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Title: Beneath The Institutional Author: William Gillis Date: January 2nd, 2019 Language: en Topics: a response, Peter Gelderloos Source: https://c4ss.org/content/51542
Gelderloos complains at length about perceived small misreadings and
misrepresentations in my piece warning about skews to “Diagnostic of the
Future” but then he engages in a number of such himself. “They say I
claim that fascism should only be critiqued at the institutional level,
and never at the ideological level.”
But note that I made no extrapolations that Gelderloos thinks we should
“never” talk about the ideology of fascism. What I wrote is that in his
piece he casts fascism “in terms of dictatorship — a structure of
institutions — rather than as an ideology.” This focus is what I take
exception with.
Gelderloos writes,
What I actually say is that fascist ideology is less important in the
historical moment when fascists have little or no elite support than it
is in the moment when capitalists and militarists have decided to throw
their weight behind it. This is a difficult argument to dispute, which
may be why William doesn’t engage with it.
Allow me to enunciate more thuddingly:
This take is not “difficult to dispute” — it’s largely beyond the pale
in antifascist analysis because it’s widely recognized as a bad take.
Fascist ideology is a pressing threat in a multitude of ways without
directly seizing or allying with the capitalist and militarist forces of
the establishment. Fascists can pose existential threats to us without
“taking power” — either through autonomous extermination campaigns or
corruption and derailment of our movements and ideologies — and there
are viable myriad pathways to power that don’t lie through winning over
establishment capitalists and militarists. When fascists are outside of
institutional power their ideological motivations are arguably even more
pertinent because this is also usually when they focus on entryism and
attempts to ideologically influence other movements. For more you can
see sections of this longer piece I wrote on antifascist organizing,
arguing against right-libertarians dismissing the threat of fascists
outside of establishment power.
Gelderloos’ focus on the establishment capitalists and militarists as
critical precisely proves my point. This myopic focus on the
establishment power structures relatively ignores the danger of them
being bypassed or radically reconfigured.
Gelderloos points out that in the two most prominent historical
instances where the most explicit fascists held regime power they
morphed much of their ideology to court capitalists. This is certainly
true enough, but it is precisely the contention that Mussolini and
Hitler are a somewhat unrepresentative sample of fascism as a whole.
There are two far more productive senses in which we might think of
“fascism”: as a self-identified movement and as deeper ideological or
philosophical position they are attracted around.
The notion that fascism’s capture or alliance with capitalists is
central to its definition or function is more commonly found in dusty
marxist analyses than anarchist ones, which is no small part of why I
recoiled in shock from Gelderloos’ confident assertion. What this
theoretical lens does is relatively erase the danger of
“anti-capitalist” variants of fascism. Under such an approach a lot of
prominent ideological branches of fascism like “national bolshevism” can
only be examined as either false fronts or non-fascist. I certainly do
not deny that some ostensibly anti-capitalist fascist movements may
happily reorient themselves to ally with the capitalists, but we must
not lose sight of the fact that it is just as plausible that they will
not. We kid ourselves if we believe that every “anti-capitalist” fascist
tendency will either not stay true to an opposition to existing
capitalists or never take power.
Gelderloos claims that “fascism’s vision for society must include some
kind of dictatorship” and in order to back this claim he has to dismiss
variants of fascist ideology that endorse decentralization as mere
illusions propagated by the fascist masters to mislead their rube
followers. Let me be honest: this is a horrifyingly misguided and
dangerous misunderstanding of the situation that makes me sick to my
gut. I’ve publicly fought to expel things like “national anarchism” and
neoreaction from anarchist, leftist, and libertarian spaces for over a
decade and the inability to recognize the sharp danger such pose makes
me afraid for the future of anarchism.
While there are certainly places where Gelderloos’ dismissive picture is
true — many instances of “leaderless resistance” are indeed nothing more
than an array of henchmen being used by fascist leaders with aspirations
to dictatorship — it is also the case that decentralization has become
sincerely ideologically core to different branches of the fascist
ideological tree. Segregation, extermination, and the toxic stew of
traditionalism and “community” are unique threats that do not require
dictatorial political structures. It shocks me that anyone could take a
look at today’s archipelago of fascist ideologies and not see severe
dangers outside the blueprint of seizing state power via making nice
with the capitalists. To ignore things like “national anarchism,”
neoreaction, or the variety of fascist-libertarian hybridized movements
is folly.
Yes, if institutional power and dictatorship were provided on a platter
for many of these movements, most would abandon part of their ideology
and seize it. But there is often strength to their ideological
commitments and their strategies often avoid pursuing institutional
power altogether, and so are unlikely to be in a position where they are
handed it.
Fascists that support decentralization and or anti-capitalism pull
directly and explicitly from fascist history, identity, and ideologues.
Gelderloos’ dichotomy of dictatorship and democracy would place them
firmly on the side of democracy, but that in no sense diminishes their
standing as fascists and it would blind us to attempt that reduction.
Definitions of fascism are just as notoriously diverse and contested as
definitions of “anarchism,” “liberalism,” and “socialism.” Do we define
things in terms of “historical movements” or explicit ideologies? Is
there space to evaluate implicit philosophical commitments? How should
we balance being honest about self-identification and extrapolating very
clear cut commonalities or cloaked entryism? These are all legitimate
discussions. Many authors have pointed out that, beyond the core
hyper-nationalism, fascism involves a cluster of different associated
positions, but not necessarily every one of them. Anti-semitism for
example is very common in fascism, but fascists are still fascists if
they don’t have that aspect. An honest evaluation of the fascist
ideological and social landscape today would have to place
“dictatorship” as one of these common but not essential characteristics.
In my various writings on the subject I’ve frequently defended a
two-tier notion of fascism: the first a series of political positions
centered around nationalism, the second a philosophical position with
some derivations centered around power, the cluster of positions around
each are important — things like palingenesis and anti-modernism, but
very numerous (dictatorship being one of them). The result is something
a lot like concentric rings or degrees of fascism. Gelderloos snorts,
“So… Winston Churchill was a fascist?” and countless anarchists would
retort “OF COURSE.” But we can be more nuanced. Churchill was both
liberalish and fascistic certainly. Just as Pinochet or Franco were
“fascistic” although on a multidimensional spectrum with many important
differences and distinctions. My claim here is that there are
theoretical or analytical contexts in which it is quite useful to speak
of them as fascist and others where it is not. The same is true when it
comes to other terms like “socialist” or “leftist.”
I support dexterity in our evaluations. It can in some contexts be
useful and edifying to characterize the makeup of a shopping mall
“fascistic” or claim that even those self-identified anarchists who
dismiss the suffering of elephants say along human-nationalist style
arguments of common “human” community are making fascist arguments.
Recognizing that terms imply spectrums or clusters like “liberal” can
add a lot of capacity to our language that is otherwise lost when we
trap ourselves with a few words with very limited usages.
Philosophical frameworks and motivations matter and ultimately matter a
hell of a lot more than the happenstance macrostructures we happen to be
under today. The raw embrace of power for power’s sake is, I think, an
important position that deserves highlighting and centering in our
language. In some but not all contexts it is appropriate to discuss
early human societies as “anarchist” or “anarchistic” — despite that
precise term and all its social and ideological baggage being a recent
invention attached to specific struggles and movements. I think the same
is true of “fascism.” There is no analytical benefit to exclusively
confining “fascism” to the smallest fraction of human history and
contexts.
In Worshiping Power Gelderloos emphasizes the ideological and
philosophical underpinnings of social systems of oppression, that
macroscale power structures like states depend upon broad shared
philosophical or ideological perspectives. I praised him for that
analysis, I just think it should be extended to likewise centering the
ideological and philosophical premise of fascism. Recognizing fascism as
a particularly self-aware purification of tendencies that run throughout
human history, not merely as a marginal or historical position devoid of
catastrophic threat without a hand from the capitalist and militarist
establishment.
I mention that in the spanish civil war the twisted liberal delusion
collapsed and people rushed to two poles: fascist and anarchist. The
anarchist literature on the spanish civil war is filled with examples
but my favorite comes from Abel Paz’ Durruti where he tells of the day
the president went to his office as normal and attempted to call his
ministers, perturbed to discover one by one that they weren’t picking
up. Slowly through investigation it dawns upon him that the entire state
apparatus has effectively been dissolved, revolution has been made, and
he is one of the last to know. Gelderloos retorts that this moment of
ideological clarity on the ground is irrelevant because of the bigger
geopolitical framing of jockeying involving powers like Britain and the
USSR. I could ask for no better example of how a focus upon the abstract
geopolitical macrostructure blinds people to the truths revealed in the
micro.
Getting to capitalism, Gelderloos dings me for giving broader examples
of how sweeping or holistic notions of capitalism warp the imagination
and understanding of leftists. Let me be more specific to his article
with some pertinent examples without fisking it line by line.
First, Peter repeatedly speaks of capitalism in subject terms, as an
agent. This is often to make sympathetic points both of us would agree
with, but the framing is important to note because of the lurking
dangers of resulting skew that I covered in my first response.
“Capitalism can brook no autonomy, no liberated space, but neither could
it overcome the resistance of the exploited.”
“Capitalism” is the entity given agency and motivation here. Not
capitalists or specific institutional or market processes. Gelderloos
chooses to speak in terms of a sweeping whole, as a single aggregate
institution.
There are a lot of ways to view “capitalism” in this institutional
analysis. One lens Gelderloos uses is as a “logic” — a kind of viral
ratchet that underpins and unifies the total system. This matches an
analysis in which “intensification” of capitalism involves the deeper
penetration of quantification and market exchange.
[I]n the new economy there is no more distinction between labor time and
free time or even producer time and consumer time; rather, all lived
time is absorbed into a unified capitalist logic leading to a
qualitative advance in the production of subjectivities.
And Gelderloos lists a number of supposedly terrible predictions
involving capitalism eating more of the world. Nano productions, gene
therapy, and decentralized diversified greenhouse production.
Note what is functionally being objected to here: not specific
hierarchies but rather just finer tuned agency in the physical world
surrounding us.
For the sake of space I will drill down and focus on a single example
from Gelderloos’ original piece, the shift from mass agriculture to
greenhouse production.
Let us remember that once upon a time big sweeping industrial
agricultural production was the perfect exemplar of capitalism — focused
on economies of scale in hamfisted ways intensely unconcerned and
incapable of parsing externalities.
Radicals retorted that what we needed to keep billions from starving was
something more akin to horticulture or permaculture, complex and varied
but attentively watched over in more responsive ways than the brute
sweeping force of mass agriculture. The critique most frequently lobbed
in response was that while you could get significant advantages out of
permaculture greenhouses, it would often take more human labor per
calorie. Now recognition of many downsides of mass industrial
agriculture is growing and pressure is building to force changes in
market or societal or infrastructural norms. But — because this involves
more nuanced attentiveness, finer measurement and response — it’s now
painted as capitalism “consuming” a space of dynamics that we once
(blessedly) could gloss over in ignorance or simple heuristics.
When a subsistence horticulturalist personally tends to the complex
polyculture they maintain, that is totally fine, but when IoT devices
are used to free up human labor and transportation pollution per calorie
produced that’s cast as bad, or at least as a strengthening or
intensification of “capitalism.”
In my aside about recurring tendencies among leftists to slapdashedly
treat “commodification” as a bad thing, I was addressing this kind of
thinking, which I encounter constantly and many people on the left are
quick to leap to. The expansion of quantified exchange dynamics
certainly means the expansion of legibility or market information, but
that in no sense is necessarily the same as the expansion of capitalism,
indeed it can mean the reduction of capitalism’s broad structural
features like centralized wealth accumulation, workplace hierarchies,
even the psychological dynamics of greed, etc. Markets are, after all,
not the same thing as capitalism.
Of course in the absence of myriad campaigns and approaches of social
struggle it is unlikely that market and infrastructural norms will
smoothly shift over on their own to some kind of idyllic networked
permaculture of decentralized and distributed, organic and responsive
production that utilizes greenhouses to help cut off or more closely
internalize environmental externalities. But the replacement of mass
industrial agriculture with more decentralized and attentive modes is
surely an objectively positive development.
You have to be trapped in a leftist frame of mind where capitalism is a
unified Molochian beast to believe our only options are reform or
revolution and thus cast these kinds of developments as mere reform,
expanding tyranny, or more sinister co-option. Instead what I see is a
spontaneous erosion of some aspects of agricultural capitalism, just as
the “boring mass media” and deep sexual controls that once characterized
our society have collapsed to significant measure because demand and
other market pressures from the bottom up ended up partially eroding
those norms.
As Kevin Carson succinctly put it,
“There are all kinds of interstitial changes going on within capitalism
that capital and the state will attempt to coopt with varying degrees of
success, but the net effect will be to gradually reduce its rate of
extraction and make withdrawal of a growing share of life from the
system increasingly feasible, and hence to make the system less
capitalistic over time. To frame this scenario as “Anything not
insurrectionary is just disguised capitalism” is flat-out stupid.”
This is not to suggest that insurrection is bad or unneeded, merely that
there are numerous developments spontaneously — even apolitically —
arising in the economy that are positive. Market pressures can
facilitate or lead to adaptations or shifts that erode power and
liberate. The world is complicated. There is no iron law imposed from
above that makes every market shift, adaptation, or development a net
expansion of capitalism.
Gelderloos uses the very loaded word “control” to characterize such more
dynamic and decentralized food production and there’s a dangerous
conflation going on in such use. In some cases the word “control”
actually means “agency.” When someone with cerebral palsy has trouble
“controlling” their limbs what we’re really saying isn’t that they’re
frustrated imperialists but that they’re facing limits or restrictions
to their physical agency. When a village loses “control” of their water
supply we’re not saying that this is a liberatory revolt of the aquifer,
we’re saying that they’ve lost agency in the use of critical material
resources.
Actual thinking minds — actual fucking agents — matter. Rocks and
vegetables are not capable of freedom. And control of persons is a
vastly different concept than “control” of objects. The premise of
freedom itself and indeed anarchy is incoherent without this
distinction.
Freedom is not isolation from causal interplay with our environment nor
is it being ignorant to the consequences of our actions. We seek to
collaboratively have more agency in the world around us, to expand the
impact of our thoughts and the accuracy of our understanding of our
world. This is not the fucking same thing as social domination and to
conflate the two is obscene.
To be sure there are deep and important tensions when it comes to
legibility and social control. Systems of knowledge that make the
physical universe more transparent also have the danger of making
struggles of resistance more transparent to political power. But
conversely, illegibility creates barriers to entry that can prop up
social hierarchies and deny us informed consent. I’ve written on this
before in dialogue with David Graeber’s works, which are both
enlightening and frustrating in this area.
Networked devices in greenhouse environments closely tracking and
adjusting for environmental and growth variables is not some imperialist
conquest. Nor is it necessarily part and parcel with a broader “logic”
of control over individual human beings.
The central narrative about “capitalism” and industrial society used to
be that it was too big — piles of capital, giant megamachines of runaway
accumulation that were divorced from and unresponsive to the
particularities of local or individual life and thus utterly inefficient
and destructive. Now, much of that is getting replaced with more
attentive, more nuanced, more responsive infrastructural norms while
even bigger monsters retain political and economic control. These loci
of power must be killed, the increasingly decentralized infrastructure
ripped out and appropriated out from underneath them, and the exact
character of the new decentralized norms should be fiercely contested,
but too often the left — and anarchists swallowing their narratives —
have gone down the wrong path by demonizing the decentralization itself
because it occurs through the market.
Decentralization alone is adamantly not a salve — obviously small
businesses can be capricious and I’ve just spent paragraphs warning
about the threat of decentralized variants of fascism. But decentralized
infrastructure is not an intensification of capitalism, even though it
may create more exchange value. Increased legibility, conscious
awareness, and agency in tiny particulars of food production, bodily
function, etc. are not “the logic of capitalism” they are the necessary
precondition to expand our freedom — that is to say, what we can do.
In its decentralized bottom-up attempt to satiate desires, the market
attempts to make legible what was not previously so as to have more
fine-tuned and efficient engagement. This is not itself a bad thing.
When anarchists practicing polyamory talk explicitly about feelings,
expectations, dynamics, etc, we work hard to make legible the illegible.
When we combat informal power dynamics of social capital or norms within
our milieus, we work hard to expose and make legible what was illegible
in the process of dragging power dynamics out and killing them.
When someone is able to better measure and respond to conditions in
their garden they are able to produce more food — creating more value.
Same as when a device or treatment gives someone with cerebral palsy
more control over their body — value is created. But this is not
necessarily the same thing as value accumulation since it is an
orthogonal question as to whether most value is seized by the loci of
power in a given political-economic context.
Gelderloos complains about myriad ways in which our leisure and social
time has been made economically legible. Many of these norms were
imposed top-down and are absolutely horrible. Everything to do with the
bottled up, planned suburbia and city centers that demolished old
organic neighborhoods and agoras is evil. But many other norms emerged
bottom-up from popular demand. To go back to my example, when a dating
site asks you to fill out a form you are in some sense “commodifying”
your social interaction, because you’re making legible and fungible in a
broader network what was previously personal and obscure — but this is
hardly a bad thing. Legibility can expand our options, our reach, and
the efficiency by which we reach certain goals. The fetishization of the
illegible is a dangerous mythologization of ignorance.
Gelderloos complains that “those in power prefer that we do not get any
kind of meaningful choice at all” and that’s certainly true, but he’s
wrong to imply that the illegibility of certain spaces like “free time”
provided us with more meaningful choice. I played with sticks in a
section of forest around a homeless camp as a kid, I am hardly one to
besmirch the latitude of such imagination, but it is a shallow play that
is cut off from affecting the wider universe. “Choice” without depth of
material consequence is as shallow as the “choice” between different
colored shampoo bottles. Those in power would absolutely love to see us
be content with sticks and dreams, thankfully people want more.
Advertising attempted to mold our desires into regulated, controlled,
and legible-to-power forms, we should be grateful the unruly power of
people’s naturally complicated and growing desires ate away at its
effectiveness.
Gelderloos willfully misreads the significant in-context distinction
between “system” and “ecosystem” and demands, “Does “unified” mean every
element is the same? …Does “unified” mean that every element is
connected within a web of influence?” There is of course a massive
spectrum between these extremes, the point here is assuming a kind of
integrability, cohesion, and intentionality to a system that casts it as
an “organic” whole where the individual components or dynamics are
unified in a kind of almost teleological reinforcement of the whole and
taking their marching orders from the whole. Even just “unified in a
common logic.” This approach is vastly different from seeing capitalism
as a battlefield where we — the actual agents — struggle and contest,
buffeted by vastly different forces and dynamics. Obviously Gelderloos
examines different components of “capitalism” and some of his particular
analyses are correct or largely agreeable, but my response was to make
clear my concern with the sweeping framework approach and the kind of
quick narratives that reflexively give institutions agency or narrative
power.
A number of radicals have pointed out that it’s actually quite bizarre
that we would use the same description of “capitalism” for today’s
economic context and that of the mid 1800s. Terms like
late-late-capitalism do a poor job at covering the vast contestation and
change that has occurred. This approach presumes a kind of historical
continuity, agential cohesion, or narrative solidity that often
misleads. I am not as convinced. I think capital accumulation, class
society, disposable wage labor in hierarchical workplaces, etc still
exist in substantive ways and thus the term “capitalism” retains
descriptive utility. But I take issue with the Molochian image of it and
worry that people will just keep redefining capitalism ever more
expansively to handwave away important conflicts within it or miss both
advances and potential developments. My hostility and need to warn and
call out about these kind of Molochian narratives is directly in the
tradition of the post-left, or at least what I find most valorous in it.
There is a danger to systemic analysis that can go quite bad. It’s not
my claim that Gelderloos is as far down that path as some, but a good
deal of methodological individualism should be re-injected.
As to the kinda random personal insinuations, I am of course an
individualist anarchist in the long vein of those that see value in
markets and a tension between their deterritorializing, decentralizing
aspects and the territorializing and centralizing aspects of capitalism.
Like Voltairine de Cleyre I can only roll my eyes at accusations of
being a capitalist. I don’t see “commodification” or “monetization” as
necessarily bad things nor deeply tied to the continuation of
capitalism. I don’t think exchange is inherently abusive or hierarchical
and find bottom-up efforts to expand legibility in exchange networks
often quite positive. Oh no. And yes I think ecosystems are often a
productive metaphor in considering markets, although less so in more
capitalist spaces. There are certainly pernicious cancers and apex
predators to be found in certain ecosystems too and in many ways state
intervention in markets can create runaway problems much the same way as
industrial intervention in biomes. The horror. What more can be said on
all that that we haven’t already in massive books and detailed essays?
Particularly fun is Gelderloos’ attempt to cast the transhumanist desire
to overcome limits and expand positive freedom as “liberal” since
liberalism historically centrally distinguished itself by its focus on
negative freedom, rights, and limits. Terms and movements are
complicated!
Let me be clear for the millionth fucking time, transhumanism is
literally just the position of morphological freedom: individuals should
be free to alter their bodies to expand their agency how they each see
fit. This has been repeatedly emphasized in the core non-anarchist
transhumanist lit from Bostrom to Sandberg, even if sometimes branches
or individuals get excited about specific technological ideas or
aspirations. I have long been vociferously hostile to non-anarchist
transhumanists over their failure to consistently evaluate the social
consequences of this position — namely a rejection of to social
hierarchy and attendant infrastructural norms and an embrace of global
collaboration to facilitate expansion of our freedom in a non zero-sum
way.
Gelderloos asks me for examples of transhumanists defending things like
the production of implants in particular “without mining, nuclear
energy, or contamination from solar and wind power.” Of course there’s a
small cottage industry of yuppie transhumanists and technocratic greens
publishing breathless articles about advances or sometimes just press
releases of the latest green tech, to varying degrees of decoupling from
the above things. There are a worrying deluge of sites like
SingularityHub trafficking in such triumphalism. I like many other
anarchist transhumanists am broadly skeptical of such chatter, albeit in
no sense giving up on the possibilities. After all the character of
“transhumanism” as a broad movement in no way speaks to the character of
anarcho-transhumanists any more than the various failings of “communist”
and “environmentalist” movements reflect upon anarcho-communists or
green anarchists. No one expects green anarchists to police the entirety
of the environmentalist movement just as it would be clearly unfair to
use the behavior and analysis of the Sierra Club as a bludgeon against
all green thought.
As to my own thoughts, we could be here all day detailing different
pathways and their relative probabilities and downsides. It’s certainly
important talk, but it’s also a quagmire of particulars that avoid the
deeper philosophical questions of what we want and should want. I prefer
to get those hashed out first and get on the same page in terms of
aspirations before we go into how hard some pathways are and the
engineering and social difficulties attendant. Gelderloos sneers about
“mining” but asteroid mining could very rapidly bootstrap a situation
with automated smelting in orbit that would radically crash metals
markets and shutter every mine within the biosphere, confining the most
destructive processes beyond the earth. A dozen years ago I wrote a long
piece with an anarchist transhumanist approach that attempts to move
industrial production ASAP into orbit or away from the interconnected
biosphere, and retract the footprint of cities. I am also somewhat open
to the possibility that developing designs of thorium salt reactors will
move beyond the stark existing downsides of the cold war generation of
reactors we all grew up critiquing. I’ve also written on the ways that
capitalist norms and state geopolitics shift innovation pathways away
from more ecologically sound tools. For example, when the Chinese state
can evict people and strip-mine massive regions, solar and wind
approaches that depend on heavy metals become better investments for
further research than far lighter footprint approaches.
Detailing some exact alternative blueprint is not my game, and has never
been the game of transhumanism, even the non-anarchist variants admit
the goal is to open possibilities and erode totalizing norms. Indeed a
longstanding anarcho-transhumanist slogan has been “not a single future
but many.” Additionally in a more pragmatic vein the future will no
doubt be incredibly messy and contested, we will win some positive
developments and lose others. My point is to make sure we don’t get lost
in reactionary narratives like “limits to agency are good” that
mewlingly defend our physical chains.
Through the magic of loose association and clustering Gelderloos implies
that wanting to tear down limits to our physical freedom is totally the
same thing as genocidal western colonialism. What a laughable misread of
history and overly expansive use of the term “enlightenment.” Yes the
atrocities of the british empire for example were totally driven by a
desire to assure individual morphological freedom. What nonsense. The
enlightenment was an incredibly complicated messy conflicting bunch of
things, often with diametrical internal oppositions, defenses appealing
to other fractions or popular notions were often draped over things done
for totally different motivations, and all that gets handwaved away on
the most scurrilous of implied causalities. Further it’s a kind of
dramatic flattening, a very “campist” way of viewing world history that
suppresses the degree to which “rationalist” or “individualist” or
whatever currents get proclaimed as the primordial sin of western
imperialism existed and exist external to “the west.” Were the pacific
islanders who didn’t accept the limits of their islands and trekked off
to cover the pacific terrible colonial monsters?
Yeah I happen to want people to not have to die when they don’t want to,
when they still have more to love, more to read, more to give and see.
The desire to help people on either side of some arbitrary social norm
of “able bodied” who personally want to run faster, swim further, see
further, etc, is obviously in no way inherently bound to the enslavement
of other persons.
But this just in, demanding the impossible is no longer the standard
anarchist position but must now be sneered at as imperialist. How dare
we be “entitled” to bread, roses, and the stars. Audacity must be
chucked because somehow nothing is worse than “entitlement, scorn, and
superiority“. …I could write volumes on the kind of performative
submission and caustic “humility” that leftist spaces too often
normalize under the delusions that holding each other down is the same
thing as a liberatory equality. A sense that wanting more than just
playing with sticks is “uppity” and the same thing as actually abusive
social hierarchy.
At the end of the day all the poetry and daydreaming in the world won’t
change the plain fact of some shitty physical constraints. I would
prefer to be on the side of those who, in the words of Evan Greer, “want
something better.” And while I am not so haughty to think I or anyone
can find the exact dimensions of flows of that, I’m going to keep on
fighting for it, keep proactively searching through all the
possibilities, to keep the impossible in our sights.
It’s not that, as Gelderloos puts it, transhumanism is defined by a
quest to “slay the dreadful beast of pristine nature,” but that we can
and should want more and be immediately suspicious of anyone demanding
we temper our dreams and desires. Our bodies have limits that suck, they
come in configurations that are inconvenient or don’t align with our
aspirations. It is precisely the longstanding assertion of transhumanism
that “we have always been transhuman,” we have always been trans, in
transition, in motion, not in a monotonous static equilibria but on a
runaway burst in wild new unknown directions. There is no magical
pristine state of being to be held to, no limit to confine ourselves to
in service of some phantasmic spook called “Nature.”
Gelderloos accuses me of apathy on the subject of technological norms
because I didn’t waste volumes on technological particulars when
responding to concerning broad themes in his analysis.
Let me be clear: abusively imposed infrastructural norms can suck, and
much of transhumanism has been an effort to go in the polar opposite
direction of eugenics — to argue for a vast diversity of explorations of
morphological freedom, of technological agency.
I’ve long argued that this includes restoring suppressed “low”
technologies and combating the social systems that would impose certain
normalizations or hegemonic structures. But I will concede that not
every emergent norm is a bad thing. Language is the prototypical
technology and language of course changes over time, sometimes quite
deliberately. Many reactionaries today complain about being left behind
by progressive discourse norms they refuse to adopt. I will concede that
there are some situations where it would be desirable to socially
normalize the usage of specific technologies in specific ways, at least
for large majorities, while leaving room for modes, spaces, or
communities of dissenters, I could imagine an anarchist society with
strong social sanctions on those that don’t vaccinate for example, or
the deployment of an encrypted chat app that refuses to communicate with
earlier less secure versions. I am not convinced that those are
pernicious any more than our strong social sanctions for using racist
language. But sure, I broadly encourage and work towards a rich
technological pluralism.
Gelderloos singles out phones in his original essay and returns to it in
his response so I’ll admit I am a partial enemy of the phone form as it
exists today and certainly desire to bootstrap different norms
surrounding their use. Unlike many I am privileged enough to largely
survive on the economic periphery in the global north and in radical
spaces where I can simply refuse to use a smartphone except in specific
cases when I actually want to, and not suffer any social pressures to or
sanction for never picking up. But social pressures to change norms
around phones definitely exist in the mainstream and have made progress.
Years ago older people used to constantly complain that millennials
refused to accept unplanned phone calls and never checked voice
messages, today this has become increasingly accepted as the new norm,
even in the few business contexts that I sometimes operate. While there
have certainly been pernicious pushes to have people always “on call” it
does seem like social norms are turning against this, although as always
the most vulnerable are often the last to see such benefits. One could
write an entire essay or book on phone adoption and norms across
societies from DIY communities in Somalia to the annoying anarchist
milieu normalization of talking openly on Signal and spamming people
with hundreds of texts a day, but I see reasons to hope within all of
these contexts, and ingenious counter-adaptations to resolve the bad
pressures. Of course consumer choice and slow cultural evolution — while
often able to eek out some positives — are hardly a panacea. Substantive
engagement to change or alter the flow of norm creation and mutation is
certainly called for, but it’s harder when people take Molochian lenses
that miss positive tendencies.
(Incidentally one very simple fix that I’ve endorsed to impede the
runaway attention ratchet of cliques or activist groups texting each
other nonstop is to adopt a collective norm of paying some measure of
money or other investment in collectively in exchange for spamming with
memes or small messages. If you want to demand everyone’s attention, pay
them for it. I gleefully look forward to the howls of me advocating the
commodification and monetization of everyday social interactions, but
it’s a good quick fix that pushes back on phone culture, encourages
normalizing activist groups having more explicit say in addressing their
particular operating context, while making sure that the negative
externalities are internalized and gives that extra second pause to the
kid who wants to talk about crimes over Signal.)
Phones — particularly in the global north — may seem a trivial example,
and we can even get into the variety of economic and environmental costs
in the existing order to make a phone and the per phone cost to
establish wildly different means of production or social contexts,
that’s always a fun one, but Gelderloos brought up this specific issue
of norms and we would be here all day going through every possible
example of technological norms.
Lastly in his response Gelderloos pulls a Neil Degrasse Tyson style
“well actually” responding to a standard bit of poetic imagery about
butterflies and storms to argue that because some measure of dynamic
equilibrium is often the norm of systems we should continue viewing
things in aggregate. One butterfly, one vote.
I could not ask for a better indictment of the Molochian approach.
Yes, there are myriad systems that stabilize into equilibria. But this
picture often ignores the small parameters that can cascade it into
disorder. Just because a pattern has been roughly stable in some
specific context for some period of time doesn’t mean it has broader
self-restorative magic, it may already be perturbed into a process of
substantive change that is not yet obvious. It’s often a grave mistake
to view a system in some dynamic equilibria as locked into some
simplified state, such shorthand atrophies our capacity to see fringe
possibilities and potentials.
Our aspiration should not be engineers, describing a unified machine
with an assumed purpose, but physicists, attempting to find the boundary
conditions, the inflection points, the root dynamics that can radically
reconfigure world, or shift systems beyond where we ever expected them
to go. If radicalism is about not getting distracted by the spooks but
instead searching for the roots, anarchism should be about using that
approach to always expand the possible.