I will always remember the first time I paused while flicking through channels and heard “boy, this planet really smells!” I was immediately hooked. And I spent the following long dark years before Serenity a fervent evangelist. That we even got our Big Damn Movie shocks me to this day and I want to make clear that I am more than content to sit back, wrap up my fandom with a little bow, put it on a shelf, and only ever trot it out when someone makes the mistake of asking the wrong question at a party. We got our ending–such as it is–and I have no illusions that our wildly successful cast will ever disentangle themselves from their various contracts in time to film anything other than Firefly: The Geriatrics.

However.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to consider the possibilities and the recent successful Kickstarter campaign for a Veronica Mars movie certainly set off quite a lot of chatter. What surprised me the most though were those who felt the story was finished and that any continuation would have to resort to the dark magic of prequeling, retconning or rebooting. That’s patently ludicrous and I feel it warrants a moment’s response. (Also–in a slightly more self-serving vein–the years have taught me that nothing revitalizes one’s writing like tapping into some geek righteousness. Spend months crafting a very compassionately nuanced and analytical exploration of objectification and pornography, get ten reads; feverishly slobber off some drelk on Star Wars, get ten thousand a day. And while I don’t have any illusions about the odds of striking readership gold again, that kind of piece always breaks my writer’s perfectionism and boy could I use a hand there again.)

Honestly I see Serenity as the perfect launching point for a really solid series and/or sequels. Here’s how Firefly continues in my head:

Remember that in all likelihood Mal and the crew are not famous. The whole point of Wikileaks was to keep B Manning’s name out of the papers and it’s very much not in the nature of Serenity’s crew to stick their heads up further than absolutely required. All the rest of the ‘verse knows is that a bit of video and possibly some boring records got leaked. Of course Mal’s name is finally very much on the government’s radar but there’s some reticence towards generating another big splashy scene hunting the crew down. A Pentagon Papers scandal like Miranda generates the kind of turbulence that changes which corrupt and privileged politicians/businessmen are holding the reins of political power, but it hardly shoves the majority of those responsible or connected to those responsible into the wastebin. Key members of parliament are going to remain, more or less, key members of parliament. Thus there’s incentive for the best repositioned factions of those in power to keep a walking potential after-tremor of the scandal like Malcolm, River and company alive and in play. It’s not in anyone’s interest to make Miranda into a truly tumultuous affair, no one wants systemic change after all, but once the news cycles have petered it out into background static, softly kicking the hornets nest again to re-malign one’s competitors becomes a survivable tactic. Insofar as those with the most amount of power post-Miranda ever consider Mal and the crew, they like that they have a piece in play that could get Miranda mildly back into the news.

But of course this is a two-sided coin. While the upper echelons of the police/military aren’t going to go on a land-burning and sea-boiling crusade for our Big Damn Heroes, there’s lots and lots of space and motivation for other hammers to come swinging at them. Those with–for whatever byzantine reason due to the most current web of politics at any moment–a stake in not having Miranda come up will very much like to see Serenity snuffed out in a silent explosion out on the ass-end of the ‘verse. As will any remnants of those with direct responsibility for Miranda carrying an itchy personal grudge at the notion of letting a flea get away after a bite. And of course River will remain–if not grow–both dangerous and valuable.

If Mal was unable to get underscrupulous jobs before because of his chaotic conscience and attention grabbing antics, now things are surely only peachy.

This is the real linchpin on which Serenity instantly transforms from a crescendo and coda to the opening salvo in our little old firefly’s real journey. Whereas before the crew were junior-grade lumpenproles, in constant danger of being crushed by a stray step but capable of eking out an honestly dishonest living begging for warm bowls of crime-filled gruel and saluting passing cops with their best pearly-white smiles, now they’re actual outlaws.

If Firefly was ever in any chance of returning as a series the first season or two after Serenity would be a tense affair of survival and piracy. Every relationship or period of sedentary safety would have an all-too-pressing expiration date and they’d have to be far more proactive about heists… and a little less discriminatory  Sure the sense of soft familial love would be strengthened by Simon and Kaylee, but the tension of “me and mine” versus common humanity with strangers would be again be a salient running theme, and tensions of ends-and-means would surely heighten as the crew turns more and more to piracy.

But! Things are not quite so glum for our occasionally-intrepid mercenaries. There are alternatives to slowly filling the fleshy shoes of the Reavers, although perhaps even less palpable. In my mind Mal and the crew eventually find the kind of sponsors of hired-guns undaunted by the powers-that-be behind the Alliance: other Alliance powers-that-be. First corporate espionage/subversion/thuggery, and then later direct employ from figures inside parliament itself. Although the crew is never treated as anything more than a few steps removed pawn only sometimes on the edge of awareness of their situations, the potential for system-spanning plot entanglements and culture/paradigm clash is immense. As are the internal tensions and counter-schemes, because our Big Damn Heroes are hardly passive.

Firefly certainly did not die with Serenity, nor did the struggles of our crew.

There are quantum-telegraph cables to be cut, murderous gunmen to be tracked down, samples of vats of copyrighted plastics and proteins to be stolen, reavers dispersed by the Alliance into local raiding parties in garbage fields, denizens of small spacestations bandying together to fend off the thugs of spectrum monopolists…

I’ve always really, really wanted to see the crew rob a giant particle accelerator in space. I think there’s so much potential there in the implicit cultural and paradigmatic clash. Firefly borrows strongly from Star Wars’ complete disinterest in science, but explicitly contextualizes this tendency as a cultural and subjective perspective by working hard to make strides towards a believable scientific framework in the background. In much the same way that Joss Whedon is personally a fan of the Alliance’s social democracy (with universal healthcare), yet the story is shot primarily from a libertarian perspective with the other aspects of the underlying reality obscured in what seem like minor details.

Neither Blue Sun nor the history of Shepard Book were sufficiently handled on by the comics–if they’re even cannon–and there’s so much more room to touch on them, if only fleetingly. Just as the first season built up a pile of references and floating plots, so too would one expect any new series to continue shaking in references and background details to entirely new aspects of their society and relationships with new characters. There’s so much more to explore in the ‘verse and so much more to be mined from the cultural, aesthetic and paradigmatic clash between periphery and core that made episodes like “Ariel” so popular.

Cosmopolitan revolutionary and radical movements surely exist in the core of the Alliance and I’d like to thing we’d get to see them open up and explore the reference implicit in Simon’s friends. But sadly a treatment that looks anything like real revolutionary and radical groups rather than nth-iterated cartoonish abstractions of hollywood tropes kinda beggars belief. (It’s still viscerally painful for me to watch those scenes in Children of Men, so embarrassingly unreal are the supposed radicals, excellent though the rest of the film is.) So maybe instead of coming into the ranks of radicals and revolutionaries, the final apex of the story is one of finally actually saving people instead of watching them die or telling their tale. I love the idea of a different sort of social landscape opening up in the border planets over the course of the story, of the sort of wildcat labor struggles that filled the wild west after the civil war was won and the railroads established. Futuristic struggles and battles between Wobblies and Pinkertons would nicely parallel the actual west, where a volunteer Confederate soldier and abolitionist like Albert Parsons could ride with the Texas cavalry, start a paper in Waco, fight the Klan, marry an unbelievably badass freed slave, and die on the gallows in Chicago as an anarchist union organizer.

Serenity framed itself and the prior prelude of Firefly as Mal’s struggle to finally stand for something, to shake off the wounded defensive nihilism of the Browncoats’ defeat and come back into the world. But it also brought to the fore River’s similar but hidden journey in ways that hinted at her always being the main character, albeit temporarily obscured in the background detail. In that light Firefly Season One and its spectacular finale look a lot like opening chapter of a George RR Martin book: the person indicated to be of central narrative importance is there primarily to set things up and characters gonna die quickly.

Serenity ends with River exactly where Mal began five years before the show in that junkyard: a couple years after a personal hell, just beginning to coming out of her shell and looking up at what could be. That’s a lot of seasons to come. I can’t wait to find out what she finally comes to believe in.

Because that? That’ll be an interesting day.

Hierarchies of knowledge and experience are shitty, and feedback loops that reinforce these suck, which is why everyone should make an effort in their life to be aware of these myriad processes and try to help explain and teach other people, especially those individuals without other/good avenues of gaining that information. But. This does not mean doing that all the time, in every conversation. Or even most of them.

Here’s some good internet etiquette: Inquire once if someone could explain or pass a link. If they say they no, recognize this conversation isn’t for you, and that’s not necessarily them trying to play catty popularity games of excluding you, it’s just a frustrating reality of specialized knowledge and our society’s insufficiently developed communications technologies. Perfectly decent people need space / separate audiences sometimes. Don’t derail the conversation they were trying to have by expressing your frustration, take the hint and shut the fuck up.

When someone posts something in public do not assume they have you in mind as their intended audience, or that they SHOULD. Sometimes them not considering you is rooted in fucked up dynamics. When someone implies quite strongly that their audience is Everyone or Everyone That Matters (like for example a very public newspaper article), that’s obviously obnoxious and can contribute to the institutionalization of oppressive dynamics.

Closed minds suck. We should always be exploring beyond our horizons as well as exploring the framing context, chance and individual particulars behind our own journey to assist others rather than pulling the ladder up behind us. But someone not willing to drop everything to talk with you right now doesn’t neccessarily mean they have a closed mind.

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 have 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.