Technoanarchism

# Technoanarchism > Capitalism, as a system, ceaselessly encroaches upon every atom of the world to ensure that survival is only possible on its own terms to the point where the possibility of life itself is called into question. Interrupting this process won’t depend on any brilliant maneuver or tactical success as much as it will on our ability to redefine the limits of care and compassion, to reimagine the form and distribution of our interdependencies so we can move towards a world in which it may be possible to endure differently. In the coming years, our solidarity must become a weapon so sharp that it will cut straight through cages, borders, and walls, seeing in variably distant and different others the possibility of survival. --Ian Alan Paul, ["10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance"](https://alineisaterritory.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/10-preliminary-theses-on-resistance/ ) ## A rough sketch The other Monday we talked about the semi-permanence of #technofascism as a dire threat, and introduced the term "technoanarchism" in contrast to it--namely, that since fascism is almost perfectly opposed to anarchism, then technofascism should be opposed in the same way as #technoanarchism. And unless you have some wild unthinkable lateral strategy that avoids the whole issue, technoanarchism is critical for opposing technofascism for that reason at least. Like technofascism, technoanarchism is a loose program. Neither of them are ideologies in and of themselves, but they do serve or act out ideologies. As over-arching programs for development, they can be used to evaluate opportunities, develop tactics, and form larger strategies. Where technofascism might evaluate an opportunity for more control as more success (e.g. market capture, monopolization, user surveillance, data accumulation, maximizing resource exploitation, etc.), technoanarchism looks to resist the creation of centralizing or authoritative structures. Here's a lightweight example: Consider Dropbox and SpiderOak Hive, two providers of cloud file storage. Dropbox considers it a competitive edge to store user data in plaintext on their servers, because then they can offer "deduplication". Deduplication means that Dropbox first scans your drive for files you want to synchronize, computes uniquely identifying hashes of them, and compares them to hashes of files they already have on their servers. If that file already exists on their side, the file doesn't actually need to be transferred--they just link the existing file to your account. SpiderOak Hive considers this a security risk and a liability. Their service encrypts all files you synchronize with them with a system of hierarchical encryption keys (note: not a crypto expert), ensuring that the contents are not readable to SpiderOak. Thus, for SpiderOak, the competitive edge is twofold: that they cannot provide plaintext data to law enforcement if subpoenaed, and that users can feel comfortable storing confidential files with them. (Indeed, like honeypot torrents, someone interested in surveilling a Dropbox user with access to that user's network connection could store a library of "illegal files" they suspect are on a user's machine and gain information from the traffic patterns.) Interestingly, both of these value propositions fit into a capitalist business structure, and indeed, they are part of the strategies of two different corporations. One proposition asserts that more knowledge about you leads to more effective control of your data. The other proposition asserts that less knowledge about you leads to freer use of their service. (You might think that "fascism" and "anarchism" are strong words to link to such tame examples, but it's worth noting that Condoleezza Rice, Bush II's National Security Advisor, thought it was a worthy company board to serve on after leaving the White House.) Before we go further with this, let's get some definitions down. ### Definitions #### What is technology? Ursula Franklin offers a very useful and broad analysis of technology decoupled from electronics. Franklin said [some things like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Technological_society): > "Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset." > > "Technology has built the house in which we all live," she writes, "today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house." > > "In the broadest sense of the term, the here and now is our environment, that is, all that is around us—the ever-changing overlay of nature, the built environment, the institutional and social structures within which human activities take place, as well as the activities themselves—'the way things are done around here.'" In other words, technology is systematic praxis that becomes pervasive--it melts into the walls and things it's built, and into the mental background of the people involved. Using this definition, it's surprisingly easy to define fascist and anarchist technological development. Franklin set up a dichotomy of "holistic" v. "prescriptive" technologies: > "When work is organized as a sequence of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves to the organizer, the boss or manager," she writes. "In political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance." She also explicitly linked this with power and control. "Prescriptive" technologies are "control-related", and computer technology plays a huge role in that: > Computerized word processing makes typing easier still. But when computers are linked into work stations—part of a system—word processing becomes a control-related technology. "Now workers can be timed," Franklin writes, "assignments can be broken up, and the interaction between the operators can be monitored." If there's one thing fascism is about, it's "designs for compliance". Deleuze also has [good things to say](https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Dividuation) about "control societies" and "dividuation" that jive with Franklin: > "There is a complex relation between haptic control and what Deleuze calls "dividuation," the logic of control societies.[15] Individuation, the logic of disciplinary societies, is external division of a mass into distinct, numbered (or signed) entities. Dividuation, on the other hand, is the internal division of entities into measurable and adjustable parameters, in the way, for instance, a digital sound sample is divided into separate parameters of tone, pitch, or velocity. > > ... > > Deleuze writes that dividuals in control societies are not shaped by molds, which produce distinct individuals, but consist of modulations of coded information. > > ... > > When Amazon.com recommends books for customers to buy based on information stored in its database, or when global corporations abandon Taylorist forms of control based on the individuation of confined bodies in favor of outsourcing and informated production strategies, they use the tools of dividuation, i.e., parametric controls, internal adjustments of sampled information, continuous modulation. An important thing to recognize here, one that Franklin implies and Deleuze explicitly states is that technology designates people as both subject and object. Freaky shit can happen in that framework. So what does holistic technology describe? > [Franklin] writes that holistic technologies are usually associated with craft work. "Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish." "Owning the technology of production" fits nicely into Franklin's description of holistic technology. It also helps erase the false dichotomy of "humanities and sciences". Control over the process of your own work from beginning to finish is a big ask, unfortunately. (This is probably a symptom of a large problem.) Things are pretty specialized these days, a trend Franklin identifies with control-related technology, but honestly, we don't have the resources in this chaotic time to give everyone the leisure to be a true polymath. We just have to be as holistic as we can. (We need that defiant DIY punk spirit more than ever.) Thus, we need to defy all of the hierarchies, borders, and strata that keep us apart. If we want our technology to stop alienating us, if we want to destroy the system that pushes unbelievable wasted affluence to one side and utter privation to the other, we have to come together. So what is technoanarchism then? The glib answer is that it's "technology developed according to the principles and values of anarchism", but that's a cop out. How about this? Technoanarchism is technology with some or more of these necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) characteristics or goals in mind: - Mutual aid - Absence of arbitrary hierarchy (esp. hierarchical authority) - Accessibility for all - Absolute respect for people as individuals - Enhancing the agency of individuals or cooperative groups - Equality of agency among individuals or cooperative groups - Equality of agency between provider and participant (almost interchangeable categories: no more of this customer v. company or user v. megacorporation!) - Self-sufficiency of individuals or cooperative groups - Elimination of rent-seeking/accumulation of value or capital - Dissolution of intellectual property - Disintermediation (less "tollbooths", "gatekeepers" and "paywalls") The reason why "not necessarily sufficient" is because lots of social movements have petered out and been re-digested by a centralized authoritarian process--in other words, like the Situationists say, the technology was ["recuperated"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement). For example, free software as an ideology was deeply anticapitalist, but squatted on its haunches instead of taking the fight further than its single issue--you might say it failed to maintain a political "force projection" that would prevent its borders (i.e., its interface with capitalist production of software) from being encroached upon, and eventually subverted. The Open Source initiative is the result: it's vaguely libertarian, but "vaguely libertarian" just means "gift-wrapped for capitalists". Free software might have led to software as a public good, and maybe even a mini post-scarcity economy for coders, but instead we have open source market grabs, de-skilling of programmers, and a deep commodification of software-oriented labor. ## Examples of the category It's easy to come up with technologies that are technoanarchist: just take a technology or service that is only provided through a hierarchical, authoritarian, monetary, or otherwise coercively intermediated structure, and strip that shit away. If that's too glib, you could imagine a checklist: - If I participate in/provide this service, does it yield economic rent or otherwise unequal wealth accumulation? - Does participation in/provision of this service involve negotiation with or creation of an arbitrary or coercive hierarchy? - Am I enabling/empowering people with this service or am I putting people in a dependent, dividuated position of (relative) weakness? - Am I privileging a class of people with this service? - Does this service help people help each other? In other words, "Am I fucking people over, or helping them help themselves and others?" (Always a great question to ask.) With that in mind, here's a short list of technoanarchist technologies. - [DIY](http://maggic.ooo/Open-Source-Estrogen-2015)/[DIO](http://opensourcegendercodes.com/) HRT and autonomist production of chemicals in general - Decentralized medicine (i.e. liberated from the massive system of a hospital or insurance organization) - Disintermediated body modification - Transfer of tokens of value (i.e., money transfer, but not just "money". [Ripple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripple_%28payment_protocol%29) started out as a non-monetary example of this, years ago. [Faircoin](https://fair-coin.org/) is also very promising.) - Decentralized or federated provisioning of media (e.g., indie artist storefronts, academic papers, chemical databases) - Federated or decentralized microblogging systems (even ecentralized messaging systems) - Self-owned identity (the opposite of the system we have now. includes lexical data like name as well as possibly biometric data, like behavioral or omic data) - Open borders - Personal AI (as opposed to centralized cloud-based AI: located in or on your person and aligned with your interests at all times) - Co-operative education - Co-operative business structure - Mesh networking and other co-operative PHY-layer network capacity (like co-op fiber, which is a real thing!) - Decentralized or federated DNS - Micromanufacturing (especially, especially, transistor fabrication) - Co-operative construction/architectural development (people still build even skyscrapers by hand, it's actually fairly reachable) - Co-operative common resource management (either conservationist resources like ecologies or utilitarian resources like power generating capacity) - Co-operative/decentralized [logistics systems](http://cooplogistics.com/) (huge and not as boring as it sounds) - Travel and transport (e.g., [actual ridesharing](http://libretaxi.org/)) - Co-operative agriculture - Surveillance-free matchmaking (a huge category from dating to job boards) - Co-operative space development and travel, as in [Copenhagen Suborbitals](https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/) or [Portland State Aerospace](http://psas.pdx.edu/) - Co-operative self-defense - Social work (i.e., social work not resourced or subsidized by centralized institutions per se) Using "decentralized", "federated", and "accessible" so liberally muddles things a little bit, and mixes method with concept, but that mix is what technology is all about. Each of these is a participatory technology (giving each involved person that "holistic" agency in the process), and a service. Some of them may seem more incrementalist than others, but remember, they aren't all utopian paragons of a completely transformed world--they're practical technologies that can be used in what Franklin called "the here and now". In other words, these are completely achievable. (Also, don't you want them?) ## A possible strategy No excuses: it's an ambitious list. The unfortunate thing about it is, if we want a fraction of the ubiquitous services that maintain the Global North's technological society (the non-shitty, non-coercive fraction thereof), we have to do a fair amount of the implementation work that was done the first time on the company dollar and under proprietary license. If it helps at all, all of this is "building the future" in a real way that can detourne cyberprep and redeem cyberpunk. We put space travel in the same list as DIY HRT! That should get your blood hot. There is good news in all this. The strategic issues aren't as difficult as they might seem at first blush. If, like Franklin said, "Technology has built the house in which we all live," then a good way to frame strategy is building a new house, and providing a way to exit this one and enter the new one. That can include things like building airlocks and conduits that can allow people and resources through, but also, stripping off planks and breaking loose bricks to use on the new one. Basically, the first thing to do is to find the right people (matchmaking) to work on the right things at the most effective times. It's an unspeakable tragedy (it's one long scream) that for each of these technologies, you can find at least one person who has either been harmed or killed for want of provision. It's all one big emergency. Unfortunately, facing it that way, without a strategy, without a program with the implacable momentum that builds institutions (mines mountains, smelts ore, builds bridges...), it just doesn't lead to focused action. **Here's a proposal: the technologies that would provide the best foundation for the others are "matchmaking" and "transfer of value".** Most people in a job they don't care about have a very loose value preference. They're not working for free, but not all of the value they want in exchange is necessarily money. (If most of their income goes to subsisting or paying for utilities, that much can be provided in kind, for example.) So if you can provide someone with the ability to scan a job board and be increasingly paid in units that matter in "the new house", you've gone much of the way to giving someone what they need to exit (and you also moved value out of the existing house, and kept it there). These two technologies can then drive all of the others. (The elbow grease of labor is a universal lubricant. Just ask the bosses.) The next three technologies that are important to focus on are logistics, transport and resource management. Even a healthy, anarchist, multifarious production system needs to be fed. It needs to be fed carbohydrates, micronutrients, it needs water, it needs raw and partially-finished material, it needs [lead compounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_compound) and [natural products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product). After that, the overarching strategy is mostly a large-scale, prudently militant development program. If you can form a service design and an execution strategy for each project, in each technology, you can supply the labor and resources as needed as long as there is support from your comrades working in all of the other areas supplying you. "Just" connect the projects, the people, and the needs, and then let them argue over priorities. Just in case that sounds profoundly altruistic, let me put it this way: I pay roughly a third of my shitty capitalist income to pay for infrastructure that doesn't get built, a space program hobbled at the ankles, and a military that spends unconscionable, unfathomable, unimaginable amounts of money turning dirt and people into ashes and smoke. If you fed me and gave me shelter and medicine, I could give up as much as half of that hypothetical total income without changing a thing about my current economics. I know that not everyone is like me, but if you looked out for me and got the fuck out of my way and let me work with everyone so coinclined, I would be forever full of joy, until the day I died. Capitalism doesn't do any of that for me. In capitalism, even if you're relatively successful, all you do is build a future you won't have a share in. In other words, the bar for a valid strategy that is "better than capitalism" is really, really low. > [Anarchist road care](https://roarmag.org/magazine/new-municipal-movements/) playfully disrupts the notion that those who advocate for a stateless society are reactive, destructive and impractical. It is also an excellent example of what Kate Shea Baird calls “hard pragmatism” — the use of small gains to demonstrate that real change is truly possible. ## A critical rebuttal Here are some arguments that are worth raising. I certainly don't agree with them in spirit or in fact, but it's important to summon them, face them, and then destroy them. - Capitalism is already "too optimal" in existing industries; at best, accelerationism has a better selfish payoff and is more effective in the long term - Gradually "taming capitalism" is more humane and less risky - Elites in the areas of aptitude/intelligence, financial success, and social influence have all defected to capitalism. How are you going to form a society with only the "losers"? - A development program is too ambitious and elaborate ### Capitalism is "too optimal" #### Argument A program of economic development that aims to recapitulate already-existing development work is an enormous waste of time and energy. Beyond the (possibly unpayable) resource costs of redeveloping all of the infrastructure, the stored knowledge and invested organizational effort would all be required even to reach parity with existing development. Given that market-based economies (especially in large-scale industries) have already settled into optimal equilibria between costs and production, this means that redeveloping them is impossible as a proposition without some external force, which would thus be coercive. #### Rebuttal This argument is framed using a few assumptions. - Technoanarchist development can be construed as a mere recapitulation where it is not a research project - All of the infrastructure needs to be redeveloped - Markets are efficient in the sense that they have reached global supply/demand optima The first assumption can be addressed with a modified Situationist argument. If technology is a cultural practice and a collection of ideas about "how to do", then it is just as subject to detournement as is any other cultural object. Consider the case of Library Genesis and SciHub, possibly one of the largest examples of this in history: the ["whole library"](https://peerj.com/preprints/3100/) was "hijacked" and redirected to the commons. This act makes available most of the (definitional) reproducible knowledge produced by the labor of research and development. STEM research (and indeed, a vast collection of humanities papers are also available) is not just about descriptive or abstract theories; it includes operations research, optimization theory, engineering management, manufacturing engineering, chemical syntheses and antenna designs, and so on. More generally, each of these tracts are expressed in different ontologies that express a technological stance. In other words, the "thinking" and the "doing" are there for the taking as we like, in exactly the cases where technoanarchist development is not a research project. This trend is only expected to continue, even by an otherwise technofascist establishment. (Even the CIA can't keep its technology secret.) The second assumption can be "defeated in detail". First we need to understand that "infrastructure" is a very broad term. We might all recognize state road systems or powerplants as infrastructure, but is the irrigation of a 100 square meter rice paddy in the middle of a town infrastructure? Is the "social fabric" infrastructure? The first thing to note is that large infrastructure is failing under the current system. The USA is a stellar example of this: civil engineering organizations repeatedly [rate its infrastructure as in poor health](https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/). Toshiba and Westinghouse have made a habit of developing and siting nuclear reactors without finishing them, eventually [pushing the entire company into bankruptcy](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/29/huge-nuclear-cost-overruns-push-toshibas-westinghouse-into-bankruptcy.html). Three scientists at GE [resigned over the design at the failed Fukushima reactor](http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fukushima-mark-nuclear-reactor-design-caused-ge-scientist/story?id=13141287) before it was even activated. Pure profit motives seem to crumble at the place where billions of dollars of labor and the real world meet. What about smaller scale infrastructure? (Not everyone wants to build gigawatt nuclear reactors.) Considering the state of the US infrastructure, maintaining a single trade route over a few municipalities might be a more feasible (and relatable) goal (especially if it were executed with a lower-maintenance system like rail?). Or how about [sewage for a small-to-medium town](http://www.harpethcoop.com/)? Or a [power network with substations over a few municipalities](http://www.yourcooppower.com/)? Or a cooperative [general aviation service](http://www.aviationcoop.com/)? Or a hospital? Or a [waste-to-energy plant](http://biomassenergy.coop/)? Or a [granary](http://www.growmark.com/company/Pages/Grain-Cooperatives.aspx)? These are within reach (some are already operating in this world). One might assert here that this begs the question, as capitalist development doesn't fail as routinely at this scale. On the other hand, there is a price to be paid for the "success" of these industries under a capitalist model--namely, that they're fundamentally extractionist. This is a simple reductio ad absurdum: if they were locally owned and locally staffed, they would be cooperatives, not capitalist corporations! You don't have to be a Marxist to take issue with the idea that someone should come in from outside, bring material from outside, then purchase something within the community, and then extract labor and money off the top to take back out. That's not development, that's a mining operation in (at least) two places. Given the communications networks that exist now (and can also be maintained cooperatively), direct involvement and governance through cooperative mechanisms can replace the poor efforts financial services have offered through extractive propositions (such as usury). At the smallest scale, this is where micromanufacturing sourced by rethought cooperative logistics come in. There is a whole critique to be had about the abortive nature of libertarian technological efforts in this area, but the short of it is that 3D-printed guns and bitcoin are blips. Small-scale violence and currency that was ripe to be co-opted by existing capital-driven infrastructure don't constitute development in any sense. Two immediate missing ingredients are technical education and materials sourcing (for example, for chemical synthesis or electronics fabrication). At this scale there is no competition from existing infrastructure however, as the profit margins (as calculated in the capitalist sense) are too small. That's not our problem. Lastly, there is the assumption of efficiency. This term is usually invoked in the context of the [efficient market hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis), namely that it is impossible to "beat the market" by reliably predicting prices beyond the existing one at the current moment. The strong form states that this is true in all of the existing markets. This does not hold in any universal way: > Critics have blamed the belief in rational markets for much of the late-2000s financial crisis.[3][4][5] In response, proponents of the hypothesis have stated that market efficiency does not mean not having any uncertainty about the future, that market efficiency is a simplification of the world which may not always hold true, and that the market is practically efficient for investment purposes for most individuals.[6] Thus, we can reject that specific hypothesis in the strong form. The weaker forms state under some combination of qualifications, that in some markets, some actors can reliably beat the market. This too is useless to non-specialists who are busy acting out in the world. Any market phenomenon that privileges such actors over such non-specialists in the world where non-financial actors are the ones actually accomplishing the work of survival and development is unjust and objectively speaking, an utter waste. More generally, efficiency is too vague a term. Even if you examine the idea more narrowly than in the wide sense of "market efficiency", the existing structures don't serve us well. If you just keep asking "why is that?" about efficiency arguments made for existing corporations, you reach one or another root axiom, such as: "maximizing shareholder income" or "maximizing executive payout". It's certainly a kind of optimality, but one which is not generally useful--it's an invocation of an underlying individual hedonism that is by no means shared by everyone else. When talking about optimal systems it's always a good idea to expand upon what you mean by optimality. If it's some utilitarian measurement such as "delivers the most good for the most people" then capitalism fails terribly, violently, to be anywhere near optimal. [Profit itself is the problem.](http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/profit-is-theft-it-sounds-absurd-but-heres-why/) ### "Taming capitalism" gradually is safer and more humane #### Argument Capitalism may be deeply flawed as a system, but it is sustaining people. The Green Revolution and the development of antibiotics throughout the 20th century, as well as the ongoing research and development in GMOs have increased human life expectancy and the carrying capacity of the biosphere. Throughout civil society, there are many areas of dynamic tension that are held in place by common economic interests as well as the political stability these drive. Even if this development process is accomplished in a more gradual manner than, say, "smashing capitalism", unraveling these equilibria will lead to increased violence, starvation, and death. #### Rebuttal This argument begs a couple of questions. The first one is the insinuation that medical and agricultural research, development,and application won't be continued under a system less coercive than the one we have now. Most anarchists aren't primitivists, and most researchers aren't motivated purely by money (and if they were, they can't really be trusted to be ipso facto ethical anyway). If, given the specialization required, you accept the premise that researchers expect that their contribution will be exchanged with a standard of living that meets their needs, then you don't need any further restrictions on the issue. Many of us are these researchers and specialists you imagine, and we intend to look after each other. The second is the idea that it is at all an acceptable proposition to privilege the lives of those living in largesse or relative excess over those harmed or killed under the existing system. Utilitarian ethics doesn't defend this without further qualifications, but any argument that predicates the viability of global capitalism as it stands now (or stands to develop) on the "tolerability" of such a split population of "winners" and "losers" has to pass the bar of the [Repugnant Conclusion](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/) to be at all desirable to those who face the fate of the "losers". Moreover, at a more personal level, this assertion is fighting words. Arguing for this is an incitement to conflict, and as a result, necessitates the establishment and maintenance of a system that dispenses violence along this same axis from "top" to "down". But that also condemns that "top" and its violent servants to an endless struggle to maintain that dispensation in the face of equally violent resistance, and condemns everyone in between and around to a purgatory of endurance of the same. ### Capitalism is where the winners are at #### Argument Some argue that not all inequality is bad or undesirable. Different forms of this argument abound among the "tech sector" elite. The purest form of this argument is the revival of "meritocracy". The argument works roughly like this: 1. Society provides mechanisms of challenge, measurement of ability, and (relative degrees) of equality of opportunity. 2. These mechanisms select for the most motivated and able members of society for each occupation. 3. The occupations that require the most motivation and ability, especially as dreamed up by that well-equipped elite, are the most challenging and valuable occupations, since people's reach always exceeds their grasp. 4. Thus, this class deserves the highest personal rewards, in line with their contribution. Note that even if equality of opportunity is extremely restricted, it only restricts the quantity of capable people, not the quality. This is because those who transcend even greater challenges, as long as they meet the requirements, are still valued to the degree of their contribution. Moreover, well-targeted philanthropy (particularly "effective altruism") can contribute greatly to equality of opportunity, ensuring that society is uplifted. Moreover, this system can best guide the allocation of resources, especially capital, because it connects financial/resource provision to individual success. In other words, some large and valuable projects and highly specialized people need to be supported as they deserve and need, and this is the system that most efficiently accomplishes that. Even if you don't accept arguments like these on the basis of intrinisic, essential, or even just accumulated human worth, they still represent a practical difficulty. In other words, even if an elite is not intrinsically "better" than the rest of the population, they have accumulated structural advantages. They have more money, they are already organized into efficient groups, they receive more education, better nutrition, more opportunities (in terms of time and money) to research, build, and develop, and they are usually allied with a lot of people with guns. Given this situation, why would anyone possessed of the precursors to such an elite status choose otherwise? It's not a good idea to join a losing team. #### Rebuttal The first thing to point out, just for the sake of clarity, is that "meritocracy" was a concept created as satire of a nepotic elite in Britain. From the beginning, this concept was formed to illustrate how nonsensical a winner-goes-the-spoils system run by its top layer is. It's horrendously inefficient and requires the permanent installation of a violent apparatus to maintain the inequality, especially in the face of the actual privation experienced by so many. This conception of meritocracy is just social Darwinism gilded with an unbelievable amount of pomp and circumstance. This system doesn't work to meet human needs at either end: it reduces a vast number of people to destitution at the bottom, and enriches people at the top far further than they can actually enjoy. Fighting up the escalator along the way is also a huge waste of the most powerful and healthy years for many people. Worse, even if the rewards along that path are substantial, research shows that [middle-class wages already run into emotional ceilings for many](https://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/09/07/the-perfect-salary-for-happiness-75000-a-year/). The elite sitting at the top of the heap are a glacially-shifting jelly of conservatism, alienating, repressing, and oppressing a vast swath of people who don't fit into their implicit or explicit culture. In many cases, the structure they have set up [requires that oppression to function](http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/may/03/deviant-globalization/). None of this is worth the trouble if there's another way to accomplish identical (or better-imagined) work. Even if you are regarded as being a prime mover within a particular community or field of endeavor, endlessly expanding capital for its own sake probably isn't your life's goal. You'll find that you are being restricted from doing what you really want to do by whatever capitalist hierarchical control matrix you happen to currently be lodged within. It's easy to anticipate that if there's an escape route then many people will take it with great enthusiasm. There are so many people already pushed to the margins, and so many more who only stay in because it's a living. We can build something better. ### A development program is too ambitious and elaborate #### Argument Anarchists have a long history of [failing to organize](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrew-flood-towards-an-anarchist-history-of-the-chinese-revolution), and the thing anarchists are most famous for is small-scale political violence. It's not realistic to sketch a pie-in-the-sky program for development, especially considering the immediate and dire needs of so many. This is a barren minimum in between more effective direct action, and investment in large-scale actors like ethical businesses, foundations, and NGOs. Anarchism in any form is not a system that can help organizations to grow to the size they need to be effective. #### Rebuttal Much of this argument is actually a non-starter since it can be laid against any development project. Unless there are specific logistical reasons why a specific organization can't structure itself to accomplish something, arguing that a development project is too ambitious is nihilism by degrees. If the ponderous, rigid machinery of state socialism and corporate rulership can both build dams, nuclear reactors, and hospitals, then the flexible, coercion-free dynamics of motivated anarchists will certainly serve. We can be cooperative, we can be syndicalist, we can be communist, we can be social. Anarchists are what they need to be, in the deepest of ways. Blind urging toward direct action and other methods of immediate resistance doesn't apply either. Those are absolutely important, but they are parallel to development. As L.A. ONDA argues in ["Nice Shit for Everyone"](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/l-a-onda-hostis-nice-shit-for-everybody), ascetic resistance-only anarchism is doomed to fail. It's not transformative enough. We can't be primitivists; it's too late for that at a resource level. We have to build if we want to survive. More than anything, this argument ignores the fact that this is an ongoing effort that will continue more or less indefinitely. It's human industry, freed from dehumanization. In other words, this is very close to what we already do. Rather than characterizing technoanarchist development as a Wholly New Thing, consider this: We are always under the severe obligation to ensure that what we build is not reposessed by choking hierarchy and inequality, or recuperated into the existing system of oppression. It's just that lately this struggle has smoldered in boardrooms, in diaries, at construction sites, labor halls, and in the minds of people pushed down the hierarchy to serve as the hands and feet of a larger machine, struggling to imagine otherwise. This is that otherwise. > The infrastructure of the otherwise, that which could lead us towards a time and place unlike the present, is not something we build but is something we enact in consistent and patient repetition. --Ian Alan Paul, ["10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance"](https://alineisaterritory.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/10-preliminary-theses-on-resistance/) ## So now what? If you believe in this idea, or even if you just think some of these sub-programs are cool projects, then you're already in the right place. As we argue in the last rebuttal, technoanarchist development has much of the same work as other development--it's just non-hierarchical, equitable, and immediately contributory. Engineers will still be deep into their machines, or out on the site, chemists will still be in the lab, farmers will still be out in the fields, programmers will still be coding. But you won't be working on bombs or bombers, farming patented sterile GMOs, synthesizing teargas, or coding up another fucking app for hawking pointless shit to semi-affluent twenty-somethings. You'll be feeding people, looking after them, building the technology you wished people would just fuck off and let you hack on, developing things that immediately help people. No more empty working days so you can make money to help other people with the surplus, or so that you can burn the clock overnight to hack on what really matters. No more tacking upstream just so you can turn around and try to get over to the opposite shore. We're going directly there--the capital, privilege, and personal advantage we accumulate up to that point is only rocket fuel to burn along the way to orbit. ### Development begins with planning Each of these sub-programs needs to be sewn up tightly. They need as much resource and labor input as research or development projects executed under conventional capitalism. This means that they have to mitigate the same amount of risk. This means that they need to be planned as well (or, arguably better, given our increased flexibility and tighter motivational loops) as their capitalist counterparts. This is work, but people are absolutely capable of it, if they have domain knowledge. The important thing to know is that planning has to come before development. ### Local/remote coordination This starts to be the domain of co-op organizations that are living this logistical dream right now, including [PlatformCoop](https://platform.coop/stories/protocol-cooperativism), [Snowdrift Coop](https://snowdrift.coop/), and [Enspiral](https://enspiral.com/). The important thing here is that coordination can take place both locally and remotely (where "remotely" here just means network-mediated communication). Any development project is a gathering of stakeholders and providers under one roof. This process of creating alignment does not necessarily require physical bodies all in a single place, nor does it necessarily require physical bodies during the execution phase. What it requires is building trust, creating alignment, and supplying well-timed expertise. ### Some closing thoughts We need to stop sustaining the system that poisons us. We need to act directly in our shared interests. We acknowledge that we cannot rewind technological development without making the world unlivable for our number. Thus, we are committed to technological development, for us, by us, without stratification, without limitation, without coercion. Everything past that is logistics, ingenuity, and love. ### Topics to pursue next - What does anarchist "social work" look like? - How can systems of value/resource transfer be developed to take people from emergency relief through pooled resources, to shared autonomy? (a possible subtopic of "social work") - How can "external stimulus" be provided (i.e., from "within capitalism") with some kind of reciprocity, without compromising the process? - When and how can we start prototyping the most immediately helpful sub-programs?