Despite its aspirations and mythological treatment, the internet has never been some perfectly connected “net” capable of regenerating like Wolverine. While that goal was an underlying assumption of a variety of protocols that became popular and helped shape the development of the internet, the internet in practice is not an organic mesh of individuals, but a few thousand organizations that are loosely tied together in clusters. In theory each organization controls the connections that comprise its internal network and, again in theory, they build physical links and negotiate contracts with one another to pass packets between networks. This peering takes many forms, passing traffic at different speeds and costs, but the traffic itself has largely been treated homogeneously.

Well, okay, this isn’t entirely true. Governments around the world have installed routers and machines capable of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) wherein a packet is routed based on its content. This is one way the People’s Republic of China, for example, has blocked connections to the Tor network.

But there are good reasons for an organization to peek inside packets and adjust their prioritization accordingly. DDOS attacks or merely bandwidth intensive but not pressing traffic can flood the network slowing down transmission rates for other content. The problem isn’t a lack of neutrality; neutrality is usually artificial, only possible where there are universally shared preferences or no pressure to optimize.

If the internet survives the next twenty years it will undoubtedly look quite different. Radicals working on overlay networks to the existing infrastructure, like Tor, I2P, GnuNet, Tahoe-LAFS, and FreeNet, are fighting the more immediate battle, but so long as only a few hundred or thousand organizations control the material connections that everything travels on we will always be in danger of the state. Even a hundred thousand networks could still be beaten into collaboration with a censorship regime. Right now the future sits on a knife edge, poised to fall into new enclosures, with state access cards and comprehensive whitelisting. And even if we win, the day still might come where the state wakes up and considers technological society itself too high a risk, sabotaging and tearing apart our centralized infrastructure.

To head off such retreats, to keep the statists on the playing field, we must build a world of proactive, individual-scale connections. In the more trivial ad hoc limit this can look like peer-to-peer connections between the phones of passing strangers, but when it comes to building lasting resilient bonds there’s no replacing on the ground community organizing. The sort of projects anarchists have long taken the lead in, building one-on-one relationships of trust and strengthening the human roots upon which all other relations are built.

There are many community mesh wifi projects with radical sensibilities, some like those of Athens, Catalonia and across Germany are already quite established and supported. Hundreds of others are still just attempted sprouts. Focusing on those in the midrange we’ve chosen to invest over six hundred dollars in People’s Open Network in Oakland, California, Kansas City Freedom Network, and AlterMundi in Argentina to provide an extra push as well as highlight their radical sensibilities and work at building community.

We at the Center for a Stateless Society believe strongly in the potency and importance of persuasion in building a freed world, but we also know that world won’t be built without hands-on grappling, activist organizing and building commons. That’s why we started the Entrepreneurial Anti-capitalism project, to pay forward the good fortune we’ve received and provide a helping hand to those doing amazing, necessary, frequently thankless work with very little.

It is our hope that others will follow our lead in donating to these great projects. Each one accepts bitcoin at the following addresses:

• People’s Open Network: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc
• AlterMundi: 12mVSq3NBKTs3tCpWXyJqwdHq8p92ka6fq
• KC Freedom: 1Jmjmf2hDWsrSfnxiM27GZtNWmWGbPNEQM

These accolades are well-deserved, as Joseph Schumpeter showed. Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who studied entrepreneurship, molded the place entrepreneurs have in the public eye. Schumpeterian entrepreneurs unite economic resources in new and innovative ways, providing means for the production of more value using fewer resources. This allows the resources now regarded as “extra” to be put to use satisfying other preferences. To draw an analogy to biology, entrepreneurs are the source of adaptive mutations in the marketplace.

Still, even non-Schumpeterian entrepreneurs meet needs that are not currently being met. These sorts of entrepreneurs recognize a preference that is not being met and redirect resources from preferences of lower importance to the more pressing preference. Someone who starts a business selling small aquatic pets is doing nothing new or innovative, but if their business succeeds, they are giving others access to goods that they would not have been able to procure. In the process, they are improving the quality of life for others by introducing the means to satisfy a greater number of more important preferences. In biology, these entrepreneurs are akin to the reproductive process.

A less well-received idea in popular discourse is that of direct action, and rightly so. Direct action intentionally sidesteps popular discourse. By simply ignoring popular opinion and working to achieve their ends outside of entrenched systems, activists can bring about their desired societies without needing to appeal to those in power. “Direct action” is a necessarily nebulous term. It includes in its purview agorism, strikes, community organizing, civil disobedience, cop blocks, etc. Anything wherein people act together against an ailment imposed on their society is direct action.

Importantly, direct action is not advocacy. It does not seek to change opinions. Part of the reason for its enormous success in many places is precisely this: It forces others to cease their illegitimate behaviors. When it succeeds, it does not do so because of the approval of those in power. Rather, it is a tool for forcing change in spite of the disapproval of the system as-is.

In one direction, the connection between entrepreneurship and direct action has already been developed. Agorism seeks to build alternatives to oppressive institutions by being entrepreneurial. Once again, it cares not for the opinions of its participants regarding the system they are changing. Only the first Schumpeterian entrepreneur in an agoristic endeavor has to care that the business is eating away at the existing institutions. It is partially because they care that this market actor is able to recognize the profit opportunity and act as an entrepreneur.

What has received less attention is investigation of the nature of direct action as an entrepreneurial activity. Where agorism is an entrepreneurial form of direct action, one can also understand direct action as a form of entrepreneurship. Schumpeterian entrepreneurship acts to improve the lot of society through the creation of more value from lesser value. It does this by replacing old and inefficient technologies with new and improved ones. This is the aim of direct action, as well, albeit not through technology as normally understood. Direct action works because it dismantles existing organizational arrangements. In whatever way it seeks to do so, it engages in what Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction”. Economically and socially inefficient methods end up falling apart as oppressors must succumb to even a small minority that refuses to utilize the system as intended. The new systems stand stronger than their predecessors because fewer people have reason to oppose them. Playing within the new rules maximizes social utility more effectively, giving more people reason to participate.

Consider the efforts of the Civil Rights movement in civil disobedience. By ignoring the legal and social rules as they stood and taking the freedoms they rightly deserved, the participants were able to bring about a social change. They created a system in which more people of color had reason to participate in an economy dominated by “whites-only” access. This incentive to tear down the vestiges of segregation has even proved effective in preventing its re-emergence. Most people, now, see the benefits of having more people actively participating as equals in the economy. The new structure has shown itself to be more efficient, both in allocation of economic goods and satisfaction of social desires than its predecessor with plenty of room for improvement to be gained or discovered. The new model has nearly destroyed the old, and the innovation has improved the lot of everyone living under the newer paradigm.

Israel Kirzner, another Austrian whose research focused on entrepreneurs, pointed out that as part of Schumpeterian creative destruction, entrepreneurs are discovering new information. To start a novel business in the way a Schumpeterian entrepreneur does, they must recognize information that no one else has – yet. This “radical” or “sheer” ignorance is the reason the Schumpeterian entrepreneur is important. They show others a way to improve their lives which they were previously radically unaware.

Direct action reveals information to others that was previously under the cover of radical ignorance. It is a part of being a privileged class that the members are unaware of how they benefit from their privilege. Privilege blinds its holders to its own existence. Due to this, those people who suffer under systems of social oppression must struggle to convince the privileged that their place in society is the product of illegitimate systems of oppression. Unfortunately, this is akin to an entrepreneur attempting to convince everyone that they could benefit from an invention which only the entrepreneur understands. In both cases, it is just easier to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed change. Direct action does this by forcing the change to occur or by building alternative systems for its participants.

It is interesting to note that, globally, humanity has never regressed technologically. Long periods of stagnation in some places and vilification of academia in others, but never a mass, collective step backward. Furthermore, in places where steps backward have occurred, there has almost always been a repressive regime of cultural norms or governmental structures. This is, in part, due to Schumpeterian forces. New ideas and better theories lead to greater efficiency in economic and social arrangements, which in turn select for more of the same. As is usually the case, it’s hard to put a genie back in the bottle. This is why anarchists have the future. The inefficiency of the state will pull it apart, and our ideas will be there to catch society when it happens. Until then, it is our job to spin the state’s dynamo faster and weave our net tighter. Direct action does both.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A ação direta como empreendedorismo.

I was surprised to open up the Columbia Journalism Review’s website last week and see this article by Steven Brill peering up at me: “Stories I’d Like To See: A fair view of the Koch brothers, and explaining bitcoin.”

This section in particular cracked me up:

This article in the Washington Post last week tried to link the Koch brothers’ support for the Keystone energy pipeline to their company’s economic interests. But it was so lame — none of their products is due to go through the pipeline — that it made me want to read a complete article, full of unbiased reporting across the range of their business interests. I want to know just how self-interested the brothers’ political spending spree actually is.

Sure, any political activism by rich people to limit taxes and government regulation is bound to be in their interests generally. But do the Koch brothers have a more specific agenda, as the Post article tried to prove? Or could it be that Charles and David Koch just happen to believe a conservative government is good for their country?

The brothers and their foundation have also given hundreds of millions to multiple charities that have nothing to do with politics. As this article in the Indianapolis Star points out, the Charles Koch Foundation “underwrites research and teaching at Brown, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Vassar and some 245 other colleges.” The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater because he’s such a generous benefactor.

These are not beneficiaries associated with hard right causes.

Brill is right, of course; while it might be easy to paint the Kochs and their corporation with one evil, monolithic brush, you can’t do it with any real consistency. But this article, as interesting as it was, wasn’t the reason I was headed over to CJR.

Over on their #Realtalk blog, journalist Ann Friedman listed out some common worries she heard from new journalism school graduates about their job prospects. One I liked – about the awkwardness of networking – described a very stigmergic scenario:

I know, I know. I need a network, but networking is for douchebags.

Networking is for douchebags if you’re only doing it to get a job or a promotion. (Or “connecting” with random journalists on LinkedIn en masse.) Instead, think of your network as a community—a group of professional collaborators with whom you share skills and ideas, contacts and advice—that you invest in whether or not you’re looking for a new job. This is what Robert Krulwich calls horizontal loyalty.

For now, your network is going to be made up of a lot of other entry-level journalists—like your classmates and fellow interns—plus a few people who have been your internship supervisors. You need to get over the feeling that you’re competing for the same three jobs and see other entry-level journalists as allies. You personally may only know three higher-up editors, but if you share the wealth, together you know six or 10 or more. Ask your friends to make introductions, and do the same for them. This is how to slowly expand the number of people you know while also investing in the careers of those who are important to you. It takes time, but the payoff is real.

And just in terms of straight media news, there’s an interesting project coming out of the Online News Association, called “Build Your Own Ethics Code.” According to CJR reporter Edirin Oputu, Build Your Own Ethics Code is “a toolkit to help news outlets, bloggers, and journalists decide on ethical guidelines that match their own ideas about reporting and journalism”:

The project, which includes the collaboration of ONA’s news ethics committee with roughly two dozen journalists and academics, will give reporters a chance to look at the issues that arise in the course of reporting and to draw up an ethical code based on the kind of work they do and the ethical help they believe they need, said ONA’s executive director, Jane McDonnell.

‘I think that when you get journalists in a room together, you can see that there is a complete will to make sure that their reporting and distribution is as close to perfect as they can get it. But the speed at which they work often kind of negates that, or makes it more difficult,’ she said.

ONA will also open the project up for crowdsourcing at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, in early May.

That’s it for now! Check back in next week for more media news and anarchist tidbits.

Don’t be shy; say hi! Leave a comment telling me what you thought of this blog, or make a suggestion for future posts. Or, you can follow me on Twitter, where we can exchange profanities – or maybe even cause the next big libertarian schism!

For y’all keeping track at home, hyperlocal news means exactly what it sounds like: basically, a person or group of persons are covering events in a town, sometimes down to the individual street level, and publishing it for their friends and neighbors – and audiences beyond either – to see. (Sounds awfully like blogging.)

Almost every city in America has a website devoted to something along the lines of hyperlocalism, whether or not they call it that. Some consist of independent reporters covering things they’re passionate about. Others, like Journatic, are in the business of outsourcing hyperlocal, which has made for some interesting and sometimes cringeworthy times.

AOL wanted their network to be the largest in the country, which is not in itself a deplorable goal. Where they went wrong? Trying to flood out their smaller competitors and gouge advertisers for more than they could afford – natural, if you model yourself off your predecessors.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis wrote (“The Almost Post-Mortem for Patch”), “Hyperlocal works in town after town. What doesn’t work is trying to instantly scale it by trying to own every town in sight. That was Patch’s fatal error: acting like an old-media company.”

Instead of trying to own everything from the top down, new, hyperlocal media needs to be built from the bottom up. Stigmergic, decentralized outlets have already been proven to thrive and be as effective – if not more so – than old media sites.

AHOY, THERE BE A CLOSED SYSTEM THAT NEEDS OPENING!
This is an article about Open Source Finance. It’s an idea I first sketched out at a talk I gave at the Open Data Institute in London. By ‘Open Source Finance’, I don’t just mean open source software programmes. Rather, I’m referring to something much deeper and broader. It’s a way of framing an overall change we might want to see in the financial system. To illustrate this, I set up an analogy between computer systems and economic systems, and I then explore what financial ‘code’ might be. I then sketch out the five pillars that could underpin an open finance movement.

The Financial Status Quo: Power concentrated in intermediaries

Software code is the organising rule system that steers energy into activating hardware towards particular ends. So, extending this as an analogy, what might financial ‘code’ look like? A financial system, in a basic sense, is supposed to arrange for surplus resources (extracted from the earth), to be redistributed (in the form of money) via financial instruments (often created by financial intermediaries like banks and funds), into new economic production activities (‘investments’), in exchange for a return over time.

Here, for example, is a rough financial circuit: A person manages to earn a surplus of money (a symbolic claim on real things in the world), which they deposit into a pension fund, which in turns invests in shares and bonds (which are conduits to the real world assets of a corporation), which in turn return dividends and interest over time back to the pension fund, and finally back to the person.

Shares and bonds are extractive financial conduits that plug into a corporate structure, but if you look for how they are coded, you’d discover they are built from legal documents that are informed by regulations, acts of parliament, and social norms. They are supported by IT systems and all manner of payments systems and auxiliary services.

But it takes more than clearly-worded documentation to be able to create financial instruments. The core means of financial production, by which we mean the things that allow people to produce financial services (or build financial instruments), includes having access to networks of investors and companies, having access to specialist knowledge of financial techniques, and having access to information. It’s these elements that banks and other financial intermediaries really compete over: They battle to monopolise relationships, monopolise information, and to monopolise specialist knowledge of financial techniques.

And indeed, that’s why production of financial services mostly occurs within the towering concrete skycrapers of the ‘financial sector’, spinners of the webs of the code that is mostly unknown to most people. We have very little direct access to the means of financial production ourselves, very little say in how financial institutions choose to steer money in society, and very little ability to monitor them.

We have, in essence, a situation of concentration of power in financial intermediaries, who in turn reinforce and seek to preserve that power structure. And while I may be happy to accept a concentration of power in small specialist industries like Swiss watchmaking, a concentration of power in the system responsible for redistributing human society’s collective resources into new investments is not a good thing. It’s systematically breaking our planetary hardware by steering money into destructive activities, whilst helping to fuel a culture of bland individualistic materialism in increasingly atomised communities.

Opening access, reconnecting emotion, liberating creativity

The Open Source movement started with software – and in particular with the concept of copyleft and free licensing – but the principles extend far past software. At core, Open Source is a philosophy of access: access to the underlying code of a system, access to the means of producing that code, access to usage rights of the resultant products that might be created with such code, and (in keeping with the viral quality of copyleft) access to using those products as the means to produce new things. Perhaps the ethos is best illustrated with the example of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has:

1. A production process that encourages participation and a sense of common ownership: We can contribute to Wikipedia. In other words, it explicitly gives us access to the means of production
2. A distribution process that encourages widespread access to usage rights, rather than limited access: If you have an internet connection you can access the articles. We might call this a commons
3. An accountability model that offers the ability to monitor and contest changes: An open production process is also one that is more transparent. You can change articles, but people can monitor and contest your changes
4. A community built around it that maintains the ethic of collaboration and continued commitment to open access. It’s more than just isolated individuals, it’s a culture with a (roughly) common sense of purpose
5. Open source code that can be accessed and altered if the current incarnation of Wikipedia doesn’t suit all your needs. Look, for example, at RationalWiki and SikhiWiki

You can thus take on five conceptually separate, but mutualistic roles: Producer, consumer, validator, community member, or (competitive or complementary) breakaway. And these same five elements can underpin a future system of Open Source Finance. I’m framing this as an overall change we might want to see in the financial system, but perhaps we are already seeing it happening. So let’s look briefly at each pillar in turn.

Pillar 1: Access to the means of financial production

Very few of us perceive ourselves as offering financial services when we deposit our money in banks. Mostly we perceive ourselves as passive recipients of services. Put another way, we frequently don’t imagine we have the capability to produce financial services, even though the entire financial system is foundationally constructed from the actions of small-scale players depositing money into banks and funds, buying the products of companies that receive loans, and culturally validating the money system that the banks uphold. Let’s look though, at a few examples of prototypes that are breaking this down:

1. Peer-to-peer finance models: If you decide to lend money to your friend, you directly perceive yourself as offering them a service. P2P finance platforms extend that concept far beyond your circle of close contacts, so that you can directly offer a financial service to someone who needs it. In essence, such platforms offer you access to an active, direct role in producing financial services, rather than an indirect, passive one.
2. There are many interesting examples of actual open source financial software aimed at helping to fulfil the overall mission of an open source financial system. Check out Mifos and Cyclos, and Hamlets (developed by Community Forge’s Matthew Slater and others), all of which are designed to help people set up their own financial institutions
3. Alternative currencies: There’s a reason why the broader public are suddenly interested in understanding Bitcoin. It’s a currency that people have produced themselves. As a member of the Bitcoin community, I am much more aware of my role in upholding – or producing – the system, than I am when using normal money, which I had no conscious role in producing. The scope toinvent your own currency goes far beyond crypto-currencies though: local currencies, time-banks, and mutual credit systems are emerging all over
4. The Open Bank Project is trying to open up banks to third party apps that would allow a depositor to have much greater customisability of their bank account. It’s not aimed at bypassing banks in the way that P2P is, but it’s seeking to create an environment where an ecosystem of alternative systems can plug into the underlying infrastructure provided by banks

Pillar 2: Widespread distribution

Financial intermediaries like banks and funds serve as powerful gatekeepers to access to financing. To some extent this is a valid role – much like a publisher or music label will attempt to only publish books or music that they believe are high quality enough – but on the other hand, this leads to excessive power vested in the intermediaries, and systematic bias in what gets to survive. When combined with a lack of democratic accountability on the part of the intermediaries, you can have whole societies held hostage to the (arbitrary) whims, prejudices and interests of such intermediaries. Expanding access to financial services is thus a big front in the battle for financial democratisation. In addition to more traditional means to buildingfinancial inclusion – such as credit unions and microfinance – here are two areas to look at:

• Crowdfunding: In the dominant financial system, you have to suck up to a single set of gatekeepers to get financing, hoping they won’t exclude you. Crowdfunding though, has expanded access to receiving financial services to a whole host of people who previously wouldn’t have access, such as artists, small-scale filmmakers, activists, and entrepreneurs with no track record. Crowdfunding can serve as a micro redistribution system in society, offering people a direct way to transfer wealth to areas that traditional welfare systems might neglect
• Mobile banking: This is a big area, with important implications for international development and ICT4D. Check out innovations like M-Pesain Kenya, a technology to use mobile phones as proto-bank accounts. This in itself doesn’t necessarily guarantee inclusion, but it expands potential access to the system to people that most banks ignore

Pillar 3: The ability to monitor

Do you know where the money in the big banks goes? No, of course not. They don’t publish it, under the guise of commercial secrecy and confidentiality. It’s like they want to have their cake and eat it: “We’ll act as intermediaries on your behalf, but don’t ever ask for any accountability”. And what about the money in your pension fund? Also very little accountability. The intermediary system is incredibly opaque, but attempts to make it more transparent are emerging. Here are some examples:

• Triodos Bank and Charity Bank are examples of banks that publish exactly what projects they lend to. This gives you the ability to hold them to account in a way that no other bank will allow you to do
• Corporations are vehicles for extracting value out of assets and then distributing that value via financial instruments to shareholders and creditors. Corporate structures though, including those used by banks themselves, have reached a level of complexity approaching pure obsfucation. There can be no democratic accountability when you can’t even see who owns what, and how the money flows. Groups likeOpenCorporates and Open Oil though, are offering new open data tools to shine a light on the shadowy world of tax havens, ownership structures and contracts
• Embedded in peer-to-peer models is a new model of accountability too. When people are treated as mere account numbers with credit scores by banks, the people in return feel little accountability towards the banks. On the other hand, if an individual has directly placed trust in me, I feel much more compelled to respect that

Pillar 4: An ethos of non-prescriptive DIY collaboration

At the heart of open source movements is a deep DIY ethos. This is in part about the sheer joy of producing things, but also about asserting individual power over institutionalised arrangements and pre-established officialdom. Alongside this, and deeply tied to the DIY ethos, is the search to remove individual alienation: You are not a cog in a wheel, producing stuff you don’t have a stake in, in order to consume stuff that you don’t know the origins of. Unalienated labour includes the right to produce where you feel most capable or excited.

This ethos of individual responsibility and creativity stands in contrast to the traditional passive frame of finance that is frequently found on both the Right and Left of the political spectrum. Indeed, the debates around ‘socially useful finance’ are seldom about reducing the alienation of people from their financial lives. They’re mostly about turning the existing financial sector into a slightly more benign dictatorship. The essence of DIY though, is to band together, not via the enforced hierarchy of the corporation or bureaucracy, but as part of a likeminded community of individuals creatively offering services to each other. So let’s take a look at a few examples of this

1. BrewDog’s ‘Equity for Punks‘ share offering is probably only going to attract beer-lovers, but that’s the point – you get together as a group who has a mutual appreciation for a project, and you finance it, and then when you’re drinking the beer you’ll know you helped make it happen in a small way
2. Community shares offer local groups the ability to finance projects that are meaningful to them in a local area. Here’s one for a solar co-operative, a pub, and a ferry boat service in Bristol
3. We’ve already discussed how crowdfunding platforms open access to finance to people excluded from it, but they do this by offering would-be crowdfunders the chance to support things that excite them. I don’t have much cash, so I’m not in a position to actively finance people, but in my Indiegogo profile you can see I make an effort helping to publicise campaigns that I want to receive financing

Pillar 5: The right to fork

The right to dissent is a crucial component of a democratic society. But for dissent to be effective, it has to be informed and constructive, rather than reactive and regressive. There is much dissent towards the current financial system, but while people are free to voice their displeasure, they find it very difficult to actually act on their displeasure. We may loathe the smug banking oligopoly, but we’re frequently compelled to use them.

Furthermore, much dissent doesn’t have a clear vision of what alternative is sought. This is partially due to the fact that access to financial ‘source code’ is so limited. It’s hard to articulate ideas about what’s wrong when one cannot articulate how the current system operates. Most financial knowledge is held in proprietary formulations and obscure jargon-laden language within the financial sector, and this needs to change. It’s for this reason that I’m building the London School of Financial Activism, so ordinary people can explore the layers of financial code, from the deepest layer – the money itself – and then on to the institutions, instruments and networks that move it around.

Beyond access to this source code though, we need the ability to act on it. A core principle of OpenSource movements is the Right to Fork. This is the ability to take preexisting code, and to modify it or use it as the basis for your own. The Right to Fork is both a check on power, but also a force for diversity and creativity.

In the mainstream financial system though, there are extensive blocks on the right to fork, many of them actively enforced by financial regulators. They won’t allow new banks to start, and apply inappropriate regulation to small, new financial technologies. The battle for the right to fork therefore, is one that has to also be fought at the regulatory level. That’s why we need initiatives like the Disruptive Finance Policy program.

The Right to Fork needs to be instilled into the design of any alternatives to mainstream finance too though. I don’t want to replace a world where I’m forced to use national fiat currencies with one in which I’m forced to use Bitcoin. The point is to create meaningful options for people. (To the credit of the original designers of Bitcoin, the right to fork has indeed been built in, and there has been significant use of the original Bitcoin sourcecode to create other cryptocurrencies, albeit it takes more to create a currency than merely deploying new code).

Ahoy! We set sail for the Open seas

EXPLORE THE DEEP

We may be in the early phase of a slow-moving revolution, which will only be perceptible in hindsight. As projects within these five pillars emerge, the infrastructure, norms and cultural acceptance for more connected, creative, open financial system may begin to emerge and coalesce into reality.

I hope this article has been of use to you, whether you’re looking to design actual open source finance platforms, programs and free software, or pioneer a new element of open access and open data, or whether you’re just keen to help beta-test new ideas as they get released. The financial sector is a big heavy conglomerate that is a perfect challenge for the adventurous pirate-meets-hacker-meets-activist-meets-entrepreneur. Please do tell me about anything you’re up to, and, in the spirit of Open Source, please do leave suggested amendments to this article in the comments section. I’ll try patch them into the next version of this.

Questo è solo uno dei tanti esempi della crescente brutalità della polizia. Secondo USA Today, il comportamento della polizia è diventato sempre più violento dall’undici settembre, presumibilmente per colpa dell’abbassamento degli standard nelle scuole di polizia e di un addestramento insufficiente. Forse questo è parte del problema. Io però penso che la colpa sia della crescente mentalità da stato di polizia che si è diffusa da quando è iniziata l’infinita “guerra al terrorismo”. Considerata la militarizzazione crescente della polizia di questi ultimi dieci anni, non c’è da stupirsi se la violenza aumenta.

Ma perché cresce l’interesse del pubblico?

Anche molto prima dell’undici settembre la polizia era brutale e forniva grandi titoli ai giornali, ma non così spesso come oggi. L’interesse sempre maggiore da parte del pubblico si basa sul fatto che la violenza è in aumento? Correlazione non significa causa. Le nuove tecnologie, i media indipendenti e la vecchia buona capacità di comunicare degli uomini sono alle origini della questione. Noi siamo connessi, noi parliamo, noi controlliamo la piazza e noi diffondiamo le storie sul web. Di fronte al crescere della violenza la gente ricorre ai social media per diffondere la conoscenza e fronteggiare il potere dello stato.

Per stare in argomento: Sahar Khoshakhlagh, una delle donne sparate dalla polizia che tentava di sparare Broadnax, non beve la storia dell’uomo mentalmente instabile responsabile delle sue ferite. Secondo il suo avvocato, Mariann Wang, l’accusa dovrebbe essere spostata sugli agenti che hanno aperto il fuoco. “È un incredibilmente sfortunato uso della discrezione dell’accusa il fatto che venga accusato un uomo che non ha inferto alcuna ferita al mio cliente,” ha detto Wang. “È stata la polizia a ferire il mio cliente.”

Sono passati i tempi in cui le persone arroganti prese di mira dalla polizia erano persone che semplicemente se lo meritavano. “Si vede che ha combinato qualcosa,” è il vecchio mantra della maggioranza. Oggi noi sappiamo che gli agenti del governo sono dalla parte del torto e non esitiamo a sollevare polemiche riguardo il fatto. La tastiera è più potente degli editti di stato.

L’informatica ha connesso la popolazione come non era mai accaduto prima, ma non è la semplice esistenza della tecnologia che fa salire il dissenso di fronte agli abusi della polizia: è l’attività del pubblico e la volontà di contrastare il potere dello stato. È incredibile vedere queste piccole fiamme di libertà che spuntano non solo negli Stati Uniti, ma in tutto il mondo. Il pubblico sta mettendo in dubbio chi ha il potere e le sue ragioni. Gli individui (e la collettività) stanno acquisendo più potere che mai. Questo ha un grosso effetto sui sistemi politici; e sulla “giustizia”. Quando si arriverà ad un mondo basato sulla libertà anarchica la giustizia non sarà misurata con il metro del castigo, della forza e della violenza; si baserà invece sulla capacità di ristabilire l’ordine e sulla possibilità di disarmare chi opprime.

E allora: via le pietre degli “agenti del bene”, ben vengano le polemiche del pubblico.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

This is just one of many examples of the ongoing increase in police violence. USA Today reports police violence has been on the rise since 9/11, presumably due to dropping police academy standards and substandard training. This may be part of the issue. However, I think the culprit is the growing police state mentality since the never-ending “war on terror” began. With the growing trend of militarized police over the past decade, it is no wonder violence is escalating.

But why the increased interest from the public?

Police brutality existed long before 9/11 and made major news in the past, but not nearly as frequently as today. Is growing public interest based on the increasing trend of violence? Correlation is not causation. New technology, independent media and good old human communication are getting the job done. We are connected, we talk, we control the public arena and we make stories go viral. In the face of increased violence folks are taking to social media to spread news and directly confront state power.

Case in point: Sahar Khoshakhlagh, one of the women shot by police as their bullets zipped past Mr. Broadnax, is not buying that the mentally ill man is responsible for her injuries. Her lawyer, Mariann Wang, says that charges should be levied on the police officers who opened fire. “It’s an incredibly unfortunate use of prosecutorial discretion to be prosecuting a man who didn’t even injure my client,” Wang said. “It’s the police who injured my client.”

Gone are the days of assuming people targeted by police simply had it coming. “They must-a done something wrong” is the old mantra of the majority. Today we know government officials are in the wrong and we don’t hesitate to write polemics about the fact. The keyboard is mightier than the state issued piece.

Information technology has connected people like never before but it is not the mere existence of the technology that gives rise to dissent in the face of police abuse — it is public labor and willingness to stand up to state power. It is amazing to see the tiny flames of liberty popping up not just in the United States, but around the world. The public is questioning who wields power and for what reason. Individuals (and the collective) are becoming far more empowered than ever before. This has huge implications for political systems — including the “justice” system. When true anarchic liberty is realized justice will not be gauged by punishment, force and violence — justice will instead be based on its restorative capacity and disarm those who make oppression possible.

Down with hot rocks from the “peacekeepers,” up with polemics from the public.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Pietre dagli Agenti del Bene, Polemiche dal Pubblico.

An adjunct faculty member is a part-time professor (who may work full-time hours) hired by contract each semester. As employment is contracted out per semester, adjuncts do not have the ability to obtain tenure, are often paid less than full-time faculty and many have no benefits. Currently, adjuncts make up the bulk of educators at colleges as they are cheaper for schools to employ – a result of reduced investment in the “public” education system. Adjuncts have the educational responsibilities of full-time professors and equivalent expertise in the discipline they teach. Work experience and advanced degrees are considered before a hire is made meaning adjuncts are highly educated and talented people.

Adjunct professors are the product of two acute problems facing higher education these days. The first, alluded to earlier, is decreased state sector investment in education. The decline in funding has made it difficult for schools to hire full-time employees. Instead of struggling to keep programs open and funding full-time staff, many schools have opted to let contract employees go when need be. Though the US population would rather see tax revenue invested in education, than say military spending, this means nothing to the political elite who would rather shell out stolen dollars on pet projects (Pork!) or increased military spending. To make matters worse, college administrative costs have skyrocketed because of the expanding size of management personnel – all to the detriment of academics. On campuses today there are seemingly never-ending construction projects and administrative programs. The problems associated with this featherbedding and reduced government revenue are further exacerbated by money generated by endowments and student loans that encourage a cost-plus markup approach to spending.

Building on cost-plus markup, the second, and yet another manufactured crisis of the political elite, is that higher education has become another bubble. Students unable to find work due to the ongoing economic downturn have started competing for higher degrees. With rising education costs, however, these degrees are much more expensive than they are actually worth. There are more graduates than there are jobs that require their advanced qualifications. In many cases not only is there no household income, but many folks are also buried in student loan debt. Students with graduate degrees have traditionally trusted the academy or its resources to find jobs with good wages. This is no longer the case.

In today’s (captured) market, advanced degrees are no longer the tools for growth and prosperity they used to be. Increased tuition, increased fees, the burden of student loans, rising conference costs, rising membership costs to (insert academic discipline here) Society of America and even the high costs of journal publications are now all imposed on a struggling public. This is a great indoctrination technique: People buried in debt do not have a lot of time or energy to invest in challenging the status quo, there are bills to pay and mouths to feed. This creates a situation where only those with the correct amount of capital, or access to the correct inner circles, are (largely – there are exceptions) allowed to play the game. Education fits the neo-liberal economic model: Push the public out-of-the-way and serve special interests. The modern academic model looks to be more about publishing, obtaining grants and patents or making connections than it does fostering an environment for learning, inquiry and creativity.

As I have argued before: When education spending is cut and when corporate influence impacts research, one can clearly hear the calls to privatize (fully allowing only those with capital to pursue higher degrees) or the calls for stricter regulation and “teach to test” policies (fully allowing for the indoctrination of students). Both solutions championed by state officials directly impede social capital and reinforce adherence to preconceived rules – they are ridiculous. Furthermore, it keeps teachers from “owning” their classroom. Teachers must ensure their students meet the demands of the state or private entity that truly chooses the instruction of the classroom – their jobs depend on it. Teachers no longer have agency over their own labor. This is what Kevin Carson has called The Real Curriculum: Please the status quo and create docile, obedient, indoctrinated future employees burdened with debt.

Despite all of this, there is resistance. With falling communication costs new orders are emerging across the market, education included.

With the emergence of new information and communication technologies individuals can take active roles in their community’s development. This trend leads to increased transfer of authority and responsibility from centralized institutions to local neighborhoods. This engages and empowers everyday people. Information technology has allowed us to question who has authority and decision-making power, why power is distributed the way it is and what implications it has for society and future generations. As a result of such inquiry, decentralization has become a main theme. In the case of education, democracy in the classroom is again on the rise.

Information technology is allowing us to build new foundations across the political divide. Beyond the dominant paradigm of “teach to test” and prepare for the workforce, many educators are looking to teach in ways that inspire critical thinking. Though still in its infancy, this democratic shift in education can empower students and promote values of free association, co-ordination and altruism. It can inspire students to work for their community’s well-being, as opposed to the requirements of a corporate state apparatus. The current Service Learning movement, where for course credit students have the option of community service, is a great example of this encouraged pro-social behavior. In other words, decentralized education will work to enhance our natural capacities as human beings and intellectual growth will be cultivated.

Communication technologies have created a market for people to work around traditional power structures. Educators are easily able to share their concerns with each other and the rest of the public because of growing social networks. Through the means of communication, consensus reveals the many problems with our mainstream educational systems – be them government or private schools. The freed market is demanding a paradigm shift. This promotes the libertarian position of individualism, the notion that we should assume more responsibility for our daily lives. If nothing else, we are now constantly exposed to the failures of the corporate state. In the individualist tradition, governance is being scrutinized. People are now talking about problems associated with their communities, workplaces and society. As a result, incredible causes are being organized around, federations are developing, movements are progressing and it is all happening because we simply talk. The traditional libertarian position is clear: Individuals can better represent the concerns of their communities, instead of a single powerful person, group or organization.

In regards to education, Kevin Carson notes:

The idea is not to eliminate higher education, but to eliminate the mass-production model by which it is organized: Transporting people to a central location with expensive physical plant and a bloated administrative bureaucracy in order to process them into human resources. Network technology, with its ability to move information cheaply rather than moving people, offers the potential of an alternative that creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques) …

Falling communication costs are allowing us to build anew within the shell of the old. Take for example the Massive Open Online Course, or “MOOC” phenomenon. MOOCs are courses offered online, for free, that are open access and have unlimited participation. MOOCs offer all of the standard materials of traditional classrooms (videos, readings, lectures, exercises, etc…) but also user groups that help build communities among students and their educators. The variety of this free educational resource is also incredibly vast.

Imagine the possibilities here. “Garage” physicists, for example, being able to take classes they could never afford online – for free. Massive human communication systems allowing them to freely associate with online social networks that educate and inspire and totally void of traditional power structures. The creative, innovative potential for our society is astounding as Sebastian A. B. explains:

The individual is the basic functional unit of innovation. Institutions provide resources — capital, human and fixed. But free people can achieve a lot with very little.

The magnitude of creative productivity is most strongly correlated with the number of researchers, and less with the talent of the individuals involved, and fortunately the positive feedback loop (or virtuous cycle) of technology continues to lower the cost of instrumentation. That is, happy accident probability is proportional to time invested rather than just skill.

But what of the traditional campus? Information technology and low communication costs have tremendous potential to allow for the empowerment of classroom instructors. Indeed, the use of emerging communication technology and information science is causing increased transfer of power from centralized authorities to locally based institutions. The internet is being used as a tool for educators to ban together, begin social movements and to once again gain autonomy for their classrooms. Network technologies are being used to create a diversity of support platforms for instructors and other temporary/freelance workers. For instance, collective bargaining is again on the rise and spreading insurance, legal aid, professional development opportunities and even locally controlled scholarly publishing. The internet revolution has already brought some liberty back into traditional campuses. With the spread of information and mass social communication this trend will continue exponentially.

So just what does this mean for us adjuncts who love to teach? Simply put, education is in the beginning phase of an evolution. With information technology, harnessed by the public, a more decentralized society is on the way – liberty is winning, naturally. Our libertarian society will of course emphasize education. Human beings long for creative labor; it is a biological universal. No longer will education be a tool to prepare us for the workplace. Education will become the life-long pursuit of our interests and creative ingenuity. We are programmed with curiosity and the desire to learn and communicate. Public consensus will naturally cultivate a new academic culture and those who aspire to teach will be in demand.

That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after Napster was shut down — Kazaa, Kazaa lite, eDonkey, eMule, The Pirate Bay — was less dependent on central servers and other vulnerable nodes than the one before it. Wikileaks responded the same way to U.S. government attempts to shut it down: Besides being hosted on backup servers around the world — some in countries less than friendly to the U.S. government — it responded to seizure of its domain name by publicizing its numeric IP address. Thousands of Wikileaks supporters around the world published its IP address or mirrored the site. One Wikileaks mirror site is hosted by Center for a Stateless Society, the think tank that pays me to write this column.

The Firefox Browser, in response to both U.S. government administrative seizures of so-called “pirate site” domains, and to proposed legislation that would generalize the practice, created plug-ins that would automatically direct users to the IP address of any website whose domain name had been shut down.

Networks, as the saying goes, treat censorship as damage and route around it. And the same is true of surveillance.

This is brilliantly illustrated by the public response to the Edward Snowden story. In the period after Snowden exposed the NSA’s domestic surveillance of American email, the daily adoption rate for PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) email encryption tripled.

But aside from the mainstreaming of encryption which always follows prominent news stories about state surveillance, those with a professional interest in thwarting government eavesdroppers have — as you might expect — adopted encryption at a much higher rate. Australian Crypto Party founder Asher Wolf noted, “those who want to break the law have already probably learnt cryptography.” That’s true not only of ordinary criminals and terrorists, but of dissidents, activists and whistleblowers of all kinds.

Snowden can probably thank the fact that he became the object of a manhunt only after The Guardian printed the leaked documents, and not before, to his use of the TOR’s anonymizing power. Wikileaks reportedly uses TOR to protect whistleblowers. And of course it’s widely used by traffickers in drugs, arms and pornography.

It’s since come out that the FBI has targeted TOR with malware to expose the identity of its users. But if you look more closely, it only bears out the general point. First of all, the malware was aimed at Firefox’s TOR browser bundle — not “the onion router” itself. It targeted earlier versions that were replaced by secure versions in July. Further, it was targeted at users of the Windows operating system.

Now, people whose living — or life! — depends on evading surveillance usually aren’t all that stupid. They respond to stuff. The Linux operating system, which was immune to the FBI’s anti-TOR malware, is used by a fairly small share of the population. But it was already in use by a disproportionately large share of anarchists and other activists, and of the kind of information freedom geeks who tend to support leaking on principle. And this latest news is likely to drive new adoption. Likewise, criminals, dissidents and activists who value secrecy are apt to respond by shifting to versions of TOR that are more secure.

This is yet another example of a broader rule: The superior agility and resilience of networks compared to authoritarian hierarchies, and the ability of freely cooperating individuals to devise new ways of evading surveillance and control faster than authoritarian institutions can devise ways of controlling us.

Tucker in particular constantly reiterated his position that if the Cost Principle (which he regarded as the definitive principle of socialism and which would necessarily mean the absence of usury) could not be realized by libertarian means, by free competition and the demise of privilege, that it was not to be realized at all. In the individualist anarchist free market, people, credit and resources would move so freely and fluidly, price signals would become so timely and clear, that before long selling goods or services significantly above cost would be rendered impossible. (Few free market libertarians of today share Tucker’s antipathy to “usury,” as such, but many now share his view of capitalism, placing it in opposition to free markets and competition.) It was thus privilege, restrictions on competition of all kinds, that allowed a capitalist/monopolist class to underpay labor and to overcharge for their products. But new technologies and the networked economy they yield are making the monopolies of old impossible by leaving regulatory and legislative attempts to limit competition powerless.

As Yochai Benkler observes of “the effects of [the] networked information economy on individual autonomy,” individuals are more free to operate without the permission of the “powers that be,” outside of the proper channels — be they licensing boards, regulatory bodies, or established corporations. The effects on competition will be sweeping; for where once starting a new business, producing a product, etc., required an appeal to tribute-takers in government and in formalized, capitalist institutions, it has today become easier than ever to evade the reaches of those tollways. Similarly, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues that the emergence of the Internet and “the nature of distributed systems” themselves have brought with them their own culture or ideology. He invokes John Dewey’s notion of “habits of thought” to suggest that our new peer-to-peer reality has changed the way we think about everything from exchange to personal relationships. And we can perceive the ways that technology informs culture (and vice versa) all around us, back through history. The work of the Center for a Stateless Society’s Kevin Carson has demonstrated the effects of a subsidized American car culture on the overall economy, suffusing everything from suburban sprawl to distribution paths for consumer goods. Nothing about the present system was simply a foregone conclusion. Authority has impacted the technological ecosystem at every step of development, suppressed alternatives, and obliged the established economic powers.

Contrast authoritarian capitalism with the decentralized, horizontally-networked and -ordered free market presently materializing, one in which the effective exercise of power through hierarchy is less and less possible. Law professor Butler Shaffer uses the metaphor of “a giant centrifuge” to describe the current trend toward decentralization and away from the pyramidal structures of corporate and government power that we’ve had to date. With “vertically-structured” institutions in decline, being replaced by networks, society is “spinning increased decision-making authority and control into the hands of individuals.” Such was the vision of the individualist anarchists — if everyone had the ability to become a capitalist, that is, had equal access to the means of production, then exploitation would cease to be a significant source of individual wealth. Everyone would have to work for his keep, but since no one could exert the power of the state to create “class laws,” limiting competition, relatively equal exchange would obtain as the general rule. If the individualists criticized vulgar proponents of “laissez faire” for their inconsistencies, then they also (and even more strenuously) excoriated vulgar socialists for prescribing an absolute equality of material conditions, to be reached through the absolute authority of a central state. Remove coercive privilege, they argued, and whatever result prevailed would necessarily be the most just. Theirs was the ultimate “open source” economy, enabling each individual to enter into any economic endeavor she pleased, to contribute in any way, thereby occupying the margins on which capitalist profits rested. The Internet has thrown open those margins to the benefit of individuals and at the expense of established corporations who have used legislative and regulatory means to keep them closed.

The individualists, from Josiah Warren onward, shared amongst one another an enthusiasm for and desire to undertake experimentations within the economic realm, eschewing uniformity and doctrinaire declarations about what a free economy must be. Experimentation of the kinds they esteemed is of course a threat to the status quo, and thus to the organizations that depend upon and hope to perpetuate it. This is among the chief reasons why the propaganda of largeness, vertical integration and hierarchy have all but completely overtaken the conversation surrounding efficiency. Anarchists like Benjamin Tucker certainly were not hostile or opposed to largeness per se, in and of itself, and neither should we anarchists of today be. Still, Tucker gainsaid the claim that large scale production for a modern society would required huge accumulations and concentrations of capital. Anticipating the emancipation and empowerment of individuals that we’re witnessing today, Tucker wrote, “Processes are expected to become cheaper, more compact, and more easily manageable, until they shall come again within the capacity of individuals and small combinations.” He confidently looked forward to a reversal of the centralization and hierarchy he saw in his own day, which has arguably only been compounded in the hundred plus years since.

With the digitization of the economy generally, and its attending vulnerability and breakdown of monopoly rents, intellectual property has become increasingly important for the monopolist class as a safeguard of those rents. Pitted against the development of the new economy, intellectual property will be a last-ditch effort both for entrenched models in domestic economies and for established, developed nations in the global economy. Expansions of technology have made a post-scarcity world of abundance not only possible, but very likely to come to fruition at some stage in the future. Standing in the way, however, is the capitalist attempt to pen in that technology, which as an abstract thing contained in ideas must rely on increasingly draconian intellectual property measures. Scholars such as C. Ford Runge and Edi Defrancesco have done a great service in observing the analogy between the enclosure of common lands and the attempt to subject ideas — specifically “relating to genomics, computer software, and scientific data” — to monopoly ownership standards.

We are now approaching a breaking point, a culmination of long-unfolding trends that will witness the old forces of rigid hierarchy and centrality collide with the dynamism of the networked, freed market. Outcomes, wins and losses, will turn upon the fulcrum of the steps that we take as free, autonomous individuals to leverage and pry ever more open the cracks that we find in the old infrastructure. New currencies (giving life to the mutualistic notions of our anarchist forebears), new organization models, new definitions of liberty and community — all are issuing forth from technological developments of only very recent vintage. Because of its defining flexibility, anarchism is the thing to rise and meet what’s next.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of M. George van der Meer’s “The Network Economy as New Mutualism“.