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: simon.collister.2010@rhul.ac.uk

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 even
more 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 with
anarchisms 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 anarchist
practice, such as personal reflections from within social movements, which are arguably equally as
valuable in efforts to expand the knowledge base.

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

3 Although, 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.

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 media
such 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 to
scholars of an anarchist or autonomous left persuasion.

Anarchist Ambivalence?
The following, then, is a brief overview of some of the dominant positions adopted
with regard to anarchism and technology, including more recent accounts of social
technology. The aim is to use these top-line accounts to introduce and provide some
context that might help us to, firstly, account for the apparent dearth of substantial
research, judge whether there is a field of anarchism and social technology studies;
and if there is not, to tentatively start to determine where the parameters of such a
field might be set. Having taken some initial steps to shape such a field I envisage the
subsequent contributions being offered today as a springboard for future research
themes and trajectories.

Figure 2 Occupy Wall Street (image taken from Sam Schlinkert at The Daily
Beast: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/06/occupy-wall-streetprotests-tech-gurus-televise-the-demonstrations.html)
One immediate consideration that must be brought to bear on any account of the
interaction of society and new technology is the increasing embeddedness of such
tools in daily life. Such a factor may be the primary cause of a limited scholarly
engagement with technology and social practices owing to their ubiquity in
contemporary society. It is broadly undeniable that the use of such tools and
technologies is already so embedded in society that activists and academics alike
cannot - or at least do not need to - see the role of technology outside of praxis. That
is, technology is so ubiquitous that it has become merely a thing that facilitates
activism. To use the term beloved of Facebook, social media offers us frictionless and thus invisible at the point of use - mediation between technology and daily

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. In Anarchy 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 byproduct 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.

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

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

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

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 PostMarxist 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 East
http://autoitaliasoutheast.org/blog/news/2012/10/29/immaterial-labour-isntworking/)
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

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 technology per 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, but
the 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 todays
conference 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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