Organizations have a lot of downsides. Anyone who’s ever attended a meeting recognizes this on some level. And yet most folks persist in an either instinctive or confused idealization of forming and participating in organizations.
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... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In talking about AI over the last few years Nick Bostrom and Stuart Armstrong have very successfully popularized a more formal and nerdy re-statement of the Humean claim that values and rationality are orthogonal.
I generally like to refer to their Orthogonality Thesis as the most rigorous reformulation and baseline argument for the value-nihilist claim: Thinking about things more will not incline minds to certain values or cause them to inevitably converge to them (but rather leave values more indistinguishable and arbitrary).
In its defense, the space of possible minds is indeed very very big. And just about everyone could do to cultivate a much deeper appreciation for this. But I think the degree to which the Orthogonality ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Infamously anarchists, marxists and conservatives all use the word “liberal” as a slur — probably the most frequent one that rolls off our tongues — and yet we each mean wildly different things by it.
To an anarchist the foremost characteristic of liberalism is shortsightedness. Liberals embrace state power and other problematic means to achieve some ameliorations in the short term at the cost of future victories. The watchword of liberals might as well be “good enough” and their slogan John Maynard Keynes’ famous line “in the long run we’re all dead.” Liberals are uninterested in the fundamental dynamics or historic consequences, they’ll do what they need to do to get... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Last Friday, The Oregonian published a staff editorial that responded to the police brutality unleashed on May Day protesters by labeling all anarchists as “punk fascists.” This editorial — published by the conservative newspaper that used to be a daily powerhouse in the Northwest — has been roundly denounced in many circles for its political ignorance, opportunism, and misrepresentation of the facts. While some participants in the black bloc chucked Pepsi cans at alt-right provocateurs and the cops, the Portland police — infamous for rehiring officers exposed as neonazis — were the clear aggressors, as is the inherent nature of police.
They responded to the minor actions of a few by brutally attac... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
When I was six-years-old my anarchist dad smuggled me a copy of Jurassic Park against my mom’s prohibitions. “When you can read it, you can read it,” he said, and within a year I had not only learned every last word, I’d read my fraying copy cover to cover dozens of times in the boring waits at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and welfare offices. Surrounded by a filthy concrete dystopia I read again and again with wide eyes as the Cassandra character inveighed against rigid systems of control as prone to diminishing returns and inevitable catastrophe, spoke about how hunter gatherers worked far less and played far more. I was hooked. Between survivalist day camps and Zerzan tracts at the used boo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
When I was six-years-old my anarchist dad smuggled me a copy of Jurassic Park against my mom’s prohibitions. “When you can read it, you can read it,” he said, and within a year I had not only learned every last word, I’d read my fraying copy cover to cover dozens of times in the boring waits at homeless shelters, soup kitchens and welfare offices. Surrounded by a filthy concrete dystopia I read again and again with wide eyes as the Cassandra character inveighed against rigid systems of control as prone to diminishing returns and inevitable catastrophe, spoke about how hunter gatherers worked far less and played far more. I was hooked. Between survivalist day camps and Zerzan tracts at the used boo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) With such a nice response from Kevin it’s probably incumbent upon me to emphasize some disagreements — or perhaps just nuances — I was hoping to draw out.
Along the way there are a few quibbles I’d make in response to Kevin’s commentary, because I don’t think things are as clean-cut as he’d like them:
I actually don’t think the case for occupancy-and-use extends merely to land. Factories are the classical example and one could easily imagine a factory that’s effectively a portable commodity. A factory that is highly specialized and costly to replicate, but that’s the sort of thing you could place on your desk. I’m sure Kevin can think of a few modern inventions ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The great economist and early anti-statist thinker Bastiat famously pointed out the way our attention is often drawn to the most immediate, losing sight of the wider array of consequences and causations. Such myopia is how modern statism flourishes, obscuring the threat of the policeman’s pistol and the swing of his truncheon, so that a proposed tax for instance is sliced away from all context and rendered into a seemingly inert, docile thing.
Through centuries of hard fought progress the public has increasingly grown adverse to violence and explicit acts of domination. It is impossible to understate the accomplishment this represents. And yet our rulers have compensated not by lessening their brutality but by obscuring it. Eve... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Anarchists who intend to act as though we didn’t live in a dystopic world must find themselves perplexed at every moment. With the ecosystems of civil society so atrophied and virtually every surviving institution of value captured and beaten into participating in the bloody circus of statism, who do you call? What do you do when you see a thug with a gun (and a badge) looming over someone, much less kidnapping or shooting people? Hell, how do you deal with the existence of sitcoms?
Ethically navigating the horrors of our world is a challenging task for anyone with a shred of humanity, but it’s unfathomable once you abandon the notion of strategy – the pursuit of wider context.
And yet the appeal of immediati... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Three close friends collectively inherit a house in the country from a departed mutual friend who built it. It’s a dream come true for these young friends, sick as they are of city life and longing to grow their own food. The house is big, gorgeous, and well-maintained. It has a large multifaceted kitchen, which is great because the friends prefer to cook separately. There’s a large stash of supplies, much equipment, a overrunning well, and acres for growing crops. To make matters better there’s a small orchard of genesliced trees that provide a variation of fruit and nuts throughout the year. Avocados, walnuts, peaches, figs, etc. Not enough to get by on exclusively, but — divided three ways — enough to provid... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Let us be clear that ecocide is happening.
While we may yet avoid the severest possibilities of global ecological collapse the situation has long been grim. And it’s not just a matter of capitalism or the state making uniquely bad decisions, the tensions at play are deep — at the core of homo sapiens itself.
Human cognition and social collaboration have created an explosion of evolution temporally detached from meaningful feedback from our surrounding ecology. Biological evolution proceeds at the pace of generations and incremental gene changes, but our thoughts leap far ahead, able to generate incredibly complex constructions in a minute. This provides our surrounding environs little time to adapt or react. Techno... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) No, no, no. What if we’re not doomed that way?
Nick Bostrom is one of my favorite academic philosophers; beyond pairing rigor with audacity, he’s one of the few to grasp and explore the philosophical avenues opened up by modern scientific understanding. But in the last decade Bostrom has shot to some prominence not for his explorations of multiverse theory and the anthropic principle but for his far more practical work on existential risks to our species. The moment it was published Superintelligence became the seminal text for those seriously concerned with the threat of artificial intelligence.
It must be said that, although it is often framed as a book on AI, Superintelligence casts a far broader net. Bostrom is... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There are few figures the alt-right hate more than Jeffrey Tucker — which may be something of a plot twist, given his alleged hand in the racist Ron Paul newsletters of the 80s. Yet Tucker has evolved into a passionate critic of racism, the alt-right and Trump. An affable and optimistic proponent of cosmopolitanism and classical liberalism, his tone has taken a more desperate and furious tilt in the last two years, becoming the most prominent outspoken figure against fascism within libertarian circles.
Right-Wing Collectivism is a compilation of Tucker’s writings between 2015 and 2017 as he sought to emphasize and explain the menace of fascism to his audience. Taken together they form a volume that isn’t bad, but al... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The situation is fluid, we may all be dead tomorrow. But it is interesting to examine the splits going on right now within the establishment.
It’s clear that no matter what the MAGA chuds will continue whacking off to fantasies of slaughtering everyone to show How Real Power Works. But the establishment has come to a consensus on strategy: They know a slaughter would mean unwinnable war, so they’re desperately trying to split liberal POC from leftists.
There’s basically two variants of this strategy:
1) the liberal one where a few thousand get selectively raided and put away for vandalism
2) the conservative one where they round up anarchists for ideology crime and use us as show trials for elec... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The allure, to me, of polyamory has always been its promise of addressing reality head on. Of communicating and grappling with the complexities in our lives and relationships in an honest and audacious manner. But I am not so on board with those who define it as in terms of “casual love.”
The comparison to casual sex is entirely misguided in my opinion. …Of course I freely admit I may not have the highest credentials in this area. Casual sex will probably always seem like a crazy scifi concept to me, completely detached from far more realistic and tangible notions like space elevators and time travel devices the size of galaxies. In some sense it’s silly to pay such an outlandish notion too much attention whe... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It’s no secret that a good portion of the left today considers science profoundly uncool. A slight affinity with it persists among a majority, but few asides of scorn by the continental philosophers influential in the contemporary leftist canon see spirited response and science’s most prominent champions remain dated historical figures like Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus. Indeed there’s a lingering whiff of technocratic stodginess and death that the word “science” has never quite shaken. Those leftists most associated with it have a tendency to either be authoritarians looking to legitimize near-fascist narratives, or doe-eyed activists enchanted by saccharine visions of self-managed bureaucrac... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Scientists are driven to inquire, to engage with the world around them and reshape their own minds in doing so. Regardless of whether they recognize it this places them fundamentally and diametrically at odds with power relations.
Consequently those power dynamics that have survived have found ways to hold back and rigorously control science, but this control rarely takes the form of direct oppression. Yes scientists do occasionally get shot, threatened, censored, fired and shipped off to gulags to starve, but as these things go they’re not a particularly oppressed class. Indeed if we accept for a moment the perception of “scientist” as a mere job description rather than intellectual orientation, then scientists hav... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Let’s say you hunger for liberation, you want to increase freedom. What is freedom but choice?
One might quickly think to equate this with the raw number of immediate options you have. But consider these options as a branching tree. What other options are opened up by choosing a specific option?
It has long been pointed out that if you have a choice between a hundred flavors of toothpaste that’s a very limited set of choices because once you make the choice there’s not much left to do. There’s very little different between the experience of brushing your teeth with one flavor of toothpaste versus another, nothing hangs on it, the impact upon the wider universe is very limited, and no further choices get... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Let’s say you hunger for liberation, you want to increase freedom. What is freedom but choice?
One might quickly think to equate this with the raw number of immediate options you have. But consider these options as a branching tree. What other options are opened up by choosing a specific option?
It has long been pointed out that if you have a choice between a hundred flavors of toothpaste that’s a very limited set of choices because once you make the choice there’s not much left to do. There’s very little different between the experience of brushing your teeth with one flavor of toothpaste versus another, nothing hangs on it, the impact upon the wider universe is very limited, and no further choices get... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) One of my less popular beliefs (and that’s saying something) is that any form of sexuality is inherently objectifying. As with all language being violence and all poetry dishonest, that’s not the end of the story, obviously, and certainly not an injunction to never engage with it.
My basic argument is that sexual desire is ultimately a very simple lizard-brain thing and while you can hook it up to to complex circuits, there’s a limit to the complexity of the triggers, or at least diminishing sustainability to complex triggers. The triggers can be ‘relatively’ complex, but they have to be ossified enough — have to have permanent enough associations or connections — to actually serve as trigger... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest.
By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on you to take your wallet is a crime, regardless of how much you subjectively value your wallet’s contents. Thus the government’s armed thug taking $20 from a poor person is in a certain sense categorically the same crime as said armed thug taking $2,000,000 from a rich person. The biggest problem by far, the NAP says, is the stickup, the aggression, the threat of bodily injury, less so the particular th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Now, obviously, as an anarchist I oppose affirmative action, welfare, public education and the like because they’re statist programs and, as such, are inherently, unavoidably, grounded in violence and the perpetuation of power structures. As statist programs they ultimately do more bad than good. And of course given freedom we could accomplish their stated ends far more efficiently without oppressing anyone.
But.
There’s nary an anarchist in the world that would go out of their way to abolish such projects first.
The reason for this is strategy. The first task of a prisoner is to escape, and with that goal in mind we’re not about to stop eating the meals they give us. Sure those meals are poisoning us.... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) There are two common ways to engage with ideas. The first is to treat them as models for the world, ideally providing us with greater accuracy or understanding and thus agency in our choices. The second is to view ideas exclusively in terms of their effects upon people and their relationships with one another.
In practice we all do both.
It’s almost impossible to consider a statement without considering the impact it might have upon likely audiences and we can rarely segregate our desire for truth entirely from our other desires or aspirations. Nevertheless there are still clearly different degrees to which we can weigh the first mode of thinking versus the second.
It’s tempting to try and parse the differen... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I want to be clear from the outset, The Last Jedi is a great film with intense artistic and entertainment value. And I don’t begrudge those who enjoyed the shit out it, not even those reviewers that made snide noises about how they never really liked Star Wars until now. The Last Jedi is a fun and at times moving and original film.
However.
It’s also a abomination that needlessly fucks over Star Wars as a world and as a saga and for all the highs I had experiencing it as a film I left with a stone in my stomach. A sense of loss, alienation, and insult.
It would, for example, only have taken a passing sentence or two of Snoke bragging while hitting Rey in the head with Anakin’s lightsaber to make any to... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A friend asked me for advice in dealing with an accusation of abuse and so I wrote a little guide with input from half a dozen feminists of differing perspectives that I admire…
First off you need to take one hell of a step back and try to remember the bigger picture. We are limited creatures, it is easy to self-delude or miss things while still perceiving ourselves as intensely rational and our experience as more objectively accurate. The effect of human cognitive biases not to mention subjective constraints is huge. It may be humiliating to think of yourself in terms of statistics among a much wider category of humans, but it can be a useful corrective. If you weren’t yourself, if you ignore your internal narrative and... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) By definition no consistently anti-statist libertarian believes that government property is legitimate. The state, by its very nature, cannot be meaningfully consented to; its claims to ownership are the claims of a ranting madman armed to the teeth and soaked in blood.
It is also broadly recognized that, because the state is aggression at its very core, many acts against it are justified as defense. Some take this to mean that assassinating say the entire New York Police Department would not only be justified but valorous. Yet however repugnant and perhaps irredeemable police are they are in some meaningful, if remote, sense human beings with agency. Killing an agent, an individual mind, unquestionably constitutes violence, regardle... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Serenity – At first it might seem ridiculous and fanboyish to place Serenity higher than Children of Men. Not only is the latter more finely composed, but on first appearance Serenity appears not simply ramshackle but less stalwartly Science Fiction. While there are necessary paradigmatic environmental changes (the G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorat, the psychic capacities of River Tam) they act less as central thematic drives than as crutches to drive events. If we take the old adage that a truly SF story is one that at its most basic and general can’t exist without a change of paradigm, it’s hard to evaluate Serenity because it’s hard to narrow down just what Serenity’s core is. Bad thing is done, man must expose? Riv... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Arrival – Right out of the gate let’s be clear that Arrival is the best Science Fiction film ever made. Both in the sense of being the purest most prototypical example of Science Fiction as a genre as well as in the sense of being simply one of the best films ever made. It introduced the world to Ted Chiang – long the science fiction snob’s favorite science fiction author – and against all odds somehow did his work justice. There’s an old bit Science Fiction fans like to tell about Mary Shelley, the first formal science fiction author, being the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, in turn often cited as the first formal feminist and anarchist. Arrival is very clearly and solidly in this tr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The more means by which people can act the easier attack becomes and the harder defense becomes.
It’s a simple matter of complexity. The attacker only needs to choose one line of attack, the defender needs to secure against all of them. This isn’t just true of small thermal exhaust ports, it’s true in our software ecosystems today and any other system with many dimensions of movement. Complexity — more degrees of freedom within a system — allows for greater attack surface. When they can come not just from all points on the compass but from above and below as well.
The arc of human history is an arc bent by our creativity and inquiry towards more options, more ways of existing and acting. Towards g... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “They’re even gassing children!”
A small affinity group of teenagers raced past me, all in black bloc, one member slowing down only to look at me. I had put my red bandanna away, soaked as it was in tear gas and pepper spray. What remained was a skinny thirteen year old kid in a bright yellow rainjacket my mom had forced me to bring.
I grinned to myself because I was no innocent. I had spent the whole day disdainful of the other protesters, sneering at the liberal speeches and inane placards, rolling my eyes at the naivety of the bloc during the fighting. N30 was my first major protest and I wanted more than anything to be above it. I originally went to Seattle more to observe the end of the world, than to pa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)