Not vice versa.

Anarchism isn't hardcore-activist-scene trappings. It isn't a "way of doing things"; a tool or commodity on the market that might help you obtain your random political desires. Anarchy IS the desire.

We want something that a centralized power structure by its very nature can't give us: Liberty.

Of course working with the Government will get a homeless shelter built faster than working in open defiance of its zoning restrictions. And sometimes that's needed. But sometimes it's faster to simply occupy an abandoned building.

And sometimes, when you do fight and you help people organize something for themselves outside of the coercive control of the state, it invigorates and inspires them to take the next step in their own lives. Something that working with the government can't do.

2. Disrupting political conventions suppresses the free speech of politicians.

So does punching a censor in the jaw.

As with anything, context matters and means are not exactly the same thing as ends.

Political democracy suppresses free speech by allowing, even encouraging people to vote on what others are allowed to say. Our government has always outlawed the transmission of information that might seriously threaten its continued existence. Simply explaining our ideals is treason punishable with the death penalty -- and would be if they ever thought our plans viable. So if you truly value free speech then it stands to reason that disrupting the political process is its best defense.

Because at the end of the day political conventions are not cafe discussions or roadside protests. The discussion is that of generals and goons meeting to gloat and showcase their plans to suppress all of us.

By their advocates' own admission, completely nonviolent forms of resistance only work in a medium where the information regarding such acts can be transmitted and received. But just how might anyone fight back against those actively using physical force to suppress free speech without disrupting theirs the tiniest bit through our resistance?

Sure, if it was somehow constitutionally, fundamentally impossible for politicians to enact or enforce laws based on say Intellectual Property, Decency, Confidentiality, Libel, Association, Movement, Counterfeiting, Treason, etc... then it might be said that government wasn't inherently suppressing free speech.

Just basing all of its actions off its capacity to murder and imprison us... oh wait.

3. People should openly accept responsibility for their own actions.

Let's examine a case study: Should the French Maquis, after an action against the occupying Germans, reveal their identity and stand out in town square to take the "consequences"?

I mean What. The. Fuck.

The idea that acquiescing to a government's revenge is "taking responsibility for one's actions" is utterly disgusting.

And insulting -- just insulting -- in its flagrant lack of thought.

Yeah, honesty and openness are critical components of any free and just society. But this isn't one. Hiding our faces is a utilitarian decision, and a tricky one to be sure, but we don't live in a free marketplace of ideas and reputations. Again, voicing our beliefs as anarchists is legally classified as Treason. We can be fucking executed for printing a zine.

There are, of course, valid concerns to be had when it comes to unilaterally deciding to up the anti in a situation of collective confrontation. That's an issue of consent, and also of broader strategy. Everyone agrees that bringing a stack of pre-made molotovs to the RNC was sketchy. St. Paul is not Thessaloniki. But obviously there were plenty of ways to stop Crowder and McKay that didn't involve proactively seeking to aid one of the most violent, hierarchical and repressive organizations in the world, the state.

Darby's decision was abhorrent. It was also really fucking stupid. That he hasn't even batted an eyelid, making the above points sincerely, again and again, to anyone who would listen, signals more than anything else that we need to shape up the way that we as a movement, as a culture, approach reason and logic.

Moreover it directly challenges what many people have already taken away as the lesson. We are not going to solve the problem of informants, traitors and cops by drawing lines, falling back on limited circles of trust and clamming up. Being able to shut people and ideas out is not the definition of winning, it's the definition of retreat.

For god's sake, enough of this inane "brute action over inquisitive analysis" fratboy bullshit. We need to grow up. Being able to rattle off a laundry list of invective builds energy but offers no restorative focus in the face of complexities. Depreciating mental explorations that don't immediately lead to actionable proscriptions is suicidal. It's our responsibility to create and maintain a culture of thinking things through. One where discourse on every topic is not only acceptable, but standard fare. Where challenging ourselves intellectually is not derided as masturbation, but as the critical component of our war on power.

Being disinclined to take action is not some passive character trait, but an argument, however cloaked and subconscious, that can and should be openly challenged. Rather than drawing lines and selecting as comrades those that happen to be correctly motivated, we should unceasingly endeavor to create them. And yet our movement is wrapped up in retreat. Progressive insularity and disengagement only broken by mild spurts of semi-inspirational actions. Propaganda through the deed has become an excuse to be 1) incredibly bad at propaganda and 2) incredibly bad at deed.

And you know what? Let me tell you, after a decade's close experience with them, Cops and Informants aren't the ones who don't do anything. They're the ones who can't give you a good reason as to why they're doing it. They revert to emotional appeals and make nebulous statements, but bristle with discomfort and finally hostility when a conversation turns to their rationales. Because emotion is easy to fake while even the most psychopathic of state actors has to justify their own actions to themselves.

That realm of logic is, by necessity, a no-go zone. It must remain their safe space. Something they can depend on, unfettered by serious doubts.

How shallow, how meaningless must have been Brandon Darby's original interpretation of Anarchism that he could carve out a secret mental space in response with ideas as brittle and preposterous as the ones above?

That's our crime. We let that happen. In the culture we created it became inevitable.

But we can build a better one.

I'm not saying that we'll covert every undercover cop at assigned to eat our tofu scramble into double agents (although this has happened). Or that opportunistic psychopathic douchebags will suddenly stop gravitating towards showy activist projects. What I am saying is that if we start holding each other intellectually accountable in our everyday lives we can make their job a hell of a lot harder. And maybe, just maybe, we will no longer have to deal with people ditching the movement and betraying us all for really stupid reasons that they somehow think are profound.

2009-03-18T14:49:00.000-07:00

(Back)

2009-02-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

(Blog Will Return Mid To Late March)

I'm back to taking emails.

2008-12-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

(An Old Quote)

"Technological Development is no more responsible for the suffering of modern world than the Spanish Anarchists were responsible for Franco's atrocities because 'they provoked it.'"

2008-12-02T05:36:00.000-08:00

(Sabbatical Cont.)

With respect to Libcom, while transexual operations may accept or even reinforce gender, they do so by dissolving sex -- and in general I would say that the distinctions of biological identity are far more entrenched in our society. A negation of coerced relational identities is meaningless without a negation of the material conditions those relations are founded upon. Conversely the negation of gender does not mean the complete extinction of mini-skirts and aftershave. The destruction of identity has never meant the abolishment of it; what we oppose is rigidity in relations -- not the medium itself.

Bindel's transphobia is rooted in the same essentialist strand of identity politics that created "just born this way" bourgeois homosexuality. If people aren't free to alter or redesign their own bodies and impulses then under no reasonable definition are they free. While indeed current transexual tendencies seem largely rife with a reification of gender, ask yourself, would a world where neither gender nor sex were reified see transexuals? I think the answer is quite obviously yes. And thus, while some individual cases may be partially rooted in gender programming, the collective existence of transexuals prior to the revolution cannot be counter-revolutionary.

Attacking transfolk as though their gender-sex pairing makes them a fifth column to feminism (or libertarian communism), is exactly like attacking a nurturing girl or rambunctious boy for being a cog in patriarchy. Obviously, being compelled to match conventional sex with conventional gender is atrocious, but the insinuation that the native anarchist stance should be on the reactionary side of body modification itself is fucking horrifying.

No, minority status should not hand the transexual movement a get out of critical analysis free card, but they deserve better than Django's.

2008-11-24T02:33:00.000-08:00

(Dropped Conversations)

As should be obvious by now to everyone but me, I'm on sabbatical. Which is bourgeois for slacking off with friends and allowing my inbox to rewild.

My anarchism has always been less a matter of mathematics or social justice than an outcropping of my romanticism. And this is the first time in four years I've had a breather to catch up and finally deal with something that once happened in that vein. So yeah, I don't really have any projections, don't know what will come of it or when. Just trying to live in the moment again.

No plans or commitments in sight, just total irresponsibility and home-town escapism. Which I swear differs from the norm. May still post random thoughts.

2008-11-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

(Speaking Of Awesome People)

Somebody's uploaded a copy of Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs.

2008-11-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

(In Surprise Election Twist: Americans Like Feeling Good About Being Americans)

The Empire is saved by an overwhelming tsunami of Restored Civic FaithTM, and the Anarchist movement loses all hope at making serious inroads with Black America for a fucking generation.

No word yet on when anarchists are going to learn that nitpicky shit like "real hope is built from below", "one man can't save us all" or "hey, aren't we still killing darkies?" don't carry water because Americans will never, ever, not in a million years rally behind a platform whose first plank implicitly says "we're not that great, let's try to be better."

Americans are the most arrogant people in the world. And we're proud of it.

Right now we're all shitting ourselves delirious over how awesome we are. We elected a black president. And it's not a big deal. And he's all hip and stuff. Woooo! (My heart goes out to all the poor Europeans only now coming to the horrifying realization that their patronizing backhanded anti-bush compliments have ran amuck and turned into popular proof that we're still better than them. I mean, imagine someone with the middle name Hussein being crowned King, Prime Minster and Grand Cheese Poohbah of Britain.)

To turn Americans against their government the very first step is has always been appealing to their patriotism. America: We Kill Kings. America: We Don't Need No Fucking Leaders. America: We're Too Patriotic To Be Nationalistic. America: Freedom In Your Face. America: I Own A Gun To Shoot Cops. America: We Invented The Fucking Revolution. America: We Invited Empire Into Our Living Room For A Reason. America: It's Only A Matter Of Time Before We Do The Fuckers In. America: It Didn't Happen Over Here.

America: The Only Conceivable Ground Zero For The Revolution.

To understand where to go from here, we have to understand that Americans are in no way attached to Obama the individual, Americans are attached to the way Obama makes them feel.

It won't win us any points to stick to our guns and pointing out just how sick and twisted of a psychopath Obama must be to want to rule us all and to actively seek out that position of domination over us. But if we suck up to the sentiment of the moment, pander to localized interests, and accept the image of a noble man while questioning his effectiveness under "the system" we do make three mistakes:

1. We look stupid, shifty and unprincipled.

2. We sound cynical and outdated.

3. We attack the individualist dream.

In short we throw away our strongest points! Anarchism is the most logical and principled position there is. We automatically win every ethical argument vigilantly taken to its conclusion. Anarchism is embedded in every advance and hope for the future. Every modern ethical awakening has struck against hierarchy, every successful component of the information age adopts more and more anarchistic attributes. Anarchism IS the individualist dream. You, you personally, can singlehandedly start the motherfucking revolution. You're going to have to.

Anarchism is not some mechanical proletarian revolt, nor is it some impersonal mathematical reality of laissez-faire economics. And it's certainly not throwing up your hands and saying to hell with it. Anarchism is a simple ethical and philosophical realization: to be a fully living, thinking human being you have to let go of your power over others. They must let go of their power over you.

The thing is, you already know this. (You're awesome.) So why don't you embrace it further. (And be more awesome.)

Things like pesky little election soap operas are just getting in the way. Never mind that Obama cat, he's no where near as awesome as you. So, and I'm just saying this, what have you done today to spread your awesomeness?

2008-11-03T03:07:00.001-08:00

(A World In Which Truly Anyone Can Become Chief Slavemaster)

Written monday night.

I'm not going to vote. This election simply matters too damn much.

Any other year I'd be up for auctioning my vote off for cash or parading photocopies of my original sin in front of anal retentive deontological anarchists. But not this year. This year isn't "nothing changes", this year is us getting punched in the crotch. This year is our nation coming together. This year is 50 million people believing once more that government can be "a positive force in our lives." This is anything we say being stereotyped into the role of the generic cynic: "Obama won't accomplish much. Obama isn't as leftist as everyone thinks." Consequently this is us getting sidelined and horrifically subverted.

It's an inevitable obstacle, but it's an ugly one. We can't afford to take it sitting down, we can't spend a minute cheering with our misty-eyed friends and family members. We have to keep up the offensive. This is not the good president stuck in an intractable and corrupting position. This is a man so psychologically fucked up that he's pursued a vocation entirely based around exerting coercive force on his fellow man. There is nothing a president can do that is not horrifically violent and oppressive. No act possible from that office that is not grounded in state coercion. It's vital we make that clear.

So as much as it pains me to miss out on a chance to piss off my fellow anarchists, I will not be voting in this election.

That said, I will be quietly rooting for Obama.

As much as I can't stand liberals--much less winning liberals--it's simply beyond the pale that I should ever have had to consider the very existence of Evangelical Christians. That we spent eight years considering what young earth creationists have to think as the slightest bit relevant is an affront to common decency. It doesn't matter if we douche our country clean with fucking hydrocloric acid (Obama: The Acid, The Presidency: Our Nation's Sphincter), we need to get rid of them before our nation dies of embarrassment. (This must be what it feels like to be British and wake up every morning knowing no one's yet guillotined the Queen.) Ideally I'd like to see bits of their brains splattered on the street, but I'll settle for electorally bloodied noses. It's just common decency.

...Also, Obama will dramatically raise expectations within the black community. For all the bourgeois cultural damage he'll wreck upon black america, at the end of the day thousands more geeky black kids will survive to adulthood. You can't put a price tag on that.

2008-11-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

(Single Link Onion Post -- Because I Roll Like It's The 90s)

Struggling Lower-Class Still Unsure How Best To Fuck Selves With Vote

2008-10-31T05:33:00.001-07:00

(Heh)

Congratulations where congratulations are due for getting quoted in Slate.

2008-10-26T00:40:00.000-07:00

(The Dustbin Of Absolute Fucking Irrelevancy)

While I'm ruffling feathers,

Marx's theory of the crises of capitalism is little more than a melodramatic description of the business cycle - standard fare in economic analysis. Every original contribution that Marx made to our understanding of capitalism is demonstrably false: the working class does not become increasingly immiserated; the class structure does not become increasingly polarised; no society has evolved from feudalism through capitalism to communism; the iron law of wages is fallacious; the State does not wither away when capitalism is abolished. Marx will continue to be neglected by serious scholars because he was wrong in every important respect. (via)

The question I always have for workerists and everyone else with irrevocably class-war tinted sunglasses is this: What if capitalism is actually leading us to a classless society?

What if a rising tide really does lift all boats (and assorted driftwood) and, as globalization is finalized over the next few centuries, every last human on earth is systematically subsumed into the bourgeoisie? Or what if the upper classes just ship the lower classes off to an incinerator one day? And do you really think that wage labor will have any relevancy to future iterations of capitalism? What happens if the humps on the graph of wealth distribution dissolve into a Gaussian curve? Or a smooth exponential? Or even a flatline of absolute material equality -- do you think that would necessarily have one fucking iota of effect on net oppression?

I'm an anarchist, for god's sake. I do not oppose a specific type of power systems. I oppose power systems.

2008-10-19T21:49:00.001-07:00

(Drama)

Because what the movement needs right now is more blindly anti-intellectual romantic double-speak.

Since organizationalists are annoying idiots... clearly the only alternative is to turn teh anarky into an emotional-support wankfest! Because with enough sexy metaphors and cute turns of phrase we can rewrite any reality to make us feel good about ourselves. We're awesome! Go team chaos!

Step 1: Smash stuff!

Step 2: Magic!

Step 3: Twenty-thousand years of ingrained, complex interlocking social psychoses reinforced by a global material infrastructure dissolves!

All we ever really needed to do was punch some things and then talk about our feelings in a circle. Maybe it'll be excruciatingly hard, with lots of internal hierarchies and horrible mistakes, but the details will work themselves out! Through The People! Shortcuts are for losers. Remember to say "praxis" a lot and equate thinking things through with inaction and ineffectiveness. And if that doesn't work "Theorist" is a one size fits all slur capable of dismissing any challenging idea and reducing your opponents to anarcho-syndicalist, campus-Marxist caricatures. Why I bet they use the internet. Geeks! Flush their heads down the toilet!

Anarchism: "We're against things that are bad."

What? You want more detail? Go read some pretentious faux-philosophical litcrit build on associative appeals that can be read to mean pretty much anything. It's alright to read a little Kropotkin, as long as you don't get infected with the dread Science. Facts are imperialism! Logic is slavery!

If you're not for throwing bricks at Starbucks then you're for selling newspapers! Viva la cliche!

2008-10-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

(Some Things)

Sorry about my absence.

Blogroll's been updated.

Hack Bloc has a wonderful new site, resplendent in the emerging black & blue color scheme of tech-positive anarchist tendencies. (see also)

Roderick has a pair of brilliantly simple articles up on the Art of the Possible. They are Required Reading, and will be on the final exam:

How An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Socialism Became An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Capitalism

Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis