agency

Guest Topic of the Week - An NPC is a gaming term, which stands for "Non-Playable Character." Simply, it is a character in a game that the player does not control. All dialogue and actions are preset and described by the DM or programmer, depending if it is a table-top or video game. An NPC does not think for itself, has limited manners of communicating and acting.

Robert Sapolsky’s 2023 Detemined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is a recent major influence on me. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, argues free will either does not exist or at best, exists at a lower rate than we like to believe. Sapolsky’s previous book, Behave states, “And [human behavior] is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.”

Just over a decade ago, a small group of anarchist media activists started what they defined as an anarchist PR project—Agency was officially launched. As we develop a vision and plans for the next decade, we want to share how Agency came to be, how it has evolved, what we have accomplished, and how we hope to spread anarchist ideas and practices into the future.

From Anarchist Agency, Press Brief

Agency, an anarchist PR project, provides key talking points and a resource list for media on why anarchists support restorative justice and transformative justice practices

From structural fract by reimagining

Embracing Anarchist-Informed Intersectionality

The tension between individual agency and the structures that shape us has been a topic of debate in philosophy and sociology for decades. However, there is a disturbing trend emerging where some popular forms of social critique seem to ignore individual agency altogether, erasing our unique subjectivity in favor of a belief that we are solely products of social systems. This crude and imbalanced conglomeration of analyses creates a flattened conceptual landscape that, through its top-down, synoptic vision, detrimentally limits building coherent mental maps and thus restricts potential forms action might take.

From cyberdandy.org by Cyber Dandy, February 19, 2021

To people who don’t know much about anarchism, it seems like a completely unrealistic worldview. To those people who know a little bit about anarchism, it is obvious that anarchism has a messaging problem. Anarchists have attempted to solve this problem in a variety of ways.

From Fifth Estate

This week’s guest Eric Laursen, Fifth Estate contributing writer and co-founder of NYC Anarchist Book Fair

from The Washington Times by Valerie Richardson

Anarchists have accused President Trump of “demonizing” and “scapegoating” them by blaming far-left extremist groups such as antifa for the spread of mass U.S. rioting.

From Outside the Circle

While “social distancing” is a necessary tool to help stop the spread of this virus, it will only be effective if it’s grounded in an ethics and practice of social solidarity and collective care. COVID-19 clearly demonstrates that only by deeply looking out for each other — acting as if everyone’s life has inherent worth and is at risk; as if the health of one is the health of all — will we actually be able to lessen the amount of sickness and death, not to mention the emotional weight on us all. Unless everyone cooperates, the virus exponentially spreads.

Not the most articulate title, but bear with me.

So, this totw shouldn't just be about A!, by which I mean, he's a very specific and fresh example, but also, at least for some of us, entirely anomalous (although, maybe that's the point of heroes in general? IDK).