Technology And Anarchy

In Technology and Anarchy: A Reading of Our Era, Simona Chiodo argues that our technological era can be read as the most radical form of anarchism ever experienced. People are not only removing the role of the expert as a mediator, but also trying, for the first time in history, to replace the role of a transcendent god itself by creating, especially through information technology, a totally immanent technological entity characterized by the typical ontological prerogatives of the divine: omnipresence (by being everywhere), omniscience (by knowing everything, especially about us), omnipotence (by having power, especially over us), and inscrutability. Chiodo proposes a novel view of our technological era by reading it as the last step of a precise trajectory of Western thought, i.e. as the most radical form of anarchism we have ever experienced, due to the crisis of the founding epistemological relationship between ideality and reality. By doing this, Chiodo helps fill the gap between technological innovation and the humanities, which is becoming an emerging research goal that is more and more urgent in order to face the greatest challenges of our present and future.

Technology lies at the heart of the issue. The technological order—the expanding web of physical technologies and bureaucratic systems of control that we call global civilization—exists despite our evolutionary preparation for a distinctly different kind of society: a society of near equals in which participation is voluntary. Anarchy—society founded on organic and direct relations with others, unmediated by artificial systems of power and authority—is the natural and preferred social state for human beings. Anarchist by Design promotes the intentional dismantling of technological society, not merely to provide relief from the corrosive effects it has on individual freedom, and not to be replaced by something else, but in order to allow natural modes of social organization—underwritten by evolved psychological systems that continue to limp along beneath the surface, deformed, repressed, and misdirected—to have healthy and unfettered expression.

Anarchy is coming. Decentralization is accelerating, and technology is facilitating the trend. Nobody trusts traditional institutions or authority figures anymore. Bitcoin, open source, Uber, social media, and the Arab Spring are all examples of anarchy in action.

Intellectual Anarchy: The Art of Disruptive Innovation reveals how a company in Hawaii defies expectations to persistently deliver game-changing technologies despite limited access to traditional capital and resources of tech hubs like Silicon Valley. Oceanit CEO Patrick Sullivan shares his creative approach, including finance and execution.

A study of communities in the Horn of Africa where reciprocity is a dominant social principle, offering a concrete countermodel to the hierarchical state. Over the course of history, people have developed many varieties of communal life; the state, with its hierarchical structure, is only one of the possibilities for society. In this book, leading anthropologist Hermann Amborn identifies a countermodel to the state, describing communities where reciprocity is a dominant social principle and where egalitarianism is a matter of course. He pays particular attention to such communities in the Horn of Africa, where nonhierarchical, nonstate societies exist within the borders of a hierarchical structured state. This form of community, Amborn shows, is not a historical forerunner to monarchy or the primitive state, nor is it obsolete as a social model. These communities offer a concrete counterexample to societies with strict hierarchical structures. Amborn investigates social forms of expression, ideas, practices, and institutions that oppose the hegemony of one group over another, exploring how conceptions of values and laws counteract tendencies toward the accumulation of power. He examines not only how the nonhegemonic ethos is reflected in law but also how anarchic social formations can exist. In the Horn of Africa, the autonomous jurisdiction of these societies protects against destructive outside influences, offers a counterweight to hegemonic violence, and contributes to the stabilization of communal life. In an era of widespread dissatisfaction with Western political systems, Amborn's study offers an opportunity to shift from traditional theories of anarchism and nonhegemony that project a stateless society to consider instead stateless societies already in operation.

From Occupy, to the Indignados and the Arab Spring, the uprisings that marked the last decade ignited a re-emergence of participatory democracy as a political ideal within organizations. This pioneering book introduces cybernetic thinking to politics and organizational studies to explore the continuing development of this radical idea. With a focus on communication and how alternative social media platforms present new challenges and opportunities for radical organising, it sheds new light on the concepts of self-organization, consensus decision making, individual autonomy and collective identity. Revolutionising the way in which anarchist activists and theorists think about organizations, this unprecedented investigation makes a major contribution to the larger discussion of direct democracy.