Silence in Perpetual Noise
Prison creates a different picture in the minds of those who have been there and those who send people there. We are indoctrinated to believe the prison system was created to keep our friends and neighbors safe. That prisons exist to help rehabilitate those criminals … Read more
Who’s Processing Whom? Digital Commons, Digital Blinders, and a Fraught Social Future
“Are You Doing the Processing, or Are You Being Processed?” —Processed World, #1 (1981) This … signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing we have to a thing that has us. —Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Almost four decades ago I … Read more
Black Sheep of all Classes: Fifty Years of Consensus Politics in Christiania
Anyone who has been involved in a group project that strives for consensus knows that working shit out together is hard. It’s challenging to collectively do the work of assessing options, making decisions, and executing plans that sometimes carry real individual and collective risks, even … Read more
Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack
May Day, 1987: thousands of black-clad Autonomen (“those who are autonomous”) riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, they stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban war against the police. The … Read more
From “Trotsky in Tijuana” to “Chernobyl”: Caution & Reason
The promise of historical and speculative fiction is the reconstruction of the past in the present, or of the present in the past, and the contemplation of what might have been, or of what might still be. As the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote, creative writers … Read more
Demodernizing Anarchism
I should begin by acknowledging my positioning: I am writing as a white settler anarchist on land stolen from the Neshnabé (Potawatomi) in so-called Northwest Indiana, and I intend here to address mainly other settler anarchists of North America/Turtle Island. I feel that we are … Read more
The World is Dying, Darling
The world is dying, darling. Humanity as we know it has existed for nearly three hundred thousand years. In that time, only the last 150 years of capitalism has managed to destroy the planet. Clearly there must be a way out of this mess and … Read more
How to Tan a Hide
Fleshing The teacher hands me a deer hide from a 50-gallon drum. My arm strains as I hold its heavy, slimy, dripping weight out in front of me, high so that it won’t drag in the dirt. I carry it to my fleshing beam, a … Read more
