For some time, I was thinking about writing a review of Kevin Carson’s book The Desktop Regulatory State, which helped inspire me to become an anarchist back in 2016, to see how it aged in the decade since it was published.
But then ICE invaded the city of Minneapolis. And then the citizens fought back in a way that is seemingly a textbook application of what Carson wrote about in that book, to the point that if a second edition is ever published, I would not at all be surprised if it had an entire subsection in the appendix of the book, Case Study in Networked Resistance.
Making broader theoretical points that draw on an ongoing conflict is always a questionable undertaking. When tensions are heightened and the situation is fluid, rigorously thinking things through is challenging and things can turn on a dime. Narratives embraced in the moment can turn out to be laughably wrong in retrospect when the facts are coldly analyzed, or new evidence comes to light.
Nonetheless, I’m willing to stand by the statement until proven otherwise.
For those who haven’t read the book or need a refresher, a significant part of the early book is about establishing what Carson sees as the primary conflict going forward, namely a conflict between networks and hierarchies.
And while I am not personally involved in the fight, from all the news I’m seeing, it certainly seems like Minneapolis is utilizing a network to fight against a hierarchy. As anarchist Margret Killjoy wrote of their experience talking to people in the city.
This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement. Because it is built out of so many interlocking networks, even if a bad actor managed to disrupt an individual piece of the network (by, for example, bogging down some particular organizing group in minutiae and preventing it from accomplishing its work), the disruption would be minimal. Because the network is democratic (not in the sense that people involved vote on decisions, but in the sense that it is run by the people who are part of it rather than by some vanguard of leaders), people are listened to only when their ideas actually appeal to people.
The basic strategy employed by people on the ground is identifying cars used by agents, following them, alerting others to their presence through the use of horns and whistles, and photographing or videotaping them when they try to accost and kidnap people on the street while getting the information of the people they seize. While ICE is still able to make arrests, the number of people they have so far been able to grab is far lower than what they would have done if the community was slower to organize.
Outmaneuvering a hierarchically structured enemy with superior firepower instead of directly confronting them is nothing new. This is the bread and butter of successful guerrilla insurgencies since time immemorial. What Minneapolis leverages is real-time encrypted communications through phone apps like Signal, but also radio networks.
Such non-violent swarming tactics amplified by many-to-many communications technology have been around for a while. In his book, Carson draws on the classic work of RAND think-tankers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt and their concept of “Netwar”. They argued that advances in communications technology had enabled decentralized swarms to overwhelm more powerful, hierarchically organized targets.
One case study Arquilla and Ronfeldt gave considerable attention to was the swarming tactics used by direct action protestors in Seattle against the World Trade Organization all the way back in ’99. Despite the decades that have passed since they wrote about it, the similarities between the two are notable:
Netwars are fought by networks; collections of groups and organizations guided by non-hierarchical command structures which communicate through “all-points” communications channels of considerable bandwidth and complexity.
Networks operate by “swarming” their opponents like bees or white blood cells—more like organisms than machines. They approach stealthily and from many directions in offense. In defense, they can react like anti-bodies moving towards points of attack. Netwar’s line between offense and defense can be blurred, leaving opponents unclear about what is occurring and how to respond. Throughout the protests, the Direct Action Network were able to offensively swarm their opponents repeatedly, as shown by the seizure of key intersections on Tuesday and the easy penetration of the “no-protest” zone on Wednesday. The anti-body defense was shown when crowds moved towards police attacks or mass arrests.
But while in Seattle such swarms were made up mostly of ideologically committed anarchists and activists looking to overwhelm defenders in the form of police to stop representatives from gathering at a conference, what we see in Minneapolis is society-wide mobilization that goes well beyond the usual leftist and liberal activists and marginalized communities of color with the aim of defending those targeted by ICE. As journalist Ana Marie Cox writes, “The mobilization has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder.” With this, you have not just workers going on strike, but also regular businesses.
It’s a proper popular front.
The broad moral consensus that ICE should be fought is key to the whole struggle. One of the distinctions between networks and hierarchies that Carson makes is that people are intrinsically motivated to act because they believe in what they are doing, not because they are being forced, and so can be trusted to do the right thing. Lower transaction costs mean that people can just take action, which is critical given that people only have minutes to act when ICE tries to abduct someone.
While the principles Carson lays out apply in many cases of people organizing in a horizontalist fashion, there are specific reasons why the people in Minneapolis are able to do what they do.
First of all, it is built on pre-existing practices of everyday mutual aid and solidarity that are necessitated by the environment. Marie Cox again:
Bonds formed under the pressure of negative double-digit windchill are key to understanding what’s happening. It is impossible to get through a Minnesota winter without help, and only sometimes does that assistance come from your neighbors. The stories about people shoveling out or snowblowing an entire block’s driveways without being asked and with no compensation are true, but the real miracles (and just as common) are the times when strangers stop to help someone shovel out a car caught in a snowbank or bring out the kitty litter from their trunk put there just for this kind of emergency. I cannot tell you one story about that happening to me. I have at least three or four. The pun is irresistible: Minnesotans have always declared common cause against ice, they’ve just changed their focus to the ice that you can’t also use for hockey practice.
You can dismiss it as a joke until someone at a café gives you a spare scarf because you can’t find yours. People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, “Just pay it back someday.”
There is also the technical infrastructure that powers the resistance in the form of an app like Signal. The slow, boring work of radical hackers over decades that have given protestors secure, easy-to-set-up lines of communication. Ancient struggles like the Crypto Wars of the 90s which made encryption legal for everyday people to use and the work to build, popularize and maintain Signal are what has enabled protestors securely communicate in ways that frustrate the regime’s surveillance attempts.
The specific structure of closed encrypted group chats means the resistance is more resilient. Hack right-wing “journalists” like Cam Higby can infiltrate individual chats, but they only reveal a small part of the broader network. Compare that to prior protests in which people openly organized over public-facing social media which was much easier to shut down or disrupt.
It’s worth talking about the broader political implications of all this.
I joke about Minneapolis activists using principles from a book that fewer than a handful of people in that city have even heard about, much less read, because it speaks how Carson got at something with his writing. The reason people are acting in this way is not because they have a formal understanding of the principles of swarming or netwar, but because they saw other people doing something effective that they could do themselves. The reason Minneapolis resistance has worked so well is that it consists of forms of activity that require minimal buy-in in terms of ideology (secret police shouldn’t abduct my neighbors) and resources (all you need is a phone, a whistle or a car).
Self-conscious radicals may have been the key to igniting the wave of action, but it’s become its own thing now. And with that it has become one of the most successful instances of “Propaganda of the Deed” in years. It’s a clear example of direct action that not only has a political impact but also sends a clear message to people everywhere.
“You, whether you live in Minneapolis or any other city in America, or even the world, can do something like this.”
Now just because people are organizing in an anarchist way does not make them anarchists. Like all popular fronts, the general solidarity we see in Minneapolis will dissipate, particularly if the city wins. But even then it’s easier to have conversations with people that draw them closer to our position when they have the visceral experience of acting like an anarchist.
But the consequences of the conflict in the streets of Minneapolis go beyond just potentially making it easier to convert people to our position while also landing a solid punch on the Trump regime. It also speaks to the future of the left in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world.
One ironic thing about The Desktop Regulatory State is that, despite it championing the wild possibilities of horizontalist organizing going forward, it was published just when we were beginning to see the resurgence of the “New Old Left”, as Jacobin founder Bashkar Sunkara described himself, thanks to the electoral campaigns of figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. In the 90s and 00s a rough and ready “horizontalism” that drew inspiration from anarchist practices was common sense across the left, but in recent decades we saw a swing back toward “verticalism”.
Part of this shift were arguments that conflated decentralist aspirations and alternate technologies with postmodern relativism and quietism in ways that defined the many parts of the left in the 90s and 00s (never mind the frustrations anarchists had with postmodernism). As Sunkara described it.
A lot of my early work, including an essay I wrote in Dissent called “The Anarcho-Liberal”, is based on the critique of a left that I thought was afraid of grand narratives and the project of modernity and small political projects of resistance.
Yet when push came to shove the people of Minneapolis did not wait around for verticalist structures to form that could resist the encroachment via institutional measures or for a formal organization to start strategically directing people – although the Minneapolis Democratic Socialists of America are part of the resistance. No, they’re doing it themselves in a horizontalist manner that, so far, has not succumbed to the “tactical freeze” that Zeynep Tufekci diagnosed in their book Twitter and Tear Gas wherein they cannot shift in response to novel forms of state repression or the necessity of creating some formal institution that can “speak” on behalf of the city and present demands as Vincent Bevins argues in If We Burn.
The horizontalist response to the failures of horizontalism in the 2010s (and we have not been granted nearly as much in the pages of formal news outlets as our verticalist critics) is that we’re really just getting started. There’s still so much more that could be done in terms of cultural practices and technological possibility to be developed and spread. Despite verticalists rhetorically posturing as the serious adults in the room, they show no awareness of the fact that it is in fact entirely possible to contest and develop the technology that powers our organizing.
What we can learn from the failure of Indymedia and Twitter-inspired social movements is not that the widespread democratization of reading and writing is preordained to fail, but that simply the status update is not enough, a conclusion that is all-too self-evident. As social movements will continue to make new tools and utilize existing tools in unforeseen manners, the future of technology is still being written
The appropriate response to the ascendant reaction across the world is not to retreat to some verticalist organization that claims the pretense of superior strategic reasoning, but to instead go further in developing and spreading capabilities.
And while I can’t speak for everyone, for me the most valuable thing from Carson’s writings is a general orientation toward the world that points toward consequential action I and others could take in a changing world. Whatever inaccuracies or errors there are in The Desktop Regulatory State – and there are many just given the sheer scope of its subject matter – I believe those mistakes are secondary to the fact that it holds up as a guide to action a decade on.
The point, after all, is to change the world.
