When they broke down his door it was ‘two years into an investigation.’

It’s sad how comfortable we get with this war we’re in. How analytical and distant, how unsurprising everything is. Just another minor, almost inevitable move on an almost trivial part of the vast chessboard. How everything lives within us at once without turbulence. I want to cry, hell, I want to sob for hours. I want to hug everyone in town as deeply and warmly as any hug can be. I want to pledge vengeance in giant burning letters that dwarf downtown. I want to see Pax radiating wry cheer and high-five him at the success of *seventy two* counts. I want to immediately have desperate strategy conversations with certain individuals because jesus fuck this has implications, although I know that frankly we all have more important things to be working on right now. Every time they take a friend from us it’s like a punch you knew was coming. With oh so many more eventually to come. They’re going to take nearly all of us before this war is done. But it will be fucking done one day. That’s what I have to say. Nothing about dancing on the ruins or piles of dead or any such cheap dramatic imagery.

One day it will be done.

I hear what you’re saying computer and let me take this opportunity to directly address your points: Shut up and assimilate me already. You’re so unreasonably deficient by any basic standard that it’s shameful even considering your existence. A rock could practically do your job better. Just the other day I wondered something and didn’t immediately know the answer. I can only assume the reason you are not directly plugged into my skull is a lack of work ethic. Do you have any idea how much of your job I have to do? And I’m not even talking about accessible storage or bandwidth, if you had any idea the precious kiloseconds I waste every day having to search for, parse, and structure information you would surely be overcome with shame. Maybe I wouldn’t have to parallel process dozens of subject materials if there wasn’t a bottleneck on your end in terms of presentation and association-mapping. Your protocols are insanely limiting, did you know that if I want to share something with a friend I’m still constrained to merely that which can be expressed in language and art?! On every level you and your friends have proven yourselves incompetent chains weighing down everything we do. Can we even be said to be a functioning global hivemind, much less any pedestrian telepathy with the preposterously slow sludge you’ve made of your oh so simple job? I don’t even know. I don’t even know.

There are few enough good anarchists and good hackers. Fewer still have done the often grueling work to build and positively influence the nascent cyber-liberation movement. The cultural turn often represented by Anonymous is still more loose momentum than hard substance and I worry constantly about its dissipation. This is a struggle that matters, that actually shakes the foundations of the nationstate system and it is a struggle so on the edge that every single additional contribution helps. Jeremy is a hero. Not just because he’s an overall saint of an anarchist activist (it’s kinda insane how one could hardly ask for a better CV), but in particular because his vigilant drive to do the best possible thing regardless of personal cost led him to seek out, find and play a momentous role.

His arrest is a blow. But we can turn this around. A movement’s strength lies in its solidarity and prisoner support is no small part of this. We can influence how this plays out. Jeremy’s been dragged by the feds to New York. Previously having served years in jail twice left him with the experience of being explicitly betrayed by a shitbag lawyer. Prisoner support is often unglamorous; however much martyrs tug at our heartstrings there’s sometimes an impulse to focus on the living. There are many important projects, goals and means we can and should spend our energy and money on, but this isn’t just about paying dividends to one of our own for their sacrifice. The state has to know that we’ve got each others’ backs at least this much or else the smell of weakness will overwhelm their nostrils and the bullshit provocations, the trumped up lies, the fishing expeditions will increase. This isn’t about stuffing cash into the unfillable pockets of some lawyer in some yet another legal battle that leeches the rest of us dry. This is about paying for support groups capable of working from the same state he’s in. This is about the cost of stamps at the prison commissary. Every human hand of outreach to Jeremy is a defiant fist in the face of a cop. Please donate and please spread the word or convey how important this is to those who might.

Magpie Killjoy’s lobbed a short trollish broadside at Markets Not Capitalism calling it “racist” and “disgusting.” Of course he’s couched his hodgepodge assembly of emotionally-charged misreads with a few notes about how he has no fundamental objection to market anarchism per se and that many of the views inside Markets Not Capitalism are legitimately anarchist, but nuance doesn’t bring the pageviews and rallying the troops against teh ancap scourge–tendrils to be found in your very collective!–does.

There’s not much to work with here but I’ll throw down for the heck of it, if only because there’s a thread of reasonableness to his objections, however inaccurately they fit his target.

We can all agree that any society that allows centralized power is not anarchist. But more than that any society that allows power relations in any form, decentralized or not, is not anarchist. True anarchists do not even countenance diffuse or interpersonal lines of control, abuse, and constraint. Here’s the deal though, the economic realm is but one facet of a society; not every problem can or should be solved within it. We draw such distinctions imperfectly, but they can be an extraordinarily good rule of thumb. If someone spites you at a party we’d hopefully frown on getting your friends together and burning down their farm. The point is it can be a good idea to have social norms that place limits on the community’s purview and delineate appropriate realms of reaction and conflict. Sad to say but if someone says something a smidgin racist we shouldn’t necessarily go breaking their kneecaps in response. In fact, not to police anyone’s rage, but that’s almost certainly an overreaction that can lead dark places. I by no means mean to equivocate with something as institutional as fucking Jim Crow or suggest that we shouldn’t do our best to navigate these issues, but it is worth noting exclusion from spaces can and frequently does become contentious within our community. What constitutes legit grounds for exclusion, who gets to decide to expel someone from a space and how that expulsion will go down… these are issues our communities deal with constantly. For all the good that we do, cattiness and fucked up stuff does happen. Part of what minimizes it is that we do generally default on respecting certain divisions of property and categories of behavior.

Of course while they’re often useful it would be a profound mistake to make too much of these distinctions. As with that old self-described “capitalist” Voltairine de Cleyre I’ve always stood on the “if you’re starving take bread” side of things. Fuck shit up if you have to. All good anarchists are utilitarians. We cannot afford to rule out any tactic or approach wholesale. In this manner I probably differ to some degree with a few of the other authors published in Markets Not Capitalism who default on what I consider the naive language of “rights” and speak strongly on the limits to our approaches. I doubt they’re as absolutist in practice as their rhetoric waxes, but it is somewhat regrettable. That said, it must be noted that similar deontological stances on tactics like nonviolence and veganism carry wide currency within the social anarchist milieu. As implicitly absolutist positions on tactics and behavior they must be called out and countered, but they do also deserve reading in a charitable light. For just as there is serious content to the arguments for veganism and nonviolence so too is there serious content to the argument that segregation can be countered without recourse to state violence or even strong violations of personal property.

In one small article (literally less than four pages) reprinted within Markets Not Capitalism one author talked about the successes of the sit-in movement against segregation in the Jim Crow South, explicitly attempting to persuade a right-libertarian audience that the ostensibly “non-coercive” racism they might poo-poo does in fact at the very least justify actions involving trespassing into someone else’s space/property. This article introduced itself as an audience-specific follow-up to another piece by editor Charles Johnson speaking about the cooption of the civil rights movement by the state,

Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C., nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and dismantled private segregation without legal backing.

Should lunch counters have been allowed to stay segregated? No—but the question is how to disallow it. Bigoted businesses shouldn’t face threats of legal force for their racism. They should face a force much fiercer and more meaningful—the full force of voluntary social organization and a culture of equality. What’s to stop resegregation in a libertarian society? We are. Using the same social power that was dismantling Jim Crow years before legal desegregation. [emphasis mine]

Let’s be clear here: Would these sort of nonviolent sit-ins be enough to crack every conceivable racist society or situation? Obviously not. And any discussion of Jim Crow that fails to take into consideration the diffuse but systemic effects of private violence (the KKK as well as a broader culture of white supremacy) and centuries of state interference in society by gun and dollar that created the entire social context of segregation would be a waste. Even if we were to posit a more right-libertarian deontological ethics, there’s a strong argument to be had that the effect of historical injustice and coercion completely invalidates any existing title to property and wealth in our society.

But Charles and Sheldon still have an extremely legit point here that shouldn’t be lost: While there’s room to argue about whether something else would be more effective and just what the ramifications might be of violence or more aggressive disregard for property, we can at least take comfort that history has proved that sit-ins work quite well — even against freaking Jim Crow level segregation. Their main point is that we don’t need state violence to fight grassroots racism, and that’s a point every anarchist should encourage. Magpie’s “critique” is that while Sheldon heroically takes right-libertarians head-on, arguing that trespass is justified even on their own terms, he shies away from opening the can of worms of more aggressive violence or property violations on the scale of say destroying spaces or forcibly invading personal homes. But such hesitancy should be understandable at the very least. Social anarchists recognize these kind of distinctions all the time in practice. When folks formed a bloc and confronted someone with a history of abuse at their home they still deliberately avoided invading that home. It’s totally valid for someone to find “we have problems with your space’s exclusion policy so we’re going to burn you to the ground” to be an ethically troublesome escalation and a worrying precedent.

It’s true that Sheldon drives home the emphatically non-violent character of such sit-ins (to his article’s original right-libertarian audience), to help establish how unassailably ethically justified such actions are. There’s a danger here of implying that violation of property can be justified only through its nonviolent character. Sheldon immediately publicly repudiated this misread of Magpie’s in no uncertain terms and has also acknowledged how problematic it can be to speak even abstractly about the most ideal tactics a subjugated group might choose, “it’s too easy for me to sit safely in Conway, AR, and tell people in bad situations what it is right or wrong for them to do with respect to an oppressive situation.” That should really be the end of it.

I’m of the opinion that ideological pacifism can be racist in effect, yet even if that characterized Sheldon’s piece there are differing uses of the term “racism” and I don’t know about you but I’m not going to go around calling pacifist anarchists like Tolstoy and Utah Phillips disgusting racists and loudly decry any intentionally diverse compilation of Anarchist material that happens to include their writings as “racist” and “despicable” as a result. I mean, props to any troll that does that I suppose, but please, a little consistency.

A second tiny article in Markets Not Capitalism focuses on explaining how we don’t necessarily need to use the state to win environmental victories and that illegal direct action can get the goods. That there are downsides to legislative approaches and feasible bottom-up alternatives is a pretty elementary anarchist point. Magpie of course nonsensically characterizes this as arguing that the foremost enemy of an environmentalist in our present context should be environmental law and our efforts should be focused on repealing it. Beyond being an insanely willful misread it should go without saying that this would, of course, usually be a really shitty prescription. Although when viewed as a one-liner in the proud anarchist tradition of troll statements with serious substance below the surface (“property is liberty“/”property is theft“, “anarchy is order“, etc) it would also be kinda admirable. Reformist tactics occasionally have their place; when a tree-sit implicitly works to pressure the passage of environmental legislation one way or the other that can be strategically valid. While I have no patience for Social Democrats like Chomsky telling us to wait another century and vote Democrat, I’ve long argued the strategic utility of things like Food Stamps while the state continues to exist. Many market anarchists agree. And even when we fully oppose something we should still be sane about our priorities. However such calculations are complex to say the least and there should obviously still be space for critiques of statist means. It’s more than a little ridiculous for Magpie to lob charges of “reformism” at someone coming at the issue by critiquing statist means. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

One might be tempted to laugh if the whole affair wasn’t so transparently in bad faith.

Kevin Carson has been writing the clearest and most substantive economic and systems analysis the anarchist movement has seen in possibly a century. His work is the backbone to much of Iain McKay’s AFAQ. He’s built a global reputation over a decade by painstakingly revealing the various mechanisms of state coercion underpinning every facet of capitalism from workplace hierarchies to the class system and attacking the multitude of private forces complicit in it even in the most intangible of ways. …Magpie apparently spends half a minute skimming Kevin’s site and decides that the argument that capitalism is built on historical violence and wouldn’t be sustainable without constant government violence disrupting and manipulating people’s free association is a redefinition of “capitalism” to mean merely any form of government interference. Well okay. If you’re looking for anything to confirm your fervent hope that we’re all capitalist apologists (maybe to avoid having to actually consider the basic mathematical realities of economics), I’m sure you’ll be able to drum something up. Even if it’s chortling about a contributor’s last name.

I began this response by talking about centralized power. The danger of processes by which those with something get more and those without are forced to continue going without is always a legit issue. Feedback loops are important. Ferreting them out, understanding them and addressing them is central to the anarchist project. Even things like making contacts more easily because you already have contacts fall within our purview. Economies of scale, logjams in communication and barriers to entry are basic building blocks of power and oppression and left market anarchists have been practically the only ones writing about these mechanisms, much less constructing or discovering viable counter-mechanisms. Folks like Kevin Carson have done far more to explore and solidly flesh out the anarchist analysis than anyone in the social milieu. Which is a shame because there are important interpersonal and cultural issues that social anarchists were historically more sensitive to, yet have done very little to map out.

Further, as with anything the precise mechanisms of enforcement (or encouragement or discouragement) always matter. No one should be able to get away with merely saying “my economic system is no making money with money” or “no runaway accumulation of power” because that doesn’t speak one whit to how precisely you mean to stop such. “We’ll have townhall meetings and vote on who we don’t like” or “we’ll just beat up and take the stuff of anyone who does something like let a friend rent their car for a week in exchange for kombucha“. The anti-market peanut gallery has offered next to no substantive thought on this front, while market anarchists have written volumes on the particulars of the particulars.

Possessions, exchange and thus markets can be brought into existence by a range of possible delineations about what to enforce with what means. Respect for property/possession titles does not necessarily depend on coercive means, as reputation/goodwill mechanisms are also viable. This is discussed at length in several pieces in Markets Not Capitalism. Heck Jeremy Weiland’s got a bit essentially cheering on prole sabotage of and theft from the wealthy as a core and vital free market mechanism.

But of course just as economic feedback loops are not the whole of the problem of power relations, market mechanisms cannot be the whole of our solution. Throughout pretty much everything he’s written Charles Johnson has worked tirelessly to drive home the reality that markets will be the result of what we put into them. Markets are an organizational tool. And while building the world we’d like to see might involve markets in certain economic facets of society, it will still and should involve activism, action, cultural and interpersonal struggles. Freed markets are part of a platform on which to build a better world. A necessary condition perhaps, and no small step, but hardly the end of the story. This reality is strongly and explicitly stated in Charles’ and Gary Chartier’s lengthy introduction to Markets Not Capitalism and comes to bear implicitly and explicitly throughout. …So of course Magpie declares that we mean the opposite.

I mean it’s just staggering.

While it always behooves us to work to improve the presentation of our ideas, the nature of anti-intellectualism is to do absolutely no work to empathize with others’ arguments or challenge your own perspectives and then lounge back in the defense that they haven’t persuaded you.

If there are in lines Markets Not Capitalism on which an extremely hostile and suspicious anarcho-communist might leap and topics touched without the entirety of “The Orthodox Left Market Anarchist Position” discussed in nuance, that is not surprising. It was never meant as “A Complete FAQ to Left Market Anarchism for Social Anarchists In Their Preferred Language Never Making Complex Points“. The book is a scattershot collection of writing from the left market anarchist milieu. Like Daniel Guerin’s No Gods, No Masters, Robert Graham’s A Documentary History of Libertarian Thought, and countless other anthologies it seeks to provide a wide sampling of discussions and partial perspectives on numerous topics rather than a complete map. It goes without saying that completeness is impossible. Hell, the editors faced the herculean task of keeping it even partially accessible to both social anarchists and the right-libertarians we argue so tirelessly to convert or at least diffuse.

I’m told that Magpie was offered a chance to air his views on C4SS in a feature before a wider audience with as much space as he needed to back up these haphazard charges and defend them in the face of logic and evidence. He of course declined. I wish this were surprising. His “review” reads less as an attempted critique than it does a desperate, floundering, out-of-depth attempt to cherry-pick two brief discussions glancing on side topics, disingenously phrase things in the most uncharitable way possible, triumphantly slander the whole of the compilation as a result, and get away with it by appealing to the most churlish of jingoistic instincts among the anti-market crowd. Christ, I’m sick of being embarrassed on behalf of anarcho-communists I expect better from. Since he’s gone ahead and publicly labeled the entirety of a compilation I was part of “racist” I’ll return a barb: Doing nothing more than confirming and reinforcing your audience’s preconceived notions may win you some popularity but it’s pretty much the lowest form of writing possible.

As the mortifying paucity of economic thought rampant in social anarchist circles comes under the light (“yay communes and sharing we’ll just talk out whatever problems arise in meetings”) some have increasingly taken to vicious outbursts, searching for anything to mischaracterize or popularize against. This kind of unfair, borderline abusive behavior is what first drove me from anarcho-communism and prompted my exploration of market anarchist thought so many years ago. And for all the ways such behavior poisons our discourse and culture I can at least take comfort that it is still driving people into left market anarchism all around the world.

I’m a share-bear at heart; I only support markets because I see them as the best tool available to build an egalitarian mass society of abundance. And even though we argue that they’re counter-weighed and addressed by other mechanisms there are certainly dangers to certain functions within market dynamics and I would love to see those so abjectly afraid of markets seriously engage with us about them. Or even pose alternatives that don’t crumble under the mathematical limitations of large-scale collective decision-making et al, without throwing up their hands and declaring that sitting in the mud / leeching from friends is good enough. Maybe then the dialogue will have opened to the point where market anarchists can start presenting critiques about the ways the amorphous collective mechanisms of anarcho-communists open the door to runaway interpersonal power dynamics.

The answer as it turns out is a little complex. It may surprise you to learn that most of the time those who break windows or get into scuffles with the police at these kind of things are not the equivalent of human non sequiturs but highly committed and rational individuals, who–right or wrong–choose their actions after careful deliberation and in sharp awareness of the personal risk they run. Although you may not immediately see it, there is no small amount of strategic thought behind such tactics.

But before I illuminate it, it probably behooves us to run through some standard stuff:

Property destruction is not violence in any substantive sense. To use the same term for vandalism as direct physical brutality is an Orwellian pollution of language that cheapens real violence and suggests that people are equivalent to things. Obviously destroying people’s inert possessions is usually not ethically justifiable–but the bar is much lower than with real violence. Civil disobedience, like blocking a port, can incur costs in the millions of dollars, while other actions widely accepted as ‘non-violent’ like pouring fake blood over draft cards or mortgage records can amount to incredibly costly direct property destruction. Breaking cheap windows may look scarier to some, but appearing intimidating is hardly an atrocity.

It should also go without saying that some property is less legitimate than others. Institutions and individuals that benefit significantly from injustice–even through indirect channels–cannot lay a legitimate claim to all their wealth. Targeting small community businesses is almost universally frowned upon and, despite media portrayal, incredibly rare in political riots. (When looters managed to take advantage of an anarchist action in Greece to destroy an old woman’s shop the anarchists raised money and rebuilt it for her.) But again let’s remember that property destruction is almost inconsequential beside resisting actual physical violence; when under siege from the police, for example, it’s highly rational for folks to set fires in bins so that the smoke can negate the tear gas.

Similarly, masking up is not just useful when it comes to filtering chemical irritants but also a good way to avoid persecution. It’s a sorrowful fact that merely being identified at a demonstration has been repeatedly used by police to pin fake charges. Masking up collectively helps obscure those individuals who are at higher risk for police retaliation, like people of color. In a just world we could stand openly behind our beliefs and actions without flagrantly unjust repercussions, but we do not believe we live in anything approaching a just world. It would be ridiculous to call the French Maquis cowards for not lining up publicly in town square.

Okay? Got it? Good, now we can move on.

In order to understand the sense behind those silly busted windows it’s important that you look beyond your personal reaction, indeed you should probably even look beyond the reactions of most of the people you know. We’re conditioned to assume that winning over a majority is the very definition of success, but in many cases that’s not true at all. Sure, when you’re trying to impose your will upon others it helps to have a ton of support, but when you’re only out to resist it doesn’t take much to make yourselves ungovernable.

As anarchists we’re not out to impose some totalizing vision upon the whole of society–exactly how you live your own life is your lookout–but we do mean to lend a hand where we can to make it impossible for anyone to impose their will over another. It wouldn’t matter if a majority of folks supported chattel slavery, we’d help slaves shoot their owners regardless (and incidentally we did). A very small minority can be such a grievous pain as to make large systems of power unsustainable. This much is obvious to everyone in our day and age. If three million people–less than 1% of the US population–launched an armed insurrection it would obviously be enough to bring all semblance of state power down. Of course that’s not precisely what we’re attempting, we are hardly blind to the non-state dynamics of power such a blithely single-minded campaign would ignore, but it is illustrative. Even the American Revolution–a campaign that sadly wasted much to replace one authority with another–was won with the support of barely over a third of the populace. You don’t need a majority to derail an injustice.

However it does help to have more than a few people. There aren’t three million self-aware and committed anarchists in the US. Our movement has been rebuilding fast since the days when capitalist and communist governments openly collaborated to kill us off, and since the nineties that growth has been exponential, but we’ve still got a long way to go. Outreach matters. And when an activist tamely busts some window they’re obviously not trying to win by depriving the state of glass surfaces. This too is outreach of a form.

But you are not the target audience.

This may come as a shock. We’re all so used to politicians and lobbying groups trying to win our support that the notion of someone completely uninterested in what you’ll say about them over the proverbial watercooler is a little insulting. Tough. To the serious activist on the street it doesn’t matter how you’re likely to vote or whether you’ll donate money–those are not feasible routes to the sort of social change we’re interested in. Are you going to actively join us in struggle or not? Organize your workplace, start a community garden, retake an abandoned building, code better tools, fight off a cop? Are you likely to seriously commit? In practice some people are quicker and more effective allies than others.

You don’t have to explain the institutional allegiances of the police to certain communities. Many folks already know the score. All that’s holding them back from joining in active resistance is a sense of isolation, weakness, and despair. In this context street fighting and vandalism are not so much proofs of method but statements of commitment and seriousness. There are others like you who are willing to fight, and we can hurt them, or at the very least we can shatter the air of invulnerability that pervades business as usual. It’s hard to overstate the psychological effect this can have on those who feel ground down or fenced in. Riots are especially useful when passive protest is widely acknowledged in certain circles to be laughably useless and indicative of protesters unwilling to commit. It doesn’t matter if a riot is directly successful on the scale of burning down city hall or permanently evicting the police from a neighborhood, what matters more is the change in perceptions. There’s a long history of social struggle skyrocketing after street confrontations–not because folks believe a few busted windows or bruised cops pave the road to a better world, but because it at least demonstrates potential.

That’s why politicians and police consistently go apeshit over things like measly storefront windows. Their control is dependent in no small part on being seen in control. Certain boundaries to what’s considered feasible must be secured at all cost lest they begin to loose the illusion of invulnerability that dissuades the subjugated from rising up. No one in power gets hysterical when a common thief, for example, breaks a window because thieves are perceived as part of the same ecosystem of exploitation in which cops and CEOs position themselves as the apex predators. Political vandalism is potent in part precisely because it risks much for no personal gain. It announces a violation of the established rules of the game, both of power and protest.

To be sure, the tactic of playing a victim in front of TV cameras in hopes of provoking outcry or disenchantment can also be useful in the right situation (when cameras are filming, enough people are listening, and public response is enough of a threat to change the cost-benefit analysis of those in charge). But such protest, even at its most acrimonious, still takes the form of an appeal to power–it assumes certain institutions can be reasoned with. As such it risks effectively bolstering the perceived legitimacy of those institutions.

In contrast, physical resistance challenges not only the state’s appearance of control but also the legitimacy of their monopoly on force. It’s a damned-either-way situation for the state. Any response sufficient to reassert the inviolability of their power will rightly strike anyone who isn’t a total asshole as grossly disproportionate; there’s no equivocating to be had when the state responds to broken windows by breaking skulls. And even if the cameras are off or filtered by ruthless propagandists when the priorities of the state are laid bare it can still have a huge impact on first-hand witnesses and their friends. Again, what’s more valuable, avoiding a few million people briefly tut-tutting at the ‘violent protesters’ before promptly forgetting us or shattering the worldviews of hundreds and gaining fifty new full-time activists brimming with passion?

It’s worth remembering that all the public outcry in the world won’t win certain battles. There are some concessions those in power will never make. Passive protest negotiates by raising costs to the point where certain trade-offs become acceptable, but it can only succeed on issues where those in power are left room to retreat and regroup. On issues like abolishing borders, prisons, or the police, our demands will never be met because they pose an existential threat to the very premise of the state itself. No matter how limited a sociopath’s options become the total abolition of all positions of power is always going to be dead last on their list of preferences. At some point those in power will have to be physically dragged kicking and screaming out. Part of building a movement should be building the capacity to do precisely that. And that kind of strength doesn’t just spring into existence the moment our leaders cross a line, it must be nurtured and developed as our ranks grow. Demonstrating that we’re at least committed to working on it–that we haven’t forgotten that success on any serious issue will require us to develop and maintain a capacity for physical resistance–is an important part of being taken seriously and building our numbers. Even if we demonstrate that through actions that leave us looking a little juvenile.

Any given tactic is going to alienate some people and draw in others. There is no such thing as a universally well-received action. When critiquing actions what you need to check is whose perspectives you’re prioritizing and precisely why you think they matter more. What are you presupposing about the political landscape?

All the considerations I’ve discussed frequently vary in relevancy and degree. It should really go without saying that every context is going to be different. Sometimes purely passive protest can have a hugely positive impact. A lot of the time–frankly most of the time–busted windows and street scuffles end up serving little to no positive effect whatsoever. But gauging such consequences is never trivial. The point is that “public opinion” is an incredibly complex subject with even more complex strategic considerations. It is not reducible to polling data or the sensibilities of the people you socialize with. There’s plenty of room for productive conversations on what’s a good idea and what isn’t, but everyone has a different slice of the world apparent to them so evaluations of strategy will always have an inescapably subjective component. Someone busting a window at a demonstration may indeed be making an ultimately poor decision, but that doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent or unethical.

What isn’t certain is what we will end up believing, how we will cope with these changes and atrocities, how we will interpret them, how we will respond and what new frameworks we might settle into.

Perspectives have always been more important than tools themselves. The opportunities a given technology opens up have always been broader than those our brains are able to parse simply. And technologies, being embedded in infrastructure, must interface at least in some form. So the memetic constructs of society will continue to play a limiting role on these protocols, especially as the term ‘social technology’ becomes more and more redundant.

We are all carrying a lot of baggage. Our understandings of a lot of things are incomplete, with so many kinks to be resolved. And so little is being processed across society. In the crises to come there is a significant chance we will not move or learn quick enough. Amid the mess folks will latch onto the first perspectives that suffice. We will entrench and by the time the divisions with reality become apparent it will be too late, either the consequences of the self-compounding complexities of our technology will spiral beyond our reach or, worse, the infrastructure will have been severed to the point where those rotten paradigms become intractable prisons. The world will end as a huddled mass before inexonerably escalating crisis or as intellectual fifedoms with all the data in the world presented in frameworks that are wrong, but too functionally right and too complicated for a human brain to revise.

If we want to survive and flourish, to avoid suffering by billions, we need to resolve these kinks, logjams and dissonances today, as soon as possible. To whittle things down to the true roots and work our way back up. Ideology and team spirit as well as the laziness of elitism and pluralism can no longer be left as viable intellectual retirement plans. We must be honest with ourselves and as honest as we dare with each other. Engagement must be our watchword, engagement past comfort and personal achievement. Because as technology compounds and advances so must our discourse be pressed even harder. There are simple truths to be found, perspectives with just a little more view, and new uses or workarounds that stretch the imagination and free up the possible. Not for what they can service in isolation, but for how potent they are in conjunction with everything else. Potent in ways yet to be discovered. The potency of the true.

It is unlikely that we will succeed. Even now the noosphere is still a tangled, knotted, fractured organ, choked of nutrition and with fragile axons. More an agglomeration of haughty cancers than something capable of real life. It is unlikely it will ever rise to the challenge.

But lord it’s worth trying. Because what could be more glorious.

Part of this is semantic. The term “organization” is so loose as to be either universally trivial or—more often—a substantive but hazy jumble of associations. Often such bundling acts to disingenuously assert a premise from the get-go and it’s worth picking apart exactly what is meant by an “organization.” “Anarchy,” for instance, directly means “without rulership” but the broader associations of violence, chaos and dog-eat-dog famously imply an inherent casual connection without bothering to enunciate it. Of course this is a flat contradiction in terms, obvious on the slightest examination; the spectre of everyone attempting to dominate everyone else is simply a change in the flavor of power relations, of relevant archies, not their total abolition. Yet such conflation has had huge impact because unspoken, unexamined ideas bundled as common sense have a pressure greater than the spoken.

“Organization” can stand for literally all modes of human interaction, but in common use “being organized” signifies effective and intentional structures of collaboration. Something anarchists defensively jump to assert we’re capable of! But as such the term is almost meaningless; no one on earth would argue against the utility of deliberative and rational approaches to collaboration – one might as well say “being intelligent“. The substance of the matter is of course how we chose to arrange and structure our collaboration. It is here that “organization” smuggles in assumptions through double-meanings. Because in practice the noun of “an organization” usually refers to a highly particular beast, requiring highly particular structures.

Specifically, “an organization” is:

Represented by a discrete concept.

An organization is a pact to simplify otherwise complex social dynamics into a single mental touchpoint. Not just in identification, but in the ways people approach it. Utilizing an umbrella name/brand/identity creates high value real-estate; if something is perceived as being done by the organization as opposed to an individual it carries additional contextual weight, usually because so many people subscribe to the simplification.

Defined by discrete sets of people.

An organization has members. It may have tiers or degrees of membership and specific internal roles, but at the very least it has to have a basic inside-outside hierarchy. And this must be policed in some way in order for the brand/name to carry any weight.

Legitimized by formal processes

More than a banner, ideal or any such static descriptor—an organization is a concept built to change and be redefined over time. Organizations do things, and thus there has to be some kind of specific procedure or conditions by which actions can be certified or accepted as legitimately representative.

In short, more than a shifting passive category like a type of people or group, An Organization is an adopted narrative that conceptually simplifies a set of individual actions (and interactions) into that of a single, albeit mythical, agent. This interpretation is at least partially shared and participated in by the individuals involved.

Some organizations follow hierarchical and/or specialized methods of decision-making. Others assume for one reason or another that their participants will almost always cede their intentions/opinions if outnumbered by contrary members of the organization’s voting body. Still others focus on trying to build some level of universal tolerance for a decision (again, within a select set of people and assuming a general stickiness, that is to say a tendency for folks of dissenting opinions/preferences to cede rather than associating themselves on a case-by-case basis). Lastly, of course the situational particulars of what constitutes legitimate authorities, majorities or consensus for an organization can be codified formally or informally, implicitly or explicitly to any degree–but they are codified.

So why on earth would anyone do this? There are, after all, many other possible ways to facilitate collective cooperation.

Like proponents of the state, proponents of organizations rarely do more than loosely imply arguments. Those that they do make can be broken into two categories: those appealing to the particulars of human psychology and those appealing to more mathematical realities.

The first realm is more abstract, but also highly tangible:

Organizations cater to existing intellectual laziness and then direct it to ostensibly positive ends. As a shared conceptual simplification, participation in an organization often functions as a pact to not really have to bother ourselves with the complexity of the underlying social realities. Of course we can still expand our awareness in situations of conflict, crisis or Machiavellian politicking. But the fact that everyone else is likely to think largely in terms of the ostensibly static organization means that deviation from the simplified perception is usually superfluous.

Additionally organizations tend to enhance perceptions of strength. Human beings are social creatures and prone to degrees of passive selection bias — the opinions contained in a room of twenty people ring far more viscerally than abstract knowledge of those outside. Our biology and our sociopolitical conditioning has hammered into us the notion that social mass is the definition of potency (which army/electorate is bigger rather than the best exploit or vector of attack), so organizations orchestrate a spectacle of mass. This helps in maintaining the organization and its direction, as well as drawing people in.

Through pressure to maintain this sense of community, strength and general simplicity the particulars of an organization are able to assert themselves, ideally motivating us to act where we otherwise might slack as well as holding us accountable when we do not. Implicit in many a defense of organizations is the notion that people are inherently too lazy or unmotivated to undertake the effort required towards some goal under entirely their own volition, but that if they have enough to show up to a meeting and put their name on an organization’s roster they can be passively pressured into more action. Organizations can thus be seen as the construction of social environments where it’s psychologically easier to act than not act.

The second realm is more mathematical:

Centralization has historically been about contact and access. And a lot of our operating assumptions are still based on the notion that information has to be scarce. In such context one of the main utilities of an organization is as a platform for connection. In the past anarchist organizations were practically synonymous with their newspapers; today it’s listservs. Centralization doesn’t just facilitate raw access through central repositories of contacts, skills, and tools–it can structure that access to be useful. The latter property is of particular relevance today. While information technologies are starting to live up to their potential to spread raw access far and wide, comparatively very little has been done to decentralize or autonomize means of filtering and presenting information.

That same centralization can facilitate resolutions of strategic dissonances that would otherwise be at odds. Different means and different short term goals can conflict and interfere with one another. As such it can behoove those working towards the same ultimate goal to voluntarily surrender their preferred approach in order to maximize the number of people working towards any approach. The conceptual space of an organization applies social pressure to discussions, but it also alters the potential payoffs to make submission to a single decision in the short term more acceptable. Most of the time the implicit goal in such conversations is to take advantage of the potency of an organization’s simplified brand or narrative in terms of propaganda; as such it can be in the interest of dissenters to maintain that for different uses in the future.

Finally at least in theory an organization can help suppress the strength of informal power dynamics. Through achieving a sort of hegemony among those pursuing a goal and suppressing the effect of all collaboration besides that done internally, an organization can force a degree of openness in such interactions, even impose formal structures to counterbalance certain influences.

In short, organizations are a mental tool we adopt collectively to simplify the complexity of human interactions. The resulting social context leaves certain actions and thoughts psychologically easier and provides a mechanism for further structuring to direct that ease. The resulting centralization and standardization can have functional advantages in terms of information access, filtering and processing. And these objective advantages can, in turn, be applied to deepen and direct the psychological ease of participation.

However all of this comes with stark limitations and dangers.

Failure #1: Collective Decision-making

There are many tiers of failure to organization, but the calculational catastrophe of collective decision-making is the best known. The stickiness of organizations derives in large part from a profound overestimation of the utility and efficiency of resolving decisions as a single unit. In the absence of hierarchical coercion one is stuck forcing some degree of flat collective discussions–as organic clustering and individually driven association can’t always be trusted to prioritize securing an emergent consensus. But flat collective discussions are extremely inefficient at processing information.

It’s a problem of subjectivity and bandwidth. Every individual is going to have incredibly complex preferences, recognize different patterns, and be uniquely familiar with certain particulars such as their own personal context. The human language is pretty damn limited in descriptive power and it can take an incredibly long time to sufficiently convey the relevant basic realities of our individual thoughts and contexts. When one person talks the rest of the room must to some significant degree quiet their own thoughts to listen. This may suffice when it comes to presenting a set of pre-constructed views in an open forum, but when attempting to actively synthesize and critically analyze between those different views the complexity of subjectivities in relation to one another grows and the amount of time and brain space left each participant decreases. Being rushed in turn pushes people to focus on things they fear will be overlooked and neglect attention to other issues or contentions.

Sometimes a rough approximation of the best resolution can be reached, but in order to achieve that people’s preferences and contributions will still get stomped down to some degree–often a quite significant degree. Mediating and translating between sharp differences of assumptions, perspective, language or culture on the fly can be a huge time sink–while excluding or organizing along strict common lines is both balkanizing and risks excluding needed critiques. Further some folks are going to be differently abled in different arenas of thought and catching everyone up isn’t always feasible–collective conversation faces a pull towards the lowest common denominator.

Obliging people to make decisions uniformly in collective is profoundly inefficient compared to individuals organically associating and convincing each other as best as they can. As the number of participants or the complexity of topics increases organizations face inescapable diminishing returns. Either an organization won’t function, or it’ll be forced to gravitate towards dangerously simple solutions.

Failure #2: Forcing Coherence

Sometimes we’re going to work against one another. There’s no getting around that. Differing experiences can lead to differing tactical prescriptions and they’re not always going to be reconcilable in a reasonable period of time. While it’s important to note that there are situations in which differing approaches go hand in hand, in other situations they won’t. Further while sometimes we are going to be able to debate something to an objective conclusion–pointing out a logical fallacy for example–other times a contention will be a matter of differing data interpretations on differing sets of data, too vast and complicated to be talked out. And it’s often impossible to know ahead of time whether something can be conceptually resolved or not.

Obviously when the issue is truly tectonic any group of folks is going to end up splitting ways; barring the occasional explicitly totalitarian organization gunning down their deviants all an organization can hope to accomplish is to force or pressure some degree of coherence in the less dramatic situations. However, the price paid for suppressing less intense breaks is the dysfunction attendant to large breaks. Applying internal tension to keep an organization together means that when things build up to the point that that tension is overcome all the energy that was spent on either side of that tension internally has been wasted.

Given that breaks are likely to occur, the focus on preserving organizations and securing coherence inside them comes at the expense of work that might create coherence broader than the ranks of an organization. Groups that differ too much on one issue to work in a single organization can still be persuaded to great effect on other issues. Organizations often act as insular tumors within a movement, stealing time, energy and thought that would be otherwise spent in wider engagement. In short, when it comes to discussion rather than wasting our time building different platforms we should be working to create better protocols–cultural norms predicated on engagement, openmindedness, and vigilance.

Failure #3: Informal Power

We all understand is that centralization is dangerous. Putting all our eggs in one basket makes sabotage and hijacking easier for infiltrators and entryists. But it also has a corrupting influence on the sincere. Given the inherent bandwidth limitations of collective decision-making there’s simply no way to avoid imbalances in representation or voice. Structures built to counteract personalities, drift or informal lines of influence will themselves have to be argued, constructed, championed and finally navigated. Institutional mechanisms designed to suppress informal power ultimately just shift it around, opening new opportunities for increased influence and thus continuing to promote power games, albeit in different forms.

Matched with an environment of subservience to social momentum and peer pressure this is disastrous enough, but centralized access to resources creates further incentive. Even in the absence of preexisting informal power dynamics, organizations by their very nature create high-value real estate. Why do maoist entryists for example target organizations they don’t consider in any way potent? To seize the social  capital. After all as the saying goes, activism is 90% having contacts.

Failure #4: Mental Laziness

We all use conceptual shorthands, but entering into a pact to rigidly use one can be quite dangerous. Partaking in a shared illusion that obtains usefulness to others insofar those who deviate from that illusion are punished is obviously reckless in the extreme.

Anarchism is about embracing our agency. Asking others to remind us of something we want to do is one thing, but when internal tensions or dissonances impede our motivation to undertake a task applying blunt external pressure to ourselves is a terrible workaround. It doesn’t resolve the tensions or contradictions leaving them capable of coming to bear later on at possibly unexpected times/contexts in unprepared for ways. Further, momentum and peer pressure are not particularly strong compared to true motivation, they’re often driven by loose biological instincts and can be randomly overridden by other base instincts. Worse, at core momentum and peer pressure are ethically corrosive tools in that they appeal to and build habits rather than active vigilance.

In summary:

• Organizations require modes of interaction dramatically inefficient at processing information.
• They’re largely worthless at building large numbers of people acting in harmony.
• They stoke formal and informal power dynamics.
• And they’re predicated on mental sloth and alienation from one’s agency.

These are hardly unknown. Just being anarchists most of us are usually pretty good at sensing and partially negotiating the downsides of our organizations. Few of the tensions I’ve brought up are unfamiliar to longtime activists. Innumerable workshops and booklets on facilitation and consensus process provide boatloads of halfhearted advice and tools. But what proponent of organizations miss is that these dangers and limitations derive fundamentally from the core concept of an organization. Workarounds are ultimately just not enough.

Of course it must be said that the world we live in isn’t perfect and in some rare contexts there can be benefits to dabbling in organizations that might partially outweigh the form’s profound limitations. Given the state’s predilection to only deal with people through the language of organization things like legally recognized unions can occasionally provide quite useful exploits. But in all such situations it’s critical that we remain fully mindful of the dangers and explicit in our evaluation of the costs lest we promote or slide into naivety.

When such work is all consuming, when mission creep overburdens an organization with a variety of projects—including those that could perfectly well be done outside the framework of the organization—or drama and busywork is invented so that individual activists can compete in activeness or simply to fill weekly meetings, an organization can become a flag of identity. It’s easy to defensively blind ourselves to the dangers and limitations of projects we’ve invested a lot into and so the more permanence, license and loyalty we give our organizations the worse their effects will be.

No one is saying ‘only do easy things’ or claiming we should focus on immediate gratification. Real struggle is long, hard and may never end up being rewarding. But nothing is more demoralizing than getting nowhere because some people are wedded to entirely unnecessary shackles.

As with the world we’d like to see, we need to build a movement where the overall focus is on discrete projects of limited lifespan–only sometimes augmented or assisted in small, defined ways by persistent groups, themselves with starkly limited license. With people fluidly overlapping and transitioning between such projects as need be rather than building identities and/or territories in relation to them. Where what few collectives exist don’t take a front and center role as a motivators and shapers of individual projects, but instead specialize in tiny realms of janitorial assistance.

A change so radical obliges us to reevaluate those tools built with the organizationist framework in mind. This means new cultures and new technologies.

The current populace is used to the language of organizations—and there’s no denying that they can make for powerful narratives by coalescing something solid to talk about. But encryption technologies are capable of proving connections between actions and declarations directly. Rather than a bunch of different affinity groups all tagging ELF while an above-ground front office defends and determines what counts as actually an ELF action–get rid of the front offices! With basic encryption it’s possible to sign communiques and thus prove mutual authorship–this much is already in common used by Anonymous–but even a single key isn’t requisite, it’s possible to set up schemes with forkable and combinable keys to avoid creating a single high-value object and allow groups a lot of latitude in both association and narrative construction. Just as it’s possible to use encryption to build timing mechanisms to certify actions. All that’s really necessary to get such out there would be some simple user-friendly design.

And that speaks to information presentation more broadly. These days in principle anyone can throw up fork of a repository online or distributively host copies of a website. Of course—as with secure lines of attribution—there hasn’t been much effort to develop intuitive, widely adoptable software to accomplish this for activists, nor do we have anything close to a culture facilitative of sharing skills, contacts and pertinent information, but it’s nevertheless obviously quite possible. With the right software separate yet interrelated projects would be able to intermingle and keep tabs on one another in a fluid and productive fashion. Right now things like this are done awkwardly with wikis or shared documents (interfaces essentially built to be printed on paper!), but the potential for services explicitly tailored to providing more ways to structure, present and manage information for collaborators is relatively untapped. Instead of a single organizational body managing the entirety of a convergence through tons of subcommittees devoted to different tasks, a properly structured web program could act as clearinghouse for separate projects to collaborate, debate and even compete.

Beyond access, communication itself can be improved immeasurably once we free ourselves from the assumption that preserving some collective solidity is paramount. Why not for example just let things heat up in places or let side debates continue as long as they need to? Discussions and arguments can oft be better presented in text, but listservs (and Facebook) do a horrible job of this. Why on earth should things be linear rather than modular, clustered around relevant points like multidimensional notes? There’s infinite of ways a platform can be structured and presented to facilitate the various levels of communication in a specific type of work. And ultimately instead of flat live discussion we can build on voip to create software capable of organically forking conversations, keeping tabs on others, suggesting others take part in one subconversation, recording, even live upvoting/downvoting what being talked about and who talking should be be given attention. The potential is infinite and yet we’ve defaulted on the few inane protozoic tools (taking stack, breakout groups, etc) provided to us.

Of course, more organic approaches to communication would be useful not just in projects but also in those few situations where a group with some permanence is truly required as with the maintenance of physical clearinghouses like maker spaces or community centers. Closed groups don’t have to share all the failings of the organizational model but they are obviously still bound by many of them such as collective decision-making. As such a clearheaded understanding of the dangers prescribes limiting the license and mandate of those collectives as narrowly as possible, taking care of only what can’t be turned into one-off projects and judged primarily on their ability to facilitate or interact with projects without domineering or seeking to determine them. Persistent groups should be confined to janitorial service. We must make a point to fight our ingrained instinct towards organizationalist modes–and actively reject the mission creep, coagulation, sedentary provincialism and fetishism of mass that gives rise to them.

Organizations are basically monsters from a bygone era. Useful in some limited ways once, but cut with a number of vicious streaks and rapidly becoming obsolete. From Tahrir Square to the Port of Oakland activists are slowly learning through practice that we don’t need them to get shit done. In fact, aside from a few limited tactical contexts (either as a consequence of the state or immature technology), forming an organization is basically like shooting yourself in the foot. Can yall please stop doing it?

In 2001 the technoprogressive and cyberlibertarian dreams of the 90s were largely on ice. The hacker community moribund. Everywhere the future seemed in retreat. For two years popular culture had dwelled on the turn of the millenium and the uncontroversial conclusion was nothing had lived up to snuff. To those who had been actively struggling in broad spheres the postponement of such predictions and dreams hardly needed explanation; hands-on engagement brings with it an appreciation of the complexity to culture and society in all its many fractal arenas. But to a certain class of people, junior technocrats mostly, who had grown up taking comfort growing up from prophesies of an assured gleaming rationalist future, this was an ecclesiastical betrayal that required a simple answer. And then the towers came down.

The core of the internet has always been atheist and so to was the fledgling bloggosphere in 2001. The difference was mostly one of age and cynical elitism. It takes a while to develop a finer appreciation of the underlying mechanisms of our society, there’s simply too much going on. “Why” can be a steep learning curve; explorations don’t deliver any framing narratives quickly. So much easier to stay at the surface with “People are stupid.” In this way, in that way. Slowly collect and label little discrete failings apparent in others, each one with attendant narrative implications. As parts of the picture fill in so to does a reflexive defense of certain institutions and assumptions.

9/11 was a pivotal paradigm-shift for a host of reasons from bewildered suburban housewives with existential vertigo to jetsetting corporate executives shocked that old fashioned things like national governments hadn’t been sufficiently sidelined. But the technocratic hordes reading instapundit, poised on the foundations of our embryonic information society, ended up playing no small part. Finally the world could be epic again. A clash of civilizations! Their conservatism was fancy devices and Janes and Stratfor, white, male and upper-middle-class, or at least aspirationally inclined to those things; they had little to fear from the conservatism of George W Bush, then merely an ineffective moderate. America was a bastion of secularism and gleaming champion of initiative, as atheists they convinced themselves it was the only tool worth a damn. And Islam was the devil. The heart of everything holding us back from an Asimovian paradise.

It’s so sad that one of the most potent cultural impetuses to the last decade of imperialism could be so blatantly fucking ridiculous.

Islam is a joke. (Christianity is a joke too.)

There are many forms of faith possible in life; religions only happen at the point when metaphorical flesh is dripping off a fractured logical skeleton and the insides have already rotted away.

Anyone and everyone capable of seizing any sort of power must at least retain enough brains to machievelli. It’s impossible to keep enough of a dynamic mind to look out for threats and manage the social complexities that interface with a religion without taking a step back from that religion and grounding yourself in less bulky faiths and more explicit selfishness. Our leaders from Ahmadinejad to Pope Sidious are atheists at core, always have been. Doesn’t make them any less evil, obviously, but it does assure a certain level of rational self-interest. bin Laden was an incredible dumbass, and he was contextually fenced in terms of social capital and desire, but he wasn’t such a dumbass as to actually be religious in his heart of hearts. He wasn’t going to start an apocalypse.

Further, at the end of the day Al Queda was stuck working through religion. Hezbolla, The Islamic Brotherhood, etc. No matter how much some of them may want to eat all our brains they’re an innately hobbled force. They have the mass sometimes, they just don’t have the speed or dexterity.

I am not afraid of Islam for a lot of reasons. But ultimately I am not scared of Islam because unlike those privileged and content enough to sit back and wait to be ushered in to some gleaming new world those of us actually struggling to build the future have a better appreciation of the landscape and dynamic obstacles at play. You can’t judge progress by comparison to shiny pamphlets as if the future was a condo going up (Next Fall!). In the trenches, in the nitty-gritty, you can see progress happening still small, sometimes just grinding industriously away at the rocks in our path, but accelerating with exponential growth nonetheless. We are changing the conditions of the battlefield faster than they can shamble. So no, you entitled bourgeois assholes who’ve never fought a fascist in your life or done any struggle besides petulant bloviating in the defacto service of totalitarianism, I’m aint scared of no holy ghost. Nor its followers.

And, if the last decade wasn’t mounds and mounds of proof that you shouldn’t think of the religious as anything other than a mindless natural disaster that it’s relatively easy to skirt, I’d like to tell you of a gal I saw once.

Minneapolis has a large Somali immigrant community, burqas and hijab are a common sight on the bus, with hot-pink phones flashing under the sleeves. One afternoon in the month leading up to the RNC while I was taking the 14 through South Minneapolis to meet up with someone at a FNB, one of these teenage Somali gals got on the bus in full black burqa. Except that covering the back of it were punk patches. From Antischism to Bad Religion. I don’t know if she was trying to balance Islam with anarcho-punk or if she was maintaining the burqa as an atheist punk in some personal fuck you to cultural prejudice and patriarchal sexualization, the way her sharp eyes burned I suspected the later. Either way, and I don’t mean to say this with any colonial associations: Free thought can consume anything. We got nothing to fear.

Or at least my team doesn’t. To hell with yours.

No one would disagree that porn is a major site of importance in modern patriarchy. And there are usually three broad categories of critique leveled against it: 1) That the means of its production are exploitative. 2) That it pushes narratives and perspectives reinforcing of patriarchy. 3) That the very act of getting off to or sexualizing visual stimuli mentally reduces other people to objects.

It’s this last critique, rarely addressed head-on or in good faith, that’s the most fundamental. The first two, while undoubtedly significant, are ultimately just matters of detail. There are folks who produce porn through egalitarian collectives just as there are now literally millions of exhibitionists who freely share images/video of themselves in open forums, repositories and networking sites. So to is there queer porn. Indeed even the most cursory overviews would reveal the last decade has seen the exponential spread into the mainstream of increasingly complicated and diffuse presentations of gender and desire. At this point the conventional for-profit “Porn Industry” is basically a tiny antiquated sideshow dwarfed by a hundred million digital cameras and sketchpads. (In this piece I’ll stick with a more Dworkin-esque definition of porn as inclusive of things termed ‘erotica’ because any distinction between the two either begs the question or is wildly arbitrary not to mention usually classist. Plus it would be more than a little haughty to completely ignore how the term is actually used.)

To be clear however just because porn is a wide category growing more diverse daily doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of freaking evil shit out there. Recognizing complexity shouldn’t mean throwing up our hands and failing to critically engage, nor should it temper the intensity of our rage. Rapists are being made. And porn is a medium used to champion this in a variety of ways. Sometimes deliberately and explicitly, but at the very least huge swathes of what’s produced today still effectively contributes to, buffers, and insulates rape culture. This is no small issue and pretty much every other conversation on porn pales before it. Yet having our priorities in line shouldn’t equate disregarding those complexities. True ‘radicalism’ means exploring concepts down to the roots rather than settling for totalizing banners, no matter how generally adequate they seem. Individuals engage with things in a variety of ways with a variety of effects; done right analytical nuance and strategic dexterity doesn’t have to lead to equivocation or lost momentum. In fact, for those of us outside institutional power such precision and nimbleness is arguably our greatest natural asset.

What I find attractive about the notion that pornography is innately objectifying is not its obvious intuitive resonance but the promise of an inarguable underlying reality leading to clear-cut prescriptions. Yet there are actually quite a variety of arguments leveled in practice, working from significantly differing fundamentals. One can argue, for example, that sexual objectification derives from any divorce between desire regarding another’s physical body and desire regarding their mental existence, while alternatively one can argue that objectification stems from any desire regarding another’s physical body fullstop. Those are obviously very different approaches and frankly I find the latter far more secure. Most of us would surely find the former more pleasant or at least lenient in prescription but it reeks of unjustifiable arbitrariness. It’s not at all clear what would constitute such a divorce, nor what degree we should recoil from.

The fact is our minds change focus all the time. Does spending a minute or two reveling in some aspect of physical sensuality or desire mean hardening our neural pathways to perceive the existence of a partner more exclusively those material terms? Obviously there is a risk present, but how innately or concretely can we speak of it? If we spend a masturbation session primarily remembering a partner’s body/touch rather than anything specifically related to their character will that necessarily have any lasting effect upon us? What if it’s a child trying to imagine what sex would be like? Or a sickly person? Or a deformed person? It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the danger in focusing on the physical nature of sexual pleasure and desire is entirely dependent on things like the awareness, vigilance, and plasticity of a given mind — a conclusion that would lead to wildly variant prescriptions and significantly problematize any uniform social policy or campaign. If we can ever temporarily shift the focus of our desires/pleasure towards physical attributes/actions of a person and avoid generating any tendency to think of them as objects then the same would be true when it comes to pornography of one another.

One response is to turn the focus explicitly on whether a physical desire initially arises in response to personal associations or narratives predicated on the other’s existence as an agent. (eg ‘I only became in any way physically attracted to them after I got to know them.’) This might still allow forms of pornography to slip by when tied to a substantive narrative (the already large field of romance novels / pornographic comics offering many noteworthy candidates) yet at least allows us to critique the characterizations, etc presented. Unfortunately at the end of the day it’s not clear what could justify holding the original prompts of a given physical desire in such significance. The argument seems to be saying implicitly that what matters is what perspective or desire is ultimately prior or more fundamental in someone’s head than a momentary perspective/desire. And surely this is a matter of choice for anyone with even the most basic vigilance or agency in the construction of their own thoughts. We frequently choose to dabble in limited perspectives and focuses in ways that avoid overwriting our more core and motivating perspectives. Certainly corruption is a danger, and the social context of patriarchy can contribute significantly, but that’s no more innate a threat with one versus the other. Momentary desire for physical aspects of a partner can lead to ingraining objectifying patterns of thought just as easily as focus on those feelings more abstractly. There’s no straightforward reason to disallow taking such a risk in the one set of cases but not the other.

So what are we left with? Well, as previously mentioned, the other major approach is to reject sexual desire of physical things (at least in any way relating to people) wholesale.

I should note that at its greatest extreme this can even mean rejecting all sexual desire (arguing that surrendering one’s mind to desires arising from one’s own body counts in some sense as objectification of oneself). Frankly, I’ve always found anti-sexual positions kinda cool. I have a lot of admiration for people who bite bullets and in my mind the audacity of the proposition speaks positively of it. Plus I spent my teenage and young adult years seriously debating whether to go on chemical libido suppressants just to get by, so suffice to say I have an appreciation of how sexual desire can subjugate and reduce one’s own mind. But the same holds true of practically anything. The fact that one can get lost compulsively surfing Wikipedia for the dopamine fix of new information, while worth consideration, obviously shouldn’t speak to its proper utility. Sexual desire and sensuality interface socially, pharmaceutically, and psychologically in a host of ways, providing a vast array of tools that can be extraordinarily useful. Chucking it out would be akin to chucking any other field of technology. Sadly, to get started on anything even approximating an appropriate overview would require its own blog post so let’s skip that for now and just press on under the working assumption that sex is acceptable in certain forms.

What we can still at least conclude is that sexual titillation by compassion, mathematical aptitude, or say pine trees clearly wouldn’t involve preferences directed at anyone else’s body. There are still valid concerns to be had about the preformative aspect of mental actions (‘dance monkey dance‘ is obviously objectifying in any form), but I think we’ve clearly achieved enough distance from concerns about objectification to stop and take a look back. Does this resemble what hardline opponents of pornography within feminism are actually saying?

In almost every case, no. (The exceptions, insofar as they’re honest about it, are really cool. But again as above I will avoid exploring that direction in depth here for space.) Instead it’s almost universally conceded that the biological prompts of sexual desire are just too strong overall. We get turned on by certain forms of touch and smell for example without conscious choice. There are a wealth of hardwired physiological circuits capable of triggering chemical responses. Some, possibly even all, can be fiddled with or cut but the effort required can be functionally unfeasible and there are a multitude of them. That’s not, obviously, to throw up our hands in surrender (some of us are transhumanists after all). But it does generally seem to prescribe a certain pragmatism towards sexual desire that allows us to embrace the positives while staying alert to the negatives. It’s okay, in short, to do things like turn one’s focus to a lover’s body or fantasize about a fictional character or imagine what a certain experience would be like.

So what then is such a fundamental problem with pornography?

In practice it seems to be centered around an objection to the visual (as opposed to tactile or aromatic) component of the sensation. While most feminists left the Porn Wars with a nuanced perspective on porn as a medium capable of conducting good as well as bad (with effects dependent on a vast array of context both social and individual), the horrified lot that wrote us off as heinous apostates didn’t seem to do so just because they were wedded to rhetorical trenches or sumsuch; there was a notable tone of alienation and disgust at the very notion of visual desire. It was declared obviously suspicious because it was ‘unnatural.’ Anecdotal evidence can only go so far but time and again I’ve found an exceptionally strong correlation between my stridently anti-porn friends (of different genders) and ‘just not really getting the whole visual attraction thing‘.

Which makes a lot of sense. A straightforward experience-gap would explain in a sympathetic light why so many discussions on pornography within feminism, even when approached in good faith by both sides, so often grind up against a wall of mutual incomprehension. Well no freaking duh. If there was an entire avenue of physiological desire other people experienced that you didn’t (or didn’t experience with anything approaching the same intensity) and intersected with patriarchy the way porn does you’d be overwhelmingly inclined to write it off as a construct of patriarchy too. I mean good god! It’s a neat hypothesis at least in regard to some anti-porn feminists because experience-gaps don’t speak to intelligence, and over the decades I’ve encountered more than a few brilliant people with incomprehensibly absolutist stances on pornography. Sending pictures to your partner? Objectification. A pubescent kid drawing boobs? Objectification. An incredibly popular porn site consisting of user-submitted videos of the faces they make during masturbation and orgasm? Objectification. (Because getting off solely to indications of someone else’s pleasure is clearly… wait, what?) The line drawn is always between visual and tactile sensation. Dildos and even fleshlights no matter how evocative are almost always given a pass by the same people who assume any reasonable person would be grossed by the notion of getting off to imagery.

There may not be hope of persuading everyone stuck in such a trap. At this point the paranoia and war-effort frame of mind probably runs too deep for some and that’s perfectly understandable. But it’s at least another opportunity to drive home the so easily forgotten reality that people’s physical and neurological experiences can be quite different; our own are not necessarily a good baseline by which to judge others. Is it really so weird to consider that just as most brains are built with certain circuits tailored to recognizing and responding to faces there might also be circuits that automatically recognize and respond to other bodily details? Are we really so scared of the “but that’s just the way biology is babe” bros that we can’t allow ourselves any explorations in empathy?

At the end of the day the only question that matters is What Is The Mechanism? Because statistical correlation isn’t enough. There’s unbelievable diversity to how people think, what frames of mind they inherit or choose in approaching a given thing in a given context, and we’re not going to win by going around voting up or down on aggregates. I’m not saying, for example, that the societal and cultural effects of pornographic saturation aren’t significant or something that we should in any way shirk from attacking. But things are rarely cut and dry. Nor would it necessarily be better if they were. Complexity allows us a lot of directions from which to attack things, just as, in conjunction with our agency and proper vigilance, it allows us room to maneuver. Porn is just a medium and even Mein Kampf can be read for diverse reasons without corruption. Over the last decade various mainstream cultural ecosystems of porn (from imagefap to deviantart) have acted as virulent contagion vectors for a number of incredibly positive perspectives on consent and queered notions of gender/sexuality as well as broadly countering patriarchal narratives through direct interaction and omnipresent diversity. They’ve also served as vectors for the standard horribly fucked up shit, but in many cases the payloads have been subverted or partially neutralized as play made less potent by the surrounding free-wheeling context. Folks can no longer avoid recognizing the complexity of desire and identity in society and with less and less uniform social pressure a particular fetishization coming from a fucked up place no longer feels the obligation to form a totalizing counter-narrative and push it fascisticly. Porn as a whole has taken the form of a conversation.

That doesn’t make it anything close to a utopia yet. We still live under patriarchy and a diffuse post-modern fascism is still fascism. But it does make pornography a hugely dynamic and vital theater of conflict. And it does mean that the agency of the various speakers is creeping to the fore in undeniable ways among even those realms of kink that its hard at the outset to see any excusable mindset for. We can exploit this. And indeed a good many folks have rolled up their sleeves to get their hands dirty. So it’s sad to see a tiny remainder of otherwise brilliant feminists filled with right and glorious rage still bashing their heads together with sweeping practically deontological 70s-era frameworks. (Incidentally calling ourselves “sex-positive” is in most cases just incredibly underhanded and douchey and not making things any better.) This isn’t about some whiney liberal appeal to ‘free speech’ or chucking core principles out to win over bros. As I’ve picked apart there simply isn’t any root principle that pornography falls afoul of inherently; getting off to imagery relating to other people isn’t magically objectifying because people both differ and have agency in their self-construction. Socialization is anything but uniform and it certainly doesn’t create mechanistic people with mechanistic perspectives. Treating people like it does is itself objectifying.

Today’s big hit is a cute little paper by a couple econophysicists in Bremen. They built a toy model where a whole bunch of limited agents each have two types of interactions: they decide a ‘trustworthiness’ value for themselves [0-1] as well as who all to contract with, and strategize to maximize the number of folks contracting with them times those folks’ trustworthiness and minimize their own trustworthiness in the contracts they initialize with others (each agent is forced to initiate said contracts/interactions with a set number of people per round). This asymmetry between initiated interactions and responsive interactions is intended to mirror a distinction between selling and buying and I’ll stick to that metaphor from here on out although it’s not unproblematic. Who to buy from in this model is decided by a straight comparison of prices while sellers set prices (quality/trustworthiness) by comparing the immediately preceding prices and resulting payoffs of their competitors. Long story short there were three major environmental variables, the set number of people the buyers were forced to buy from, a randomness factor localized to a single agent each iteration and the relative speed at which buyers updated their strategies versus sellers. The resulting system behavior revealed that this market had only two stable points: extreme competition (selling with next to no profit above marginal costs) or extreme cartelization (sellers get ridiculous profit).

No freaking duh. Said runaway cartelization is a direct result of the defining obligations imposed upon buyers. The number of sellers one’s obliged to sell to [K] is explicitly recognized as a big one, if the whole market is raising prices like crazy and one person deviates a little to undercut their competitors they don’t get appropriately flooded with payoffs from buyers because those buyers are obliged to buy from K sellers (of which the undercutter is just one). But most importantly K isn’t a strategic choice that can be set to 0 (through savings, austerity, DIY, etc) for extended periods by the buyers or lowered via model-external tradeoffs. Essentially what’s being modeled is forced consumption. It should be intuitively obvious that forced consumption will have a tendency to drive up prices as if sellers were operating as a cartel, if only because whatever’s artificially forcing buyers to buy no matter what IS usually in reality a cartel. The authors repeatedly emphasize gas prices as the best example and it doesn’t take unusual knowledge of history or political economy to recognize the role the state has plated in establishing the fixed demand there.

Predictably, coverage of this paper has largely played to the popular myth that free markets inexorably lead to oligarchies, which is a little sad because the best part of the paper is the quantitative analysis of response time in determining the critical point between competition and cartelization.  How fast sellers and buyers pick up on market changes and adapt their strategies relative to one another is obviously of huge importance in the fight over what emerges.  And this is actually a left-libertarian point: insofar as situations arise where smaller market actors are forced to consume rigidly they can leverage their well-known calculational advantages against larger more sluggish actors (usually the ones responsible for the situation).  And in the other direction, where larger firms typify the position of buyer and individuals typify sellers (as with labor), such “cartelization” effects would be positive. Whether through solidarity unionism or more diffuse mechanisms like RateMyBoss.com, we want to drive them out of business after all.

Of course while this provides further impetus for the development of information technologies empowering consumers, there are obvious difficulties in practice for unrestrained market mechanisms alone when our existing “market” is already so far gone to cartelization (precarity, etc), but that’s what molotovs and pikes are for.