anarchism & social technology: contextualising the (non)-field

7/30/2019 Anarchism & Social Technology: Contextualising the (non)-Field

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Anarchism & Social Technology: Contextualising the (non?)-field?

Simon Collister, Royal Holloway, University of London

3rd September, 2012

Paper presented in the Anarchism and Social Technology Stream at the 2nd Anarchist

Studies Network conference: Making Connections, Loughborough University, 3rd -

5th September 2012.

Simon Collister, Doctoral Candidate

New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International

Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Email: [email protected]


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The purpose of this short paper is two-fold, firstly it seeks to contextualize the origins

of this particular conference stream and set the scene for an investigation of the fields

of technology and social change interpreted largely, although not exclusively, from

an anarchist or libertarian communist perspective. Secondly its ultimate goal is to

kick-start a wider debate about the role technology plays (and the potential it

possesses) in political resistance and social struggles as well as to stimulate renewed

theoretical as well as practical engagements with the topic. To begin, then, some

background: this conference stream came about following discussions with a number

of individuals interested or involved in technology theory and practice with a personal

desire to bring about transformations at the social level. It seemed apparent to us that

there was a distinct lacuna within the Anarchist Studies Networks annual conference

programme regarding the role technology has played or can play in driving anarchist

studies and practice in the contemporary networked age (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;

Castells 1996; Latour 2005). This absence was particularly problematic given that the

conference call for papers made use of ongoing events in the middle east and the

global #occupy movements movements making extensive, if complex and

contested, uses of technology - as lead points to highlight the relevance of anarchist

social struggles and studies to contemporary politics.

This prompted us to a) submit a proposal for a conference stream dedicated to

technologies, with an emphasis on more recent iterations of social technologies (see

below for a more detailed clarification of terms) and b) reflect on whether there is a

field of anarchist studies engaged with issues surrounding social

technology or social media. At a first glance it would appear that there is no

substantial engagement with issues of social technology and emergent forms of praxis

or theoretical evolution among anarchist scholars.1 For example, while far from an

exhaustive indicator of the present academic state of affairs, a Google Scholar search

for anarchism and social technology throws up little relevant research.2

Such results, however, prompted us to believe that there is scope for an initial

investigation of the issues of social technology and anarchism, even if we were forced

1

Of course, it is highly probable that a number of scholars engage with issues of technology and evenmore recent iterations of social technologies and social change without using the banner of

anarchism. While such papers may potentially reflect on issues and directions broadly aligned withanarchisms position we are focusing here on overtly anarchist or libertarian communist politics. 2

This evidence also risks missing non-academic publications about social technology and anarchistpractice, such as personal reflections from within social movements, which are arguably equally asvaluable in efforts to expand the knowledge base.


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to conclude that further investigation along the trajectory would be fruitless.

Furthermore, we discovered an anarcho-Lolcat which gave us hope that somebody,

somewhere, was interested in the field! (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Anarcho-Lolcat (image taken from

https://twitter.com/d150b3y/status/254303835768635392

Social Technology and Struggle

The starting point for our investigation then is the seemingly powerful and ubiquitous

adoption and adaption of technologies, in particular the recent developments in social

technologies, as tools within political resistance and social struggles. By way of a

short detour into terms and definitions social technology in considered social in

both senses: 1) as technology which connects users primarily according to social

relations and facilitates dialogic, asynchronous communication and 2) any technology

that can be appropriated for social purposes that is purposes intended to build and

foster associations between individuals or collective groups, predominantly outside of

commercial relations3. Crucially, this definition can include, for example, Facebook

as a specific technology platform enabling peer-to-peer dialogue as well as more

traditional technologies, such as fax machines or landline telephones when applied in

the relevant context. Such technologies and social practices and contexts have been

3Although, as this paper develops I will argue that within contemporary society it is impossible to

acknowledge hierarchical strata between reductive concepts such as capital, social, etc.


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put to use in a range of struggles over the past few years, notably the Arab Spring

(McQuillan 2011), Occupy Wall Street (Firger 2012; Schlinkert 2011) and the UK

student movement (Economist 2011) to mention just a few more mainstream

examples. Moreover, while it has been demonstrated that earlier forms of networking

technology such as listservs, websites, and collaborative networking tools helped to

facilitate new patterns of protest (Juris 2012, 260) with newer and emerging

technologies embedded within the social domain, it can be argued that such

technologies are actively transforming and (re)shaping the fields of practice and

underlying the reality of autonomous political struggles. As Juris has already

observed:

The question that now arises is whether the increasing use of social mediasuch as Facebook or Twitter has led to new patterns of protest that shape

movement dynamics beyond the realm of technological practice and to what

extent these are similar to or different from the networking logics

characteristic of global justice activism. (ibid)

As a result, it could be argued that such technologies are prefiguring social change

through the emergence of collaborative, decentralised and non-hierarchical norms

embedded at the level of practice. Whether it is livestreaming actions, mapping

spaces, fundraising, establishing secure independent wifi networks, etc, technology is

enabling (as well as limiting, in some cases) a fecund practical realm of political

action with additional implications for established theory. This interpretation is

perhaps over-idealistic but hopefully this analysis will bear fruit by demonstrating that

such practices do not emerge unproblematically within a dichotomous divide

between, for example, hierarchical versus non-hierarchical organising. Rather the

subsequent analysis will argue that such material, technological practices must also be

reconsidered through a revised theoretical framework of post-anarchism. However,

parameters need to be established in light of such a bold claim in order to set and

manage expectations. My aim here is not to comprehensively map this new, emergent

theoretical and practical space - although the co-contributors here today will hopefully

start moving us in such a direction. Rather I want to introduce some of the current

anarchist and autonomous thinking in this general area and raise some questions as to

the perceived lack of engagement with technology, which I hope will offer much toscholars of an anarchist or autonomous left persuasion.


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practice. (See Figure 2) Perhaps the study of anarchist practices through social

technology is lost somewhere between, what Shirky (2009) terms, the socially

interesting and the technologically boring utility and novelty of it all (105).

Alternatively, maybe the reason for minimal anarchist engagement with social

technology arises from the historical position of technology within the anarchist

tradition. InAnarchy Alive Gordon (2008) undertakes a historical overview of

anarchisms engagement with technology and plots the views of a number of early or

classical anarchists, such as Kropotkin, Malatesta and Goldman. These anarchists

appear to have adopted a broadly optimistic approach to technology as a result of their

perhaps nave - belief that technology itself was little more than a neutral by-

product of industrial progress and thus provided opportunities for workers to

appropriate technology as a means to transform their social position (Gordon 2008,

113-114). Gordon, however, points to Joseph Pierre Proudhons (1847) pragmatic and

pessimistic analysis as the defining account of anarchisms relation with technology.

Proudhon asserts that, in terms of social benefit, technology:

would have no other effect than to multiply labor [] make the chains of

serfdom heavier, render life more and more expensive, and deepen the abyss

which separates the class that commands and enjoys from the class that obeys

and suffers. (169)

Despite the mass adoption and use of technology (including new media such as the

Internet, email and mobile phones) by anarchists in organising and communicating

social movements, Gordon intimates that owing to contemporary technologys

modern antecedents in the origins of the industrial revolution and its potential (or

inevitable) appropriation by capital, there is a general distrust of technology within

anarchism. More specifically, the historical relation between anarchism and

technology is highly ambivalent (2008, 111).

Technological Disciplining

Proudhons position, it would seem, sets the tone for ongoing assessments of

technology and its relation to society in broader terms by left-wing theorists.


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While Marx (1867) argued for a differentiation between machinery and its

employment by capital Gordon argues that this misses the reality that such a

distinction is not possible owing to the ways in which technology has the needs of

capital encoded into it from the start (114-120). As a result, Gordon continues, the

development of new technology over time has merely created a reality whereby a

technological disciplinary regime is constituted, generating power relations that

structure permitted and unpermitted forms of subjectivity and action (122). Or put

another way: given societys bias towards exploitative, capitalist relations, technology

will inevitably be used for state and corporate surveillance, whatever other uses they

may have (Lyon 2003) [italics in original].

Figure 3 The Zuckerborg? (image taken from Charis Tsevis via Google:

http://www.tsevis.com/)

While Lyon and Gordon specifically address technology in a general sense, we do not

need to look too far to recognize the ways in which such a framework can be applied

to contemporary social technologies, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs (see Figure

3). Moreover, some scholars argue that rather than simply constituting a

technological disciplinary regime, the new iterations of consumer technology

enmeshing social performances with structuring technologies lead to a more

pernicious effect of self-surveillance whereby the cybernetic systems generating and

enabling self-managing subjectivities and social relations move Foucaults


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disciplinary regime to a regime of control. Such control societies have emerged,

according to Deleuze, directly as a result of the proliferation of communication and

computation technologies. Such a regime operates in close alignment with Michel

Foucaults notion of biopolitical power or biopower marked by an intensification of

apparatuses of governmentality. Given the ubiquity and embeddedness of such

communication technologies, their function as apparatuses become increasingly

immanent to the social field. If conventional technologies can be said to exercise

disciplinary powers through closed [] and quantitative logics that fixed

individuals within institutions but did not succeed in consuming them completely in

a control society, power becomes premised on open, qualitative and affective

relations (Hardt and Negri 2000, 24) that capture and manipulate the entire (social)

body through the continual and real-time modulation of social relations, values and

expectations (Deleuze 1992).

Social Technology and Liberal Politics

Arguably more prevalent but equally unappealing - analyses of social technology

and its role in social change can be found in liberal, broadly agent-centric accounts

both optimistic and pessimistic. Such accounts often the result of mediatized

discourses supported by popular (or mediatized) academics (see Shirky (2009),

Gladwell (2010), Morozov (2011), for example) - invest in their analysis the

individual as the all powerful agent enabled by unproblematic technology. These

idealistic and technologically determinist perspectives simplify the interaction

between individuals, collectives, tools and technologies in pursuit of popular liberal

narratives about protest, democracy and progress. At the present time, these narratives

focus predominantly on the revolutionary moment with events in Moldova, Iran and

Egypt generating debate (Morozov 2009, Palfrey, Faris and Etling 2009, Castells

2011). Previously, such liberal optimistic accounts could be found closer to home

with the potential for e-democracy to re-ignite political engagement and revitalize

participation in democratic politics4.

(Post-) Marxist Critiques

While it can be argued that such state or liberal democratic-focused interpretations of

social technologies are generally unappealing to anarchists, another more dangerous

4See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy for a useful (but continually edited) summary.


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side-effect of these narratives can be identified. Transposing the agency located

within individuals by liberal perspectives onto the technology, we can recognize a

parallel narrative emerging in the media in which dominant (yet commercial and

proprietary) platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, become mythologized as

emancipatory tools engendering freedom and empowering individuals. This narrative

is popular on the one hand because it renders accounts of complex, techno-social

negotiations into easily reductionist and determinist analyses that offer a

comprehensible story for mass consumer audiences. More worryingly, as the Post-

Marxist Escalate Collective argue after the 2010 UK student protests (where such

accounts of technology and political resistance were swiftly brought to the fore by

mainstream media) such media narratives reinforce the perceived leaderlessness of

Twitter and Facebook because of how clearly this myth masks the mechanisms of

privilege and capital power which allow leadership to emerge (Escalate Collective

2011).

Figure 4 Social Factory (image taken from Auto Italia South Easthttp://autoitaliasoutheast.org/blog/news/2012/10/29/immaterial-labour-isnt-

working/)

Shifting the field of study from the streets to the workplace, Italian Post- and

Autonomist Marxist scholars - and the Workerist movement in particular - have

identified the troubling ways in which capital has appropriated social technologies as

a way to gain deeper control of workers emotional and psychological productivity,

thus appropriating the very human soul as a product of capital (Beradi 2009). This

raises concerns that social technologies, while perceived as a set of emancipatory


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tools and practices, are in fact ways to extend production and control into the once

personal or genuinely social domain of workers lives. By encouraging the

generation of technologically-enabled flows of endless semio-capital (ibid),

capitalism has created an inescapable social factory (Figure 4). Interpreted through

Terranovas neo-materialist critique of the contemporary digital business (2004) or

Tiqquns account of the cybernetic drives of state and capitalism in The Cybernetic

Hypothesis (2001) it is easy to see how anarchisms ambivalent relations with

technology can become actualised as highly problematic.

New Luddism and Post-Anarchism

Having mapped out a rudimentary account of a number of possible anarchist

engagements with technology, we arrive at the question: where do we go from here?

Returning to our start point, Gordon (2008) draws inspiration from the Luddites,

whose resistance was not against technologyper se, but against technology that

further establishes dominant power relations (predominantly those of capital).

Building on this original resistance, Gordon proposes the development a new

luddism, more specifically a contemporary anarchist Luddism [] understood as a

heading for all forms of abolitionist resistance to new technological waves which

enhance power-centralisation and social control (Gordon 2008, 129).

But does this new luddism offer a desirable position? Is an engaged resistance to

bad as opposed to good technology an adequate response? Given the ubiquity of

technology and its embeddedness in day-to-day life it can be argued that this

abolitionist resistance offers a limited engagement with technology on two counts:

Firstly, given the complex meshing of technology and social practices - is it a

productive use of energy, or even feasible, to attempt to monitor and police the

adoption and uses of technology in an emergent environment? Secondly, and arising

partly from the first point, its possible to argue that viewed through the lens of a

range of contemporary theories, such as post-structuralism, feminism, post-marxism

and neo-materialism, any reductive distinctions between good and bad or technology

and society become increasingly problematic. From an anarchist perspective such

theories can be broadly reconciled under the heading of post-anarchism (Newman

2011; Rouselle and Evren 2011) characterized by a number of attributes that

potentially offer us a way out of the impasse of new luddism.


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Firstly, post-anarchism accounts for reality as an immanent space in which

hierarchical ontologies or categories of existence become irreducible to fixed or

generalizable concepts or processes. Such a space, then, is in a process of continual

emergence and creation. As a result, political resistance must be instantiated in

response to the contingent circumstances in which fluid models of power or authority

emerge or become generated. More specifically, this immanent domain of social

reproduction and political struggle is inseparable from the relations and forces of

capital which dominate contemporary society. Attempts to step outside of technology

and capital to occupy an objective watchdog role become not only undesirable but

unfeasible.

In place of this watchdog role I would tentatively suggest that the most potent

response is to produce or assemble new configurations of resistance from within the

immanent milieu. Bruno Latour (2004) articulates the reality that in the contemporary

social domain:

The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is

not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the nave believers, butthe one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. (246)

This is a critical theory rooted in praxis, drawing on the rich potential for creating rich

socio-technological solutions out of this irreducible space. Von Busch and Palmas

(2006) call it abstract hacktivism that is, an adoption and application of a hacking

mindset and methodology to broader social domains while Dan McQuillan (2012)

terms such theories and practices, critical hacktivism. Regardless of the

nomenclature, this is the other half of the debate we had hoped to bring to todaysconference but unfortunately were unable to deliver.

What we have been able to bring to the party, however, are a set of papers from Aaron

Peters and Thomas Swann that draw on a number of fecund approaches to social

media, technology and political action that in the true ethos of the Internet hack

existing theories to account for contemporary radical projects or events. Aaron Peters

takes Paolo Virnos Soviets of the Multitude an extremely far-sighted perspective

that appropriates Marxs notion of the general intellect and uses it to account for the

decentralised and autonomous techno-social organising that were witnessing through


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the social web. Thomas Swann, meanwhile, draws on cybernetic theory to account for

the decentralised organising seen during last years riots, which is then linked to the

potential for extending the non-hierarchical, federated structures of traditional

anarchist organising.

Finally, the ultimate goal of this conference stream is to firstly kick-start a wider

debate about the role technology plays and the potential it possesses in political

resistance and social struggles. Secondly, it is to stimulate renewed theoretical as well

as practical engagements drawing on existing or new approaches. The papers

presented today, combined with the ensuing discussion, will play a valuable but

minor part of this initiative. What this initiative - or any emerging subprojects - will

ultimately look like remains to be seen. Ideally, it will include a greater level of

scholarly and activist reflection - and I would welcome any suggestions or ideas that

participants in this stream might have. One thing is certain, however: going forward

the most powerful achievements will emerge if we work together to create the arenas

in which researchers and activists can gather, imagine and assemble new futures.


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