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Mostly I think, people never encounter each other. I suspect there's people living near me, with similar politics, who I've never met. Quite often nowadays, connection seems to be almost random. People find each other on corporate platforms like Facebook, in non-anarchist groups, through friends in common. And often it just doesn't happen. The difficulty with real-life interactions is getting enough people. And avoiding idpol shitstorms and big-man takeovers. Most people are very busy nowadays and quite a few don't go out much. Some will avoid political contexts because of repression or big-man politics or idpol or other bad experiences.

The anarchists and quasi-anarchists I still know are mostly people I know through two routes: people who were involved in my local scene when it was more lively, and people I know through involvement in online projects. A lot of them are in a similar situation to me: they don't have a real activity-context but are still in touch with old friends, and online contacts.

Past routes that I think were common:

1. People started out in student activism, passed through the left into left-anarchism and then into direct action. This is less common now because uni activism is so heavily idpol.
2. People started out in left sects, moved from one sect to another, finally found anarchism. This happens less now because the left sects have shrunk.
3. People started out in single-issue NGOs, moved towards the radical wing and thus into anarchism. This is less common now because moderate NGOs are too recuperated and don't protest much, there's too big a split between the NGOs and the radicals.
4. People move into anarchism from participation in a subcultural scene such as punk or raving. This is less common now because the scenes are smaller and more regulated. Also the internet has eaten into that whole pub/club/festival model.
5. People meet each other through DIY lifestyle practices like squatting, skipping, urban foraging, gardening, self-build, etc. I think this still happens, but is less common.
6. People get radicalised by a particular demonstration, riot or action, and move into anarchism more broadly from that. This still happens, but I think the level of repression makes it less common. A lot of people protest once, get traumatised, and stop.
7. People start out in cyber counterculture – hacker community, channing, piracy – develop hacker ethos and then move into anarchism from there. This still happens, but it's less common because the alt-right is so strong in these scenes and the repression is stronger too.

So I think we need to rethink how to build connections. We have the dense social networks at a macro scale with the internet, but we've lost the local affinity groups, we've got a kind of networked possessive individualism. And we're dealing with a different problem “activating” people now. If you look at Helena Flam's work, there's a clear difference in mobilisation problems in “democratic” and “authoritarian” regimes. In “democratic” regimes the big problem is getting people discontented enough to want to revolt. In “authoritarian” regimes the big problem is keeping up courage in the face of fear. I think the west has moved far enough towards the second pole that the problems have shifted more in that direction.

A few suggestions of how to revive connections. One is that we need to create our own social network sites that aren't corporate and aren't big-data mines, preferably on the dark web. Something doing for us what Gab is doing for the far-right. Second, we need good anarchist real-world events that are clear in not implementing idpol safe-space crap. Third, we need a group of people specifically dedicated to funnelling people active on social media into safer channels. Fourth, we need to recreate local affinity groups or autonomous zones based on 1, 2 and 3. Fifth, once we have groups we need to try to reach out to people like squatters, prisoners, homeless people and so on to recreate a milieu. We aren't far off the point where we could in principle have a global network coordinated from a few hidden autonomous sites which could gradually expand into ZAD-like autonomous zones all over the world.