TOTW: Anarcho-prototyping

Recently, I came across a (former?) anarchist reflecting on their bygone youthful rebellion in a piece called “Anarchyland.” It’s a quick, worthwhile read if you’re a sucker for indulgent nostalgia and want some company in your love/hate relationship with the Beautiful Idea. I have to dock the author some points for the following section, though, as they lose me with their pride of what they see as innovative anarchist thinking.

I didn’t know it at the time but I was participating in a laboratory where the new ideology was being built.

We were building it in the basements and warehouses on the edge of town.

The liberals were completely oblivious to concepts like “trans rights” and “mutual aid” and “anti-blackness” and didn’t use words like “harm” and “abuse” and “trauma.”

But in the hidden little protean stew, things were being tested out on a small self-chosen group. Things that weren’t necessarily meant for mass consumption.

This idea of “anarcho-prototyping” makes me super uncomfortable. Partly because it’s totally arrogant, partly because it feels shamefully accurate. I can roll back the tape and see how I’ve acted as a beta tester for a New World in the shell of the Old. Anarchists, in all our miscreant glory, can tend toward some kind of hipster intelligentsia of rebellion. “Oh, you’re reading Bonanno? I like his early stuff…”

It doesn’t help that I’ve heard this “cutting-edge” narrative casually repeated through the years.

We were militant vegans before everyone else.”
“We hated work before it was cool.”
Our gangs popularized the getaway car in bank robberies.”
“We knew politics was a joke even before Trump.”
“We’ve long sat with how fucked everything is while others still clung to hope.”

To give credit where it’s due, being an anarchist requires a degree of novelty and experimentation, assuming the unofficial templates don’t suite you[1]. With much less of a playbook to follow, I appreciate and welcome the wingnutty cross-pollinations that result.

But fringe positions don’t tend to stay that way, of course. Just ask the hippy generation, erhm, I mean your square-ass parents[2]. And like the author mentions above, you may just get the worst thing imaginable: exactly what you wanted...The Impossible Whopper, r/antiwork, sparkly circle-a stickers at the Boy Genius show, TikTok nihilism.

To be clear, I don’t see this all one way. Before you leave your tired take about how everybody sucks and “anarchy is dead,” remember “life is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophe included.”

So, what positions have anarchists played a fundamental role in shaping? And what might that influence have led to? History nerds, share with me your favorite anarcho-pioneers, either as brave example or doomed folly. What does this say about the need for anarchists to “keep moving” to outpace recuperation? Or, on the other hand, what does this say about anarchists unknowingly leading the charge toward a Better Tomorrow? Is the contemporary shift toward No Future any more desirable?


1: Food Not Bombs cook + IWW secretary, PhD candidate + legal observer, full-time shoplifter + part-time DJ
2: Grandparents? shit I’m getting older...

There are 35 Comments

An extremely cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic, and paranoid take would be to claim that all the things that came from counter-culture that then became mainstream were inputted by state agents infiltrating these spaces in the first place, and then the servile media and academia amplifying these aspects. Some of this has happened and does happen, but it's not the whole truth.

do you have examples of this happening? i srsly can't think of anything. capitalism can recuperate on its own, no need to go the extra mile for infiltrating counter-culture.

This is huge and obvious: how Identity Politics, which has NO real problem with capitalism, has displaced class consciousness/anti-capitalism as what is understood as "left" by the public.

This did not require infiltration by State agents, though some of this may have occurred.

It was enabled by what got mass media attention after Occupy. And the career opportunities capitalism and academia provide IdPol as DEI trainers, bureaucrats, consultants, etc. And how easily racial and other identity resentments blot out any class consciousness, which is harder to aquire.

I look at it as part of the general balkanizations of politics, and any sort of meaningless balkanization that gets popular tends to later get embraced by politicians etc. because that's exactly the kind of distracting nonsense they like.

In the end, politics is about splitting groups of people and then supposedly representing then, or at least that is the most perfected form.

I think recuperation, like a form of decay, is unavoidable. It's like being biodegradable in a sense, or even recyclable. It's like we all share a commons of spirit, ideas, material, and energy.

and comment section allows this to stay up, but i am glad: that pretty mirrors how i feel about the revolutionary grasping (shown when anarchists talk about recuperation in a serious way), the desperate desire to impose "anarchy" or whatever word people use. There's no control, let us die, it is unavoidable.

Those who are partisans of novelty are inherently anarcho-curious but will quickly drift to shinier newer things, hopping on to any new thing, being the eternal early adopters. They keep moving, anarchy was never a conviction, but a novelty.

The 'Anarchyland' reading linked up top is just some bitter butt-hurt anarchy-bashing like the type we see sometimes in this comment section. Why even give it the spotlight? If anarchy really was what he described, I wouldn't even mess with it in the first place.

if there's a fallacy exhibited in that piece is that of anarchist exceptionalism. the life arc he mentions is one that's very common among people nowadays regardless of if their part of some subculture or not. a lot of people wander aimlessly in their early years without acquiring profitable skills or settling down and being responsible adults. this is far from exclusive to anarchists, one may online look for life testimonies from many other mainstream online spaces

Far from exceptional in some ways, sure. But the ideological journey from anarchism to Mask Magazine to corporate Manhattan sure is a trip, isn't it?

Could you clear up your comment about Mask Magazine and the relationship to corporate Manhattan? Mask Magazine which occasionally published anarchist content seems like an earlier form of e-begging, like they had a pay-wall for anarchist content before the New York Times did kind of kewl. I'm reminded of more pay-for-anarchist-content that has become a lot more common today with Substack and Patreon, for the good and bad. It doesn't seem like Mask Magazine is around today, but I'm wondering if anyone remembers the end?

It also reminds me of the Signal messaging app, which was largely designed by THE anarchist superhacker named Moxie. Signal made the big leagues and got tons of money, Moxie stepped back and new ppl took over. The new president recently accepted the job of president and CEO of National Public Radio (NPR). So they are both Signal and NPR president. V rich. "v anarchist"

One of the founders Hanna now works for that super popular astrology app, the other Tyler used to work on signal and makes a bunch of money programming somewhere.

With a comment: Whatever that bitter Anarchyland author was doing all those years in the anarchist milleu, it did not solve his problems. Including his internal (i.e. character) problems.

And of course his anarchy-bashing can get him an in with the capitalist system.

At age 66, I am probably far older than that bitter old Anarchyland author. I have done "marginal" things (eg. over 10 years total experience living in a truck w/camper shell). I also solved most of my problems and have a more complex take on anarchy.

To "the Anarchland reading" comment that ended up way down here.

i was in a poli sci class decades ago where the professor was pretty hopeless about any substantive change under capitalism. his point was that it has the capacity to recuperate anything. (he was also impressed that i knew who Emma was, so not sure what that's saying except maybe that teaching is a depressing job.)

which i think was the point being made in Nih Com when the authors talk about not doing anything until we do The Thing. as unrealistic/impossible as that might be, it is an attempt to address the quick subversion of anything that capitalists can find out about.

not answering the prompt, oops! :)

I don't condone terrorism, but anarchist terrorism > self-repenting post-scenesters with blog every day of the week.

prototype stereotype karyotype phenotype tripe

i didn't start staffing the infoshop until i was almost 40 years old, i knew train hoppers who got PhDs while riding the rails, ... point being any stereotype you got for who an anarchist is can be countered by another anarchist who did it differently. this man's angry because he never understood anarchy in the first place. alas, an oft told tale.

of course, I was responding to the linked essay, not the totw prompt. :/

and i think, while anarchists don't want anarchy to be recuperated, you know in a bad way, didn't there used to be the phrase "a virus in the system" ? where is the line between generalizing a practice of anarchy and mere recuperation?

it can seem like anarchists think the only thing one needs to do is change one's mind about the State and voilà -anarchy accomplished! but, to me, anarchy is a day to day practice. not just about how the state, government et al impinge upon myself, but also how i hierarchilize others, ie look askance at Normies or the uninitiated.

and don't anarchists want this sort of generalization?

ideas can spread, the original definition ‘meme’, rather than virus. anarchism is a bunch of ideas. i think it’s more honest, less condescending, and paternalistic for anarchists to return the disdain their ideas receive from normies, than to assume they can unwittingly be nudged into adopting the phonemes of anarchy without them putting them together and figuring it out. alternatively one can have open conversations with normies without euphemisms and homeopathic doses.

concerns with ideas generalizing is mass culture spectacle and cybernetic governance. calculated dishonesty or convenient half-truths is demagogy. are you anarchist or a politician?

i agree with your final points, but think that the disdain you assume in your first paragraph is overstated. doesn't really matter, i guess.

more significantly, there is not a clear line (ever?) between sharing ideas and spreading ideas. the language can make a distinction that doesn't really exist in human beings, i think. we always have multiple motivations for the things we do, some of time we will be trying to show we're better than other people (by "we" i mean human beings, not anarchists), and we will also want to meet people and share things that are important to us, along with a ton of other motivations that will usually contradict each other.

what The West (to use an unfortunate term but useful here) has a specific meaning of honesty that is pretty culturally specific that you're relying on here too, which is probably a whole other conversation.

lol, not really sure how you came to respond to my post the way you do... if you are unsure of what a person means asking what they mean is more efficient than assuming.

ANYWAY... i certainly am not in favor of trying to trick anyone into anything. what I meant by generalizing a practice of anarchy is just this - making things such as 'not-calling-the-cops' the default attitude in most people regardless of (anti)political orientation.

I was further arguing for a non hierarchical communication style with non anarchists, a lack of disdain for regular folks, a speaking plainly. a radical sincerity, if you will.

what has anarchy done for you lately? are you making it work for you or are you working for it?

It has brought me plenty of free goodies, partly for survival but also for comfier living, much less stress with demented socially-imposed imperatives, and enjoying similar lifestyles than the wealthy.

Finding like-minded buddies and lovers is a whole other story, tho. So paying off... yeaaa, but maybe not for the highest goods in life, that are always hard to get outside of conveyor belts.

I think my favorite example is the 90s insurrectionary anarchist street conflicts, obviously I have a bias here cuz i'm a 90s kid, it comes off me like a bad smell but this is a critique as much as anything.

i'm talking about the very particular, very weird, partially performative extreme combat sport of fighting the cops in a temporary partial truce where they've implicitly agreed not to just outright murder the (often white) kids who are deliberately fighting under a riot version of the social contract? put another way, a weird consensus emerged about non-lethal and usually-not-lethal weapons and tactics for a whole bunch of circumstantial reasons. this is all just very odd, compared to the rest of human history.

it's not that these anarchists weren't very brave because they were. it's not that the cops agreed to any of this because they wanted to, more like it was a fragile tension between their public relations and a lack of development of their riot control theories and a whole range of other things that i've eventually come to think of as oddly similar to the more ceremonial types of warfare from the ancient world. also, it justifies bloated police budgets, so they have an economic incentive to perform their storm trooper routine in front of the cameras.

comparisons could be made to old traditions like counting coup. big topic and i'm barely scratching it but i think the insurrectionary anarchists developed some things that were genuinely new here, even as guys like bonanno were basically saying none of it was good enough and everybody should have gone way harder. if they had, presumably a lot more of those anarchists would be dead, what with conventional warfare not going very well for anarchists over the years ...

The main reason for the partial truce was that the cops knew the anarchists were just privileged idealistic college kids destined to become wealthy law abiding citizens after graduation!

that hasn't prevented blood shed plenty of other times, maybe your cute little hot take needs work?

I can confirm that this is so painfully the case... to say nothing of the posers who were trans in Uni who have totally sold out and reverted to being cis straight yuppies.

Uhm ackshully, true individualist anarchs don’t give a damn about social context or what’s downstream of our actions because society! isn’t real anyway. And don’t get me started on our list of reasons for writing off anyone who has fallen away from the fold.

The sixth part of that Anarchyland essay is downright laughable.

"Now I am old and cynical and neutral, more interested in what is normal and good not just because what is normal and good is normal and good because society says so, but because the weight of time has shown it to have some kind of value."

I hope this is supposed to be some sort of sarcasm. Coming out of a culture where you were presumably told to Question Everything(tm) and this is what you came to. It's like the Hegelian dialectic. Soon enough we'll get the synthesis and this person will say "oh, well you should question some things."

"To give credit where it’s due, being an anarchist requires a degree of novelty and experimentation, assuming the unofficial templates don’t suite you"

As far as the rest of it, all the spooky insinuations, talks about trauma, abuse, nationalism...it honestly seems to me that a lot of anarchists just want to perpetuate tribal nationalist ideology with different words. For example, all the pro-ukraine and pro-palestine rhetoric i have seen on here. Yeah, feel sorry for the victims if you want, but the alternatives being opposed to these forms of oppression aren't anything short of nationalism, call it whatever you want.

Not sure why those two words particularly bother you: it sounds like tech and shit, also sounds empty.

Yeah I'm over all the seething raging ressentiment which hid beneath the traditional anarchist political agenda!

Some things are invented/discovered/elaborated by a small group before becoming mainstream. Small anarchy group invent or reinvent themes that stay fringe for decades before becoming obvious, that's a fact. What is unhealthy is the attitude of feeling superior because you were part of that small group. It is kind ridiculous to call it an "intelligentsia" because those groups do not really depend on education level but more on contact with problems hidden from the actual "intelligentsia". And often a group that points a dynamic to solve a specific problem will be totally oblivious to other problems.

I think the problem you point out disappear when you do not ascribe some sort of higher status, either moral or intellectual, to the people who point out the problem first but instead see them as peers that are there to help solve the problem and may have a headstart there.

When e.g. a support group made of opiod addiction survivors come to tell you what type of support works or not and how to help them in a non-coercive way, you should neither feel they are arrogant by telling you they know about a situation you never encountered, nor put them on a pedestal for having been in contact with a suffering you had the chance to avoid.

And it is not arrogant either to think that some things are not for "mass consumption". Even the most militant does not have time to get into every cause. These groups form to think about how to help society heal.

WEHERE THE FUCK IS NEW TOPIC??? IT IS MONEDAY! WHY DO YOU SO BAD YOUR AT YOUR ONE JOBS????

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