How would an anarchist society compare to statist and capitalist societies? It is apparent that hierarchical societies work well according to certain criteria. They tend to be extremely effective at conquering their neighbors and securing vast fortunes for their rulers. On the other hand, as climate change, food and water shortages, market instability, and other global crises intensify, hierarchical models are not proving to be particularly sustainable. The histories in this book show that an anarchist society can do much better at enabling all its members to meet their needs and desires.
The many stories, past and present, that demonstrate how anarchy works have been suppressed and distorted because of the revolutionary conclusions we might draw from them. We can live in a society with no bosses, masters, politicians, or bureaucrats; a society with no judges, no police, and no criminals, no rich or poor; a society free of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; a society in which the wounds from centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and genocide are finally allowed to heal. The only things stopping us are the prisons, programming, and paychecks of the powerful, as well as our own lack of faith in ourselves.
I might be misunderstanding something, but I think the modern internet is a lot closer to being anarchist than the early internet, unless you’re going back to the 1980s.
Today, anyone who can come up with the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee a month can have their own domain name, email, and a web presence without being a master technologist.
The first domain name I acquired on behalf of a client in the 1990s required that I engage the services of the local ISP, pay US$200 annually to some outfit called Network Solutions, and make application by postal mail. The application had to include proof that we met the very rigidly enforced criteria for our TLD of choice.
Then we still had to have the relevant contract with the ISP for server space and email services, because we weren’t actually permitted to run our own servers without a separate, very expensive contract.
Building the website meant hand coding HTML, something beyond the reach of most.
The client was paying the equivalent of a decent used car every year, not counting that portion of my time allocated to the endeavour.
When the .ca domain first became available, it was available only to the federal government and companies doing extensive cross-country business. If the organization was not national in scope, it had to be content with one of the provincial subdomains, or maybe even on a municipal sub-subdomain, like .saskatoon.sk.ca
I am talking about the governance of the whole thing. The IETF is a volunteer organization. Most of the protocols that fuel the whole thing are coming from its RFC, they are not enforced, purely voluntarily. We owe them principles like the net neutrality. I am saying “early internet” because I don’t know if it is still like this but it very well may be. Are we lucky that these people believed in self-organization or was it doomed to happen this way, internet being too big of a project to be steered in a different fashion? We will probably never know.
You are talking about accessibility, which is an important aspect as well, but I would argue an orthogonal one: Google search is extremely accessible, it is far from being anarchist.
I see what you’re getting at, and I mostly agree. Yes, the whole thing is still resting on the goodwill and good behaviour of the participants.
But I don’t know that access is orthogonal to what you call governance in anarchistic systems. I think that balance of or limits to power requires ready access to all.
Ok, yes I agree, ease of access is important. I just mean that lowering the material barrier of entry is not enough to make a project anarchist in nature.
Got it. I agree.