Untethered, Unbound
I just polished off the second collection of Jason Lutes' ongoing comic series Berlin. In short, the series follows a diverse cast of characters in late Wiemar Republic Berlin. Rich, poor, artists, intellectuals, workers, Communists, Nazis, Jews and even a black American jazz band make an appearance. Even Horst Wessel appears briefly to get shot in the face. The story is a set of tightly connected vignettes, and all the characters are presented very humanly regardless of their views or position in society. The clean black and white line drawings evoke a very gray period, with a foreboding sense of doom, heightened by the fact that the reader knows the inevitable conclusion. The series also captures the social, economic and political fragmentation of the inter war period - the disappearance of “traditional” morality, the cultural ferment, the extremist politics and the economic depression. The author has been working on Berlin since 1996 and is only 2/3 complete, but the time spent really shows in the quality and detail of the series. Highly recommended if you have any interest in the 20th century or graphic novels - or if you just like good literature.
Superficially similar to the Wiemar Republic, my own politics have been in a sustained drift for a little over a year now. The Political Compass - a political personality test of sorts which plots position on a Cartesian plane rather than on the limited and misleading right-left line; shows where my drift away from a broad liberalism is headed - left and down.
More specifically speaking, towards anarchism. While most people think of anarchy pejoratively (chaos, lawlessness, disorder, etc), the key thing to understand is that the word anarchy derives from the ancient Greek anarchos meaning “without rulers”, not “without laws”. In short, anarchists consider all forms of authority to be inherently illegitimate. Beyond that, there is a wide variety of adjectives that anarchists use to define themselves. I for the moment will not lay claim to any of the titles, including adjective unadorned anarchist, because I do not think I quite fit any of them and do not want to be intellectually dishonest.
While it is not terribly surprising to me that my political sympathies have ended up near anarchism, I am curious as to how exactly they got here. In general, I have always identified with with a broad liberalism - rationalism, democracy, individualism, egalitarianism, etc. I've always felt that nearly all authority is illegitimate, and disliked any ideology that aspires towards authoritarianism or dogmatism, whether from the left or the right. I completely lack any sort of religious or spiritual belief, which precludes ever accepting religious/spiritual political authority. At first I was attracted to libertarianism (a synonym for anarchism until the 1950s and still synonymous with anarchism everywhere outside the English speaking world), but found the idea of replacing one master (the state) for another (property owners, so in other words, the state again) repugnant.
Basically I can quite precisely point to the beginning of the drift because I wrote a post about it. Anyway reading a chapter from the wonderful book Postwar entitled “The Spectre of Revolution”, mostly about those lovable Situationists and attending a party full of 60s memorabilia got me wondering about the future of revolutions in light of the increasing irrelevance of traditional ideologies. Mulling it over, it forms the basis of a short story, which was accepted for publication and I later withdrew as I was unsatisfied with the story. In the process of writing I research into a number of historical revolutions and the ideologies that drove them, looking for something that could be made to fit. My research suggests that anarchism is a good fit for the internet age. A really good fit*. I had never really explored anarchism beyond a superficial level before, but my interest remains mostly academic, if piqued.
In the month after leaving Teletech I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, his memoirs about fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and experience that would inform all his later work. I had borrowed this book from the library on a whim. I can't really understate how this book forced me to re-evaluate my already drifting opinions. I didn't know a great deal about the political history of the war before, but Orwell quite clearly explained the political diversity of the Republican side, and that the anarchists were traditionally the party of the left in Spain, not the communists. As the communists were the only conduit to foreign aid for the Republican government, Moscow had a lot of say over who was a “Trotskyite Wrecker”. Orwell barely escaped, and the revolution was betrayed once again by the Bolsheviks. What was it about these anarchists that they kept getting the raw deal from both right and left?
I dove into An Anarchist FAQ to see what these guys are all about. Besides sounding appealing, it anarchism is incredibly well thought out, and much of it is eminently practical, something that is key for me in politics - that it can work in practice and has. My short story turns into a trilogy of shorts. the one I'm currently working on titled “Homage to Califorina”, set about ten years from in a US wracked by civil war derived from economic instability and a polarized political climate that turns violent after a presidential assassination. It focuses on a revolutionary group pushing a blend of anarchism, technological singularity and post scarcity economics.
And during this period I watch the world economy disintegrate because of an American economic policy which favours large corporations. Policy that allows a handful of unelected and barely regulated individuals who are in charge of some of the most important institutions in the world which they use solely to enrich themselves. This is seen as a normal and even desirable state of affairs. In order to preserve this system, public money on the scale the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo Program, the S&L bailout, the Korean War, the New Deal, the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget combined is ponied up. Mortgaging the future is not seen as a priority in order to save what is somewhat misleading called the “free market”. A market where one is free to work for any number of masters and always be remunerated at less than one's labour is worth. If that is unappealing, there is also the freedom to starve.
Interspersed with all of this is my interest in copyright reform, as information should be free and democratic, as it is a post scarcity economy in action. And 3D printers, because physical objects should damn well be free too.
Strangely because of this thing called the internet we are heading towards am anarchist future where where technology is doing what no other movement has accomplished. It is democratizing the means of production, the means of communication, decentralizing power into the hands of the individual, making collective action more easily possible, making mass direct democracies possible, pulling away the veil of state secrecy, and putting control back in the hands of the individual, because the state can no longer easily control the most important of resources - information.
And it is already beginning.
*A strange title, as the only thing new about it is the internet. Virtually all of the ideas behind it are old hat if one knows anything about anarchism, which is totally the perfect basis for advanced information societies. Plus socialism is not synonymous with Leninism, as the article seems to suggest when it talks about the "old" socialism.
Superficially similar to the Wiemar Republic, my own politics have been in a sustained drift for a little over a year now. The Political Compass - a political personality test of sorts which plots position on a Cartesian plane rather than on the limited and misleading right-left line; shows where my drift away from a broad liberalism is headed - left and down.
More specifically speaking, towards anarchism. While most people think of anarchy pejoratively (chaos, lawlessness, disorder, etc), the key thing to understand is that the word anarchy derives from the ancient Greek anarchos meaning “without rulers”, not “without laws”. In short, anarchists consider all forms of authority to be inherently illegitimate. Beyond that, there is a wide variety of adjectives that anarchists use to define themselves. I for the moment will not lay claim to any of the titles, including adjective unadorned anarchist, because I do not think I quite fit any of them and do not want to be intellectually dishonest.
While it is not terribly surprising to me that my political sympathies have ended up near anarchism, I am curious as to how exactly they got here. In general, I have always identified with with a broad liberalism - rationalism, democracy, individualism, egalitarianism, etc. I've always felt that nearly all authority is illegitimate, and disliked any ideology that aspires towards authoritarianism or dogmatism, whether from the left or the right. I completely lack any sort of religious or spiritual belief, which precludes ever accepting religious/spiritual political authority. At first I was attracted to libertarianism (a synonym for anarchism until the 1950s and still synonymous with anarchism everywhere outside the English speaking world), but found the idea of replacing one master (the state) for another (property owners, so in other words, the state again) repugnant.
Basically I can quite precisely point to the beginning of the drift because I wrote a post about it. Anyway reading a chapter from the wonderful book Postwar entitled “The Spectre of Revolution”, mostly about those lovable Situationists and attending a party full of 60s memorabilia got me wondering about the future of revolutions in light of the increasing irrelevance of traditional ideologies. Mulling it over, it forms the basis of a short story, which was accepted for publication and I later withdrew as I was unsatisfied with the story. In the process of writing I research into a number of historical revolutions and the ideologies that drove them, looking for something that could be made to fit. My research suggests that anarchism is a good fit for the internet age. A really good fit*. I had never really explored anarchism beyond a superficial level before, but my interest remains mostly academic, if piqued.
In the month after leaving Teletech I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, his memoirs about fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and experience that would inform all his later work. I had borrowed this book from the library on a whim. I can't really understate how this book forced me to re-evaluate my already drifting opinions. I didn't know a great deal about the political history of the war before, but Orwell quite clearly explained the political diversity of the Republican side, and that the anarchists were traditionally the party of the left in Spain, not the communists. As the communists were the only conduit to foreign aid for the Republican government, Moscow had a lot of say over who was a “Trotskyite Wrecker”. Orwell barely escaped, and the revolution was betrayed once again by the Bolsheviks. What was it about these anarchists that they kept getting the raw deal from both right and left?
I dove into An Anarchist FAQ to see what these guys are all about. Besides sounding appealing, it anarchism is incredibly well thought out, and much of it is eminently practical, something that is key for me in politics - that it can work in practice and has. My short story turns into a trilogy of shorts. the one I'm currently working on titled “Homage to Califorina”, set about ten years from in a US wracked by civil war derived from economic instability and a polarized political climate that turns violent after a presidential assassination. It focuses on a revolutionary group pushing a blend of anarchism, technological singularity and post scarcity economics.
And during this period I watch the world economy disintegrate because of an American economic policy which favours large corporations. Policy that allows a handful of unelected and barely regulated individuals who are in charge of some of the most important institutions in the world which they use solely to enrich themselves. This is seen as a normal and even desirable state of affairs. In order to preserve this system, public money on the scale the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo Program, the S&L bailout, the Korean War, the New Deal, the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, and NASA's lifetime budget combined is ponied up. Mortgaging the future is not seen as a priority in order to save what is somewhat misleading called the “free market”. A market where one is free to work for any number of masters and always be remunerated at less than one's labour is worth. If that is unappealing, there is also the freedom to starve.
Interspersed with all of this is my interest in copyright reform, as information should be free and democratic, as it is a post scarcity economy in action. And 3D printers, because physical objects should damn well be free too.
Strangely because of this thing called the internet we are heading towards am anarchist future where where technology is doing what no other movement has accomplished. It is democratizing the means of production, the means of communication, decentralizing power into the hands of the individual, making collective action more easily possible, making mass direct democracies possible, pulling away the veil of state secrecy, and putting control back in the hands of the individual, because the state can no longer easily control the most important of resources - information.
And it is already beginning.
*A strange title, as the only thing new about it is the internet. Virtually all of the ideas behind it are old hat if one knows anything about anarchism, which is totally the perfect basis for advanced information societies. Plus socialism is not synonymous with Leninism, as the article seems to suggest when it talks about the "old" socialism.